Second Earth (5 page)

  
“Safety protocols?”
Melissa chuckled. “You are really cute sometimes, you know that.” She placed a
hand lightly on her chest as her laugher subsided. “Did you and
Raven
have a good chat on the way down?”
she said teasingly, drawing out Raven’s name as she had done back on the
Rhea
after she’d had too much to drink.

  
He shook his head
slowly. “You really are something else, lady. You know that?”

  
She rolled her eyes
and stepped closer to him, easily invading his personal space in the process.
“Look, I’m sorry about how I acted earlier.”

  
“Oh, and how was
that?” he asked cynically.

  
“I was…rude. And
inconsiderate. And—”

  
Shawn’s eyebrows
rose high on his forehead. “And?”

  
“And
unappreciative.”

  
Shawn held his
index finger and thumb up about an inch apart. “And just a little bit crazy,
too. Don’t forget to include that.”

  
Melissa dropped her
arms to her side. “Fine, Commander. I’m sorry for that as well. It was entirely
unintentional.”

  
Shawn grunted with
approval. “You seem to be apologizing a lot lately.”

  
Melissa cast her
eyes to the battered and scorched runway under her feet in silence. She kicked
at a loose clump of asphalt near her boot, sending the debris scattering toward
a pile of brush nearby. “I’m…I’m trying to say…that I…”

  
“Yes?”

  
His eyes were
burning into hers, and though she couldn’t tell if he was angry or expectant,
she knew it wasn’t the time to get into this conversation. “I…I just need a
little time. That’s all, Shawn.”

  
He couldn’t help
but carry a sarcastic tone to his words. “That’s all, huh?”

  
Melissa smiled
weakly. “Well, that and a little patience on your part. Look, I’m really sorry
for coming down here like this. I want you to know I really do have a deep
respect for your concern for me and I want you to know that—”

  
In the distance, the
rear doors of one of the Pharaohs opened, and a team of Marines began to unload
the contents of the vessel: two small troop transports. Due to the sound of the
two vehicles hovering out of the Pharaoh, Shawn couldn’t hear what Melissa was
saying. For a moment her mouth moved, but the sound didn’t penetrate his ears.
After a few seconds, her voice broke through as the skimmer’s engines wound
down. “—you feel the same way. So, having said that, do you think you could
forgive me?”

  
Having no clue what
she’d said, he hoped he wasn’t about to agree to something he would live to
regret. “You ask a lot.”

  
“Well, I’d like to
think that I have a lot to offer…toward the mission, I mean.”

  
Of course she did.
There was no way Shawn could argue that point. On the other hand, if she wanted
to help a headache along, he was sure she’d be able to do that with marked
efficiency. He rubbed his chin absently, admiring her guile—even if it
was
a bit misplaced.

  
“So,” she asked,
drawing out the ‘o’ in the word as she extended a gloved hand toward the
lieutenant commander. “Friends again?”

  
Shawn smiled as he
realized that keeping up with Agent Melissa Graves was like surfing blind; you
could never tell if you were about to get smacked headlong into the surf or
ride the water smoothly back to the shoreline. “Why do I get the feeling that
we’ll be repeating this little routine for a long time to come?” he smiled
again as he gracefully took her hand in his own.

  
Melissa returned
his smile with an even more mischievous one. “Because you have wisdom beyond
your years, Commander.”

  
He sighed deeply
and motioned his head over his left shoulder. “Come on. I’ll introduce you to
the team.”

* * *

  
Melissa watched as
a squad of Marines from the 92
^nd
Marine Expeditionary Unit unloaded
a small hover carrier from one of the two Pharaohs. The temperature was
beginning to reach its projected zenith for the day, and was already well past
ninety degrees by the time the Marines had finished setting up the makeshift
camp. Their dull green and black armor, covering every inch of their bodies
except for their heads, was thankfully cooled internally, and afforded them an
unparalleled freedom of movement in even the harshest of environmental
conditions. Melissa noted with approval that Sergeant Adams, who had been with
her and Shawn aboard the doomed
Icarus
,
was with them again today.

  
Once the Marines
had set up a two-hundred-square-yard patrol perimeter around the camp, Shawn,
Melissa, Raven, and two ‘grunts’—Sergeant Adams and one Private First Class
Ernesto Montoya—climbed into one of the two hover carriers. A second squad,
commanded by Lieutenant Burgess, filled the other carrier.

  
The utilitarian
craft was moderately comfortable, with lightly padded seats and an open storage
compartment in the rear for all the equipment the team needed. Melissa was
sandwiched between the two Marines in the front of the craft, with Shawn and
Raven sitting on a bench seat behind them. They sped away from
Sylvia’s Delight
and the rest of the
camp under full power, the wind rustling their hair as it passed over the
transparent windshield that wrapped around the bullet-shaped front of the
craft.

  
The first stop in
their investigation was the enormous twin hangars they had sighted while coming
down. One by one the team went in and inspected the crumbling remains. The
first of the structures yielded very few clues. The colossal space was
virtually empty, save for the occasional decrepit backup generator or portable
lights—none of which looked to have been used in quite some time. The thick
concrete floors had cracked in several places, and various ferns and other
greenery had begun to sprout up through the openings. The overhead was littered
with cobwebs and birds’ nests, and it gave Shawn and the rest of the team every
indication that it had been abandoned for some time.

  
When the team moved
on the second hangar, however, there were definite signs of recent activity.
Vehicle tracks and numerous footprints could easily be seen in the silt-covered
floors. There was a water storage tank, used to refresh landing teams on the
surface of arid worlds, that was still half-full and covered with only a fine
layer of dust. Not far from the fifty-gallon tank was a garbage can full of
food ration wrappers.

  
As Melissa leaned
down to investigate the boot prints, she withdrew her vid-recorder and took a
series of three-dimensional images with the recorder. “Sergeant Adams,” she
called to the Marine who was in a corner of the hangar conversing with Shawn.

  
“Yes, ma’am?” the
Marine called out, just as one of the infantry crawlers sauntered into the
structure, its micro servomotors humming and filling the cavernous space with a
beelike buzz. The six-legged mechanical beast, about ten feet tall with a
Marine seated in the center of its body, came to a halt just inside the hangar
doors. A small scanner-recorder extended from the forward nose of the vehicle,
and its red beams swept across the entirety of the space, recording everything
so it could be recreated holographically at a moment’s notice. The way it moved
gave Melissa every impression that the huge techno-beast was hunting for its
next meal.

  
“Sergeant Adams,
could you step over here for a moment?” she asked, turning her attention away
from the mechanized unit.

  
The dark-skinned
Marine complied, stepping to her side and leaning down to examine what Melissa
was looking at.
  

  
“What do you make
of that, Sergeant?” Melissa asked as the young man squatted down to her level.

  
Adams locked his
pulse rifle into a holster on his back, then reached down and placed a hand
near the object in question. “Looks like a boot print, ma’am.”

  
Melissa nodded.
“Mind if I take a look at the bottom of your shoes?”

  
The sergeant didn’t
hesitate. He stood, turned around, and offered his foot to the OSI agent for
her inspection. Melissa used a small recording device to take an image of the
man’s shoe. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

  
“Of course, ma’am.”

  
The flash of the
recorder having caught his attention, Shawn stepped up to where the two were
poised. “What do you think?” Shawn asked as he leaned down to Melissa’s side.

  
“I can’t be
positive until I make a sample comparison, but my eyes tell me this is where
the
Valley Forge’
s team set down and
started lifting…well, whatever was in here up to their ship,” she said, waving
her hand slowly around the space. “These prints on the ground seem consistent
with standard issue Unified Marine Corps boots.”

  
Unlocking his rifle
from his back, Adams moved the weapon down to his side. “Any ideas about what
was in here, ma’am?”

  
She looked around
the cavernous space, but could only shake her head. “It’s impossible to say at
this point. I can’t even offer a guess. Hopefully something we find on Delta
Base will tell us.”

  
“You think they
might have left a clue?” Shawn asked as he regarded the boot print embedded in
the dust.

  
“Back on the
Icarus
, Lieutenant Garcia said that the
Valley
Forge
was sending down waves of transport craft to the surface. If
the carrier and her escorts were destroyed before they had a chance to retrieve
everything they came for, something might still be here.”

  
Both Shawn and
Adams nodded in agreement. “So, where to next?” Shawn asked, helping Melissa to
her feet.

  
She brushed the
dust from her hands and twisted her head slowly, scanning the space and getting
her proper bearings. “I’d like to check out the administrative building.”

  
Shawn nodded with
understanding. “You think there’ll be anything left in there?”

  
Melissa shrugged.
“It’s worth a shot. Maybe we can find a manifest or something that recorded the
contents of this building.”

  
The multi-legged
crawler, having finished its scan, ambled out of the hangar and left the
assembled officers bathed in silence.

  
Adams looked down
to the computer built into his left gauntlet. “I have a bearing and distance
for the admin building, ma’am.”

  
Melissa stepped
over to him just as Adams initiated the computer’s embedded holo-emitter. A
small map, with their current location indicated by a blinking dot, appeared
and turned a few inches over the surface of the computer.

  
“All right,” she
said after scanning the map for a moment. “Let’s go.”

* * *

  
Back on board the
Rhea
, Richard Krif was anxiously
awaiting an update from the planet’s surface. As he paced the walkway behind
the communications officer’s station, a young technician approached him with a
digital reader. Captain Krif recognized him as the specialist he had ordered to
perform a deep scan of something unusual the sensor team had noticed lingering
in low orbit not long after Kestrel’s team had departed.

  
“You have something
for me, specialist?”

  
The young man
seemed nervous as he approached the Captain. Krif knew this was par for the
course for most of the younger people on the ship. Sometimes, it seemed, the
majority of the crew paced the passageways and crawlspaces uneasily, constantly
in fear of running into “the old man” in some remote corner of the enormous carrier.
Krif maintained a tight ship, and that was the way he preferred it. If some of
the crew felt he was a bit overbearing, so be it. The
Rhea
wasn’t a democracy.

  
“Yes, sir.” The
specialist stopped a few paces from the captain, stood at attention, and
offered Krif the computer tablet. “Sensor report of the material we found in
orbit above the planet. It appears to be debris, sir.”

  
“Debris, you say?”
Krif took the device and gave its contents a quick visual scan. Everything he
saw seemed to be in order, which wasn’t at all what he had hoped to see.

  
“Sir?”

  
Krif kept his eyes
on the sensor report, looking for something that would dissuade him from the
report he knew he’d have to file concerning the revelation. Sighing, Richard
stole a glance at the specialist’s name tag. “Yes, mister Fredericks?”