John Dalmas by Soldiers

Author:Soldiers
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-12-14T21:05:53+00:00

They’d drilled the procedure back in the Sol System. The Bering had emerged off Luna’s far side (and been snooped by a police craft from nearby Yerikalin Dome). The Tagus rainforest had been represented by the Marañon Ecological Benchmark Preserve, in Terra’s Peruvian Autonomy. And to make the drill complete, the hornet team had returned (illegally) with a bunch of outraged Terran hornets. None had been the size of a man’s thumb, but they were big-time mean.

There too it had been Captain Paul Stoorvol who’d piloted the short-range scout, SRS 12/1. And beside him, as here, had been Alfhild Olavsdóttir, blond and perhaps forty years old, stocky and fit-looking. Now as then, Stoorvol guided the scout smoothly across the lunar gravitic field, veering around occasional topographic obstacles, then slowing as he approached the limb of the moon. He stopped when he’d cleared it, parking a bare hundred feet off the surface.

From there they got their first look at Tagus, a little less than 170,000 miles away. Alfhild Olavsdóttir inhaled sharply. “Holy Gaea!” she said. “It’s gorgeous!”

Her oath annoyed Stoorvol; he disliked Gaeans. But the annoyance was remote; his feelings were often somewhat remote. Besides, lots of non-Gaeans used that oath, and somehow Alfhild Olavsdóttir didn’t strike him as a Gaean. A deist maybe. Deism was supposed to be big among scientists.

At any rate she was right: Tagus was beautiful. Colonized worlds invariably were; it went with being Terra-like. At the moment, what dominated his view of Tagus was the world ocean—a vivid blue with white cyclonic swirls. The equatorial zone showed a modest continent whose predominant blue-green suggested heavy forest.

After perhaps ten seconds of planet gazing, Stoorvol called up his instrument display, checking for technical electronic activity. He found plenty, from a single south-coast locale. Two other sources appeared that the scout’s shipsmind identified as surveillance buoys parked above the equator at an altitude of 4,600 miles. He marked their locations with icons, but just now his primary interest was the surface location. Centering it on his screen, he magnified the site. It was nearly rectangular, a six by eight-mile area cleared of forest—distinct enough to be measured by his scanner from 170,000 miles out. He marked it with another icon.

“That’s probably the colony,” he said. “Or one of them. We’ll have to check the other hemisphere, but except for size, this one fits Morgan’s site description. It’s equatorial and on a south-coast headland—an open block with forest on two sides, the ocean on a third, and an inlet on the fourth.”

Olavsdóttir nodded. “It’s hard to imagine a natural opening looking like that.”

Stoorvol held the scout where it was, and they kept alternate, one-hour watches. Whoever wasn’t on watch used the main cabin to nap, snack, exercise, or otherwise break the monotony. The scout’s shipsmind didn’t experience time in the same way humans do, and it also had external tasks. It assigned an arbitrary meridian to Tagus, bisecting the visible Wyzhñyñy settlement. With that and the equator as references, it

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