And no site preparation. On a stealth assault, there’s minimal site preparation even on the main landing zones—just a fast first-wave flyover dropping screamers and gas canisters (supposed to make the Gerin itch all over, and not affect us). Alternate strips didn’t get any prep at all. If the Gerin guessed where alternate Alpha was, they’d be meeting us without having to duck from any preparatory fire. That’s what alternate landing sites were like: you take what you get and are grateful it doesn’t mean trailing a chute out a shuttle hatch. That’s the worst. We aren’t really paratroops, and the shuttles sure as hell aren’t paratroop carriers. Although maybe the worst is being blown up in the shuttle, and about then the shuttle lurched again, then bounced violently as something blew entirely too close.
Then we went down. I suppose it was a controlled landing, sort of, or none of us would have made it. But it felt, with all the pitching and yawing, like we were on our way to a crash. We could hear the tires blow on contact, and then the gear folded, and the shuttle pitched forward one last time to plow along the strip with its heatshield nose. We were all in one tangled pile against the forward bulkhead by then, making almost as much noise as the shuttle itself until the captain bellowed over it. With one final lurch, the craft was motionless, and for an instant silent.
“Pop that hatch, Gunny.” The captain’s voice held that tone that no one argues with—no one smart, anyway—and Rolly and I started undogging the main hatch. The men were untangling themselves now, with muttered curses. One of the wetears hadn’t stayed up, and had a broken ankle; he bleated once and then fell silent when he realized no one cared. I yanked on the last locking lever, which had jammed in the crash, just as we heard the first explosions outside. I glanced at the captain. He shrugged. What else could we do? We sure didn’t have a chance in this nicely marked coffin we were in. Rolly put his shoulders into it, and the hatch slid aside to let in a cool, damp breath of local air.
Later I decided that Caedmon didn’t smell as bad as most planets, but right then all I noticed was the exhaust trails of a couple of Gerin fighters who had left their calling cards on the runway. A lucky wind blew the dust away from us, but the craters were impressive. I looked at the radiation counter on the display—nothing more than background, so it hadn’t been nukes. Now all we had to do was get out before the fighters came back.
Normally we unload down ramps, four abreast—but with the shuttle sitting on its nose and the port wing, the starboard landing ramp was useless. The portside hatch wouldn’t open at all. This, of course, is why we carry those old-fashioned cargo nets everyone teases us about. We had those deployed in seconds (we practice that, in the cruisers’ docking bays, and that’s why the sailorboys laugh at us). Unloading the shuttle—all men and materiel, including the pilot (who had a broken arm) and the wetear with the bad ankle—went faster than I’d have thought. Our lieutenant, Pascoe, had the forward team, and had already pushed into the scraggly stuff that passed for brush at the base of the nearest hill. At least he seemed to know how to do that. Then Courtney climbed back and placed the charges, wired them up, and came out. When he cleared the red zone, the captain pushed the button. The shuttle went up in a roiling storm of light, and we all blinked. That shuttle wasn’t going anywhere, but even so I felt bad when we blew it… it was our ticket home. Not to mention the announcement the explosion made. We had to have had survivors to blow it that long after the crash.
What everyone sees, in the videos of Marine landings, is the frontline stuff—the helmeted troops with the best weapons, the bright bars of laser fire—or some asshole reporter’s idea of a human interest shot (a Marine looking pensively at a dead dog, or something). But there’s the practical stuff, which sergeants always have to deal with. Food, for instance. Medical supplies, not to mention the medics, who half the time don’t have the sense to keep their fool heads out of someone’s sights. Water, weapons, ammunition, spare parts, comunits, satellite comm bases, spare socks… whatever we use has to come with us. On a good op, we’re resupplied inside twenty-four hours, but that’s about as common as an honest dockside joint. So the shuttle had supplies for a standard week (Navy week: Old Terra standard—it doesn’t matter what the local rotational day or year is), and every damn kilo had to be offloaded and hauled off. By hand. When the regular ground troops get here, they’ll have floaters and trucks, and their enlisted mess will get fresh veggies and homemade pies… and that’s another thing that’s gone all the way back, near as I can tell. Marines slog through the mud, hump their stuff uphill and down, eat compressed bricks commonly called—well, you can imagine. And the next folks in, whoever they are, have the choppers and all-terrain vehicles and then make bad jokes about us. But not in the same joint, or not for long.
What bothered me, and I could see it bothered the captain, was that the fighters didn’t come back and blow us all to shreds while all this unloading went on. We weren’t slow about it; we were humping stuff into cover as fast as we could. But it wasn’t natural for those fighters to make that one pass over the strip and then leave a downed shuttle alone. They had to know they’d missed—that the shuttle was intact and might have live Marines inside. All they’d done was blow a couple of holes in the strip, making it tough for anyone else to land there until it was fixed. They had to be either stupid or overconfident, and no one yet had accused the Gerin of being stupid. Or of going out of their way to save human lives. I had to wonder what else they had ready for us.
Whatever it was, they let us alone for the next couple of standard hours, and we got everything moved away from the strip, into a little sort of cleft between two of the hills. I wasn’t there: I was working my way to the summit, as quietly as possible, with a five-man team.
We’d been told the air was breathable, which probably meant the green stuff was photosynthetic, although it was hard to tell stems from leaves on the scrub. I remember wondering why anything a soldier has to squirm through is full of thorns, or stings on contact, or has sharp edges… a biological rule no one yet has published a book on, I’ll bet. Caedmon’s scrub ran to man-high rounded mounds, densely covered with prickly stiff leaves that rustled loudly if we brushed against them. Bigger stuff sprouted from some of the mounds, treelike shapes with a crown of dense foliage and smooth blackish bark. Between the mounds a fine, gray-green fuzz covered the rocky soil, not quite as lush as grass but more linear than lichens. It made my nose itch, and my eyes run, and I’d had my shots. I popped a broad-spectrum anti-allergen pill and hoped I wouldn’t sneeze.
Some people say hills are the same size all the time, but anyone who’s ever gone up a hill with hostiles at the top of it knows better. It’s twice as high going uphill into trouble. If I hadn’t had the time readout, I’d have sworn we crawled through that miserable prickly stuff for hours. Actually it was less than half a standard when I heard something click, metal on stone, ahead of us. Above and ahead, invisible through the scrub, but definitely something metallic, and therefore—in this situation—hostile. Besides, after Duquesne, we knew the Gerin would’ve wiped out any humans from the colony. I tongued the comcontrol and clicked a warning signal to my squad. They say a click sounds less human—maybe. We relied on it, anyhow, in that sort of situation. I heard answering clicks in my earplug. Lonnie had heard the noise, too (double-click, then one, in his response), which figured. Lonnie had the longest ears in our company.