magnifying scope and a recording device. The headgear’s integral sight was linked with a tiny data crystal, allowing them to play back whatever he saw for the others when they returned.
There hadn’t been too much to see until now. They’d ridden their dirtbikes into the desert for more than twenty hours before attempting to transmit a message to the cruiser
After quickly vacating the transmission position, they’d traversed a wide, curving arc around the edge of the Wastes, avoiding the farmsteads and coming up, finally, on the isolated plateau that was the site of Aphrodite’s only spaceport. That was when things got interesting.
He didn’t know what he’d expected to see. Perhaps he’d thought the place would have been destroyed. After all, the laser-launch facility doubled as a planetary defense system, and it would make a logical target for any invader. As it turned out, however, the Invaders had another use for the device.
The port was a sprawling, spread-out facility, with three separate sections clustered around the blockish control center. The large, paved landing pad was built for the use of orbital shuttles. The one that the O’Keefe party had arrived on was still sitting on the plastcrete, seemingly intact. Beside it was something big and white that had to be over fifty meters tall and more than half as wide. Trang assumed it to be a heavy-lift shuttle of some kind, although he had never seen its like before. An onion-shaped craft, it rested on nearly two dozen landing struts mounted around a curved heat shield, the cant of the numerous thrust nozzles ringing the ablative estrutcheon indicating that the ship took off and landed vertically.
The second element of the port was the electromagnetic levitation cargo train rail that ran in a loop around the landing pad to the keystone of Aphrodite’s space transportation system: the laser-launch platform. Fed by underground cables from the fusion plant outlying Kennedy, the huge free-electron laser was built mostly underground, its beam emitter emplaced at the center of a broad, ceramic platform. A conveyer track ran up to the platform from the maglev train’s loading dock, allowing iridium and uranium from the mines to the southeast and crude oil from the wells deep in the Wastes to be shipped in simple, easily-replaceable laser-launch capsules, wheeled directly onto the platform and launched into orbit for the waiting cargo ships.
That was the way it had worked for the Republic’s transportation multicorps prior to the invasion, and, to Trang’s and Vinnie’s surprise, the system still seemed to be in motion. In the hour they had been observing from their vantage point nearly two kilometers away, the maglev trains had been running nonstop, disgorging one bulbous laser-launch pod after another before heading back to the mines or the wells. Even as they watched, one of the rough metal pods rode up the track and settled in on the beam emitter. Intake fans on a skirt around the bell- shaped ignition chamber at the capsule’s base whirred noisily, sucking in air for a few seconds before the launch laser fired.
The laser was infrared, its beam invisible to the human eye, but Trang and Vinnie could see the sparking ionization of the atmosphere in a glowing line beneath the launch pod as it rose slowly off the platform. The high- energy pulses superheated the air sucked into the capsule’s ignition chamber and propelled the ten-ton vehicle with ever-increasing speed until it was hurtling skyward nearly faster than the eye could follow.
Trang could almost believe that things were back to normal—except for the dozens of Invader troops guarding the port facilities and the four Hopper battle machines patrolling the perimeter. Other Invader troops drove Port Authority loading equipment, ferrying what looked like electronics and computer equipment on pallets from the maglev train dock, up a cargo ramp into the belly of the onion-shaped shuttle.
“They’re looting the planet,” the mercenary Captain declared, resisting a temptation to shake his head in amazement, knowing it would jog the ocular’s picture. “They must be loading the ore and the oil onto their ships in orbit.”
“Jeez,” Vinnie snorted, sitting back on his haunches. “You mean this whole thing’s been just one, big armed robbery?”
“Apparently.” Trang pulled the Marine helmet off, deciding that he—and its camera—had seen enough. He turned to the Sergeant, shrugging expressively. “Although I must confess it makes little sense to me, either. I think, however, that we should return and report this.”
“Lieutenant Stark wanted us to scout out Kennedy,” Vinnie reminded him, unscrewing the cap from his canteen and taking a long swig.
“We know enough already,” Trang argued. “We can’t take the risk of getting captured in the city and losing this footage. I guarantee you, my friend,” he said, smiling coldly at Mahoney, “your Lieutenant will want to see this.”
Chapter Nine
“It’s better to be a live jackal than a dead lion—for jackals, not men.”
Shannon sat alone in the shelter’s darkened control room in front of a small, flat-screen monitor, watching the playback of Captain Trang’s surveillance recording for the twentieth time. Nothing had changed in the crystalline matrix: it still projected the same images she and the rest of the group had seen earlier that day, and they were still just as vexing.
“Why the hell,” she asked herself out loud, “would a race that has star travel bother to invade a two-bit colony just to loot computers, fissionable ore and oil?”
“Is that really the question?” Shannon spun around in her seat at the unexpected voice and saw Nathan Tanaka stepping into the room, dressed more casually than she had seen him since they’d arrived onplanet: a plain, white T-shirt and loose, black pants.
“What?” She shook her head in confusion, disconcerted at his sudden appearance.
“Should you really be asking the why of it, Lieutenant?” he elaborated, sitting on the edge of the console, glancing down at the infrared images displayed there.
“Why not?” She shrugged. “Figuring out why they’re here could help us figure out the best way to resist them.”
“Undoubtedly,” the bodyguard admitted. “But I propose to you that the question of why is not an answerable one at this point.” He waved a hand expansively. “Perhaps they are exiles, on the run from some higher authority and desperate for resupply. Or maybe the abundance of resources we have found on our colonies is the exception rather than the rule, and they’re green—or should I say blue,” he amended, “with envy. We could debate different theories forever. Even if we were able to capture one of the individual troopers, I am not sure it would be helpful. They seem to me to be something on the order of a biological automaton, incapable of independent action.”
“So what would you suggest we do, Mr. Tanaka?” She leaned back in her chair, folding her arms across her breasts.
“
“I guess,” she sighed, “that’s what I’ve been trying to avoid.”
“I would suggest that what you have been trying to avoid is admitting to yourself that you already know what you must do, and that it may result in many or all of our deaths.”
She glanced at him sharply, his angular face oddly half-lit by the glow of the monitor, his eyes lost in darkness. That was exactly her concern, and it was something of a shock to her that he had discerned it so easily.
“We have to attack the spaceport,” she almost whispered. “We don’t know why they want the supplies, but we know they want them, and we know they’re the enemy. We have to deny it to them.”
“That is the decision of a leader,” Tanaka assured her, putting a hand on her arm. It was a simple gesture, without intention, but the warmth of his fingers seemed electric against the skin of her arm and she pulled away instinctively.
Tanaka withdrew his hand, his eyes showing an unaccustomed confusion. Shannon shook the feeling off,
