ridiculous. They were flying hunks of iron, made for space travel, where aerodynamics meant nothing. In atmospheric conditions, they had the grace and elegance of a brick. They were built to carry troops and absorb punishment and did a good job of both.
I placed the case on its side and opened it. The S.C.O.O.T.E.R. was shaped like a hubcap, a smooth chrome ellipse, twelve inches across, with four independent wheels on the bottom. The remarkable thing about these little robots was the sense of self-preservation that had been programmed into their processing chips. At the moment, this little robot could not have had the slightest idea of what danger it was in; but once it was deployed, the programming would come in handy. Sergeant Tabor Shannon, my mentor and the finest Marine I had ever known, died because he underestimated the self-preservation programming in one of these little bastards.
I stared down at the S.C.O.O.T.E.R.’s outer shell, which was not the mirror it appeared to be but a well- crafted 360-degree lens. This little robot could slip into narrow spaces, map out enemy positions, and plan routes of attack. I placed this new S.C.O.O.T.E.R. back in its case and headed for the cockpit. The powerful engines of the transport filled the kettle with a soft sucking noise, and the handles along the sides of the ladder vibrated.
“What’s our ETA?” I asked as I entered the cockpit. Looking through the windshield, I saw virginal forests of snowcapped trees, a vast carpet that swept on for miles and miles. With the ion curtain above us, there was not a trace of blue in the silvery sky. There were clouds, lots of clouds.
“Five hours, maybe,” Freeman, ever the raconteur, responded. Where was a Bible when I needed one?
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I headed up to the cockpit and watched in studied silence as we flew closer.
The aliens could have dug their mines on an open prairie or deep in the deserts, some sensible convenient place. Had they been after gold, they might have done it the old-fashioned way, panning silt in streams and rivers. Whatever they were here for, they had burrowed into the side of a mountain in the middle of a remote range.
“Ah shit,” I said, as a nearly paralyzing sense of deja vu spread through me. The setting for the Avatari Mining Company looked very familiar indeed. A few years back, the Unified Authority Marines tracked the Mogats to a burned-out planet called Hubble. Finding themselves trapped, the Mogats hid in a series of caverns that ran deep below the only mountains on the planet. Likewise, when we finally tracked the Believers to their home planet, it was a burned-out planet in which their cities were hidden deep below the surface. The only way to get to those cities was through shafts that had been carved into tall mountains.
“I’m beginning to see a pattern,” I told Freeman.
The mountains formed a jagged wall of granite gray slopes and icy peaks. They looked like a giant fortress from the distance. The light from the ion curtain illuminated the various nooks and crevices that would otherwise have gone dark.
Some of the peaks disappeared above the clouds. I pointed to one and asked Freeman if it could possibly extend through the curtain. He shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Don’t know.” Hypothesis was the sport of scientists like Sweetwater and Breeze; Freeman felt no inclination to try his hand at it.
“If that peak goes higher than the ion curtain, we might be able to climb to the top and set up some sort of communications link,” I said.
“You saw what happened to the bullets I shot through the sphere?” Freeman asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“And you want to risk hiking through that shit?” he asked.
I thought about that as we approached the coordinates William Sweetwater had provided. This took us deep into the mountains, flying low among ridges and saddles. Freeman circled around until he found the exact coordinates where the digging had been detected, then circled more until he found an opening along the face of the mountain. This took over an hour, and I began to wonder if the Avatari had found a hollow spot in some mountain and materialized inside. Finally, we found our doorway, a squared opening in the face of a mountain that was fifty feet tall and one hundred feet wide.
Designed to fly in space as well as in atmospheric conditions, our transport could perform vertical landings. We would not need a long runway with this bird, thank goodness, but we would need someplace sturdy enough to support three hundred metric tons—preferably a location with a strong granite base so that the landing gear would not dig in too deeply. After another fifteen minutes, Freeman found a solid shelf about a quarter of a mile from the opening, and we touched down.
“You know, they might have dug a gravity chute?” I said, as we headed into the cargo hold to off-load our equipment.
The only time I had ever seen a gravity chute was on the Mogat home world. It was an enormous well that ran between the surface of the planet and the underground cities a few miles below. The damn thing worked like an elevator, using some weird convection that lifted outgoing ships to the surface and lowered incoming ships to the core.
“There won’t be a chute,” Freeman said.
“How can you be so sure?” I asked.
“The Avatari haven’t had time to dig one,” Freeman said.
“Maybe they dig really quickly,” I said. I knew Freeman was right, but that did not mean I wanted to give in. The chute on the Mogat planet went several miles straight down.
Freeman only grunted.
We loaded a dozen trackers into the back of the Jackal along with guns, grenades, charges, cameras, and the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. We took rappel cords for scaling any vertical chutes we might encounter. The goal was to get in and out of the mines undetected, but that did not mean we would not go in ready to fight.
Jackals might handle foothills well, but the landscape around us was cliffs and peaks. Jeep-sized boulders stuck out of the ground. There were ruts and drop-offs, every obstruction except for trees. We were one hundred feet above the tree level, and the mountain was bare.
We were able to drive to a ridge forty or fifty feet below the entrance to the Avatari mine. Then we had to ditch our ride and haul the equipment by hand. I strapped three particle-beam cannons and three trackers to my back and started walking.
My load weighed damn near eighty pounds, and I had nothing to complain about. Freeman carried the S.C.O.O.T.E.R., two trackers, and a satchel filled with demolition gear. He probably lugged 150 pounds out of the Jackal in all.
“I thought we didn’t want to blow anything up,” I said, remembering Freeman’s response when I asked about bringing more men.
“Not by accident,” Freeman said.
We came to a sheer cliff, where we would need to scale the side of the mountain. I found a groove in which I could climb and stripped off the gear I was carrying. Big as he was, Freeman was more suited for combat than climbing, and our combat armor wouldn’t make scaling the ridge any easier. Once I got to the top, I would throw down a cord. I would haul up our gear first, then Freeman could use the cord to come up.
It did not take long for me to get to the top. I shot a piton into the granite and tied our cord to it. After securing the cord, I found a solid foothold on the dry granite and tossed the cord down to Freeman. He sent up the satchel full of explosives first, then the S.C.O.O.T.E.R., the trackers, and the rifles. Next, Freeman attached the cord to his armor and started climbing.
“You know that this whole thing will have been a waste of time if there’s a gravity chute inside that cave?” I called down to Freeman, using an interLink connection.
“Did you see a gravity chute on Hubble?” Freeman asked.
“No,” I said.
“Then they don’t build one on every planet.” He grunted as he worked his way up the groove. He was breathing heavily. The man weighed over three hundred pounds; mountain climbing did not come easily for him.
“So it’s a fifty-fifty chance,” I said. Something about Freeman’s obsessive silence made me more chatty, like I
