V
The Dutchman had been lying back in his couch, deliberately irritating me by pretending to be asleep, his hands folded over his massive belly, the cigar clenched in his teeth.
The shuttle settled down on its landing pods. I went into the powerdown sequence while Buchholtz deployed the weapons turret and manned the foamer—after a quick trip through an atmosphere, the heat shield tends to start any vegetation around the LZ burning, which can make one unpopular with the locals. Norfeldt's eyes sagged slowly open, and he brought up his lighter and lit his cigar with one hand while he opened the biogel port with the other.
"Anything, Kurt?"
"Negative, Al." Buchholtz sounded disappointed as he eyed his screens, swinging the weapons turret radar and camera a full three-sixty before he set it on auto. "We've got a quiet plain. Want to go to Yellow, anyway?"
"Shit, no."
Planetside, we're always on alert, but doctrine allows for the Team Leader to take us to Condition Yellow—a state of high alert—pretty much at his own whim. The disadvantage of Yellow is that it gives the weapons officer more discretion to fire without consulting, and I can imagine that Norfeldt wasn't eager to take the safety off Buchholtz.
By the way, going to Condition Blue, "Attack Expected," allows the WO to assume anything is hostile without further evidence, and as far as Buchholtz was concerned, I had the feeling that there wasn't much difference between Blue and Black; Condition Black is "Attack Initiated."
"You getting anything, An?"
McCaw's eyes were dreamy and distant. "Just . . . a vagueness on a vagueness, sir." He shrugged, then resumed his reverie.
"Any feelings of hostility?"
"No."
I was waiting for McCaw to say more, but he didn't.
The Dutchman spat. "Okay. We're about five klicks from the village, and if they didn't hear us come in, they're deaf. So we're going to play it conservative, and let them come to us while we wait for the biogel to spoil.
"Buchholtz, you get the recoilless out of the skimmer and mount it topside.
"Emmy, you and Ari launch a comm balloon; swing-mount the III-b radar on the all-purpose flange. I'll sit with the panic button.
"Let's get to it, people."
Deciding what to wear outdoors on a new world is easy; until developments in the biogel have had a chance to show us whether there are local airborne bugs or toxins that like human flesh, we always have to go through the full decontam protocol.
When there's a significant overpressure outside, we either have to accept breathing thicker air or go with hard helmets. While hard helmets do have an advantage—they are tough—doctrine is to prefer membrane helmets, and run just a bit of overpressure inside, which keeps them inflated. The membrane helmets aren't exactly easy to puncture, and they do have one big advantage: they conduct sound better than air, which means we can rely on the natural acoustics of our own ears, rather than external mikes. Much better.
I tightened my helmet to the rubbery collar of my E-suit and immediately thumbed on my suit air to push the clinging plastic off my face. Then, as per doctrine, I checked McCaw's seal while he idly checked mine.
He looked like a frankfurter in foil in his silvery E-suit; despite everything, it was all I could do to keep myself from giggling while we both donned our olive-drab oversuits and stepped out into the lock, him with the balloon and gear tucked under an arm, me with a wiregun slung over my shoulder and some sampling gear in a beltpack.
Despite Buchholtz monitoring the situation, and able to fire the recoilless in support, if necessary, it's always a good idea to have a bit of personal weaponry. Others like slugthrowers; I prefer wireguns. Back when I was a boy, I used to skitter a ball around our patio with the garden hose. Using a wiregun is a lot like that.
The inner door snicked shut behind us, and we stood in the airlock for a moment while the outer door wheezed itself open.
I put my hand on my belt and thumbed for the general freak. "Von du Mark here. Radio check. How—"
"Hey!" The Dutchman cut me off. "I've got a fucking hangover. Skip the tin-soldier stuff, Emmy, and just float the balloon, eh?"
McCaw followed me down the ladder onto the plain.
That's all it was, just a grassy plain. I felt vaguely disappointed, although I don't know what I'd expected. Some sort of eerie alienness, maybe. I probably shouldn't have expected anything. I'd been to Luna, of course, and had done practice landings on both Mars and Venus—the Mare Serentatis reminded me of the Schwarzwald; Mars was just a rocky field as far as the eye could see; Venus was like being inside a dirty cloud—but I guess I'd expected the first really alien world I landed on to look special.
It didn't.
While McCaw made ready to launch the balloon, I walked outside the broad black oval our belly jets had charred, took a sampler from my belt, then stooped to cut out and bag a piece of grassy turf. I stowed the bag in one of the shuttle's outside lockers, just above the black slickness of the heat shield.
There wasn't anything apparently special about the grass. The leaves were more purplish than I was used to, thinner and denser, but it was obviously just plain ordinary grass on a plain ordinary plain.
Big deal.
Since McCaw was finished tethering the plastic line to the shuttle, I opened the box containing the radar and took the white plastic ball out, snapping it onto the gondola's utility flange.
If there's anything simpler than flying point-to-point in space, it's launching a Service comm balloon. You just make sure that none of the lines leading to the electronics package are tangled, and that the line is in a normal-looking coil. Then you pull the ripcoard and stand back; it inflates and launches itself.
It was a huge, inverted plastic teardrop, falling upside down into the sky.
"Okay, radar's working, Emmy. You and McCaw get back in."
We waited in the airlock while the blue biocides rose up to our membrane helmets, eating away our olive-drab oversuits, leaving both of us in shiny E-suits and bubbles. The biocide fluid drained away, to be replaced by flickerings of UV and IR, and by both rinsings of water.
Stomping our boots and slapping at ourselves to shake off the last of the water, we went back into the shuttle and removed our helmets.
My first time on a really alien world, and it had been . . .
. . . nothing special. Not really. Just like a drill.
The Dutchman was still puffing away at one of his cigars. "The good news is that the biogel doesn't seem to be changing."
McCaw stripped off his E-suit and settled himself into his couch. He didn't take the bait; I guess anything going on outside of his own skull was too dull to bother with.
"Well?" Buchholtz asked, both eyes on his screens. "What is the bad news? I don't see anything."
The Dutchman sighed. "Neither do I. That was the bad news. Okay, we go to single watches. Sundown is in three hours; if we don't see anything in the night, first thing in the morning we take a hike." He sighed again. Sort of like a whale moaning. "Which means I'm on the wagon tonight. Shit. How much you want to bet nothing happens?"
I didn't say anything; I had a hunch that the Dutchman was right.
Sure enough, nothing much happened during the night. Buchholtz took first watch and spent the rest of the night sleeping in his couch, his headphones clamped on his head, the feedwire running into the radar alarm.
McCaw, being the comm officer, was exempt from being on watch; he spent the time in his cabin, no doubt communing with himself.
The Dutchman stood his watch without complaint, which surprised me. And apparently stayed sober, which surprised me more.
All that happened to me was that I got incredibly bored.
In the morning, we suited up.