"COME ON, IVO, talk to me," said Garcia in Cardoso's ear. Cardoso tweaked his helmet transceiver's volume up and turned the EQ wheel with his finger to get out some of the static. Then he said, sticking his head out of the tunnel entrance. "Yeah, we copy, Valbaiano. We're just on our way back for that picnic lunch you promised."
They'd been deep enough in the tunnels that Cardoso's team could barely talk to each other if they got strung out around curves, let alone communicate with the bird Garcia was piloting. But part of the reason Z-77C had that kind of strata that hampered communications; it went with the territory.
He kept his 12 guys strung on lines---breakaway lines, but lines nevertheless. He didn't want to lose anybody if this unsurveyed cavern decided to crumble under someone's feet. They hadn't seen anything like an alien. They hadn't even found the alleged rebel base camp----the B target. But they'd found some signs of human exploration, or habitation, where no official exploration had been done.
Corporal Rodrigues had shut up the evidence before Cardoso had gotten down there and scared the hell out of everybody. The DU shot had bounced around that rock so bad Rodrigues had thought someone was returning fire, and there'd been a free-for-all with Cardoso screaming his lungs out for a ceasefire.
Then everybody relaxed and they collected their shell casings and didn't find one more than their meters told them they'd shot. The packs and supplies Rodrigues had found in the cave were full of holes and singed where one of the privates had gone to plasma when his chamber jammed, but at least they had something to take home.
It beat nothing, but not by much. The work bosses who'd been swearing up and down that they had a runaway problem could use the evidence to prove they hadn't been trying to cover up an unacceptable number of field deaths with some story of escapes. But Cardoso wasn't hear to make the work bosses' job any easier. What he'd seen at the drop point had turned his stomach; there wasn't any reason not to treat the workers better, except that the workers had the staff outnumbered and the staff was scared to death.
It was one of those vicious circles Cardoso didn't normally have to think about. But Z-77C wasn't normal. It had a revolution going on. He propped himself in the cave's mouth and pushed up his visor with his free arm, looking out over the bleak plain, full of heat-shimmer down here near the equator.
At least this terrain was deforested----or preforested. He watched the sky, waiting for Garcia's bird. They hadn't dropped a ground carrier, not for subterranean work, and that meant they were without any but natural cover until Garcia put the VTOL down to pick them up.
Sometimes all you did in this business was hike and wait. Garcia shook a cigarette from his belt and lit it, just a little concerned that some pocket of gas he wasn't briefed on would turn him into a human torch when he struck a spark.
It didn't and he was content to let the smoke relax him while he waited for his team to make it to the cave's mouth. Every so often he could feel a tug or tremor on the line at his waist, proof that they were en-route.
It wasn't a bad team, not really. It was a damn good team. All of them had shipped out-system before, and fully 7 had worked together. So all he had to do was convince them of his competence and teach them his style....that and make up for the fact that Castro, the true mission commander, wasn't going to get his boots dirty down here.
That left Garcia the ranking officer, but Garcia didn't do field patrol, so they were all Cardoso's, these 12. And out of the lot of them, Rodrigues was the only nervous Nellie, and that was because of something Cardoso could understand: this whole damn alien bullshit.
Try as you might, you couldn't keep that kind of mission definition from seasoned guardas; the grapevine was too goddamn good. So they knew and he knew but nobody talked about it. Nobody would talk about it until there was something to say about it---until someone saw something or something happened. But he had to let them know that if somebody did, he wanted it priority one, day or night, even if they had to bust into the latrine to tell them.
He was going to do that tonight, after Rodrigues's little misfire down there. Oh, sure he was. Maybe he could get Garcia to do it----Garcia was doing precious little else but keeping the armor and the firepower and the birds spic and span.
Back before the drop, when they'd still been transiting to orbit and he and Garcia had made their shopping list, the two of them had been sure they couldn't get what they asked for. So they'd asked for the moon---everything they could think of. And damned if Garcia's two pressure-suited friends hadn't read the list and looked at each other and said, Yeah, they thought they'd anticipated all of that.
So when the recon detachment had dropped out of orbit, they'd had a VTOL, and a TAV just in case they needed to make a hasty exit back to the mothership. They had 24 guys and redundant firepower, 2 ground-ready troop carriers with flame and shot, and enough electronics to put a girdle around the whole planet's equator. They'd had so much, in fact, that they'd dropped like a stone in a huge kangaroo hauler on chemical burn.
And once they'd made landfall at the equator, they'd had lots of red tape because they didn't have maintenance people of their own and Cardoso didn't want anything else to carry. Recon was light baggage. They'd left as much as they could at the equatorial base camp, and they hadn't brought any of the local paramilitary along with them.
If the locals could have done any good here, EICSA wouldn't have called in the 203rd under the table. That was where Garcia had come in handy----dealing with the local power structure; Cardoso didn't have the patience for it at the best of times, and lately the very sight of EICSA mission patches got his back up. Plus, he didn't want them to find out who he was.
He flicked ashes into his palm, crumbled them despite the oppressive heat, and squinted at the sky, where the VTOL was a growing speck. There wasn't much in the way of flora and fauna here to worry about, but he always felt better when the bird was there, the door open, and he was moving his guys inside.
When he used to have those dreams about Z-42B, he'd always dream the bird crashed, that he couldn't make it aboard, or some such. Just because the only animals on the charts to worry about on Z-77B were human or human imported didn't mean you couldn't have a problem.
He'd asked Garcia, back on the mother ship, whether Garcia had had bad dreams about Z-42B, and Garcia just said, "I have bad dreams about a lot of places." And then they'd talked about some EICSA then, but not like later. Then, he'd only let out a couple of hints about being boxed in for so long at EICSA's insistence, and that because he'd told Garcia about how he'd been signed up for Z-77C.
You had to tell somebody, and Garcia's ass was going to be hanging on Cardoso's decisions once they got staged through, so Garcia had a right to know that Cardoso wasn't real sure about some things. Like the hows and whys of the tactics used to get him here. Like whether Cardoso really was in perfect physical and mental shapes and drugs were to blame for the rest of it.
He'd gone as far as telling Garcia about the woman with him---the EICSA woman, Camila O'Flynn. He'd asked Garcia if Garcia had seen anybody like her shipboard, because he'd had that glimpse of her being hustled onto the same plane at Caipora. But Garcia hadn't seen any woman like that and had said, very carefully, studying his beer's head. "Maybe you just thought you saw her---if you were drugged, I mean," making it plain he wasn't accusing Cardoso of hallucinating without chemical assistance.
Or trying to. Cardoso had checked the women among the rangers himself, and when he came up dry, admitted that he hadn't expected to find her there. She wasn't trained for out-system; she was likely just hitching a ride to some corporate vacation spot and what he'd seen had been her luggage.
But Cardoso relied on his senses to keep him alive. He knew what he'd seen and it bothered him that Garcia wasn't telling him he hadn't seen it, like it bothered him that Garcia hadn't been put in some endless debrief program the way Cardoso had. Well, rank had its privileges. And anyway, Garcia had never claimed to have seen an alien---Garcia just saw Cardoso after Cardoso had seen one.
Now nobody was seeing aliens, when that was what they were on this shitball to do. Not even seeing revolutionaries. And Cardoso was about to pull the plug on the equatorial site and head north, where there was a bigger concentration of workers and techs in close contact, and where it wasn't so goddamn hot. Z-77C (actual astronomical designation classified) was tilted more than Earth, with gravity a fraction lighter, and Cardoso figured it must be a little farther from its sun, or else that sun was cooler.
The astronomy wasn't a burning concern for him; Brazil would give up all that data when it was time for statehood; until then, Cardoso neither needed nor wanted to know more than his mothership was up there, ready and waiting, and that his bird was coming in for pickup.
He could see the bird clearly now, and he put his index finger over the last coal of ash on the tip of his cigarette's filter before he ground it out underfoot and slapped down his visor. Turning into the cavern, trying to give his signal as much direction as possible, he tugged once on his line and called out, "Hey, Rodrigues, vamanos! Scramble for pickup, girls. Repeat: Proceed to pickup area."
He tugged on the line again and it didn't snap right back. In fact, it didn't snap back at all. His heart double-timed, stopped entirely, and started up as soon as his saliva turned to glue in his mouth.
"Foda-se tudo," he muttered, and started pulling the line in, praying for resistance, his feet braced in the tunnel opening. He took three loops before it pulled tight. Please, Christ, don't let it be snagged somewhere! Let someone be at the end of it!
He tried again, this time setting his co-channel open so that maybe Garcia would get some of what he was sending into the cave with its damned natural shielding.
"You sons of bitches call in, fall in, or I'm going to leave you here," he yelled hoarsely into his helmet.
There was crackle, then a dead spot. Cardoso could hear his blood rush in his ears.
Then Rodrigues's voice came clipping into his helmet----"---ucking pants on, sir! We're comin,' and we got something for ya!"
Cardoso actually slid down the rock wall, sick with relief. He didn't want to lose them. He couldn't lose them. He was too close to the memories of losing everyone, including Mendes, on Z-42B. He just couldn't handle it---getting through it, writing it up, having to tell people about it, getting boxed again because of it.
He was still sitting like that when Rodrigues, looking armed and dangerous, came up out of the dark, all pack and full-auto with something hanging from his belt in a regulation sling that wasn't regulation at all.
And behind Rodrigues, Cardoso could see more phosphorescent lines and another armored head. He slapped off his com-mike for a minute and cursed the lot of them. Then, having let off steam, he rejoined the com-circuit, rose to his feet and held out his hand. Behind him, the bird was landing.
"What is it, corporal?" he said to Rodrigues, a little too gruffly.
Even with Rodrigues's visor down, Cardoso could see the man do a double-take. "Sorry, sir. We saw this thing and we thought we'd cut it out for you. Next time, we'll leave it behind. But we couldn't raise you round that last bend, and...."
"Never mind. Just remember that I don't like eating all by myself. Let's have it." Rodrigues handed over his sample bag and it was a piece of rock with some scratches on it. Or were they letters? Or were they pictures? It was manmade. Or was it?
For this those bastards had nearly scared him shitless. Cardoso shook his head in his helmet, but hooked the sample bag onto his belt. Now he had a worthy reason to pull these guys out and take them north: the real tech talent was all up at the terraforming center.
Behind him, Garcia was so close that the sound of the bird putting down came right through Cardoso's helmet, and the amount of air it was pushing made him stagger. He yelled, "Okay, form 'em up. Let's head out," and stood back as Rodrigues did just that.
Cardoso leaned against the rock wall, rifle ready, until he'd head-counted his people. then he followed the last of them toward the open slider of the VTOL, the sample bag banging against his crotch. Maybe it was a little revolutionary graffiti, but if it wasn't, even Garcia was going to star taking this whole thing a little more seriously.
When he reached the VTOL, Cardoso looked back involuntarily, and in the tunnel he was sure he saw something glowing a little bit....a pale something about the size and shape of a naked man.
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