The longboats were as dead as beached whales, their antimatter pods exhausted. Unfortunately, a study of the island revealed it as dead as the boats. No smoke rose from fires. No sign of human habitation showed on the optical scans.
“They couldn’t have come this far and . . .” Kris ran out of words.
Captain Drago turned to Jack. “Colonel, prepare a Marine landing party. You drop next orbit. I would recommend fully armored space suits.”
“Yeah,” Jack agreed. “Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air. If that planet’s a killer, we won’t bring it back.”
An hour later, Kris gave Jack a kiss. “Find them, if you can,” she whispered, “but don’t you go dying on me.”
“Trust me. I’m good at not doing that. I’ve had a lot of practice around you.”
Kris would have slugged him, but he was in full armor, and even a squid had to learn sooner or later not to punch people with hides as tough as Marines.
“And thank you for not coming,” Jack whispered back.
“I’m learning to be a boring senior officer,” Kris grumbled. “Don’t get too senior, or I’ll be telling you not to go fun places, either. It would serve you right, you know.”
That got a chuckle out of Jack, and Gunny at his elbow, even as the NCO tapped the watch at his wrist. Their time together was gone.
Kris drifted back, and Jack shoved off for Longboat 1. He didn’t look back, and she didn’t expect him to.
Kris glided back to the bridge. All good stuff was going on elsewhere. Why wait for it to be processed and passed along to her station? There was a limit to how much she’d let herself be senior officered out of the fun.
As she went, she couldn’t help but think about her and Jack. She’d often wondered how a woman could kiss her man and wave him off to where he might die. Now she found the answer. She did it because she had to. Jack was Jack, and he had a job to do and it was a job worth doing.
Meanwhile, Kris was Kris, and she had a job to do, as well. “Nelly, get ready to spawn some nanos. That wreck ahead of us came with two good reactors and four 24-inch pulse lasers. It may be a hunk of junk, but it’s my hunk of junk, and I will not ignore anything that might help me and mine stay alive.”
38
Jack had often wondered how a man could kiss his wife good-bye and head off to where he might get his head blown off. Now he knew. You went because you had a job to do. A job that someone had to do. It didn’t mean he loved Kris any less. In fact, he was kind of glad to go, knowing that she would be staying behind, out of harm’s way.
There wasn’t a lot of time for introspection. He did have a job to do. He had Sal project an overhead picture of his target. It showed a big, lush, green island. At a glance, it could pass for a paradise.
So, what was wrong with this picture?
For one thing, there was no sign of humans. No huts, no smoke, no cleared area. The Hornet’s crew had been here for four or five months. Why was there no human footprint?
The good news was that the picture showed no evidence of the monsters they’d spotted on the mainland. There were a few instances of something large and nasty driving fish to jump out of the water, but those were all outside the reef. It looked like the reef was keeping the monsters at a distance. Jack wondered what the fishing was like.
All the time they’d studied the island, no human had gone down to toss in a line.
Jack did a quick check of his fire teams. Every other trigger puller had a grenade launcher attached to their M-6. If there were monsters, they were ready. All of the four Marine teams had a medic attached. There were extra medical supplies secured in the back of the shuttle. Every one of his ten fire teams was prepared to fight or save . . . very likely both at the same time.
Longboat 1 made an easy landing in the lagoon, then motored slowly for the beaching area. Jack and Gunny studied the long, wide, sandy beach. The noise of their sonic boom should have brought Sailors down to greet them.
The beach showed something like a turtle making its way back to the sea but nothing human. “This is past strange,” Gunny muttered.
“Okay, Marines,” Jack said, turning to his teams. “There may be monsters, so be ready. But for God’s sake, let’s not be too itchy on the trigger finger. We don’t want to kill any good guys.”
“Ooh-rah,” greeted his order.
“Don’t beach the longboat,” Jack ordered. “If it gets nasty, I want you to be able to back out fast and get out of here,” he told the bosuns flying the shuttle. “Open the forward hatch when it shows a meter of water.”
The longboat was fifteen meters from the beach, rocking in gentle swells, when the pilot applied reverse thrusters to take way off the boat.
Gunny popped the hatch and ordered the first fire team out. Was it a coincidence that they were some of the tallest Marines in the crew? They splashed out and quickly waded ashore, rifles ready.
The turtle thing fifty meters down the beach ignored them and continued on its slow path to water. Gunny ordered out the second team, then the third. Jack went with the fourth.
Ashore, his Marines formed a perimeter, guns aimed at the trees for the most part though four were covering the lagoon behind them. In his helmet, Jack heard the lapping waves, the buzzing of small creatures, and an occasional grunt, snort, croak, or call.
Animals all. Nothing human in the mix.
“Sensors, talk to me.”
The tech sergeant carrying the sensor pod strode across the sand, but even in space armor, Jack could see him shaking his head. “I’ve got biologicals all over the place, some whose heart function even matches some of our own critters. Of human cardiology, I got the Marines here on the beach; but other than that, nothing.”
“Well, keep an eye out and give a holler the first time you see something.”
“I will, Skipper, but there’s something in the soil or plants that’s cutting my range down next to nothing. You’ll likely see something before I get a heartbeat.”
Jack did not like it when his technology funked out, but with forty-three Marines keeping careful watch, he could at least search with the Mark I eyeball. Jack ordered the last two of his ten fire teams to break out the medical supplies and food and form a chain to pass them to the beach. With that done, he waved the shuttle out to midlagoon.
Jack checked out the beached shuttles with Gunny and five of the medics. They were stripped of anything that might help a struggling camp and now occupied by something like land crabs. “I wonder if you can eat those things,” Gunny muttered on net.
“I’ll ask Phil Taussig when I see him,” Jack said.
The longboats revealed nothing more. No arrow pointing inland, no cryptic note. The longboats were just as silent as the island.
“There may be a trail over here,” Sergeant Bruce announced on net.
“Show me,” Jack said, heading for the sergeant.
“It’s not much of a trail,” Bruce added. “I can’t tell if there are footprints or just animal tracks.”
What Jack saw was just as ambiguous as reported. He studied the beach; a high tide or two had washed the sand clear of prints. The shuttles were tied to trees. A close look at their hulls showed where they’d been tossed around on the beach, scraped against the sand, and knocked against trees. Clearly, this planet had weather, and just as clearly, that weather was doing its best to remove any marks men had made.
“Let’s follow the trail. Gunny, you secure the beach with five fire teams. I’ll move inland with the other five.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper,” was solidly neutral. If Gunny thought an officer ought to leave rooting around in the jungle to enlisted swine, he wasn’t prepared to take a solid position. Jack reconsidered his order for a second. What lay ahead was way past unknown. Officers got the big bucks to lead into those dark places where monsters might lurk. He’d made the right call.