Alien Hostiles by Ian Douglas

Author:Ian Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Published: 2021-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Present Day

The members of the recon team donned their helmets and filed up the rear ramp into the depths of the waiting Predator. Its tie-downs freed, the vehicle rolled aft into the cargo bay airlock, then waited in darkness as the door was sealed and water poured inside. Once the chamber was filled, the outer hatch lowered to the seabed, and the RV trundled out into the alien sea.

The ARVX Predator was completely sealed with its own internal life support and was propelled by fuel cell–powered electric motors mounted inside its wheel hubs, and so could operate in poisonous atmospheres, hard vacuum, or, as this time, underwater. Directed by radio from the TR-3S, tech sergeant Walters steered the vehicle through rapidly shoaling water, until it burst into the air in an explosion of white spray.

The rear ramp came down and the passengers spilled out, taking up positions in a broad, defensive perimeter. If they’d been observed, any nearby hostiles might be expected to launch an attack . . . but the alien night was silent and empty. A golden-red glow dominated the eastern sky above a deep violet sea, with the immense crescent of the gas giant Charlie hanging in the northeast. The rings, viewed almost edge on, were a brilliant razor’s slice across that crescent, looking like an arrow about to be fired from a titanic cosmic bow toward a point just below the eastern horizon.

The gas giant provided light enough for the team to go to work. Hunter supervised the placement of a small radio transponder that would trigger when the team returned and broadcast a coded signal. The storm of radio noise from Charlie would block longer-range communications, but the transponder signal would be strong enough to guide them through the last few kilometers of unknown terrain to the TR-3S’s submerged hiding place here, just off the beach. The TR-3S had already extended a radio mast above the surface perhaps a hundred yards off the coast, which would listen for the transponder signal, and for radio signals from the team.

Hunter flexed his knees, experimenting. Daarish’s surface gravity was just a third of Earth’s. That might be to their advantage. The temperature, he noted, was in the eighties and humid enough that Hunter was glad of his environmental suit. This far out from the local sun the temp should have been well below zero. Something else, something unknown, was at play.

A volcano on the southern horizon suggested that tidal stresses with Charlie might be behind the anomalous temperatures.

His NVGs provided plenty of illumination. Even as a crescent Charlie flooded the alien landscape in light, beneath the eerily shifting green haze of the aurorae.

“Mount up,” Hunter ordered. “Let’s check out the lay of the land.”

RM1 Ralph Colby, squeezed into a jump seat with Walters in the driver’s cabin, scanned the radio frequencies, listening for . . . anything, anything at all besides the storm of noise from Charlie. So far they appeared to be all alone . . .

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