“What’s our ETA?” I asked.
“Ten minutes,” Freeman said.
Outside the transport, the plains gave way to steppes and the steppes gave way to foothills. Soon we would cross the guardians of the mountains. I could imagine these granite giants framed by an orange sunset, as dark as shadows and as mysterious as the night. I could also imagine them turned to dunes of ash with Avatari spider-things creeping across them.
I looked out and saw something I had not seen for a couple of years, something I had hoped never to see again. A series of trenches crisscrossed the flat areas between some of the mountains. “Snake shafts,” I said.
“Those weren’t there last time you came,” Freeman commented.
“No, they weren’t,” I said as I studied the network of trenches and troughs that the drones had dug. Until that moment, I had never put two and two together properly. Nobody knew what snake shafts were used for, but the common consensus was that it had something to do with smuggling. Now I understood all too well. The Avatari would cover the trenches without filling them in, and they would serve as a capillary system for harvesting shit gas from the planet.
As Freeman circled for a landing, Sweetwater and I returned to the kettle. I found most of the men in the cargo hold sitting in clusters, checking their weapons or simply talking. Burton stood at the rear staring at the crates with the nukes.
Sweetwater found a shadowy corner where he could be alone. He sat with his head down, examining his breathing mask.
“Doctor,” I said in a soft voice, as if waking a sleeping child. “Dr. Sweetwater?”
“Lieutenant,” he said. “Please tell us you’re not giving another briefing.”
“Ha, very funny,” I said.
Sweetwater smiled. “So it’s showtime.”
“Yes, Doctor,” I said.
“Call us William, Lieutenant.”
“Freeman wanted me to warn you Dr. Breeze’s body is just inside the caves. He also told me to warn you that the body is pretty messed up.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Sweetwater said.
“You really don’t need to go in there,” I said.
“You’re wrong, Lieutenant,” Sweetwater said, a new stiffness in his voice. “We do need to go in there. That is the very place we need to be.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The late Arthur Breeze must have been one hell of a pilot.
Freeman had a far easier time lowering our big bird than Breeze must have had landing his plane. Our ship weighed at least twenty times more than Breeze’s craft, but transports had rockets for vertical landings. Breeze’s light craft required a runway. The ridge on which he had landed was too short and too bumpy for a safe landing; and if he’d overshot the landing, he would have either crashed into the mountain or skidded off a cliff.
We touched down not more than a hundred feet from Breeze’s ride. The loose ground settled unevenly beneath our skids, and forty-six Marines lunged for the crates with the nukes to make sure they didn’t slide.
“You don’t need to do that,” I told them over the interLink. “You can toss those bad boys off the side of the mountain, and they won’t go off. The specking Hotel Valhalla fell on them, and they didn’t go off.”
I heard some nervous laughter, and the men backed away from the crates.
I pulled off my helmet and looked down at Sweetwater; he stood beside me waiting to exit the transport. “Maybe I should go out there first and check the air quality,” I said.
“You’re worried about us? Lieutenant, we’re touched.” The little bastard might have had a better facility with sarcasm than scientific terms. “We already agreed this was a one-way trip.”
“Know what, Dr. Sweetwater? You’d make a hell of a Marine,” I said.
“Really?” he asked.
“Yeah, well, except for the height requirement,” I said.
He smiled. “That means something coming from a homicidal clone like you. We heard you killed your commanding officer last night.”
“He had it coming,” I said, only half-joking.
“What did he do?” Sweetwater asked.
“Asked too many questions,” I said.
“Oh,” said Sweetwater.
I thought about what we were heading into and decided this was not the time to hold back. “His name was Lieutenant Moffat,” I said. “He was one of those antisynthetic types.”
“Lieutenant, we just want you to know that we wholeheartedly support clone equality,” Sweetwater volunteered.
“Equality among clones?” I asked. “Not all clones are created equal.”
“How about equal treatment and opportunity for clones?” Sweetwater asked.
“Lieutenant Moffat sent one of my platoons out to get massacred because he had a problem with the platoon sergeant,” I said. “I couldn’t live with that.”
“Someone said that he wanted to kill you, too,” Sweetwater said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I suppose he did. We’d better test our gear.”
As I put on my helmet, he strapped on his rebreather and protective goggles.
“Can you hear us?” he asked.
His breathing gear did not have an interLink connection. We could give him an earpiece for listening in, but he would not be able to speak to us without breaking the seal around his oxygen mask. He said something to me that my audio gear picked up as an ambient noise. Given more time, we could have found some way to make our combat armor fit him, but time was the thing we lacked. What he needed most was a helmet, but that big head of his was too wide to fit a standard-sized helmet.
Wondering what tortures the air inside those caves would perform on Sweetwater, I gave him the thumbs-up to show that I had heard him just fine. Then I hit the button to open the ramp, knowing I had just signed the little scientist’s death sentence.
The kettle doors slid open, revealing Breeze’s aircraft. Standing silently beside me, William Sweetwater stared at the plane that had brought his close friend to his death. He was breathing through the oxygen mask now, his breath fogging the clear plastic.
Maybe it was just my imagination, but I sensed death as I looked at the little six-seater plane. Breeze had left the hatch hanging open. Up here in the mountains, that opened door looked out of place. It reminded me of a porch light left on for a traveler who would never return.
Sergeant Thomer asked, “Lieutenant, should I have the men unpack the crates?” waking me from dour thoughts.
“I would appreciate it, Sergeant,” I said.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Thomer said.
“Major, we might as well send everybody out,” I said.
I felt a certain level of helplessness looking across the kettle. Marines in dark combat armor moved around the shadowy cabin. Across the deck, Ray Freeman slid down the ladder from the cockpit with the alacrity of a spider on a web. They were a good crew, a game crew, men ready to put up a fight.
Sweetwater opened his canvas satchel and brought out a T-shaped environmental meter much like the one Freeman had used on our last trip into the mines. As the little scientist tested the air, Thomer and his men removed the nuclear devices from their crates.
Stripped from their crates, the nukes were distinctly unimpressive—neither especially heavy nor unreasonably large—two polished metal cylinders about one yard long and two feet in diameter with two sets of handles, one at either end. With some struggle, a single Marine could have lugged each device, but we assigned four to the task. They carried the devices like pallbearers around a casket.
Freeman, carrying a case in one hand and a particle-beam cannon in the other, came to the ramp. Sweetwater naturally gravitated toward the giant mercenary. He had been the eyes and hands of the Science Lab. When they ran field experiments, Sweetwater and Breeze had relied on Freeman to carry out their wishes.
“I don’t know how long he’s going to last,” I told Freeman over a private line. “Did you check out his breathing gear? That oxygen mask isn’t going to protect him. I’ve seen masks like that before; it’s from a paramedic’s emergency kit. The seal around his mask is not airtight.”