Under Strange Suns (5 page)

And of course she would need a crew. Birthing another complication: There was no way she would be able to afford a pair of ships, not with the investors her utter lack of a track record would attract. That, sure as Mehmet Azziz was roasting in Hell, would affect the makeup of the crew. Given the roughly one in fifty odds of Y-Drive failure, Brooklynn would have to find people crazy enough, desperate enough, damaged enough to take the risk of becoming adrift in deep space, on an endless one-way trip.

Crazy, desperate, damaged. Okay. But above all, the crew would need to be people she could trust.

S
TAFF SERGEANT AIDAN CARSON ADJUSTED THE
fit of his parachute harness and wondered why the prospect of a fiery atmospheric re-entry followed by a nighttime HALO jump into hostilities left him feeling unmoved. Should have had his blood pumping, the adrenaline flowing like Niagara Falls. Instead he sat calmly in the passenger bay as the rest of the five-man team saw to last minute equipment checks.

The shuttle detached from the dedicated Special Forces orbital platform. Maneuvering thrusters spurted, orienting the craft earthward. Another jet and the craft began its descent.

Master Sergeant Antoine Summers drifted by, taking advantage of the last few minutes of weightlessness to inspect the team. Clutching a hanging strap he paused by Staff Sergeant Bryce Sinclair, seated next to Aidan, and he tightened the chinstrap on Sinclair’s aerodynamic helmet. The smart camouflage paint impregnating the Kevlar/polycarbonate sandwich of the helmet showed as dim ochre with red and orange highlights, mimicking the conditions inside the cramped bay; muted tactical lighting and LED status indicators provided limited illumination for the team.

“Slipstream’ll rip your fucking head off if you keep it so loose, John Wayne,” Summers told Sinclair. Then, continuing on to Aidan he said, “You in the game, Carson?”

“Don’t worry about me, Summers. I’m in all four quarters.” And he meant it. He didn’t display or even feel any of the symptoms of short-timer’s disease. He was focused and knew the other four on the team could rely on him just as he relied on them. He didn’t feel detached, just...emotionally disengaged. He was there, in the moment, ready to do his part as a member of this woefully short-handed team. But the rage fueling the last two years of firefights–interspersed with periods of training for more firefights–had dwindled, flickered out.

“Coms check,” came Captain Merit’s voice through his implant.

“Summers, check.”

“Massey, check,” came the voice of Sergeant First Class Bill Massey, team medic, called Hearse by rest of the team.

“Sinclair, check,” said Sinclair, the communications sergeant and designated Mule operator.

“Carson, check,” Aidan said.

“Okay, listen up,” Merit said as the shuttle began lurching and shaking. “We’ll be over the drop point in ten mikes. Nothing fancy about this one, just another jackal den to clear out, an al-Shabaab offshoot according to intel. Should be minimal collateral damage to worry about.”

Which could mean anything
, Aidan thought. Intelligence estimates were notoriously unreliable. If the brass had been one-hundred percent certain that no civilians were in the vicinity they’d have just hammered the area with cruise missiles. But the Pentagon had grown leery of massive, non-surgical retaliation ever since the firestorm in Ankara in the days immediately after DC. DC: that’s how everyone now referred to that horrible day over two years ago, the incident and the place forever conflated. The response had gradually evolved to pinpoint “retributive actions” conducted with troop strength judged just sufficient for the operation. And with operations on a global scale, that troop strength was spread thin. At least the poor bastards trying to orchestrate America’s response to the abrupt destruction of the United States’ capital had orbiting military staging posts that could drop Aidan and his heavily armed and angry friends to any point on the planet within thirty minutes.

“Made a decision yet, Carson?” Summers asked. He’d buckled in, preparatory to re-entry.

“Hell, Carson’s going to re-up,” Sinclair said. “What the hell else is he going to do?”

Hearse said, “Why don’t you break out the lucky twenty-sider and roll for it, Carson?”

Carson grinned. The die was zipped in a utility pocket on his combat harness, next to a multi-tool and a palm-sized signaling mirror.

“No more serious decisions based on die rolls, Hearse,” Aidan said. “Not after Daytona Beach. I think that redhead gave me crabs.”

Hearse said, “The blond was clean. Should have rolled under ten. Tell you what though, when
my
enlistment’s up I’m going to find a beach to sit on–not Daytona–drink beer, and watch it all collapse around me.”

“Save me a spot,” said Summers. “I’ll bring ice.”

“Right,” said Sinclair. “Come on, you’re a lifer and so is Carson. Ain’t you?”

“Hate to disappoint you, Sinclair, but I haven’t quite made up my mind,” Aidan said, before the craft began shaking, putting an end to further conversation.

The buffeting eased once the shuttle had passed through the upper atmosphere. When Captain Merit announced “one minute,” Aidan and the rest of the team stood to face the rear hatch, bunched together in a space not much larger than a freight elevator, all the more cramped with the roughly one hundred pounds of parachute and gear strapped to their bodies. The light above the hatch turned green and the door dropped open to reveal a rectangle of night sky, the howl of the wind reaching through the lowered ear pieces of Aidan’s helmet, but not loud enough to mask the “go, go, go” command received through his implant. The oxygen-rich air mixture whipped out of the bay. The transparent visor of his helmet slid down, blocking the worst of the gale battering his face, and the tiny bottle of oxygen clipped to his parachute harness began a thin feed through a flex-hose into his helmet, the soft waft past his cheek feeling almost like a caress. He shuffled after Sinclair, then hurled himself in turn into the void.

He’d torqued the straps attaching the squad automatic rifle to his chest so tightly they were digging into him, but nonetheless the SAW threatened to rise up and clobber him in the chin as he plunged into the violent stratosphere. The thermal pumps in his battle dress uniform kicked into life, counteracting the frigid conditions engulfing him. The display in his visor lit up, detailing altitude, wind speed, rate of descent, temperature, and Aidan’s location in relation to the rest of the team. Other than those fluctuating symbols, he was dropping into a featureless black abyss.

“Headcount,” Merit said through the implant, the free fallers still close enough for the limited range of the communications devices implanted in each man’s jaw. The operation anticipated them maintaining that proximity, but each man carried radios for greater distances and could of course link the implants to their personal wrist mounted datapads for globe spanning (but only poorly encrypted) communication. Sergeant Sinclair was burdened with the secure coms, just as SFC Massey was toting medical supplies, and Aidan the SAW.

Guided by the display in his visor, and occasional, unnecessary instructions from Captain Merit, Aidan dove earthward, headfirst. On command, at 2,500 feet, he flattened out, slowing his fall, then opened his chute. A few lights–
very
few lights–interrupted the darkness below. Another nearly unpopulated backwater, another hidey-hole for the dirtbags. This particular hidey-hole was somewhere in central Africa, so he’d get to add wild animals to his list of things to watch out for on this op. Aidan drifted down, adjusting the lines to direct his descent, steering toward the destination blinking on the map overlay in his visor.

The visor informed him of his impending rendezvous with the ground, and he caught just a dim view of a less dark mass rushing up at him. Then Aidan hit with a five-point landing that would have gotten him at least a grudging “go” from his instructors at Fort Benning. He checked himself for broken bones, then collected his chute. He thumbed the stud on his helmet that retracted the ear flaps, taking in the night sounds. He retrieved his night vision goggles and strapped them on over his helmet. The darkness took on shape: a dim greenish landscape appeared before him, computer modeling enhancing the imagery and displaying a virtual depth across the inside of his visor. The map overlay led him to the rest of the team, scattered over no more than two kilometers.

Aidan called up a picture of his mother and father as he walked, slipped it to the upper right hand corner of the visor. He glanced at it periodically for a minute, then dismissed it before linking up with the team. Nothing. The image didn’t change anything.

The team had come down within the planned drop zone, ten klicks from the target. “Listen up,” Captain Merit was saying as Aidan joined the gathered team. “The target is Farouq ibn Farouq, the terrorist so nice they named him twice.” A portrait briefly occupied the upper left quadrant of Aidan’s visor, showing him the visage he’d already memorized the previous day: a bearded, aquiline face, skin the color of toasted almonds. “He’s head of operations for the local Western Civilization Fan Club. Nothing fancy here: we go in, kill him, snap a picture, get bio-samples, grab any readily available intel, then scoot. Questions?”

“How many hostiles?” Aidan asked. “Any noncombatants?” They’d been over the operation on the station, but Captain Merit had been receiving updates until they’d actually leapt from the shuttle.

“Last intelligence estimate: twenty fighters plus about fifty women and children. So, we’re a scalpel, not a hammer. Got it?”

Four variations of “yes, sir” answered him. They spread out, roughly ten-meters separating one man from another, and moved, so many dots on Aidan’s visor. Six dots, to be precise: five widely separated, the sixth, the Mule trotting along like a dog behind the dot representing Sinclair, the Mule’s electric engine a faint background whine, audible only to one listening for it.

It was a ghostly landscape, this eerie scrub land, portrayed in shades of green, and oddly flat, despite the computer’s best efforts to provide a level of three-dimensionality. Tall grasses scraped against Aidan’s boots and slapped against his legs. He moved cautiously, alert for the ankle-breaking holes of animal dens or loose rock turning underfoot. He half expected to see the reflective, saucer-size eyes of large predators gazing hungrily at him.

He crouched when the map indicated he was about a kilometer from the encampment. He heard the barest rustle as Summers slipped away to reconnoiter the target, the labeled dot representing him on Aidan’s visor inching away.

Aidan sipped some water, listening to the insects and the unfamiliar noises of the African night. He stared about him, looking for anything that appeared out of place–other than himself. By the time Summers returned and conferred with Merit, half an hour had elapsed. Aidan found he’d been enjoying the nocturnal symphony.

“Game time, ladies,” Merit said. “Here’s the layout.” A plan of the encampment appeared on Aidan’s visor. “We’re going to split the party.”

“Fucking geeks,” Summers said.

“Stow it, Summers. One guard here, at the south entrance. Hearse, you take him down quiet. Carson, Sinclair you enter. Carson break left, Sinclair right. Secure here and here. The rest of us will breach this structure here, Farouq should be there. Rally point right here.”

Each man unslung the rucksack from his back and piled it on the Mule, then waited a moment for Sinclair to instruct the robot to stay. Then they moved, Hearse about a hundred meters in advance, threading the suppressor to the barrel of his .45 caliber pistol.

“Down,” came the whisper through Aidan’s implant. He crouched. Looking ahead he saw a wavering point of light–artificially bright through his night vision–and he could just make out the figure of a man, limned with a thick outline by the computer’s biometrics programming. He heard a noise like a muted exhalation. The outlined figure collapsed, disappearing in the grass and the spot flicked off. Aidan stood and raced Sinclair to the gate, an open space in a waist high mud-brick wall.

Aidan split left as he passed beneath the lintel of thin, twisty logs that marked the gateway. He had only the sketchiest impression of the compound or village the wall encircled. In his enhanced night vision view he saw a collection of squat, irregular, slab-sided structures, roofed with thatching or sheets of corrugated metal. He saw no watch towers or block houses. Nothing lending the place a military aspect. Farouq was blending in, then. Going to ground and relying on the human shield school of thought–using his enemy’s disinclination to kill women and children.

He could hear the boots of the entry team behind him as he reached his assigned post, the mud-brick corner of a house where the curve of the compound wall still allowed him a view of the south gate if he turned his head. He knelt, putting his back to the corner, hefting the SAW to his shoulder. He watched the three dots form a triangle outside the outline of the largest structure shown on his map of the village. Setting up for a breach, just like training in the kill-house scenarios they’d all drilled over and over at Camp Rowe. Then he minimized the map, not wanting the imagery to distract him.

A dog began barking somewhere deeper in the compound. A sharp report seemed to answer. Apparently Farouq’s front door was locked. Aidan heard shouting, a burst of gunfire–the ubiquitous AK-47–then silence. Momentarily.

To his right he heard doors opening, followed immediately by yelling. He double-checked that the fire selector was switched to auto. The slap of sandaled feet announced his first visitor. His visor silhouetted the advancing figure, distinctive geometry of the Kalashnikov rifle held at port arms, bare chested, wearing only baggy trousers and cheap flip-flops, a bolo knife tucked through the cord holding up the pants. The man clearly hadn’t noticed Aidan, nearing Aidan’s position without slowing, so Aidan raised the barrel of the SAW as the man passed within two feet of him and depressed the trigger. Four rounds caught the man in the side, tearing open his rib cage and sending his corpse sprawling, Kalashnikov launching from dead fingers to land yards away.