''Sorry,'' Kris said. She could never remember a time when the chief had been this grouchy.
''Everyone is hiding,'' Jack said.
''Can you blame them?'' mFumbo added.
Kris nodded as she gnawed at the problem. ''They know there's a warship in their sky loaded with sensors. Bad guys on the ground as well. They're hiding from them. So, of course, they're not showing off for us. Am I usually this slow?''
For a long moment, no one answered that.
''No, Your Highness,'' the chief said, ''you're not usually this slow. Me and the crew are usually able to jack up the gain on things and give you more intel feed than the other guys. Only this time, I can't do any better than they are.''
''Maybe when we get closer,'' Jack offered the chief.
''And maybe not,'' Penny said as she joined them on the bridge. Andy Fronour trailed only a step behind her.
''Yes, my very esteemed intelligence chief,'' Kris said, ''do you come bearing a rare answer?''
''Which I may keep to myself, if all I'm going to get is more maligning.''
''My, my,'' mFumbo said through a shining white grin, ''aren't our warriors touchy today?''
''As they should be,'' Kris said gently, ''since they're the ones who will do a drop mission from orbit right into one huge question mark. Please, Penny, what have you found out that the rest of us haven't?''
''What's the kind of soil down there?'' Penny asked, clearly unwilling to give up her advantage yet.
''Alluvial,'' Professor mFumbo said. ''Our soil scientist did a full workup. Not that it told us much.''
''Oh, it told you something, you just didn't hear it. I only found it myself while debriefing Andy here.''
''Alluvial soil,'' Kris said slowly.
''Is easy to dig in,'' Nelly answered from Kris's neck.
''On hot summer days, we kids used to dig into mounds, riverbanks, whatever gave us a chance, and make our own cool forts. Grampa had his own cool storage house to keep ice in.''
''The dirt came out easy,'' Penny added, ''and given a couple of days' exposure to air, the cave turned as hard as concrete.''
''In my databases,'' Nelly cut in, ''there is a story about a war back in the bloody twentieth century in a place called Vietnam, where the resistance fighters dug tunnels to hide in. The soil there was alluvial.''
''So Andy's people have literally gone to earth,'' Kris said.
''That's what I think,'' Andy said.
''And the bad guys?'' Jack left hanging.
''Got a hot message from my good friend Thorpe to do their own vanishing act as soon as he found out I was leading a bunch of hard cases through his very own jump hole.''
''Oh joy,'' Jack grumbled, ''a game of blind man's bluff. I can't tell you how much I love my modern instrumentation. Going blind into a battle with a bunch of thugs as smart as my Marines does not make my bunny jump.''
Kris let these answers cascade around in her brain for a moment, weighed what they told her, and found that she still didn't know nearly as much as she wanted to before she took strong men and women into armed battle. But she'd asked for this job. And this was what she wanted to do.
''Chief, look for assault vehicles, trucks, cars. Any kind of transportation. Hunt for their tracks if you can't find their bodies getting warm in the noonday sun. Panda's got too much settled area for a strike team to walk very far. They had to bring or steal vehicles. Where you find them, you'll find the guys holding the guns.''
''Doing it, Your Highness,'' the chief said with a grin.
''You can dig a hole and hide on Panda. We've got to accept that. So we don't look for the cat. We look for the tail on the cat that it forgot to pull into the hole. Look, boys and girls, look.''
14
The swing that put them in orbit around Panda's one moon was done at 2.55 gees deceleration. Sulwan put pedal to the metal only after Captain Thorpe was hull down behind Panda.
Thorpe might have gotten a brief glimpse of the Wasp's sudden change of course. If he did, it was through the haze of the planet's atmosphere. It told him Kris was up to something, but only enough to leave him scratching his head wondering.
Kris learned a new thing or two. High-gee stations were never intended to cope with full ground battle rattle.
The Wasp would be under high-gee maneuvering until a few minutes before Kris took her Marine company into the boats. Thus, Kris found herself pinned by armor and gear weighing two and a half times its normal burden. Kris really wanted to meet the guy who decided it was ''normal.'' Had he ever lugged it?
At 2.5 gees, it was just past bearable. And Sulwan was just getting started. Kris gritted her teeth and tried not to moan … at least into an open mike.
The forward screen ticked off the critical movements of the Wasp and Thorpe's ship. Just now, Thorpe was on the far side of Panda, expecting to come around for a perfect shot up the Wasp's engines as Kris's ship finished its final break into orbit.
Instead, he'd get a look at the front end of the Wasp as it vanished into a lunar orbit swinging far out behind the moon. Kris wished she could see Thorpe's face when he found himself with a whole different set of ballistic problems on his hands.
* * *
Captain Thorpe held his face a rigid mask as every plan he'd made in the last three days shattered into question marks.
''What the hell does that Longknife girl think she's doing?'' Mr. Whitebred shouted. As one of the financial backers of this expedition, he considered it his right to shout at everyone. The man would benefit much from trading in his three-piece suit for an ensign's commission. Fifteen minutes under Thorpe's command, and he would learn a lot about leadership.
Unfortunately, the man already considered himself a leader. He had the money, didn't that make him a leader? Not for the first time, Thorpe wondered if this was such a good idea.
But it put that Longknife brat in the crosshairs of his eighteen-inch pulse lasers. That made up for a lot.
''We shall see what the Longknife girl is actually doing in a moment,'' Thorpe said, voice even, controlled. Around the bridge, his crew responded to his voice. His orders. Not the other man's screeching.
''She's been maneuvering at 2.5 gees,'' his sensor boss reported.
''I am projecting her deceleration and course,'' his offensive weapons officer announced. On the main screen, the moon took the center view. The pulsing red pip that portrayed that brat's ship slowed its hurtling flight toward Pandemonium, then cut back to skim a mere hundred kilometers above the moon and head out for a long, looping orbit that would take them a major part of the way to the jump point.
''Do you think she has finally done something logical?'' Whitebred asked. ''Is she headed back out?''
Thorpe shook his head even before the fool civilian got his question out. ''Longknifes don't run,'' he snapped. ''Weapons, project a revised course. Assume continued use of as much as three gees of deceleration. Can she cut off that time-wasting soar over the far side of the moon?''
''Working the problem, sir. Wait one,'' Weapons answered.
''Sensors, have you found what I asked you to look for?'' Thorpe demanded, switching concerns. The young woman on weapons was good. Not as well trained as a naval officer, but certainly more trustworthy than a Longknife. She would attend to her course projection and reply when she had something.
''Yes, sir,'' Sensors replied. ''I have the low-level chatter that is the signature of Smart Metal™, sir.''
''Very good,'' Thorpe said, and allowed himself a smile. ''Very, very good.''
''What do you mean?'' Whitebred asked.