Dropzone

TWENTY-FOUR: DRAGONFLIES

15 km S of Port Arthur
Epsilon Eridani e / Avalon
0800 hrs Local Time
April 7, 2279

"Talk to me, Chief," Katherine said, as the team raced across the scraggy ground back toward the dropship landing site. Her tactical HUD showed their position as little less than five kilometers from the ship.They had left the flushed and sweating Fortunato splayed on his bed. Her battle-armored team had shuffled out, stepping over the shattered remains of his bedroom door and withdrawing without a backward glance or explanation.

Chief Petty Officer Streep's voice was tight with strain as he replied over her private channel. "We fucked up, Major. Seriously underestimated the natives." He paused, his discomfort bleeding through. "I would, ah, exercise a bit of extreme caution as you get closer. Ah, probably right about where you're at now, Ma'am."

Katherine held up her hand at the same time she sent the halt command over the tactical LIFI net. The team dropped from a sprint to a trot, then took up covered positions roughly ten meters around her facing outward. "What happened, Chief?" She couldn't imagine any scenario where the team at the dropship was negligent; they were too well trained, skilled, and experienced to simply "fuck up." And Zielinski, despite whatever had occurred, was just too good.

But something had happened.

Streep cleared his throat. "The Lieutenant and Private Asari were scouting the perimeter a few klicks to the northeast." Nawtheast, it came out as his normally-mild Boston accent roughened under the stress. He flashed an amber-shaded wedge on her tactical map that indicated the area of terrain. "The Lieutenant mentioned something about a transient EM spike a klick or two to his north. Asari didn't see anything and they thought it just might have been a sensor glitch, but Lieutenant Zielinski wanted to check it out anyway with a Mark-One Eyeball." Green dashes marked the short path of the perimeter team's movement.

Katherine eyed the timestamps as Zielinski and Asari's GPS traces moved. Streep was feeding her the imagery in a compressed time format. Zielinski certainly wasn't dashing recklessly toward whatever anomaly he'd spotted.

"Nothing happened until—here." A red X suddenly flashed. "Their signal cut out," Streep said.

Katherine frowned. "Signal" in this context would be the LOS LIFI to Manning as well, something a Faraday net or jamming couldn't block. "And then?"

"Check out the Lieutenant's bodycam, Major."

Streep dropped her a compressed file and Katherine opened it; stark black-and-white video in the visual spectrum showed a rocky, jumbled terrain, far craggier and more upheavaled than the stretch her team had crossed to Fortunato's compound. Boulders and spires shot up from the stone-strewn ground and she guessed to about an average height of about ten meters. IR and EM views replaced the visible light feed for a second out of every five, overlaying green and blue-colored imagery respectively. Numbers and vectors overlaid altitude, bearing, position, temperature and air pressure. Digital stabilizers smoothed the bounce of movement, but Katherine could tell how Zielinski struggled to pick his way over the jumble and still maintain some semblance of stealth. His biomentrics showed his exertion, despite the heavy assist from his body armor. And his tension. Most of the narrow paths the team chose through the landscape were in shadow due to the early morning sun angle, and Zielinski had not lit off his battle helmet's floodlights. Time to bag it, Katherine urged, even though she knew that what she was seeing had already happened.

As in response to her mental advice, the view pivoted one-hundred and eighty degrees as Zielinski came to the same conclusion: in that terrain, it was too risky to continue to chase a ghost. She watched the timestamp roll for a few more seconds—