“That is Protectorate,” Podbyrin declared, a slight waver in his voice.
“You’re damned right it is,” McKay muttered. The visor was gone, shattered, the pieces buried and carried away in the snow melt, but the helmet’s design was all too familiar to McKay. He waved Jock and Vinnie forward, standing and turning to keep watch as they examined the helmet.
Jock cursed softly. “Well, no more doubt now,” he muttered.
“Come on,” McKay said. “We still have to find where they landed.”
As they moved on through the forest another few hundred meters, McKay began to notice a gentle upward slope to the ground and a thinning of the trees, accompanied by a lightening of the gloom and the presence on the forest floor of some short, stunted growths of some sort of plant life that wasn’t quite grass but could have passed for it on first glance. Gradually the slope increased and he could see that they were heading for the crest of a small hill. He halted the others with an upraised hand, taking a knee on the soft loam.
“Jock,” he instructed. “Scout the other side of that hill.”
The big man nodded and slowly made his way toward the hilltop, going from a crouch to a high crawl, knees and elbows taking him forward to the very edge, where he dropped to his belly and wormed the last few meters. Jock was, McKay reflected, surprisingly stealthy for someone almost two meters tall and a good 110 kilos. After a long moment, he turned back to them and waved them forward. McKay led Podbyrin up the hill while Vinnie watched their backs, trailing them by ten meters and scanning carefully around.
“Eleven o’clock, one hundred meters,” Jock said quietly as they went to the ground beside him.
McKay looked down into the valley on the other side of the hill, seeing a narrow, shallow stream cutting through it and meandering into the near distance as it wound around another hill. The trees had thinned out near the hilltop and there was a clearing near the middle of the valley, not far from the creek. In that clearing was what appeared at first glance to be a mound of loose dirt… until a closer look revealed its true character. Here and there, the dirt deposited by mudslides after the spring melt had fallen away, revealing the bare nickel-iron and small pieces of the grey, gnarled surface of polystyrene: a cheap, low-tech method of making the thing invisible to microwave sensors. A single surviving parachute shroud whipped in the wind like a tail behind the thing, the huge parasail it had once secured long ripped and blown away by winter storms.
It was a Protectorate drop pod, the same sort of cheap, stealthy insertion craft that Antonov had used to invade Earth five years before.
McKay felt his throat go dry. It was one thing to know something on a purely intellectual level; it was another to come face to face with the reality of it. He swallowed hard, forced himself to concentrate on scanning the area around the pod for threats.
“Looks clear,” he rasped. “Jock, stay up here and cover us.”
The footing on the downward slope was treacherous from fallen leaves slick with yesterday’s rain and the three men wound up half-sliding down it, McKay and Vinnie in a half-crouch, Podbyrin squarely on his ass. As McKay reached the valley floor he brought up his carbine and nearly squeezed off a shot at a blur of movement to his left, but held off as he saw that the tan flash was an animal of some kind… an herbivore by the look of it, the size of a cow, four-legged and covered with shaggy fur. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding as the thing galloped silently out of the valley.
“Coulda’ been dinner,” Vinnie cracked quietly, shrugging. McKay snorted, grateful for Vinnie’s irreverence.
“I like my steak a little less rare,” he muttered in return.
There were no humanoid tracks around the pod, McKay saw as they approached it, no trace of the Protectorate biomech troops at all. Everything had been wiped clean by the snow melt and the rains and the only tracks were from the local wildlife. He circled the lander slowly and carefully, not fearing a present threat as much as the possibility of missing something.
Going around the other side, they could see where the explosive bolts had split the pod in half to free its payload of troops, the edges jagged and broken. The floor of the pod’s interior was buried in several inches of mud, dirt and animal droppings… something had evidently used it as a den during the winter. McKay saw piles of small bones collected under the metal benches that had held rows of seated biomechs but were now bare except for more caked dirt.
McKay sighed, shoulders sagging. “We’re not going to get anything useful out of here. Time to let the lab techs have their fun.” He tapped a control on his ‘link. “McKay to
”
“Get a fix on my location,” McKay instructed, “and get me a full field investigation team down here ASAP. We’ve found the Protectorate drop pod.”
“Aye, sir.” McKay could hear a slight waver in the woman’s voice as the reality of the situation hit her. “Captain Minishimi says it will launch in a couple hours.”
“Acknowledged. McKay out.”
“This feels wrong.” McKay turned, surprised, at Podbyrin’s quiet declaration. The Russian was shaking his head thoughtfully, staring at the wreckage of the drop pod.
“What?” McKay wanted to know.
“To attack like this,” Podbyrin amplified. “This is a risk, no? It draws attention. The General has spent the last five years avoiding attention, rebuilding one assumes. To do this, there would have to be something very important here that he wanted.”
“We’re not going to find it standing here,” McKay shrugged. “Let’s head back to the outpost site. Maybe someone’s turned up something there.”
“What do we know about this planet?” McKay murmured to himself, staring at the globe map of Peboan projected above the table. He’d been leaning against the table for the last ten minutes and the map hadn’t yet revealed any secrets to him.
“It’s pretty rich in minerals,” Vinnie shrugged from where he sat on the floor of the outpost building, leaning against a bare wall. The investigation team had cleared them to use the place as a base after they’d finished scanning it a few hours ago, but there still wasn’t much in the way of furniture available. “Oil, natural gas, uranium, gold…”
“But we haven’t seen any evidence of mining from orbit,” Jock pointed out. The big man was squatting by the opposite wall, cleaning his field-stripped carbine.
“D’mitry,” McKay asked the Russian, who leaned against the wall beside where Vinnie was sitting, “did Antonov ever do any asteroid mining or did he get his resources from planetside?”
“We did not have the equipment for smelting asteroids,” Podbyrin shook his head. “Nor did we have extensive EVA gear for working in vacuum for long periods. We were forced to get those resources which we couldn’t steal from your cargo ships from easily-available mines near the surface of habitable planets.”
“Okay, we have no reason to believe that’s changed,” McKay said, nodding. “So, it’s possible he needed resources from this planet… but we haven’t found the location he mined yet. Is there anything else you guys can think of that would make this place important to him?”
“Location?” Jock ventured. “He uses those gates to travel FTL… maybe this system is a hub of some kind, and he needed to move something through here without us seeing?”
McKay cast a questioning glance at Podbyrin, who nodded confirmation. “That is possible,” the Russian said. “There were several systems that had multiple gates.”
“Not bad, Jock,” McKay said, nodding thoughtfully. “That feels more likely to me than just a mining site. If he has to move through here to get to where he’s going, he’d want to keep this system clear of Republic forces. It might be worth the risk to him to take out this outpost.” His eyes narrowed and he grabbed his ‘link from his belt. “
A pause and then: “Roger, McKay, this is
“Let me speak with the Captain,” McKay told the communications officer. “It’s urgent.”
“Aye, sir, wait one.”
“Minishimi here,” her voice came over the ‘link after a moment. “Go ahead, McKay.”
“Captain,” McKay said calmly but firmly, “we’ve been piecing some things together and I have reason to believe that Protectorate forces may still be in this system and are probably maintaining surveillance here… we may
