Worthy of Time Read online

  Worthy of Time

  By K. Constantine

  Copyright © 2019 K. Constantine

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and events are fictional and have no relationship to any real person, place or event. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any manner whatsoever without the written permission from the author except in cases where brief quotes are included in articles or reviews.

  Chapter 1

  First contact

  Star System: Virgil’s Star (VGL 191)

  Force: Marine Company One — dispatched from the Alcmene naval vessel Nemean

  Location: Two klicks inside the Structure

  “Fall Back!” Major Lewis shouted into the general channel. “All units fall back!”

  His Marines raced through the tight corridors, flashes of green laser light mixing with their headlamps to illuminate the darkness.

  Gravity here was heavy, but the Marine EVA suits were designed to compensate so that the wearer would feel Earth-normal. Despite that, Lewis felt his feet dragging.

  He switched to the command channel and began giving orders.

  “Wessler! Duffy! You’ve got four squads coming your way. Unidentified hostiles on our tail. Have your men ready to fall back behind the squads. Execute defensive retreat. Don’t try to hold your line once we are through!”

  “Corporal Duffy here, sir! Acknowledged.”

  “We’ll be crossing your position in about sixty seconds. Wessler, acknowledge!”

  “Sir,” said Duffy over the comm, static muffling his voice. “Wessler took a squad to explore one of the side corridors. We lost contact with his unit about ten minutes ago, sir.”

  “Shit!”

  “Should we send scouts after them, sir?”

  “No time. Execute as ordered. Once the squads are through, you are to fall back in full defensive retreat. Understood?”

  “Yes sir!”

  Lewis closed the command channel and gave a signal to Waverly.

  Waverly was his command’s official liaison to ISAT, the Institute of Science and Technology, a pan-governmental organization whose original function was to monitor and control potentially destructive technologies. These days ISAT had a monopoly on technology and dolled it out — or forbid it — as it saw fit.

  Lewis opened a private channel to Waverly. “Waverly, we need to slow those hostiles down. What have you got in your TSAC?”

  Waverly placed a hand on his backpack and another on his utility belt, thought for a moment and replied, “A round of GGs ought to slow those things down.”

  “Great! I’ll cover you from here. Martinez and Lotte will cover your flanks. Get those things ready now!”

  Lewis gave orders to Martinez and Lotte to lay down fire to the left and right of Waverly, while Lewis took point just off their central line of attack.

  “Wait for my order, Waverly!”

  “Yes sir!”

  “Last squad to cross perimeter one,” Lewis shouted into the general channel, “call out your position when you are through. Duffy and his team will cover your retreat back to the shuttles.”

  Electronic acknowledgements flashed green on Lewis’ heads-up display.

  Lewis glanced at his watch. They should be getting through in ten seconds.

  Five seconds.

  “Waverly, get ready!

  Three seconds.

  Waverly began taking aim.

  Two seconds.

  Lewis took in a deep breath to steady his nerves.

  One second.

  “Squad four through, sir!”

  “Waverly, now!”

  Waverly steadied what looked like a two-foot tube on his shoulder, his fingers dancing over a red keypad, and fired.

  The GG landing zone seemed to turn pitch black, as gravity within a ten-meter area increased tenfold.

  “Good job! Waverly, get your ass back to the shuttle. Martinez, Lotte, hold your positions and keep firing at those bogies! Run like hell when I give the word.”

  Lewis turned his attention to his heads-up display, turned on the SITMAP and watched icons representing each squad make their way back to the shuttle landing point. Even with the SITMAP on, he couldn’t see Wessler’s team.

  They knew coming in that this structure was heavily shielded, and communications would be difficult. But he didn’t expect anyone to disobey orders and get themselves lost.

  Not wanting to leave anyone behind, he reluctantly gave the order to Martinez and Lotte to retreat.

  “Get back to the shuttle. NOW!”

  Lotte and Martinez retreated in staggered fashion, with each Marine running ten meters, stopping to lay cover fire while the other Marine ran ten meters and so on, until they could get out of the hostiles’ firing range.

  Crouched behind a twisted piece of steel, Lewis opened the general channel and called to Wessler again.

  No answer.

  “Sir! We’ve got a problem.” That was Lotte.

  Before Lewis could answer, a deafening roar blasted static through his EVA comm and blinded his heads-up display.

  It took seconds for his visor to correct and restore his vision, coming in shadowy at first, before the visor adjusted to the lighting and compensated for damage to his EVA suit’s external visual sensors.

  The corridor ahead of them was blocked by tons of debris.

  He saw Martinez’s name tag among the debris but no other signs of him.

  Lotte was lying over the jagged edge of a boulder, his back bent at a painfully dangerous angle.

  Lewis made his way to Lotte, plugged his suit into the Marine’s EVA and checked for vitals: still breathing, heart rate low, unconscious, being pumped with recovery nanos by the suit’s onboard medical computer.

  Lotte would survive the explosion.

  But with the effects of the gravity grenades fading, and blasts of green laser fire coming their way again, Lewis wasn’t so sure they’d be getting out of this alive.

  Dragging a piece of metal in front of their position, Lewis placed Lotte flat on the ground behind the sheet and took aim with his rifle.

  Whoever — whatever — they were, they were coming.

  Search and Rescue

  System: Virgil’s star (VGL 191)

  Location: The Structure, 350 meters from the landing zone

  Corporal Duffy watched the two shuttles take off from the Structure’s hangar bay and fly back into open space.

  Their mission to explore the Structure had quickly become a search-and-rescue mission. Duffy felt a surge of pride when he asked for three volunteers to stay behind to help him carry out the mission, and every member of his squad who wasn’t wounded stepped up for the task.

  Despite his ample pick of volunteers, he knew immediately who he wanted.

  Private First-Class Laura Chan, formerly attached to the Flying Hornets, a combat engineering unit that specialized in rescuing commercial spacers trapped in shoddy mines dug by shady companies in Alcmene’s in-system asteroid mining belt.

  Senior Private Michelle Hauser, a medical doctor by training who’d joined the Marines out of her deep desire to see the stars — or at least that’s what she’d tell Duffy whenever they’d drink too much and fall asleep in each other’s arms.

  And finally, William “Buff” Layton, arguably the fittest Marine Duffy had ever encountered. Rumor had it that a fully suited Marine wearing EVA-strength augmentation gear, which was standard on such missions, would still lose to Layton in an arm wrestle.

  Duffy called into the command comm, still in range of the shuttles.

  “Falcons One and Two. This is Corporal Duffy. Get
back to the Nemean and give a full report to Captain Gregory. Give us six hours to conduct our search, and then ask the captain to come and get us.”

  Green acknowledgements flashed in his heads-up display. The two Falcon shuttles accelerated away from the structure bound for the Nemean, station keeping one AU away.

  Back to the task at hand, Duffy surveyed their surroundings with a sweep of his head. Things looked quiet — a far cry from the chaos a few moments ago, when the entire Marine recon force was making a headlong retreat from an unknown, heavily armed enemy.

  Still, as the ranking officer it was his duty to stay back and retrieve anyone left behind.

  Luckily, the Falcons were equipped with portable excavation equipment, which the Marines could supplement with their EVA suit’s augmented lifting capacities.

  The job here was big, but Duffy figured between the four of them and their equipment they’d be able to dig out anyone who was under all that debris.

  “Laura, would you do the honors, please?” said Duffy into his teams’ channel, gesturing at the excavation equipment resting by Private First-Class Laura Chan’s feet.

  “The pleasure is all mine,” Chan replied.

  Chan and Duffy had attended university together and joined the Marines at the same time. They’d been longtime friends, and while never pursuing a romantic relationship, deeply cared for each other.

  They had promised to be each other’s best man or woman at their respective weddings — assuming either of them got around to doing that.

  While Chan set up the excavation equipment near the beginning of the debris field, Duffy turned his attention to Senior Private Michelle Hauser.

  Hauser was already using her MEDKIT to scan for life signs within the debris field.

  “Anything?” Duffy asked her.

  Silently examining her MEDKIT display, she paused for a moment before shaking her head. “No. Nothing so far.”

  “OK, keep at it. They could have survived if their EVA suits weren’t damaged before the collapse.”

  Layton was already at work, digging through the debris himself, using his suit’s augmented strength to move the heavier, more dense pieces of debris and his gloved fist to smash through smaller, more brittle pieces.

  “Joining you, Buff,” Duffy said, and began hand-digging through the field.

  It would be a few minutes before Chan had the excavation equipment ready to go, and even with it running, the debris field was large enough to keep a single excavator from finishing the job in time for their scheduled pickup.

  Duffy would have requested more volunteers and more equipment, but he was already pushing things as it was by disobeying direct orders to retreat along with the rest of the recon force to the shuttles and the Nemean.

  Beyond that, he didn’t want to risk any more Marines than he had to. Duffy figured that his small team of four could more easily evade any hostile force they might encounter; a large team would be easier to spot and engage immediately, as had happened with the original recon force.

  “All set here, Corporal,” called Chan. “I’m turning on the excavator. You guys stay clear over there on your end while this thing is on. Don’t want to pulverize your lovely EVAs,” she said with a smile.

  The main body of an excavator sat on a tracked chassis allowing it to maneuver over most types of terrain. The front of the device looked like a protruding cone with jagged teeth. The excavator was guided by the operator, as it slowly moved forward along its tracks and into the material being extracted. Through a combination of heat, grinding and chemistry, it could chew through most rocky and metallic material, boring out a hole one meter in diameter.

  The chassis allowed the boring mechanism to track for three meters before it had to be reversed and backed out of the hole to either allow personnel access into the tunnel or reset so that another section could be cut out.

  In this case, since the debris field was around ten meters wide, Chan would bore out the six meters to the right while Duffy and Buff would hand-dig their side of the field, until they got through to the other side or found survivors.

  “Corporal, what if the excavator accidently bores through the major or any of our guys unlucky enough to be stuck under this mess?” Layton asked.

  “Good question. Laura, are you sure about your readings? Are you one hundred percent certain that there is no one trapped under this stuff?”

  “I’m taking continual readings as the excavator does its thing. I’ve set its forward speed to a foot per minute. At that rate, the excavator scanner should be able to identify life signs before the nozzle gets to within a foot of anyone who might be under there.”

  “Understood. Michele, how certain are you that your MEDKIT can reliably scan through this stuff?”

  “It doesn’t appear to be made of any exotic material. Basic reinforced steel, basalt rock and some crystalline material I haven’t identified yet. I think the MEDKIT is working fine.”

  “These walls were playing havoc with our comm during the firefight,” Layton said. “What if this place is also affecting the MEDKIT scans?”

  Duffy thought about that for a moment. Turning to Laura, he asked, “OK, how many Lifter Sets did you bring?”

  The sets attached to an EVA suit, augmenting the wearer’s ability to both lift and move large, heavy, bulky objects that would otherwise be impossible for a human to handle on their own.

  “Just two,” Laura answered.

  “Great! Buff, grab one. I’ll take the other. Michele, keep your scans peeled and close to Laura’s excavator. Augment the excavator scans with your MEDKIT scans. Sync them up and see if they produce the same results. If there’s even a hint of a doubt that what that machine is about to touch is organic or made of Marine-issued material, full stop — and we dig out that area by hand. We don’t want to pulverize the major. That won’t look too good on any of our records.”

  Just a little levity, Duffy thought, to help calm their nerves. Or rather, it was his nerves he was trying to calm.

  Fastening his Lifter Set to his EVA suit, Corporal Duffy joined Layton as they continued to dig out their side of the debris field.

  Squad 17, commanded by Sergeant Wessler

  System: Virgil’s star (VGL 191)

  Location: Somewhere inside the Structure

  Sergeant Wessler had ordered his squad to reconnoiter the corridor as a precaution against a flanking attack on the Marines making their way into the structure. He and Duffy had been ordered to establish defensive perimeters to protect the main force’s advance and, if needed, its retreat, and to maintain comm with the shuttles. But there wasn’t much standing in the way of his squad and any attack coming from his side of the ingress point. Sure, he had assigned a fire team to watch the entryway, and the ISAT sensors deployed were not picking up any hostiles in that direction, but his gut told him otherwise.

  So over Corporal Duffy’s protests, he ordered his force in to look around.

  From the outside, the corridor didn’t appear to be that deep. The main run looked to be about three hundred meters deep with some adjacent, smaller corridors branching off along the way. That would have taken his squad a few minutes at most to recon and secure.

  His watch indicated it was now four hours since they had first entered the corridor’s entrance, and they had yet to find a way back out. Somewhere along their scouting mission they had lost sight of the entrance, and their sensors were not very helpful either. They could record the path they were walking along just fine with their SITMAP displays but were unable to position themselves in relation to the rest of the force, the shuttles, the corridor entrance and, for that matter, anywhere else in space.

  The good news so far was that they had encountered no hostiles, and their supplies were holding up fine. The bad news was that he could tell the squad was getting edgy as the clock ticked and had still been unable to link up with the main force.

  Having been trained to think of the big picture during his tenure as a Marine, he fou
nd the big picture nowhere in sight.

  “Sergeant,” called Rodriguez from Fire Team One, “we think we have something.”

  A corner of Wessler’s heads-up appeared magnified in his visor, and he could see what Rodriguez was seeing.

  “That looks like an energy source,” said Wessler.

  “It looks bigger and hotter than anything I’ve ever seen in here so far,” said Rodriguez. “Should we investigate?”

  “Let’s keep the fire teams together,” said Wessler. “Take point. Fire Teams Two, Three and Four, eyes on Rodriguez. Single file until we get close, then stagger your advance until circumstances tell you otherwise.”

  Acknowledgements flashed green on Wessler’s heads-up display, indicating that each fire-team leader had received the orders and confirmed their intent to execute.

  The corridor was dark and only slightly backlit by a pale blue hue that seemed to emanate from the wall material. It wasn’t entirely unlike phosphorescence in terms of the effect. While their EVA suits compensated for the low light levels, the darkness still gave Wessler an uneasy feeling.

  He had always been afraid of the dark as a child, a fact that made his joining of Alcmene’s Marine force all the more amazing, given that space was generally…black.

  All four fire teams followed Rodriguez and Wessler in single files, each team spaced two meters apart.

  Wessler noted that the surface they’d been walking on had changed from smooth and metallic to rough and rocky, like the desert surface of a terrestrial world.

  And while their path had so far been on level ground, they were now entering what appeared to be hilly territory, starting with an incline that continued for twenty meters.

  “Full stop,” Wessler called into the squad channel. “Teams Three and Four, watch our six. Teams One and Two, forward firing positions.”

  “What are you thinking, sir?” asked Rodriguez.

  “I’m thinking we are now high up on a hill and exposed from both directions — plus whatever may or may not be inside these walls,” he said, pointing to the corridor to their left and right. “Switch to your SCOPE and let’s see what’s down this hill.”