Operation Sierra-75 Read online

  “If Cabot was a victim of hostile action, as your recording would seem to suggest, this is a military matter, just the same as it would be if we were rescuing a fighter pilot shot down behind enemy lines.”

  Cortez frowned as she leaned forward, placing her elbows on the edge of the briefing-room table. The doctor glared at Taggart as though she were designating him for a laser-guided missile strike. Something ugly flashed in her eyes.

  “General, I . . .” Cortez began, but Andrews cut her off.

  “That’s enough, Doctor. I have to agree with Captain Taggart. He is an experienced combat officer. He and his platoon have been serving as ship’s Marines aboard our security cutters ever since the Induction. He will have operational control of the mission. You may overrule him in matters of medical necessity, but only so long as it does not endanger the mission or the rescue team.

  “Your cutter is being prepped now. I’ve assigned you the best, most veteran crew we’ve got available. You shouldn’t have any worries in that department. The yeoman here has chip copies of all briefing and background materials you should need. You and your people should be ready to move out in twenty-four hours.

  “Dismissed.”

  Taggart got to his feet, saluted, and headed for the door, followed by his gunnery sergeant. Almost predictably, he arrived at the door at precisely the same moment as Rebecca Cortez.

  “After you, Doctor,” the Marine captain said, stepping back slightly.

  “Don’t patronize me, Taggart,” Cortez shot back. “I may not be a trained killer like you, but I’m still an officer. So let’s put aside all this ‘professional courtesy’ crap, and call things like they really are. I don’t give a damn if you like me or not, but you had damn well better give me the respect I deserve.”

  With that she turned on her heel and stormed out of the briefing room.

  “Now what the hell was that all about?” Gunnery Sergeant Onawa Frost said over Taggart’s shoulder, her features darkening in anger.

  “C’mon, Gunny, you know damn well what that was all about,” Taggart said, stepping into the corridor. “She’s MCF. There are so many jokers in the Union Armed Forces who despise the Mexican Contribution Forces. And the Corps is certainly not exempt from it. She probably thinks that I think that she can’t handle command of the mission ’cause she’s MCF.”

  “I can understand the feelings,” Frost snorted. “But not the expression of them.”

  Taggart stopped and gazed levelly at his senior noncom. Gunnery Sergeant Frost was a Mohawk, with as pure bloodlines as it was possible to have in America today. Her strong features and coppery skin tone had been the cause and butt of many coarse jokes and the target of many prejudices throughout her career in the Corps. Even now, as a Gunnery Sergeant, she faced old prejudices which refused to die out, though the age that spawned them had long gone by.

  Far too often, the objects of those prejudices responded by adopting prejudices of their own, hating others first, before the others had a chance to hate them. Frost was speculating, and to Taggart it seemed correct, that Cortez had adopted such an attitude toward him.

  “Yeah, Gunny, I guess you would at that.”

  “Yeah,” Frost echoed. “Just leave her alone for a while, Cap. She’ll come around. They all do eventually.”

  “Yeah,” Taggart said, as though relying on the superstition of three-for-luck. “I just hope it’s sooner with this one. If she keeps up this hardcase act, it’s gonna make things really interesting when we hit Sierra Seven-Five.”

  2

  * * *

  T ycho Base’s main hangar bay smelled like every other hangar bay Captain Taggart had been in. The odors of fresh and burnt fuel, spilled lubricants, paint, hot metal, and human sweat mingled to create a sour aroma like no other. If the stink of Tycho’s hangar bay had any distinction, it was the added undertone of staleness that came from recycled air. In the hours since his briefing, Taggart had changed from his dress uniform into the mottled green, brown, and black of standard Battle Dress Utility fatigues issued to every G-Forces trooper, regardless of rank. Only the black embroidered cloth “railroad tracks” sewn to his collar proclaimed him to be an officer.

  “Okay, squad leaders,” he barked, turning his attention back to the armed men and women standing before him. “We’ve got two hours before we’re due to board the cutter. I want a final equipment check. Make sure we aren’t leaving anything behind. If there’s any gear you need or think you might need, tell Gunny Frost, and she’ll tell me. We’ll see if we can’t get it for you.

  “Any questions? No? Good. Fall ’em out, Gunny.”

  “Platoon,” Frost said in a deep, rasping growl. “Fall out.”

  As the Marines under his command broke ranks and began checking over their equipment, Captain Taggart turned toward the cutter to which the rescue team had been assigned.

  She was a fairly large ship, just over one hundred meters in length and thirty across the widest part of her fuselage. Her wingspan was over seventy-five meters. Much of her hull was taken up by two powerful engines and the fuel needed to power them. Two sets of massive, clamshell-type doors in the ship’s midsection stood open. Inside Taggart could see a pair of angular shapes, like fat grasshoppers. The dark olive green machines were military shuttlecraft. Each of the assault boats was about the size of a large, conventional helicopter, minus the rotors, and was capable of carrying a platoon of heavily armed men.

  What remained of the cutter once you took engineering and the assault-boat hangars into account was not impressive. It was almost as though her designers had slapped living spaces into the vessel as an afterthought. The result was a big, ungainly-seeming vessel intended more for practicality’s sake than the comfort of her crew. Taggart knew from long experience with patrol cutters that this was precisely the designers’ intention. The original ships of this type were converted Martian shuttles. Now that Earth had been ripped out of its own solar system, leaving Mars very far behind, the shuttles had been stripped down and refitted into long-range patrol cutters and exploration ships. The missing Cabot was one of those vessels. So was the ship before him.

  Like many spacecraft in use before the Induction, the cutter had once been painted a spotless white with black accents. Now, in the wake of intensified hostilities with the Neo-Sovs and contact with alien races, she had been given a coat of dark gray radar-absorbent material. Just beneath the command deck glazing, in black paint, barely perceptible against the smoky RAM, was the vessel’s official designation PY-20. Beneath that, in the same black paint, her crew had stenciled the ship’s nickname, Gallatin.

  Captain Taggart watched as a small man wearing dark off-blue coveralls dropped out of the assault-boat bay, landing lightly on the concrete hangar floor. Pinned to the collar of the man’s coveralls was a single silver bar. The nametape sewn to the garment’s right breast proclaimed his name to be Tamm.

  “Lieutenant?” Taggart said, approaching the naval officer. “I’m Captain Maxwell Taggart. Your passengers are just about ready to go.”

  “Levi Tamm, lieutenant, junior grade.” The man smiled broadly and shook Taggart’s proffered hand. “I wish I could say the same for the Gallatin.”

  “How’s that?”

  Tamm crooked his thumb at the open boat bays. “The old girl wasn’t designed with assault boats in mind. Our boat bays were intended for pinnaces or shuttles. Your assault boats are a good bit bigger than we’re used to carrying. We had some trouble with the launch and recovery systems. Took all damn night to get the things to work right.”

  Taggart stepped forward to peer at the big magnetic grapples that held the assault boats fast in the Gallatin’s bay. Three oblong pads, each housing a powerful electromagnet, were mounted on extensible arms. When launching or recovering a shuttle, the arms were extended and the magnets turned on or off, as the situation dictated. The simple, but efficient system was usually controlled by computer, but could, in a pinch, be handled manually. The most dicey part
of the operation was making sure the shuttle was properly aligned with the boat bay.

  “What’s the problem?” Taggart asked.

  Tamm said, “We had a heck of a time figuring that out ourselves. It seemed like the grapples didn’t want to latch on to your boats. We finally figured it out. The system is used to much smaller craft. Your assault boats barely fit the bays. The system judges the space between the bay’s bulkheads and the hull of the boat and decides if it’s lined up correctly. With so little clearance, the computer kept thinking the boat was out of position in two directions at the same time and refused to grapple. Once we figured that out, it was simply a matter of resetting the parameters of the docking program, and the grapples took hold slick as you please.”

  Tamm said ruefully, “I know, it sounds simple, and it is. We just kinda had a case of group brain-lock. We never thought about looking at the software. We assumed it was a hardware problem.”

  Ducking out of the boat bay, Taggart chuckled. Tamm’s honesty was refreshing. Even experts sometimes overlook the obvious.

  “Do you mind one more question, Lieutenant?”

  “Not at all.”

  “What’s with the name?” Taggart asked. “I was under the impression that all patrol cutters were just given a number.”

  “Officially, that’s true,” Tamm said, looking up at the black-painted characters. “Officially, we’re PY-20—PY for patrol cutter. Yeah, I know the Y doesn’t make sense, but that’s the traditional designation for a cutter. The C designation is reserved for cruisers or carriers. I think the Navy came up with all the abbreviations and designations just to confuse civilians and ground pounders. Anyhow, like a lot of crews, we’ve given the old girl her own name. In this case Gallatin, after the first patrol/rescue cutter deployed by the old US Coast Guard. I guess the crew feel she deserves it. After all, we were the first patrol cutter commissioned as such after the Induction.”

  “I see.” As a Marine, Maxwell Taggart understood pride and tradition. Movement on the far side of the cavernous hangar bay caught his attention.

  Dr. Lieutenant Rebecca Cortez and her ten-man medical team had finally put in their appearance. The medical personnel were far less burdened than the Marines. Each of the medics carried only one small bag, containing whatever clothing and personal effects they chose to bring aboard the Gallatin. Most of their equipment and supplies had already been stowed aboard the cutter by ground crewmen.

  Taggart had not seen or spoken to the medic since the chilly end of the briefing session. The lapse in contact was not wholly Taggart’s doing, nor, he was forced to admit, was it Cortez’s. Both the Marine and the doctor had plenty of things to keep them busy during the scant preparation time; neither had the leisure or the inclination to pay a social call on the other.

  In an attempt to smooth the way between them, Taggart caught the doctor’s eye and tossed off a friendly wave, which Cortez returned in kind. To the Marine captain, that was a positive sign. Doctors, he knew, could be touchy about who was in charge, but Cortez seemed to have a firm enough grasp on the reality of the situation to defer to the judgment of a superior officer.

  “How long ’til I can board my men?” Taggart asked, dragging his attention back to the issue at hand.

  “As soon as you like, Captain,” Tamm answered. “My XO is around here somewhere. He can see to getting your troops billeted.”

  * * *

  “As soon as you like” was a lot longer than either Captain Taggart, or Lieutenant j.g. Tamm had expected. By the time the Marines finished their final equipment check and had been assigned berthing spaces aboard the Gallatin, nearly two hours had elapsed.

  “Okay, folks, we’re ready for departure. Please assume launch positions,” Tamm’s cheerful voice sounded through the ship’s intercom.

  As Taggart strapped himself into a thickly padded acceleration couch, he felt a distinct rumble through the cutter’s steel decking. Taggart knew the preferred method for launching the ship in a heavier-gravity environment was vertically, with the aid of a gantry and a belly-mounted scramjet boost vehicle. The cutter, unlike most spacecraft of the past, was capable of level-flight takeoff, rather like a gigantic airplane. The moon’s weak gravity and a pair of solid-fuel rocket-assisted takeoff booster packs attached to the Gallatin’s aftersection made the task that much easier.

  “All personnel, prepare for boost,” Tamm’s voice came again. “Boost in ten seconds . . . nine . . .”

  Taggart tuned out the cutter skipper’s droning count, closed his eyes and braced himself for the powerful inertial forces that would shove him back into his seat when the boosters fired.

  “Zero . . . launch.” There was no hint of excitement in Tamm’s voice as the boosters fired. For a long second the Gallatin remained in place, as though she refused to move. Then, slowly at first, but rapidly gaining in speed, she started off down the launch track. The expected Newtonian forces felt like a giant hand pressing Taggart into the acceleration couch’s synth-leather padding. The whole ship vibrated as the boosters propelled it forward. A new sensation crept into Taggart’s awareness, as the Gallatin pulled up into its takeoff rotation. Almost reluctantly, the big patrol cutter pointed its nose toward the sky. For several long moments, the cutter streaked down the launch track, its nose in the air, and its after landing gear seemingly refusing to loose their hold on the lunar soil. Then, with a lurch, the ship staggered into the air. The Gallatin’s engines cut in, adding their thrust to that of the rapidly depleting RATO packs. Minutes ticked by as the pale blue-gray sky of the terraformed lunar surface around Tycho Crater Moonbase was gradually replaced by the diamond-studded black of space. A pair of heavy thuds rumbled through the cutter’s hull as the RATO packs were jettisoned.

  “That’s it, folks,” Lieutenant Tamm said through the intercom. “Gallatin is spaceborne, and outbound for Sierra Seven-Five. Major Taggart, would you please come to the control deck?”

  Taggart snorted in amusement as he unfastened the thick nylon seat restraints. No matter how many flights he took, he would never get used to the temporary and strictly honorary promotion given to all ground-pounder captains the moment they set foot on a naval vessel. The promotion was another tradition stretching back to the wet-water navies of the last century. Tradition dictated there could be only one captain aboard any one vessel. Though Levi Tamm was officially a lieutenant junior grade, he was the Gallatin’s commander, and was therefore called Captain. Thus, Taggart would be called Major so long as he and his platoon were aboard the cutter.

  Unbidden, Onawa Frost released her safety harness and pulled herself to Taggart’s side as he made his way out of the troop bay.

  Reaching the command deck, Taggart and Frost were met by Lieutenant Tamm. The cheerful officer quickly laid out the mission’s flight plan. The plan called for the Gallatin to follow Cabot’s original flight path, passing within a few thousand kilometers of three other planet-sized bodies. These planetoids were, according to probes, dead, or at least uninhabited. Tamm wanted to mimic Cabot’s outward course, in an attempt to learn what had caused the survey ship to go missing.

  “It’ll take us a couple of weeks to reach Sierra Seven-Five,” Tamm explained. “And that’s barring any kind of encounter or incident. Your Marines going to be able to keep themselves occupied that long?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you, Lieutenant.” Gunny Frost grinned at the Gallatin’s commander. “We’ve got all sorts of things planned to keep the boys busy.”

  “That’s right,” Taggart cut her off with a choppy wave of his right hand. Frost had referred to Levi Tamm by his official rank, rather than Captain as his position dictated. While the cheerful S-Corps officer did not seem the type to stand on the regs, Taggart did not want a flare-up of the interservice rivalry that often accompanied close contact between Marines and their “Navy” counterparts. Tamm had let the matter slide, but the Gallatin’s crew might not.

  “We’ve got a lot of work to do, familiari
zing ourselves with the telemetry recordings Cabot sent back before she vanished. If the boys get bored with that, I’m sure we can find something for them to do. Don’t worry, Captain,” Taggart said, stressing the honorary rank. “We’ll stay out of your way.”

  3

  * * *

  L ieutenant Tamm’s estimate of a couple of weeks proved accurate enough. Fifteen days after the Gallatin lifted off from Tycho Base, she slid gracefully into a high-altitude orbit over the planetoid designated Sierra Seven-Five.

  The trip had been so uneventful that Captain Taggart would have called it boring if not for the constant exercises he and Gunny Frost were putting the platoon through.

  Far from being the mindless, barbaric robots that many believed them to be, the Marines displayed an intelligence that would have surprised their detractors. They quickly assimilated the data provided by the Union Space Agency, becoming so familiar with the ship and her layout that any one of them could have made a freehand drawing of the survey ship’s deck plan and not been off by more than a meter. They knew the bios of Cabot’s officers and senior crewmen almost as well as they knew their own. Each could recite and understand the survey vessel’s meager findings regarding Sierra Seven-Five’s atmospheric composition, pressure and temperature, gravity and projected hydrographic index. Only the chilling reports detailing encounters with alien races separated the background data of this mission from that of a more routine operation. Taggart made sure that all of his men, especially his highly trained reconnaissance scouts, were familiar with those sections of the briefing material dealing with the nonhumans.

  When the “head-work” threatened to become boringly familiar, Gunny Frost broke the platoon into squads, or fire teams, and took them to the Gallatin’s cargo bay, where she ran them through zero-G combat exercises. Still more time was devoted to checking and rechecking equipment, including the two Type 60 assault craft in the cutter’s boat bay.