The big Gunny elaborated. "The good news is it looks like we're alone down here. No life signs, nothing hostile we can see. I'm getting some real hinky readings bearing two-six-niner relative, but whatever it is, it's beyond pa.s.sive scanner range. We'll get a better look if we go active."

Monster's torso rocked back, his faceplate angling up as he continued, "My best guess is that's where we broke through." A dented gauntlet pointed straight up.

Ridgeway looked up at the cavern ceiling, zooming his view and boosting light amplification. His rangefinder told him that the ceiling towered some seventy meters overhead, a jagged carpet of dark stalact.i.tes. An even darker hole, some ten meters wide, gaped in the forest of hanging spikes.

Monster looked down and shrugged toward the glowing pool. "Without the lake, we'da been paste on the rocks. I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but that's weirdness number one: it d.a.m.n sure ain't water. Too thick, too blue, and water doesn't glow in the dark. I've got Merlin running a check, but I'm laying heavy odds it's synthetic. If so, somebody had to put it here."

Ridgeway nodded, making a mental note. Another lower-priority item to be resolved later. "Go on."

"Weirdness number two, the atmosphere. Way too clean. Oxy-Nitro mix is solid, most of the right trace gases, it's d.a.m.n near Earth-normal and that just doesn't happen, especially not underground. That suggests a terraformer down here."

Ridgeway's fingers drummed lightly against his thigh as he mulled the point for the second time. "Yeah, St.i.tch came to the same conclusion. But Intel said the reactor was at the deepest level."

Monster snorted abruptly. "Oh yeah, it'd be a real shocker if Intel missed something now wouldn't it?"

Ridgeway grunted, having a ground-pounder's typically low regard for intelligence officers. Safe in air-conditioned offices, a.n.a.lysts sipped coffee and peered through second-hand reports, often forwarding best-guess conclusions as gospel fact. The guys on the front line ate the mistakes.

Monster continued. "We took one h.e.l.l of a drop. The Hex must have ate it's way into some kind of big crack, a natural shaft, something. Best estimate is that we pinballed through close to five hundred meters of rock before dumping out through the ceiling. Add another seventy of freefall, that puts us roughly twenty-five hundred meters below the surface."

The Gunnery Sergeant paused as if considering the weight of his own statement. Ridgeway mulled the conclusion carefully. Two and a half kilometers underground. h.e.l.l of a long way to dig.

Outwardly undaunted, Monster continued to present data in a steady stream. "It's way below freezing right here, about eight degrees Fahrenheit. We'd have to dig down to tap a lingering magma plane, and we sure as s.h.i.t don't wanna get any deeper. That leads us to weirdness number three: You can't have fog without heat. If the cavern is stone-cold, what's heating up the lake?"

Ridgeway cast a suspicious eye on the thick haze that lay across the rocks. What indeed?

The report left Ridgeway with more questions than answers, so he focused on the practical aspects of their survival. "What's our op status?"

"We've got enough power in the cells to repair maybe eighteen percent of the total armor damage, but that would leave us dry on juice. I've got an ammo redistribution in the works to give everybody close to a thirty-four percent load-out. Our s.h.i.t's hanging out a little, but we've got fight left."

Ridgeway nodded solemnly as his gaze snapped from one banged-up Marine to the next. With at least one critical injury on his hands, they had no time to sit idle. He keyed his ComLink to a team-wide channel.

"All right, here it is without the candy coating. We're two and a half klicks underground with no obvious exit. We need juice and shelter. There's no plan in the book for this one, so we've got to improvise."

The RATs turned to face him in silence, impa.s.sive faceplates fixed and unmoving.

Ridgeway pointed toward the roof of the cavern. "That's where we came in, but we're in no shape to even see if the door is still open. Odds are the reactor slagged it behind us."

"So what's the plan, Majah?"

"Conditions down here indicate two things, a terraformer and a heat source. Taken together, it smells like somebody else has been down here. If so, then there's got to be a way back up."

The Marines edged closer as Ridgeway took a knee like a quarterback in the huddle. "Here's the drill. We're sitting in low-signature mode. We don't see anything, and thus far it looks like nothing has seen us. I want everybody locked and hot, we're gonna bring up the lights and get a better look around."

Ridgeway looked across the group at the sniper. She sat up, armor secured once more. The heavy rifle rested on her lap.

"How're you doing, Darcy?"

"Five by five, Major." The pain in her voice belied the reply, but Ridgeway couldn't do much to help. He needed everybody on-line and functional.

"All right Marines, let's make it happen." Ridgeway handed the final prep to Monster and shifted focus to his own last-minute readiness. He cycled through an onboard checklist of weapons and armor, measuring his ability to wage sudden battle.

Something rapped against his bicep, a six-pack of twenty-mil grenades in Taz's outstretched hand. Ridgeway accepted them with a nod and slammed the magazine into the CAR's stock. A two-line display on the rifle incremented to reflect the increased load-out; four HEs, three frags, two Thermalite. The select-fire mechanism would launch the appropriate round on command.

Just above the grenade counter, a second line glowed a steady seventy-four percent. The rifle's covalent accelerator was online, with a fair bit of firepower left. The CARs fired the same charged round as the Gatling, albeit at a much slower rate. Even so, the destructive power of covalent ammo made it a murderous weapon.

Ridgeway gripped the rifle firmly. If anything is out there waiting to jump, he thought grimly, it better be ready to have its a.s.s unraveled in a hurry.

A glance at the TAC confirmed that the other Marines had reached a similar level of readiness. Ridgeway spun two upright fingers and the Marines formed up on his position. Shoulder to shoulder, they created a tight circle on the small island of rock, each Marine facing outward.

Pumped with enough drugs to numb a rhino, Darcy shouldered the Hammer. Monster squared himself on the suspect heading two-six-niner and held the Gatling level. Merlin, St.i.tch, and Taz completed the circle, their weapons up and ready.

"On my mark." Ridgeway's voice was low and deadly.

"Three."

Armor hummed softly as Taz settled lower in his stance, the muzzle of his CAR canted skyward.

"Two."

Quiet ascending whine as St.i.tch's exotherm ramped into magnum mode.

"One."

Taz's grenade launcher barked with a dull crump that echoed in the empty darkness. High overhead a pinpoint sun blazed to life as the flare burned away the shroud of darkness.

Monster's deep voice cut through the silence, "Oh my G.o.d."

CHAPTER 8.

The searchlights on Ridgeway's armor could bathe a hundred meters of midnight in a blazing glare. Together, the six Marines could throw enough candlepower to light up a stadium. But this was beyond forty lights, beyond sixty. Their beams angled up and played along the immense curving hull like tiny fingers tickling the belly of a whale.

The sweeping bow towered easily three hundred meters above them, its metal skin a patchwork of greens and greys. The hulk lay slightly on one side, nose-high and listing to starboard. Towering stalact.i.tes reached down from the ceiling and nailed the dead leviathan to the floor. A mangled stump, remnants of a severed wing, extended toward the cavern roof as though reaching for a distant sky.

In the crawling splashes of light, Ridgeway could make out sections of crumpled framework through gaping holes in the skin. It took a h.e.l.l of a lot to bend girders that thick, Ridgeway noted soberly. Whatever hit this thing had ripped parts off of it like they were made of wet clay.

"What the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l is it?" Taz muttered, his voice low and guarded.

St.i.tch drawled, "You mean, aside from the obvious?"

"Stow it!" Monster's tone was rock-hard. "Merlin, biometric. Taz, high band EM. St.i.tch, vibro-acoustic. Sitrep in ninety, so hit it." The orders snapped out in a rapid-fire series.

Thermo-optic had been skipped, but Ridgeway knew for good reason. Darcy's sniper rifle was already crawling over the expanse of metal hull in a methodical hasty search. A sniper's first priority was always observation. More than anyone in the group, Darcy was trained in the art of visual search, dividing a threat area into smaller and smaller quadrants, noting details and moving on. The imaging power of the Leupold Mk-23 scope surpa.s.sed even the armor's optics in terms of long-range scanning. If a gnat lurked in the darkness, Darcy would spot it.

Ghost time, Ridgeway thought as he ordered the TAC to cue up a telepresence. In a burst of radiant energy the TAC reached out to Darcy's armor and absorbed a replica of her complete sensory construct; sight, sound, the works. Creating what amounted to a splitter for virtual reality, the TAC captured everything Darcy could see and hear, and pumped it into Ridgeway's brain.

For some, the perception of jumping from one body to the next was disorienting. As a telepresence veteran, Ridgeway barely noted the gaussian ripple that pa.s.sed when one reality melted into the other. The muddled double-exposure just as quickly vanished and Darcy's perspective snapped into clarity.

Crosshairs suddenly quartered Ridgeway's vision, the reticle sliding along rusted hull plates with mechanical precision. At the high level of zoom, Ridgeway could see small cracks with clarity. He followed the sniper's view through the rifle scope, noting a thick layer of ice that encrusted the expansive hull. Every twisted metal edge was lined with needles of frost.

Fifteen seconds ticked by and Ridgeway's perception jumped again. The crosshairs vanished, replaced by the thick suppressor of an MP17. St.i.tch tracked the weapon from one irregular breach to the next, pausing to gather shreds of vibration that emanated from within. Ridgeway looked for jagged waveforms to dance across the graph, relieved to see that the flatline was broken by nothing more sinister than the occasional drip of water.

At the fringe of the medic's vision, Ridgeway could see his own figure standing motionless. As callous as Ridgeway had become with the technology, the disembodied view of his own form always proved disquieting. He reminded himself of another piece of Grissom logic; you're not in trouble until you see your own body from above and your view keeps drifting away.

Ridgeway completed his lap, ghosting each Marine in turn. The electronic clairvoyance allowed a commander to peel a little bit off the top of the data stream. Satisfied that sudden death wasn't immediately ahead, he dismissed the ethereal perspectives and returned once more to the center of his own world.

A string of icons formed along Ridgeway's vision, noteworthy items detected by each Marine as they scanned their a.s.signed spectrum. Nothing was discounted; energy sources, vibrations, points hotter or colder than their surroundings. As each bracket appeared, Ridgeway snap-focused on it and brought his own sensor package to bear, ranking each contact in terms of perceived threat. While comparative a.n.a.lysis of wildly disparate facts might reveal a hidden pattern at some point down the line, right now he would be happy just to know that they were alone.

At ninety-two seconds, Ridgeway leaned shoulder-to-ma.s.sive shoulder against Monster. "What do you think?"

Ridgeway knew that Monster had been voraciously chewing through his own observations, sorting hard facts for a logical conclusion. Dual-layered pressure hull, conventional deck elements. The why made no sense, but the what seemed undeniable.

"It's a starship Major, and a big one at that," Monster made the statement firmly, then added, "but I'll be d.a.m.ned if I know what she's doing way the h.e.l.l down here. Its d.a.m.n sure too deep for a shipyard, and there's no sign of a tunnel wide enough to bring that big b.i.t.c.h down here in the first place."

Ridgeway stood silent, Monster's a.s.sessment matching his own. But he took no comfort in the conclusion. One answer opened a hundred bigger questions.

Still, a ship was likely to have engines, APUs, batteries. A million possible sources of power and right now, power was high on their list. The broader answers would have to wait.

"Threat a.s.sessment?"

"We've got no biosigns and no lights. There's a heavy weapon turret on the port wing, but e-mag is negative-- no juice in the gun or the wing. As far as we can see, the whole ship is stone cold on every spectrum." The sergeant turned toward Ridgeway and added, "Course, you know what that's worth."

The two had seen enough combat to know that invariably, the moment a zone is declared clear, something G.o.d-awful would pop out of the sand to bite them in the a.s.s. 'Clear' really meant 'I can't see what's coming'.

Ridgeway nodded silently, his helmet fixed on the hulk in the darkness. The prospect of boarding a ship of unknown origin was fraught with risk. But the threat of losing power for good was a far more pressing hazard.

"Listen up," Ridgeway barked on the team channel, "we now have one goal and that's to get out of here. The first step is finding juice." He pointed toward the ship, "whatever the h.e.l.l that thing is, it's our best shot, so we're heading in."

Ridgeway turned to Monster. "Half arc, Taz on point. Give me an approach vector for max cover from the turret gun."

"Roger that." The sergeant spun quickly in spite of his injuries and set Ridgeway's orders into motion.

Silently, Ridgeway gazed at the ship. Questions burned fitfully as he sifted through woefully limited data. What the h.e.l.l was a starship doing in a deep-core cavern? The contradiction chafed his mind and Ridgeway had long ago learned to distrust the incongruous.

His eyes tracked back to the island as he considered the approach vectors. A wide curve would let them use the closest group of stalagmites for cover. That would get them to within fifty meters. From there the curve of the hull would-- SCREECH!.

The sound of groaning metal beat the TAC's warning tone by half a second. As Ridgeway spun toward the tortured shriek, his CAR snapped up to his shoulder. The muzzle came to rest pointed at the truck where a damaged interior door had fallen open with a crash. Like a swarm of fireflies, six targeting laser dots converged on a bright orange glove that dangled in the opening.

Taz bolted forward, side-slipping through the waist-deep pool. In a dozen strides he reached the cab and flattened against the crumpled skirt. The muzzle of his CAR remained fixed on the glove. Merlin advanced left, matching Taz's pace. Moving as one, the two figures spun to the doorway. Their a.s.sault rifles swept a rapid four-corner pattern.

Taz grabbed the limp arm and yanked hard. An orange-clad figure slid free, bounced hard off the doorframe and flopped lifelessly into the pool. With barely a glance, Taz stamped his foot atop the rubbery form, driving it beneath the surface as he swung his CAR into the darkness of the rear compartment.

"Clear," he snapped, rifle rock-steady.

"Clear," Merlin echoed as his muzzle swept low and forward.

Clutching the CAR's pistol-grip firmly in his right hand, Taz reached down with his left and fished for the submerged figure. Backpedaling quickly, he dragged the lifeless form across the pool.

Merlin leaned into the truck. "Looks like a fair amount of Hex blew through here, Major. I've got a few pieces of seat-frame and some sc.r.a.pped electronics. Top of the dash and the ceiling is about all that survived."

Turning to the rear of the cab, Merlin peered into the dark compartment. "Huh. They beefed the h.e.l.l out of the back." His voice held a quizzical note as he continued his examination. "There's a whole bunch of s.h.i.t back here. More electronics, survival gear, couple of MREs and -- what the h.e.l.l is that?"

Merlin paused, then turned and looked back at Ridgeway as he hooked a thumb toward the compartment. "Hey Major, some clever b.a.s.t.a.r.d stuffed an old grav-couch back here. How's that for survival planning?"

Before Ridgeway could reply, Merlin swung back to the cab and resumed his inventory. "OK, clothing, spare parts, and a stack of-- well h.e.l.lo."

The abrupt change in tone riveted Ridgeway's attention. "What have you got?"

The engineer spoke calmly, his voice suddenly flat. "A s.h.i.tload of plastic, major. I'm guessing Thermalite." The Marine's movements slowed dramatically. His upper body eased toward the front of the cab, gaze sweeping upward.

"Bingo." Merlin extended an armored finger toward the cab's ceiling. "Here's your trigger." The illuminated b.u.t.ton sputtered briefly as if in recognition.

"Hey guys," the engineer backed quickly away from the wreckage, his voice an icy monotone. "Just a suggestion, but I'm thinking we give this b.i.t.c.h some distance. She's about one short-circuit away from solving all of our heat problems."

Ridgeway pulled his Marines back to the far end of the island before he turned to the medic and motioned towards the survival suit. "St.i.tch, what have you got?"

The medic slid a fluorescent baton rapidly across the figure's limbs and torso. The penetrating glow revealed a number of injuries. "Got a male, early twenties. I make six broken bones at first count, probably a few more once I get down to small fractures."

The baton shifted hue and St.i.tch drew the device slowly across the figure's centerline. "Internal bleeding, lot of soft tissue damage, bunch of teeth knocked out. Frostbite in all the appendages. No combat gear, no guns." St.i.tch paused, then added, "I'm guessing driver or nav."

"Might be," Merlin chipped in, "Looks like he had the brights to climb into the grav-couch. Even without power the gelpack would have sucked up a lot of pounding. Clever little weasel."

Taz leaned over the figure and with detached efficiency raised a clenched fist above the cracked orange helmet. "Well this one is easy to solve."

"Negative." Ridgeway snapped the word with a force that froze Taz in his tracks and drew stares from the other Marines. Ridgeway understood their concern. In survival situations, prisoners were a huge liability. But this was an unusual scenario.

"If this is an Alliance dig, he may know something useful. Sweep him for weapons or wires, bundle him up and bring him along. We've got a starship to catch."

CHAPTER 9.

Taz oozed forward like a snake, cursing the glowing pool with every step. His slightest movement created ripples of light and shadow. Even at a snail's pace, the fog split around him in a growing wake that looked all too much like a giant arrow pointed at his back. The only thing that struck him as missing was a huge neon sign that read 'shoot me'.