Defender

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.

Jack sent one fire team ahead of him, then followed with the other four behind him.

The Marines, professionals that they were, spread out, letting five paces stretch out between them. Eyes and guns roamed the jungle ahead and above them. Alternate Marines concentrated to the right and left of the path.

They moved through a jungle that quickly became deadly quiet.

“Snake,” a Marine called on net, and the teams halted, taking a knee. Even through the faceplate, Jack could see the grin on a Marine’s face as she held up a headless, long, round something. “It tried to bite my boot. Hardly dented the shine, sir,” she said. The bayonet on her rifle dripped green goo.

The sand gave way to marshy ground; the heavy Marines sank ankle deep into mud that slithered with things that made wakes in the water. A kind of sea grass waved in the wind around them, waist high. There were side tracks through the stuff, game trails that would let something with big teeth charge them without warning.

Jack was taking a serious dislike to this place.

“I found something,” the point Marine called. He held up a tattered piece of cloth, with foam still attached to it. “It looks like part of a longboat seat, sir.”

Jack shook off his willies, and said, “Let’s keep going.”

They came to a pond. Sergeant Bruce cut off a long, tough plant, the local equivalent of bamboo, and tossed it high. It came down and planted itself maybe a quarter of a meter deep in the “lake.”

“This could have been a nice meadow before the last storm,” Bruce said.

Jack ordered the Marines to slog through it. At least out here, they had a better field of fire at anything trying to take a bite out of them. They shot two snakes that didn’t get the word.

SONIC BOOM. RIFLE FIRE, Sergeant Bruce said to Jack on Nelly Net. BUT NO REACTION FROM THE HORNET’S CREW. THIS IS EITHER CRAZY OR BAD, SKIPPER.

Jack said nothing.

On the other side, the trail wound uphill into the volcanic heart of the island, and the jungle grew thicker. Jack was about to order his Marines to hunt around for another trail leading off the pond when Sergeant Bruce pointed uphill. “Isn’t that a ration pack?”

“I think you might be right,” Jack said, and led the way up the trail to its first twist. There, held down by a rock, was the foil wrapper for an egg omelet that was uniformly detested by boonie rats.

“Sensors, talk to me.”

“Nothing new to report, sir. I’ve got even worse reception around this rock pile.”

“Well, stay close. Something human passed this way.”

“Aye, aye, Skipper.”

They started up the trail. There were broken limbs and branches on the trees and bushes, but it was impossible to tell if it had been done by man, animal, or wind. They came to a fork in the trail. One path led farther up, the other down the slope. Jack pointed down.

Again, the trail was full of switchbacks. Under the thick canopy, the ground was covered with a mosslike purple stuff that was slimy and slippery. Marines paired up to help each other over rocks and fallen tree trunks.

“Maybe we should head back,” Sergeant Bruce suggested. “Why would anyone lug their gear over this kind of ground?”

Jack might have agreed, but on net, another Marine chimed in. “My old man is a guide in the mountains of Arkana. You’ll do a lot of stuff for good, clean water. That stuff we walked through looked stagnant. It would make you sick. I suspect these rocks have a spring in them somewhere.”

Jack took the input under consideration and found it good. “We’ll keep following this trail.”

Jack saw him before sensors reported a human outside the Marine line of march.

He was a naked scarecrow of a man, heavily bearded and making slow, stumbling progress with the help of a crocked pole. He was on the switchback below them.

“Corpsman, forward on the double!”

It still took Jack a long minute to cover the ground to the wreck of a human being. In that minute, the man gave up the effort and collapsed into the mud. Jack saw why when he arrived. Diarrhea. Fecal matter dripped down his leg into the mud.

“Medic, to me! We got a man down.”

“Coming, sir.”

“I knew you’d come. I kept telling the crew, Kris Longknife won’t leave us out here.”

The living skeleton in Jack’s arms didn’t look anything like the ship captain Jack had known, but the voice said this was Phil Taussig.

“What happened?” Jack asked as one corpsman arrived, followed quickly by another. They had trouble finding a vein, but it didn’t keep them from quickly getting a liter of water going into one arm and a liter of glucose into the other.

“This planet is killing us,” Phil managed to get out. “The stuff we were eating tore up our guts. You had to be horribly hungry to eat it. But when you’re starved, and there’s nothing else, what can you do?”

“We’re here, and we’ve got meds and food at the beach. Where’s the camp?”

“Down the trail. At the pool. The only drinkable water we could find.”

Thank God for a young Marine’s dad.

It was another thirty minutes to the camp. If Phil was bad, others were worse. Kris had been right to come as soon as she could. In another few days, they would have started dying in droves. Three had died already.

A call to the Wasp brought more medics down on the next orbit. Most of the boffins who knew anything about planets were back on Alwa, but a pair of astrophysicists volunteered to do their best as analytical chemists. After they ran their first set of tests, they leaned back and shook their heads.

“Aluminum. That and arsenic and a couple of other heavy metals. Every plant is poison. Slow poison, but poison nonetheless.”

Phil choked on his bitter laugh. “We knew we couldn’t fight the big monsters on the mainland. We had to find some place they weren’t. They weren’t here.” He cackled again. “Now I know why.”

“You survived until we got here,” Jack said. “That’s all that matters. You’d have never survived on the mainland. That’s for sure.”

“Maybe I should have tried the other planets,” Phil said, his voice now reduced to a whisper. “But the Hornet was so beat-up. We killed the last three of those bastards chasing us, but they hit us good right back.”

“They’re dead. You’re alive. We’ll have you back on your feet in no time,” Jack promised, hoping the docs could come up with a magic potion to get all the heavy metals out of Phil’s and his crew’s system.

All his calls back to the Wasp that day were directed at getting more Marines and medical personnel flowing to the planet below. He didn’t ask for Kris, and she never came on the line. Jack wondered what she was doing with her day but didn’t bother her. He had his hands full.

Still, he had to wonder, what was so important to keep Kris from giving Phil an immediate call. He hoped she wasn’t getting herself—and them—in trouble again.