“So Phil hasn’t just screwed himself, he’s got everyone above him in trouble.”
“I am not sure I understand what you said, but I think you have the general situation correct. He has broken the ties that bind us together. Much must be sacrificed to correct that.”
“Jack, I want this Iteeche taken alive if possible. I want every Marine we can mount in the landing boats ready to drop in sixty minutes. Locked and loaded.”
“Do I fill all the seats?”
“No,” Kris said, looking up at Ron. “Three Iteeche will be traveling with us. At least, they will be if Phil didn’t drop himself in the middle of the largest city on this planet. Please tell me he didn’t.” Kris paused for someone to say something.
No one did. “Will someone show me a map of what was under us when that nutcase took off. Please.”
Nelly flashed a map on the wall beside Kris. It showed vast plains covered in grass. Three or four human residences flashed red on the map. Maybe this time Kris had gotten lucky.
Seventy minutes later, Kris was in full battle rattle and strapped into her seat in the longboat. Ahead of her, a sailor finished bolting some arrangement that promised to secure an Iteeche just as well as a standard-issue seat.
Or so she said.
Kris would have loved to pilot the lander, but she was doing ninety different things at once. And a distracted pilot was a dead pilot.
Kris very much wanted everyone aboard to survive this drop.
A sailor helped Ron get the strapping right around his body and lock it in as Kris took another call.
“Penny, do you have any report yet on who owns the property we’ll be landing on and trampling about?”
“Chief Beni has Da Vinci hacking the local net. Problem is, each dukedom has its own net, and most use different systems.”
“So?”
“And our damn Iteeche landed between two different dukedoms with really different systems. The northern two ranches in our search zone are owned by a Deafsmith and a Leon. I’ll need some time on the two southern ones. I’m sending Nelly the full info.”
“Thanks.”
“Oh, and Kris, I’ve got a call from Austin wanting to know when you plan to land and suggesting it be tonight. They want to throw a hoedown for you. I think that’s a dance. Square dance.”
Kris considered her chances of finding an Iteeche and getting back up to the Wasp and down to Austin before dark and sincerely doubted that was possible.
“Penny, you better tell them I’m going to be delayed. Tell them we’ve got the Wasp under quarantine for the day for smallpox or bubonic plague, or something like that.”
“I’ll try to come up with something not at all like that,” the intel officer said.
“I trust you,” Kris said, and went on to her next problem. “Have you got any idea where the guy landed?”
“No, Kris, and we’ll have to drop you before the search zone comes up on our horizon. We’ll send you pictures as soon as we have them. I’ll have Mimzy do a search as fast as she can.”
“Start with the areas close to the settlements,” Kris said. “If he’s there, we have to stop him fast. If he’s not, we can take a little more time.” Kris could just imagine an Iteeche wandering into one of these ranches. The briefing on Texarkana said many people wore guns. Probably every adult on one of these isolated stations carried one.
“I was doing that, Kris. Now would you shut up, belt yourself in tight, and go away,” Penny said, sounding like she meant it.
Kris shut up and had Nelly call up a map. The data on the map was very skimpy, so Kris asked Nelly for the photos made during the first orbit and an analysis of the terrain and vegetation.
“It’s flat, Kris, except when it’s not. And it’s grass covered, except where the grass died or won’t grow.”
Apparently, Kris had managed to piss off everyone with her nervous questions, even Nelly. Especially Nelly.
From Kris’s point of view, she’d been amazingly flexible. When Jack had suggested that she might have gotten carried away with the idea of launching all the shuttles and the remaining LACs next orbit, Kris had readily agreed that it might be wise to land the landing force one orbit at a time. That way, if one force found itself in a long stern chase, they could land a new team to head him off next orbit.
Jack put Gunny in charge of organizing the separate teams for their drops and settled down next to Kris. “Princess, you really need protection just now.”
That was so not fair. Kris had kept her temper when the errant LAC did not squawk, and when Chesty, Sergeant Bruce’s purloined computer, stubbornly refused to come online and give away its position.
“Kris,” Nelly pointed out, “he’s been turned off. And when you turn off one of us computers, there’s not a whole lot we can do for you or anyone. There’s a reason why I don’t like an on/off switch.”
Kris’s attention was focused on the present, when the pilot announced, “Launch in thirty seconds.” The sailors pushed themselves hurriedly for the exit hatch. A moment later the small spaceship pressurized. Kris listened as the pilot and copilot quickly went through their final checks.
Only a moment after they fell silent, the longboat dropped free of the Wasp, did a quick flip, and started braking hard.
Kris found herself in the unusual position of nothing to do while someone else bore the burden of getting her from orbit to ground in one piece. She didn’t much like it.
She gritted her teeth, got a death grip on the seat arms, and tried to hang loose as the shuttle’s maneuvering knocked her from right to left, up to down, and from bothered to irritated.
Maybe that was irritated to irrational.
Finally, a full set of pictures came in of the search zone. “Nelly, please do a match against this and the last set of pictures. Please find a fire, or scorch mark, or something that tells us where our lost puppy has gotten to.”
“I am working on it, Kris. Now, for crying in the weeds, would you please leave me alone.”
“Crying in the weeds?”
“Yes. The boffin helping Cara with her literature interpretation is also trying to break her of her foul mouth. Cara has taken quite a shine to Ms. Burgess, and is adopting the terms she uses to avoid stronger terms.”
So, of course, Nelly was following Cara’s lead.
“Just find me a four-legged pilgrim who doesn’t want to be found.”
“There are no new fires, no new scorch marks. Wherever he set the LAC down, he managed the heat problem very well.”
“Are there lakes or rivers down there?”
“At the moment, every form of drainage is dry as a bone,” Nelly said equally dryly.
Which presented Kris with a major problem. She might have acted a bit hastily. If a runway wasn’t available, a shuttle could land on a lake or river. If none was available, things could go badly.
“Nelly, do any of the ranch stations have a runway?”
“All of them do.”
“How long are they?”
“Very short. Far too short for an orbiter.”
Kris said nothing more. In wartime, risks were required. She could probably argue that the present situation with a rambling Iteeche who wasn’t supposed to be here required taking more risk than normal. Still, Kris had a bad feeling she’d be filling out a ton of paperwork if this landing went bad.