Haze and the Hammer of Darkness (3 page)

Roget swallowed. All he could do was wait … and review the drop procedures. He tried not to think about his options
after
he completed his survey evaluation of Haze—
if
he completed it. If the landing boat survived the transit of all the objects in the three orbital shells, he could take off and attempt to reach low orbit where a scoutship could retrieve him. Or he could program the boat to climb as far as it could, far enough into or beyond the haze to burst-send his report. Or he could commandeer local transport, assuming any such existed. None of the options were optimal. But, after his last two missions, his situation had been anything but ideal. Not because he had failed, but because he had been expected to fail, and had managed at least limited success. The FSA had been forced to take over governing Khriastos station because of the degree of corruption when all the colonel had really wanted was the removal of Station Administrator Sala-Chung.

Roget took a long slow breath. In a fashion, all of his independent assignments had ended that way. Was it because the FSA hadn't wanted success? Or because they'd only defined success in limited terms.

Roget forced his mind back to the drop.

Dropboats, stand by.

Standing by.

Another five minutes passed. Then the scoutship shivered once. Another five minutes passed before the second shiver. Then another interval passed, not quite five minutes.

Drop three, stand by … ten, nine, eight …

With the linked
one!,
Roget was pressed back in the half-cocoon for a moment before weightlessness took over. He swallowed to keep the bile in his stomach, rather than let it creep into his throat, then used his implants to link with the dropboat—now fully powered.

The farscanners showed no ships above the planet—except for the scoutship returning to the
WuDing
and the five dropboats, spaced far enough apart and with enough difference in course, velocity, and trajectory so that they would not land all that close to each other.

Roget gave the steering jets a quick squirt to orient the dropboat to the planned courseline.

“You won't like the entry.” The colonel's words went through Roget's thoughts as he waited for the dropboat to encounter the outer orbital shell. Theoretically, the first shell shouldn't be too bad, because the scoutship had dropped all the boats on trajectories that would ensure they entered the shell at a velocity only slightly slower than that of the outer level of orbiting objects—whatever they were.

After that, it was up to the operative and the dropboat's nav systems and shields … and luck.

The farscreens showed nothing but the other dropboats … and the grayish haze. Was that haze something totally alien, perhaps even alive? Or was it a form of technology that comprised the planetary defense system? And what lay below it? Were the readings correct in assuming a breathable atmosphere, or was the whole operation a way to remove him and the other FSA agents?

It couldn't be the last. Cold as they could be, even the upper-level Federation Mandarins wouldn't have sent a battlecruiser and its escorts across the stars and dispatched five operatives and dropboats to their death to remove one operative whose attitude had been less than exemplary. Nor would they have forced the FIS and FSA into a semicooperative joint effort.

Colonel Tian's nonanswers suggested much more was at stake, and that the Federation regarded the Thomists as far more than an historical curiosity.

Roget continued to watch the closure with the planet below looming ever closer. All he could do was wait until the outer fringes of the atmosphere began to impact the shields. The screens and systems still registered nothing in any energy spectrum except some reflected light and emissions from the boats.

Then … what could only be called noise appeared, concentrated in the orbital layers, creating three levels of smokelike spheres. That was how his implants registered the data.

The dropboat neared the outermost sphere, the one whose shardlike components appeared to orbit from polar south to north, unnatural and implausible as it was. As the dropboat entered that outermost layer, angled to go with the apparent flow, the outside temperature sensors went blank.

The dropboat seemed to skid sideways, then drop, slewing sideways to the courseline.

Roget
knew
that couldn't happen, but the instruments confirmed what he felt, and the system pulsed the port steering jets. When nothing happened, Roget overrode the controls and then fired them full for an instant. Sluggishly, the dropboat returned to courseline and orientation.

The dropboat shivered, and a chorus of impacts, like metallic hail, reverberated through the craft. Cabin pressure began to fall, and Roget closed his helmet, letting the direct suit feed take over.

The EDI flared. Drop one was gone.

More impacts battered Drop three, and Roget eased the nose down, adding thrust. He'd pay later, but there was too much of a velocity differential between the dropboat and the orbital shards or whatever they were.

The intensity of the hammering decreased. But even inside his sealed suit, Roget could feel the heat building in the dropboat.

The hammering vanished, and the screens showed that the dropboat was below the outer orbital layer. They showed nothing except Drop three and the two layers, one below and one above.

The nav system, as programmed, increased the thrust and began a course correction to bring the dropboat onto a courseline at right angles to the previous heading. Roget watched intently, ready to override again if the dropboat did not complete the heading and orientation change before it entered the second orbital shell.

Heading, course, orientation, and the smokelike shell all came together at once.

This time the hammering was louder. Was that because there was some atmosphere or because the dropboat and its shields were being punished more? Roget couldn't tell. He was just glad when they dropped below the second level. By then he was sweating heavily inside the pressure suit, and he hoped that he didn't fog the inside of his helmet.

The third level was worse. By the time the dropboat was clear, the shields had failed, and the craft had no atmospheric integrity. The automatics had dropped offline, inoperative, and Roget was piloting on manual. The dropboat shuddered and shivered.

Roget eased the dropboat's nose up fractionally to kill off more speed and decrease the rate of descent. That might bleed off some of the excess heat that was close to cooking him, even within his suit, and the dropboat's remaining functional systems.

His entry and descent had to have registered on every planetary tracking system. Yet the screens showed no aircraft, no missiles, and no energy concentrations. Roget concentrated on maintaining control of the systems and holding as much altitude as possible, especially given the ocean directly below. The waters were silver green. He thought the screens had shown small islands, but he was still too high and too fast to try a landing there. Besides, getting off an island might be more than a little difficult, given the failing state of the dropboat.

Before long, the screens registered a mountainous coastline ahead. In moments the dropboat was approaching a coastal range and passing through twenty thousand meters in a gradual descent. Less than five minutes later, the dropboat had descended to twelve thousand meters and was passing over the tallest of the peaks, less than three thousand meters below.

Roget's scans showed that the mountains were the center of a peninsula. To the east water stretched as far as the screens could show. He immediately banked to the north, paralleling the lower hills because of the short distance between where the hills ended and the ocean began.

With that sharp a turn, the dropboat's glide ratio began to approximate that of a flying brick hurtling downward toward the forested slopes below. Roget hurried through the landing checklist while scanning the terrain ahead, finally settling on a long brushy area some three klicks ahead.

When the radalt alerted him at five hundred meters AGL, he eased into a partial flare, using the dropboat's lifting body form to trade off speed to kill his rate-of-descent—but not enough to stall.

Less than a hundred meters above ground, the dropboat shivered with a sudden crosswind. Roget corrected, angling the nose to the wind and easing the nose up just a trace.

The power levels were at less than 7 percent when the dropboat's tail touched the ground. Roget let the nose drop slowly, and the boat skidded and bounced across the uneven ground. It came to a stop less than a hundred meters from the tall evergreens to the north.

The farscreens were fading. They showed no one and no large animals anywhere nearby. Given the sonics that had preceded the dropboat, that didn't exactly surprise Roget. The diagnostics did tell him that the atmosphere composition was T-norm, or close enough that it made little difference. He doubted that the dropboat would be useful for much of anything after the descent and rough landing. Still, he went through the standard shutdown checklist before he unstrapped his bruised and sore figure from the pilot's couch and eased himself out through the narrow lock hatches, one after the other. Once he was clear of the still-warm hull, he cracked his helmet. He could smell evergreens and charred vegetation. For all that, there were no fires around the craft. That suggested that the area wasn't all that dry.

For several moments, Roget stood beside the dropboat. All his implants and systems checked, despite the rough entry. There was one problem. They registered nothing beyond himself and the fading residual energies within the dropboat.

No emissions. No signals. Nothing. Was there no intelligent life on the planet? Or had all his implants failed, despite the internal telltales that indicated they were functioning? That couldn't be. He was getting indications from the dropboat.

He shrugged.

One way or another, he had a mission to complete. He needed to retrieve his gear from the sealed locker and get on with it—preferably before any locals showed up. If there were any.

After a last set of scans of the area around the dropboat, Roget moved quickly, stripping off his pressure suit and helmet, then retrieving his gear and the modest backpack to contain it, and finally locking the boat. If the locks were forced, certain key parts of the controls would melt down. Since the screens and shields had been tried to their limits on the descent, the boat didn't have enough power to carry Roget more than a few klicks, let alone return to orbit.

He checked his equipment a last time, then paused, taking a deep breath. The air was heavy and damp and carried a faint scent, somewhere between a sultry perfume and the clean dankness of a virgin forest. He had a feeling that the sea-level atmospheric pressure was higher than T-norm, possibly as much as 10 percent. The oxygen content was a bit higher, and that might offset the slightly higher gravity.

Finally, he strode into the forest, heading north. There certainly hadn't been any signs of technology or habitation farther south on the peninsula. He decided against powering up the camouflage capacity engineered into his singlesuit. That burned power, and he saw no reason to drain his limited supply, especially since the background melding capability was only useful for optical detection. Even had he used the camo feature, the last thing he wanted was to be caught in the open. The tall pines, while spaced in a way that suggested a natural and mature landscape, provided enough cover that an attack from something like aircraft or even an advanced flitter would be difficult. If there happened to be a local culture with nanotech capabilities, they wouldn't need anything that crude to deal with him.

That was what he hoped.

 

4

23 JUYU 6744
F. E.

Wearing a dark gray proffie singlesuit, like any number of young professionals, Roget sat in the reception area, a space with shimmering dark gray walls and green accents. The chairs and the couch were a muted dark green. The piped sunlight added a note of cheer to the semicircular chamber that could have been one in any multilateral's headquarters. It wasn't. It was one of a number of similar reception areas in the Federation Security Agency's Taiyuan headquarters.

Roget did not read nor did he access any of the entertainment nets. Instead, he amused himself by tracking the energy flows everywhere, although he couldn't discern the purpose of most, except for those designed to locate explosives, metals, and other potentially lethal objects. Some were doubtless merely routine dataflows. A polite-looking young man sat at a console, occasionally glancing indifferently in Roget's general direction. Behind the receptionist/guard and the console, three wide corridors fanned out into the north half of the tower.

Roget had been waiting for sixteen and a half minutes when a tall Sinese with silver gray at his temples emerged from the left-hand corridor and walked past the receptionist. Another seven minutes passed before the receptionist looked up.

“Agent Roget … the colonel will see you now. Take the left-most corridor to the second door, also on the left. Just open the door and enter.”

Roget stood. “Thank you.” He walked past the reception desk, noting that there were no open screens behind it. The reception agent was direct-linked, another simple security procedure. If anything happened to him, hidden gates would doubtless seal the corridors.

When he reached the door, he touched the entry screen. The door slid into its recess, and Roget stepped into the office. He stopped and offered a slight bow. The door closed silently behind him.

“Agent-Captain Keir Roget, do come in.” The man behind the desk console did not stand. To his right was a wide window that offered a sweeping view of the silvered side of another tower. “Please be seated.”

“Yes, sir.” Roget bowed, then took the seat across the desk from the Agent-Colonel, whose name he did not know … and might never, not unless he encountered the man in another setting, and that was unlikely in a capital city of ten million plus, surrounded by satellite cities that each held millions.