McKay pulled a digital map unit from his belt and showed it to Sergeant Shannon. “Secure areas 7-J, 6-J, and 5-J, then set up camp at the perimeter—space W.”
“Aye, sir,” Shannon said, and saluted.
McKay returned the salute and walked off. The loud whine of turbines cut through the air as the transports lifted from the landing pad. More would arrive shortly.
Our drop zone was twenty-two miles outside of Hero’s Fall, a city with nearly 2 million residents that served as everything but the government seat for Ezer Kri. The locals called Hero’s Fall “the old city” because it was the planet’s first settlement.
“Okay, gentlemen, we have a long night ahead of us,” Shannon shouted over the interLink. “Let’s spread out. Harris and Lee, your fire team can take the flank.”
Marines do things in threes. Platoons have three squads, each of which is composed of three fire teams. Lee, as the senior corporal, was our team leader. I carried an automatic rifle. We had two privates on the fire team—a grenadier named Amblin and a rifleman named Shultz.
As the platoon divided into fire teams and formed a picket, we moved to the rear. We would remain to the right of the formation. When the shooting started, it would be our job to circle around the enemy. The formation worked well for scouting wide areas but would have left us exposed to sniper attacks in a less secure zone. But we were not walking into battle, and as far as I could tell, the only danger on the planet was that the locals wanted to tell us “sayonara” instead of “good-bye.”
Klyber, however, saw our incursion as more of an unofficial occupation than an exercise. He deployed Marines to close the roads around Hero’s Fall. Two thousand men might not be enough of a force to lay siege to a city the size of Hero’s Fall, but we could certainly teach those Godless Japanese speakers a lesson.
As we left the glare of the landing lights, the lenses in our visors switched automatically to night-for-day vision that illuminated the forest in eerie blue-white tones. While the lens enabled us to see clearly at night, it also rendered us color-blind and hampered our depth perception.
“Keep the chatter down, gentlemen,” Shannon said. “Call out only if you see something.”
Shannon led us across the meadow and into the trees. The woods outside of Hero’s Fall were filled with towering pines that reminded me of the grounds around my old orphanage. “Fan out,” Shannon said. “Keep an eye on your team.”
About forty minutes into our march, we located a paved road that ran through the woods—a highway leading to town. There were no signs of cars. The police had probably closed the highway to assist with our invasion. Shannon divided the platoon into two squads, which he marched on either side of the road.
“Harris, over here,” Shannon called, as we marched.
I trotted to the front of the formation, sloshing through the damp pine needles and kicking up mud. Shannon had left the rest of the platoon and stood on a small ridge surrounded by a particularly dense growth of trees.
“Harris, what do you see in that stand of trees?” he asked, pointing straight ahead with his rifle.
The pocket of trees looked unremarkable. I used my heat-vision lens to see if someone was hiding in the brush. Nothing. Magnifying the view made no difference. “Trees,” I said, sounding confused.
“Ever patrol a wooded area?” Shannon asked.
“Only as a cadet,” I said.
“There’s a trapdoor between those trees,” he said. “See it?”
I used every lens in my helmet. “No, Sergeant,” I said, beginning to wonder if he was playing with me.
“Stop looking for it. Listen for it. Use your sonar locator.”
The locator was a device in our visors that emitted an ultrasonic “ping,” then read the way that the ping bounced off objects and surfaces.
Using optical commands, I brought up the locator. A transparent green arc swished across my visor. In its wake, I saw four lines cut into the ground beneath a tree.
“Come here, Harris,” Shannon said. He walked toward the door. As I followed, my sonar locator made a new reading, marking an oblong cavity beneath the ground in translucent green. “Damn,” I whispered. “I never would have thought about a locator sweep.”
“It’s called a snake shaft,” Shannon said. “You have any idea what it’s used for?”
“No,” I said.
“Neither does anybody else,” Shannon said. “They’re what you might call an anomaly. Let’s go in for a closer look.”
Sergeant Shannon pulled a grenade from his belt and set it for low yield. “Fire in the hole,” he yelled as he tossed it into the trees. The grenade exploded with a muffled thud. When the steam cleared, I saw that he had blown a ten-foot hole in the top of the tunnel. Water poured down it as if it were a drain.
I stepped in for a closer look. It was so dark that even with my night-for-day vision, I could not see the bottom. “Who builds these?”
Shannon came over to me. “Mogats, I suppose. Nobody knows for sure. We found them during a battle in the Galactic Eye. That was the first time anybody saw them, I think.”
I looked up from the hole and stared at Sergeant Shannon. Had Shannon let that slip, or was he trying to tell me he was a Liberator?
“They can stretch on for miles, and they’re strong. I’ve seen LG tanks park right on top of one of these snake shafts and not dent the roof.” LG tanks were low-gravity combat tanks—units that ran low to the ground and weighed in at as much as a hundred tons. “We used to dare each other to hide in the shaft while a tank ran over it. Far as I know, no one ever died doing it.”
I stared down into that gaping black maw and watched water pour into it. “Should we check it?” I asked.
“You want to go down in there?” Shannon asked. He did not wait for me to answer. “Me either. I’ll have a tech send a probe through it later. Might be something down there. Sometimes they’re rigged to blow up.
“I want you and Lee to go scout the area for more of them. Make me a map.” With that, Shannon returned to the platoon.
It took several hours to scour the area. Our search turned up eleven more snake shafts. Lee and I caught up with the platoon at Hero’s Fall. I needed sleep, but that was not about to happen. Captain McKay and Sergeant Shannon hailed us.
“Harris, Lee…Glad you could join us.”
“We just got here, Sergeant,” Lee said.
Across the camp, the platoons had already begun to assemble. I could see ranks forming. “Follow me,” McKay said as he started toward the camp.
We set up camp in a large meadow just outside of town. By that time, the rain and wind had stopped. A pervasive stillness echoed across the grounds. The sun rose over the trees, and the wet grass sparkled.
Three Harriers and a civilian shuttle flew in from the west. The fighters formed a tight wedge and circled low in the air as the shuttle touched down. Once the shuttle landed, the fighters thundered over the city’s edge and vanished behind a line of buildings.
Captain McKay called the two platoons he commanded to attention. When we were in place, the shuttle’s hatch opened. Out stepped Captain Olivera, looking tall, gaunt, and dapper in his Naval whites. Behind Olivera came Vice Admiral Barry, the rather bell-shaped commander of the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Olivera and Barry met with McKay at the bottom of the ramp, and the three of them held a brief conversation. A few moments later, another officer disembarked, one whom I had not expected to see. Wearing a white uniform that seemed tailored to fit his skeletal frame, Admiral Klyber strode off the shuttle with what I would later learn was his distinctive long gait.
Klyber stood at least three inches taller than Olivera—the tallest of the other officers. Pudgy little Barry barely came up to Klyber’s neck. Klyber conferred with Barry, asked McKay a question, and the entire party ambled forward.