“Think so, sir,” the younger man said, fingers dancing through a haptic hologram, face screwed up in concentration. “Not getting any transmissions.”
“You wouldn’t from up here. Try bouncing a signal off one of their satellites.” Nance speared me with a glare. “You know, we haven’t named this girl yet. It’s bad luck, sailing on a ship you haven’t named.”
I blinked, then shook my head.
“I thought you’d name her,” I confessed. “You’re the captain.”
Nance snorted derision.
“I fly her, but you’re in command and you know it.” He shrugged. “At least until the Fleet gets ahold of us and throws us all in a loony bin after we tell them what happened to us. May as well give her a name in the meantime.”
I shared a look with Vicky and she smiled, though there was a sad tinge to it.
“What about Top?” she suggested.
“I like that,” I agreed. “She’s the CSS Ellen Campbell as far as I’m concerned.”
Nance tilted his head to the side thoughtfully, like he was considering whether or not he approved of the name, but Chase interrupted the conversation and his ruminating.
“I sent a hailing signal,” he reported. “Bounced it off one of the comm-sats. But I’m not getting any reply except the automated confirmation of the signal from the satellite.”
Nance scowled.
“Goddammit, why can’t anything ever be simple?”
“We’re an unknown vessel,” Yanayev chimed in. “With a signature no one’s ever seen before, claiming to be people who were probably declared dead years ago. They might not want to respond to us.”
“She has a point,” Captain Emily Nagarro agreed. Clad in the black uniform of Fleet Intelligence, she didn’t have an official station on the bridge, but as the senior intelligence officer on board she did have a standing invitation. “They might think we’re pirates or Tahni or God knows what else. We’ll probably have to talk to them in person.”
“We don’t have any landers,” Nance sighed. “No Intercepts, no drop-ships. The only way to land is to set this thing…” he frowned and raised a hand in apology, “… to set the Ellen down, and I can’t honestly say there’s enough open ground down there to accommodate her girth.”
“There’s one other thing that can land without the Ellen touching down,” Vicky countered, eyeing me. I nodded.
“Get us as low as you can, Captain,” I told Nance. “Chase, get ahold of the armorers. Tell them to get my Vigilante ready.”
One more drop. Maybe the last.
[ 2 ]
I’d lost count of how many drops I’d logged since that first training mission in Armor school. Hell, I’d even lost count of my combat drops, and one seemed to blend in with another until I barely noticed the rush of adrenaline anymore.
This jump was different. The Ellen wasn’t a drop-ship, wasn’t an Intercept cutter—she was nearly the size of the Orion, a starship that looked at home in orbit or traversing the black between the planets and so totally out of place deep within the atmosphere of Plateau. Maybe if she’d been screaming at full speed in a desperate strafing run, I could have accepted it at a gut-level. But instead, she hovered just above the mouth of the Rift canyon like something from a dream, and when I jumped out of her utility airlock, it felt like I was a depressed Corporate Council middle manager diving headfirst from an office building window.
It would have been suicide in one of the older Vigilantes, the ones we’d left the Commonwealth with, or certainly one of the cruder models we’d cobbled together on Yfingam for the Vergai. The maximum safe jump altitude for one of the stock suits was four hundred meters at Earth-standard gravity, and the Ellen hovered at least a kilometer above the river valley floor. Still, I didn’t hesitate and neither did Vicky, confident in the abilities of the Predecessor-tech reactor and jump jets installed by the Resscharr on Lilandreth’s world. The thrusters could keep us in the air for half an hour or more and could easily land a suit from a thousand meters up.
Dropping into the Rift felt almost like passing through a doorway into a different world, the dry and lifeless sandstone giving way to the thriving green and blue of the river valley as we descended.
“I’m not picking up any EM transmissions,” Vicky said about halfway down, her voice barely audible in my headphones over the roar of the jets.
“I noticed.” Not so much as a spike on the meter at the corner of my helmet HUD to show an automated air traffic response, much less a message. No laser line of sight either. Not a single indication that anyone had seen us. Or that there was anyone to see us.
There was nothing else to say, and neither of us broke the silence until the buildings came into view. They’d been hidden by an outcropping of the cliff wall overhanging the river, giving Shadewater its name, and even in the glare of midday that shadow kept the settlement a good ten degrees cooler than the surrounding trees and brush. The river ran wild over the rocks scattered through it, frothing in desperate fury as if the rocks had invaded its territory and deserved to feel the full measure of its wrath. Some people got their jollies rafting over rapids like that, but I thought even the foolhardiest of the extreme sports types would have given this area a pass.
Certainly no rafts braved the waters today. No poles dipped into the isolated, still pools at the water’s edge, no tractors plowed the flood plains of the valley, no groundcars wound the rough dirt tracks leading up and down the river to smaller towns. Not a single person rushed out of those houses and storage buildings and fabrication centers to stare at the Vigilante battlesuits coming down on jets of blue fire.
“There!” Vicky said when we were about fifty meters up, but my targeting system had already picked up the movement.
Fast and low to the ground, a shaggy tail trailing behind as it darted out of the open doorway to what might have been some kind of government building. Gray fur with orange highlights and canine features. A coyote. We’d scared it out of the building with the scream of jets and the billowing cloud of dust as we touched down. The turbines whined down to nothing and I stood there and let them, scanning the buildings.
Nothing on thermal, no motion other than the occasional bird flitting in and out from nests built under the eaves of the roofs of houses and businesses. Something flashed white in the doorway the coyote had come out from, and I zoomed in on the object with my helmet optics. Gnawed upon, splintered, and worn with time, yet still recognizable. It was a human femur.
“It’s a ghost town,” Vicky murmured.
“Alvarez, Sandoval,” Nance said, his voice obscenely loud in my ear, almost disrespectful in this graveyard. “You wanna tell us what’s happening down there?”
Not particularly.
“Haven’t found anyone yet,” I reported tersely. “The settlement looks abandoned. I’ll get back to you if we come across anything significant.” In other words, stop bugging me.
He’s technically your subordinate, Jim reminded me. You could just order him to stop bothering you.
I’ve ordered you to stop bothering me and look how much good that’s done.
But I’m not your subordinate.
Then what are you? I demanded.
Your best friend, Jim declared with malicious humor.
