The Pavonis Insurgence Page 2
“Right, Jordan Burnside,” Carson said, remembering. “Tevnar said he decided to stay at Verdigris, and parachuted in. Has Homeworld Security replaced the suit and retro-pack he borrowed?”
“They have. Ducayne is good about paying the bills. Speaking of, I’m going to have to kick you out. We both have work to do.”
Carson swallowed the last of his coffee and stood. Jordan Burnside might be the reason Jackie had to rush off, but Carson didn’t envy him. Using a reentry pack to land on a planet wasn’t exactly fun—he’d done it himself once. Even less fun were the jungles of Verdigris. “I wonder how he’s doing,” Carson said.
“Who? You mean Burnside? I guess I’ll find out when I get there. Now go. I’ll call you.”
PART I: VERDIGRIS, TWO MONTHS EARLIER
CHAPTER 1: BURNSIDE
Delta Pavonis system, above planet Verdigris, two months earlier
Jordan Burnside watched the airlock door slide shut as he drifted away from the Razgon. Neither he nor the ship had the velocity to maintain orbit, but neither were planning on staying. He was headed for Verdigris, the planet below, and the Razgon would be leaving the system.
As he drifted away to a safe distance, the ship’s attitude jets flared briefly, putting more distance between them. They fired again to rotate the ship, pointing it at Epsilon Indi, nine light-years away.
He had never seen a ship go to warp from this particular vantage point. This should be interesting.
The ship held there, not doing anything. Captain Tevnar must be waiting to make sure Burnside’s retrofire went without a hitch. That was considerate of her. He adjusted his own attitude so that the retrorocket on his de-orbit pack pointed forward, at the horizon. He could still see the Razgon from that angle. Good.
Burnside had a compact life-support pack strapped to his chest. On his back, a larger pack held a deployable heat shield. He activated it.
He felt a thump and then several vibrations as a polymer bag, shaped like a rounded, shallow cone, inflated out of the pack. The vibrations changed as the bag filled with a quick-setting ablative foam. Between the surrounding vacuum and his suit layers, he couldn’t hear the hiss he imagined, but within moments he was half cocooned by the shield which would, so it said on the label, protect him from the heat of entry. He wondered wryly if there was a guarantee, not that he’d be able to collect on it if it failed. All right, he couldn’t put it off any longer. Tevnar was waiting for him to depart, and it was time to make planetfall.
Simplicity counted for a lot in an emergency pack. The retrorocket was a small chemical rocket motor, mounted at the apex of a triangular frame connecting it to his suit and the heat shield. Its nozzle pointed away from him, toward the horizon. Below, from what he could see, was the planet’s swirly green skyweed layer, with the occasional white streak of high-altitude clouds. His nav system said that beneath the skyweed lay jungle, not ocean. That better be right. One final check that his emergency locator beacon was OFF—the last thing he needed was it broadcasting his position—and he triggered the retro.
It burst into life in front of him with a physical thump, its exhaust surprisingly faint although the nozzle glowed from the heat. He felt pulled toward it as it pushed back on the frame, decelerating him. The Razgon, meanwhile, continued in its own trajectory, pulling ahead of him rapidly as he slowed. Then, with a pale violet flicker, it winked out. It had gone to warp. He was on his own now, and as the retro burned out, he began falling toward Verdigris.
The retropack’s attitude thrusters jetted briefly, turning him to place the heat shield forward. Things were about to get interesting . . . and hot.
∞ ∞ ∞
Before long, he felt the first gentle pressure as the thin upper atmosphere began to slow him, and the dark sky above him hinted at an orange glow as the faint traces of air ionized with the energy of his passage. As the glow grew more intense, he felt heat radiating back at him, almost as if it, and not the increasing gee forces, were pressing him back against the foam shield.
After a minute, smoke began to fill the trail he left. Then, with a jolt, a chunk of flaming insulation spalled off the shield, disappearing into his wake. The ride got rougher, shuddering and bumping, and he wondered just how long this particular entry pack had been in storage. Maybe I should have had Tevnar land me after all. But the whole point of this was stealth. A meteor could be shrugged off; a landing ship couldn’t.
In the thickening atmosphere, the attitude jets were useless, and the retro blew off with another thump, dragging his drogue ballute out with it. It bobbled in his wake, and he hoped it wouldn’t burn up or melt before it had done its job. But the fiery orange glow was already fading to blue.
The ride settled down. Was that the worst of it? Then there came a flurry of green as he fell through a skyweed layer. I must be getting low. When does the heat shield jettison? His main parachute couldn’t deploy until the shield was gone.
And then it went, with an impact so sudden Burnside thought he must have hit the ground, until he saw the slabs of charred foam blow past him. It jettisons at four thousand meters, he remembered.
With a THUMP the ballute pulled a bigger drogue chute from its pack and released, taking the frame with it, and he felt another tug as the bigger drogue deployed, stabilizing and slowing him further. Finally, as he descended through a thousand meters, it extracted his main chute.
Burnside scanned the ground, or rather, the tops of the trees, beneath him. He couldn’t see any clearing that he could reach as he descended. He was going into the trees. At least his spacesuit would protect him from small branches.
As he neared the treetops, he hooked his left foot behind his right ankle and squeezed his legs together. He did not want to hit astride a branch. He stretched his arms up, crossed in front of his helmet visor, alongside the parachute risers. With any luck, the canopy would catch in the trees before he hit the ground, yet leave him close enough to it so he could lower himself down. He tried to remember how tall the trees typically grew in the Verdigran jungle, but that factoid escaped him.
With a rush the upper branches brushed by him, and as best he could, he twisted his body to slip between the thicker branches below. Space opened up around him as the branches thinned, then he felt a strong upward tug as his parachute caught in the tree, the lines stretching slightly as he came to a stop some height above the ground.
Great. Now what?
∞ ∞ ∞
The jungle floor was about seven meters below. Too far to just drop, but his parachute harness held a rope he could slide himself down on, once he unstrapped. He looked up at the parachute tangled in the branches above him. It was still mostly open, and it was draped over much of the foliage. It would be obvious from the air. That wasn’t good.
If it had been one of Covert Services’ gadgets, it wouldn’t have been a problem. The chute would have been a drab, camouflaged color to start with, and it would disintegrate in a few hours after exposure to the elements. But this one was part of the standard bail-out pack that Jackie Roberts had given him from the Sophie prior to this impromptu visit. This canopy was brightly colored, designed to be highly visible in case its user needed rescue. He had disabled the emergency beacon, but that canopy was a giveaway. He’d have to get it down somehow.
Experimentally, he pulled down hard on one riser, then on the other. The left one seemed to sag more than the right. Okay, that might work.
Burnside took the descent rope and uncoiled it, then looped one end through the buckle on the right riser. If this worked better than he hoped, he wanted to have some control over how fast he fell. Gripping both ends of the loop of rope in his left hand, he reached up and unfastened the right riser buckle. The strap jerked upward as his weight, now entirely on the left side of the parachute, pulled it over the tree branches and he started falling. The ropes slid through his left hand. He grabbed them tightly with both hands, and managed to slow, then stop, his downward movement. He was two meters closer to the gro
und.
He carefully eased his grip on the ropes, sliding slowly downward as, above him, the right riser of the ‘chute rose, the parachute canopy starting to follow the lines and left riser, still attached to his harness, downward. It was working!
And then it wasn’t. Burnside’s downward motion stopped two meters above the ground. Looking up, he saw that the lines had become hopelessly tangled in various tree branches, but at least now most of the parachute was below the top leaves. He jerked on the remaining riser a few times, but made no further progress.
He pulled the descent rope loop free of the right riser buckle and then threaded it through the left, letting the ends drop to the ground. After undoing the rest of his harness, he slid down the rope to the ground.
Burnside unfastened and removed his helmet, taking a deep breath. The jungle air was warm and humid, smelling of damp soil and vegetation. His suit had been designed to keep him cool in space, not on a planet with atmosphere, and he had been working hard getting out of the tree. Despite the jungle’s heat, taking off the helmet was a refreshing change.
He pondered what to do about the parachute canopy as he doffed the rest of his suit. There wasn’t much he could do, but he pulled his descent line free. That might come in handy.
As far as he could tell from this angle, more than half of his canopy was now hidden from above by leaves. He’d come through a thick layer of skyweed on the way down, and anybody flying above that would see nothing. Hopefully, no one would be flying below it. Skyweed didn’t stay aloft indefinitely. The tiny plants—aerophytoplankton—would get washed out by rain, and older plants got too heavy for their buoyancy sacs and winds to keep them afloat. With any luck enough of the weed would settle out over the chute to hide it from view before anyone spotted it.
Either way, he intended to put a considerable distance between himself and his landing area as quickly as he could. He just had to figure out the direction to Verdigris City, where he could contact the local Union de Terre security office. Fortunately, Verdigris had a navigation satellite system that wasn’t bothered by skyweed, and he had downloaded what maps Tevnar had available to his omni. Less fortunately, large sections of those maps were marked with a single word: jungle.
CHAPTER 2: VAUGHAN
New Toronto, Verdigris
New Toronto was rapidly becoming the largest city on the planet Verdigris. Already the regional capital and biggest city on the continent, it was both an agricultural and major manufacturing center. The city lay on the shore of a large freshwater lake, some twelve-hundred kilometers from the site where Paul Fabron had first landed in the Jules Verne decades earlier.
Fabron, heir to a billionaire’s fortune, had bought the ship—originally built for the 2069 Alpha Centauri expedition but never used because of mechanical issues—and refitted it with the latest solid-state fusion units and the newly available commercial warp modules.
It was a bastard design, lacking the warp-induced artificial gravity of newer ships. Furthermore, as had its sister ships of the first Centauri expedition, it relied on its chemical engines for lift-off from a planetary surface. Still, it was the Jules Verne, and Fabron had a certain Gallic pride in it. He was determined to find a new terraformed planet.
The yellow star Delta Pavonis was known to have an Earth-sized planet in its habitable zone, but while early observations had detected oxygen in its atmosphere—almost a sure sign of life—its overall color was wrong. Terraformed planets should look mostly blue and white, not green. It was low on the list of places to visit with the new V-class ships. That made it a prime candidate for the eccentric young Frenchman.
Even with the upgraded power and warp systems, Delta Pavonis was beyond the Jules Verne’s range of ten light-years. Paul Fabron was determined, though, and laid out a course that took him and his crew first to refuel at Alpha Centauri, then at Epsilon Indi—this was before the Terran Union, or UDT, had imposed restrictions on visiting Taprobane—and finally from there to Delta Pavonis.
The third planet appeared mostly green from space because of its vast clouds of aerophytoplankton known as skyweed. After several orbits of radar imaging, the Verne found a thinner patch of weed over what their radar told them was a suitable landing site. They made their descent and landing, acquiring a film of scorched brown and green slime in the process. Being a rather irreverent fellow, Fabron named the planet Verdigris.
In a similar vein, he named its mottled-looking large moon after a particular creamy, semi-soft, blue cheese made in his home region of Jura, France: Bleu de Gex, now simply referred to as Gex.
His landing site, near the mouth of a large river, would later become the town of Louisbourg. The river itself, a major watershed for much of the continent, originated at a large lake. Given the lake's similarity to a Great Lake of North America back on Earth, he named it Lac Quebec.
Some years later, another wave of settlers deemed the shore of that lake an ideal spot for their colony. It provided easy access to much of the interior of the continent and easy water transport to Louisbourg and thence to the other continent. However, they were no Francophiles. They couldn't change the name of the lake, but since it was about the size of Earth’s Lake Ontario, they defiantly named their settlement New Toronto.
Now, several of New Toronto's major industries were owned by Velkaryan interests, and that organization played a dominant role in regional politics. Klaus Vaughan didn’t care about the history of New Toronto, he cared that his Velkaryan superiors had ordered him here to resolve slowdowns in the Velkaryan-owned industries, with a particular focus on the production of armed starships.
∞ ∞ ∞
Velkaryan HQ, New Toronto
When he’d left Verdigris, nearly a year ago now, he had left behind a smoothly operating assembly facility that was producing a complete, flight-worthy ship every ten days, with that rate projected to double within a few months. Now . . . well, fuselages were still rolling off the assembly line, but many critical subsystems were incomplete or missing entirely. His two highest priorities were to determine what had led to this shamble and fix it, and to inventory the existing ships to find out just how deeply the rot went and how long it would take to repair them. They were essential to Operation Jade Ribbon.
While the Velkaryan political party was strong in the New Toronto government, it didn’t have absolute control. Vaughan wondered if other industries in the region were suffering a similar decay. If so, he might turn that to Velkaryan advantage. He had been turning things around in Harp City on Tanith before being recalled here, that nonsense with the fake alien artifact aside.
It was time to catch up on local events.
∞ ∞ ∞
New Toronto had been founded thirty-five years earlier, largely as a transportation hub for two industries: agriculture and mining. The jungle surrounding the area was thin and young. A few hundred years ago, the area had been more arid and savannah-like. There had been nothing unique about the forest, which extended to cover much of the continent. Much of the thin forest here, several thousand square kilometers, had been cleared and plowed under to make way for farms. The crops and, more recently, processed food supplied much of what was consumed in the other towns on the planet. A modest ship-building industry—sea-going ships, not starships—arose to fill the need for long-distance bulk transport.
That industry, in turn, had declined in recent years. There was still a demand, but it had leveled off after an initial rush. Associated businesses—the small manufacturers who made various fittings, plumbing and electronic parts for the ships—had turned to other products or gone out of business. The Velkaryans had taken advantage of this to buy up some of these, or engage them in long-term contracts at advantageous rates, and built up their own industries: small arms, farm machinery, starship subsystems, and more. All of which left the Velkaryans with money and significant political influence.
∞ ∞ ∞
Velkaryan HQ, New Toronto, Verdigris
Vaughan’s inspe
ction of the operation at New Toronto had left him in a sour mood. While significant progress had been made—the number of starship hulls on the landing field had been impressive, even if they had been left in the open—but other areas were severely lacking. Those starship hulls were mostly just that, empty hulls. Oh, they had life support and basic flight control systems installed, but only half of them had their fusion generators, and less than half of those were warp-capable. What’s the point of a starship that can’t warp?
Fusor and warp module fabrication was lagging sadly behind.
He had asked his assistant chief of production, Bill Cardigan, about that. “Why aren’t we getting more warp modules? Are we embargoed?”
“Not officially,” Cardigan had said. “Most of the available production on Earth goes to the shipyards at Kakuloa. There is a limit on what we can get from Tau Ceti. It’s not just the constraints on what we can smuggle, but also because they’re still getting the bugs out of their production lines. Maybe it’s Skead’s higher gravity.”
If that were the case, Vaughan had wondered, why didn’t they just move it to their moon? There were probably details he wasn’t aware of. Warp module production was still something of a black art as far as he was concerned.
On the plus side, the ships all had weapons hardpoints: laser turrets and missile launchers. Vaughan wasn’t sure how space combat would play out. The lasers might work, but if an enemy ship saw a missile incoming, surely it could just make a millisecond warp jump and be hundreds of miles away. The trick was to program the missile to come in directly toward the enemy’s bow; then, if it warped, it would warp straight into the missile. On the other hand, once an adversary figured out that tactic, a bow-mounted anti-missile laser was an obvious countermeasure. Did his own ships have those? It was a detail he’d have to check.