Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

“Fucked if I know,” Halley replies. “But if you don’t mind, Commander, I’d rather not land this thing and risk contamination.”

I hadn’t even considered a ChemWar attack, but now that Halley voices her concern, I feel very uneasy about our low flight level. I know it’s just my overactive, terrified brain playing tricks on me, but I imagine a cloud of lethal contaminant getting stirred up by the downdraft of the ship’s engines. Back in ChemWar class, we were shown videos of chemical and biological attacks from the last major tiff with the Chinese and Koreans back on Earth, and the closeups of hapless NAC troopers who died by choking on their bloody vomit left a lasting impression in my memory.

“Let’s not,” the XO agrees. “I don’t feel like puking out my lungs today. Take her back up, and let’s get on the radio, see if anyone’s made it out of there. Maybe their Marines had their suits on.”

We circle above the settlement at high altitude for a while, trying to contact the Marines that may have made it out of the city. Halley sends challenges on the Marine field frequency for twenty minutes while flying a holding pattern, but once again, there’s no reply.

“If they’re within fifty miles, they should hear us,” she says. “I can’t do this much longer if we want to make it back to the terraformer on what’s left in the tank.”

“Understood,” the XO says. “Make another loop south, and then let’s head back to the barn.”

“That’s a whole lot of flying done for nothing,” I say to Halley in a low voice, careful to keep my finger away from the transmit button. She merely shrugs in response.

“Beats sitting on our asses and waiting for the next Navy boat to come pick us up.”

There’s a soft chirp on her TacLink console, and she turns her attention to it. She taps the screen, reads the display for a moment, and then sits up straight with a jolt.

“What is it?” I ask, dreading more bad news heading our way.

“Emergency transponder,” she says. “It’s the other drop ship from the Versailles. Stinger Six-One.”

Her fingers do a rapid little dance on the comms console as she goes to a different frequency.

“Stinger Six-One, this is Halley in Six-Two. I’m picking up your beacon two-niner miles to my south. If anyone down there can hear me, please respond.”

Again, we get no reply. Halley repeats the broadcast two more times, and then lets out an exasperated little snort.

“I swear, this is the Planet of Broken Fucking Radios, or something. I’m getting tired of talking to myself out here.”

She toggles her intercom button.

“Commander, I’m picking up the emergency beacon from our other drop ship. I’m going to try and eyeball the site, check if anyone’s made it out.”

“Go ahead,” the XO says.

When we’re back in the weather, Halley runs a radar sweep of the ground ahead of us. I look over at her sensor screen as the display shows a wedge-shaped segment of the planet surface below and in front of us, swept from side to side in short intervals by the focused beam from the drop ship’s radar transmitter.

“We don’t usually run continuous ground sweeps like that,” Halley says when she notices that I’m watching the screen. “That radar lights up threat warning receivers like a Christmas tree. If we had SRA down there, it would be like turning on a huge billboard that says ‘Shoot Me’.”

“You know what? I almost wish those were just SRA troopers down there,” I say, and she smiles.

“Yeah. Who would have thought we’d ever wish for that, huh?”

Suddenly, the ship transitions out of the heavy cloud cover and into clear weather with startling abruptness. One moment, we’re flying among drifting bands of rain in zero visibility, the next moment we’re in calm skies. I look out of the port cockpit window in surprise, and see a wall of clouds receding behind the ship. I can see the ground a few thousand feet below us. It looks like we just crossed into the eye of a hurricane. We’re in a huge bowl of calm weather that looks like it’s twenty miles or more across.

“Holy living fuck,” Halley says next to me, in a tone of profound awe and astonishment.

In front of the ship, right in the center of this clear patch of sky, there’s an enormous spire reaching into the sky. It’s the color of dirty snow, and so tall that I can’t see the top of it even after craning my neck and peering through the top panel of the drop ship’s windshield. In relation to its height, the structure seems impossibly thin, but even at this distance, it’s obvious that the trunk is a few hundred yards in diameter. It flares out at the bottom, like the lower section of a tree.

“What the hell is that?”

“You want to come up here and take a look at this, sir,” Halley tells the XO, who promptly unstraps from his jump seat once more and steps forward into the cockpit.

“Jesus,” he says when he sees the spire rising into the dark clouds ahead of us.

“I have nothing on radar,” Halley says in astonishment.

“Come again?”

“It’s not showing on radar,” she replies, and cycles through display modes on her screen. “Ground radar, air-to-air mode, millimeter wave—not a damn thing. If the weather hadn’t cleared up back there all of a sudden, we could have flown right into that thing without ever seeing it.”

“Looks like they’ve been busy,” the XO says. “They’ve built that thing in less than a month?”

To me, the structure rising from the surface of the planet doesn’t look built at all. There are no visible supports, no protrusions or seams. The surface of the spire looks smooth and uninterrupted. It looks like an enormous tree stripped of its bark.

“The emergency beacon is five degrees off our bow, four miles ahead,” Halley says. “Right near the base of that .”

“Just fly around it for now,” the XO orders. “Keep your distance. I don’t want to add another crash beacon to the first one.”

The patch of calm weather seems to be perfectly circular, and the tall, white structure is right in the center of it. Halley turns the Wasp to the left, putting us on a course that’s parallel to the outer walls of this strange eye in the storm.

“It shows up on infrared,” she says. “It’s not like a furnace or anything, but it’s definitely throwing out some heat.”

“Yeah, but what the hell is it?”

I lean forward to look up through the top windshield panel again. The clouded sky overhead is a little lighter in color that the wall of clouds towering to the left of the ship in the distance, and as I look at the cloud cover directly above the Wasp, I get a sense of swift movement, like a front of storm clouds rushing across the sky in a high wind. The flood of lead-gray clouds is pouring straight out from the center of the storm’s eye, and flowing toward the walls.

“It’s a terraformer,” I say. “Atmospheric exchanger, whatever they call it. Look at that.”

Halley follows my gaze with her own, and the XO leans forward over the center console to get a glimpse of what we’re looking at.

“I think you may be right, Mister Grayson,” he says. “And if that’s the case, I think we’re off this rock for good.”

He retreats from his uncomfortably stretched position, and settles in a crouch between the pilot seats.

“It took us fifteen fucking years to build a terraforming network on this rock and get it fit for people to live on. If these things can waltz in here and set up a working network of their own in three weeks…”

He leaves the sentence unfinished, but I get the sentiment. If this is a working atmospheric exchanger, the alien species is so much more advanced that trying to compete with them for the same real estate would be like showing up at an architecture competition with a child’s erector set and a few rolls of polymer sheets.