Jack Campbell - Guardian

“Yes, sir,” Carabali agreed. “Roughly six thousand. We talked to some of them through the surveillance gear. They were hauled out of prison camps in other star systems without any notice and dumped here within the last few weeks.”

“What else?”

Carabali gestured to the images again, her expression dissatisfied. “There’s been a lot of activity outside the camp-construction area. The ground shows signs of a lot of activity for a radius of about seventy kilometers around the camp, but, again, our sensor sweeps found nothing of concern. There’s a dense web of paved and unpaved access roads crisscrossing that area, most showing heavy use from what must have been construction equipment and loads intended for the prison camp. We’d have to go in and dig extensively to see if there was anything under those roads or elsewhere.”

“Seventy kilometers?” Geary asked. “Outside the camp?”

“Yes, sir. It doesn’t correlate to any kind of threat I know of, and my engineers say when a project is being rushed, they tear up everything around it instead of being careful with grass and trees and stuff.” Carabali sounded as if she herself wasn’t too sympathetic regarding the fate of “grass and trees and stuff” if important work needed to be done fast.

How could something seventy kilometers outside the camp threaten a recovery operation? If the Syndics wanted to nuke the recovery force, they just needed bombs within the camp. “What’s your gut feeling, General?”

Carabali paused, looking at the images. “I don’t know of any reason not to go in,” she finally said.

“That’s not exactly a strong endorsement of that course of action,” Geary observed.

“It’s not my call, Admiral.” Carabali frowned. “I’m dodging the question. If the decision were mine, I’d go in. I can’t offer any reasons not to go in except for a total lack of trust in what the Syndics might do.”

Geary snorted a derisive laugh. “Anyone who did trust the Syndics at this point would be crazy. What about buried nukes?”

“If they’re there, those nukes are buried deep and heavily shielded.”

The plan called for eighty shuttles, almost every one available, which would each have to make two trips to get all of the prisoners up to the fleet. “What’s the absolute minimum number of personnel I can send down to do the job?”

Carabali considered the question. “Zero personnel. Send the shuttles on full auto, programmed to land, pick up the prisoners, and return. But that runs the risk of the Syndics subverting the systems on the shuttles since they’ll have physical access to them. Worst case, they could load them with nukes instead of prisoners and the shuttles would tell us everything was fine until they docked in our ships and went off. Not so worse but still bad, discipline could break down, the prisoners could stampede for the shuttles, killing any number of their own as they all tried to cram on board, and possibly disabling some of the shuttles. Even in the best case, where the Syndics didn’t try anything, any major system failures on any of the shuttles could result in loss of the bird and any prisoners it might have picked up.”

“How many Marines are required to avoid that?”

“Enough to operate and conduct emergency repairs on the birds if needed, and enough to provide security if the Syndics try to board a shuttle or if crowd control of the prisoners is needed. Shuttle pilot. Copilot. Flight mechanic. A fire team of three Marines for security. Six per shuttle. That is the minimum I would recommend, Admiral.”

Six per shuttle. Eighty shuttles. Four hundred and eighty Marines. Geary studied the images for several seconds, thinking. “All right. I think we have to try this. Those six thousand prisoners are counting on us. Put your plan together. I’ll have the fleet in position to provide fire support if needed and to provide cover if any of the Syndic warships pretending not to be Syndic warships try to attack the shuttles.”

From orbit, worlds displayed different personalities. The ancient standards were living planets like Old Earth, blue and white, with patches of different colors on the landmasses. Geary had heard of the Red Planet near Old Earth, and had himself seen countless planets that revealed different personalities ranging from the multicolored clouds of gas giants to the bare rock of small, hot worlds.

The habitable world in Simur Star System seemed to have been painted by an artist who had nothing but shades of brown. Even the small seas looked like muddy expanses of rust. The stretch of sand dunes at the hot northern pole were a lighter terra-cotta shade. Near the equator, some patches of green could be seen, where farms clung to the planet’s narrow temperate zone. The few cities, barely large enough not to be classified as towns, were also near the temperate zone. The prison camp was located halfway down toward the south pole, the construction scars around it a multishaded tan/khaki/beige patch in the middle of a vast, empty plain. At the cold southern pole, the land was a murky chocolate color, like thick mud, interspersed with streaks of dirty ice that was so dark as to be nearly black.

“What a hole,” Desjani muttered, putting into words what nearly everyone in the fleet must have been thinking.

“Let’s get this done and get out of here,” Geary agreed. “General Carabali, begin the operation. All units in the First Fleet, be prepared to engage any warships that threaten the shuttles or the prison camp.” At least with the fleet in this tight a formation, communication delays were too tiny to be noticeable.

The four groups of Syndic ships were all less than a light-minute distant, close enough to be worrisome but not close enough to justify postponing the recovery. The guards at the prison camp had fled in the few available vehicles, leaving the prisoners no longer watched over but still effectively imprisoned by the wasteland surrounding the camp.

The planet scrolled by beneath the fleet as the shuttles launched, coming down toward the camp in waves.

Geary, his nerves keyed up to highest alert, watched his display, waiting for something unexpected to happen, for some threat to materialize. The first wave of shuttles were penetrating the atmosphere of the planet, the site of the prison camp becoming visible on the planet as the orbiting fleet approached it from high above.

The high-priority signal that blared at Geary came from an unexpected source. Why would Tanuki be calling—?

Geary hit accept, his worries multiplying rapidly.

Instead of Captain Smythe, he saw Lieutenant Jamenson, her green hair contrasting vividly with a face gone pale. “Admiral! You have to call off this operation! They’ve got the mother of all traps down there!”

Jamenson didn’t wait for a reply, but kept talking, the words spilling out of her so fast that Geary could barely understand them. “I just put it all together. I’m sorry… I… there are two engineering units identified in the Syndic comms. They were in this star system recently, and I know those unit designators. They’re both the equivalent of what the Alliance calls planet-breakers, engineers who use large and superlarge munitions for certain specialized tasks. Two of those units, Admiral. And the only major new construction in this star system is that camp.

“There was lots of large excavation gear here, and a very large amount of drilling equipment. I recognized the Syndic equipment codes. They dug some big holes and did a lot of drilling very recently.

“And there are some strange materials identified in cargo manifests or off-loading documents or transportation requests or gossip between individuals. Individually, those materials have a few uses, but together they are very reminiscent of an Alliance research project five decades ago. The code name… never mind the code name… the nickname for the project was Continental Shotgun. Bury a lot of very powerful nuclear munitions and use their energy when they explode to pump a huge field of single-use particle beam tubes. The research project aimed to turn a section of a planet about a hundred kilometers square into a one-time-only dense field of particle beams that could annihilate an invasion fleet when it passed above that region of the planet.”