Hybrid: A Military Sci-Fi Series (The Acheron Book 3) by Rick Partlow

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2020-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

“No wonder I couldn’t see the settlement from orbit,” Ash said softly, shaking his head.

Gunny Kamara had led them on a five-kilometer hike back towards the mountain pass, a winding journey around thermal springs and geysers and ponds of meltwater and over layers and layers of algae. It hadn’t been a pleasant walk, even in half normal gravity, not wearing vacuum suits and sucking in air that was too thin to be healthy and too near freezing to be comfortable. The Marines carrying Singh hadn’t complained though, so he’d kept his mouth shut.

He’d expected to see buildings, or equipment or vehicles, but there’d been nothing until they’d cleared the hot springs and started walking a trail over and between rolling hills of moss-covered soil and algae-coated rock. That’s when he’d spotted the opening in the hillside. He’d thought it was a cave at first, though he wasn’t certain of how the local geology would have formed one there; but as they walked closer, he’d begun to see that the tunnel was man-made. It was also much larger and farther away than it had looked when he’d spotted it, and it took another five minutes of resolute trudging before they’d reached the buildfoam walls.

They had to be reinforced by some sort of high-strength framework to support the weight of all that dirt and rock over them, he thought. Maybe BiPhase Carbide? But that was expensive, usually reserved for starship hulls and military armor. Transporting heavy, expensive alloy here to some insignificant moon in an isolated system way out at the edge of the Cluster had to have been expensive as all hell and keeping it secret…automated construction equipment? Even more expensive.

“This is some serious shit,” Fontenot commented next to him, voice pitched low, and he nodded by way of reply.

Kamara led them through the tunnel into the darkness, and Ash’s eyes struggled to adapt to it; he felt like the slow child of the bunch, since Fontenot had thermal and infrared filters in her bionic ocular, and the Marines all had night vision lensing in their helmets’ Heads-Up-Displays. He resisted an urge to put a hand to Fontenot’s arm for support; his hands were bound tightly behind his back with plastic slip-cuffs. He had stumbled for the second time when one of the Marines took him by the shoulder and guided him to the far wall, where he could see the glowing digital readout of a security lock plate.

Kamara tapped in a code, then peeled off a glove and placed his palm flat against the plate. It flashed yellow for a few seconds before finally going green. Ash hadn’t been able to make out the doorway in the shadowy gloom of the tunnel; but when it began to slide open, the yellow glow of interior lights outlined the breadth and height of it, nearly as wide as the tunnel itself. The door opened into what looked like a storage area, stacked high with plastic tubs with government markings.

Not Fleet markings, Ash noted.

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