Excerpt from Vision Rising
(Book 1 in The Countdown Universe, coming Fall 2022)
(Book 1 in The Countdown Universe, coming Fall 2022)
1: COVERT DROP
Ganymede
April 2287
Four figures in military camouflage crept slowly toward the mouth of a massive ice trench. It was but one of many kilometers-long furrows carved deep into the surface of Ganymede’s moon. The soldiers, outfitted in the latest vacuum armor, kept to the shadows cast by the channel’s towering wall. The trench’s other side was just visible in the distance, a full five klicks away.
Joe Kovacs led. Amanda, the team’s medic, and Dee, their intel specialist, flanked him. Ramon had their six. Their progress had been long and tedious, yet easy in the fifteen percent gravity of the Jovian moon. As the ravine began to narrow, Joe held up a fist, his gaze pinned to where the wall sloped downward to meet Ganymede’s frozen crust.
“Anything from Chaos?” he asked as he turned to face the comms operator at his back.
Ramon came to a stop, his gloves resting atop the rifle slung crossways over his chest. His gaze remained on the terrain they’d just traversed as he replied.
“Hang tight; I’ll run another sweep.”
The sergeant had been monitoring the local radio traffic the entire time they’d humped their way from the drop zone to their target, which was on the icy plains just beyond where the ravine terminated. He was hunting for a preset signal, a broadcast buried in local chatter by the fifth member of their team.
Tony, call sign Chaos, was the team’s sniper; he’d inserted days ahead of the team to recon the area.
Ramon’s gaze remained fixed, but Joe could tell the man’s focus wasn’t on the tundra before him; it was on the readout displayed across the inside of the man’s helmet.
Abruptly, he nodded, his eyes meeting Joe’s. “Got it. I sent a pingback. He should reply in…” The commo’s words cut off with a grin. “Confirmation. Packet coming your way.”
An icon flashed in the lower third of Joe’s vision. He lifted a finger in silent acknowledgement, then turned his attention to the file unpacking across his field of view. When he saw the time-stamp for the rendezvous with Chaos, Joe turned to Amanda. The medic stood waiting, an expectant look on her face.
“Pop the tent,” he told her. “We’ll hole up here for now.”
She slung the bag off her shoulders and bent to open it. Once deployed, the tent would harden, providing protection from stray micrometeorites. Its surface, made of the same thermal metamaterials that coated the outer layer of their suits, was tunable to the environment. The white-on-tan material was the best the Terran military had to offer and employed transformation optics to prevent eyes, both electronic and human, from sensing their presence.
With Amanda occupied with the tent, he turned to the others. “Chaos sent a location.” He pointed in the direction of the dome that was their objective. “There’s an airlock on this side of the habitat. He’ll meet us there at oh-three-hundred—”
His words cut off abruptly as a beam of light sliced through the thin atmosphere, close enough to set off his suit’s proximity alarms. It slammed into the ridge above them with the power of a dozen mortar rounds. The ground bucked from the impact, and Dee flew skyward.
“Shit!” The expletive was ripped from the intel operator, her arms cartwheeling in the low gravity. Both Joe and Ramon lunged for her. Ramon beat him there, snagging Dee by the belt right before she passed the mouth of the trench.
Dee nodded her thanks as she landed, bouncing lightly on her toes as she fought to regain equilibrium.
“That was too close,” she began, turning to face Joe. Her head jerked back, eyes widening as something above Joe caught her eye. “Behind you!”
Joe’s head whipped around, gaze following hers. His jaw clenched at the sight. Large chunks of ice, dislodged by the laser’s impact, tumbled in dramatic slow motion, the moon’s fifteen precent gravity lending it an otherworldly air.
Joe knew better than to be lulled by the avalanche’s sluggish start. The danger it posed was considerable, encased as it was by a cloud of lethal shards raining down upon them. The laser had created them, water vapor left over by its strike instantly refreezing into a hail of crystalline death.
“Go! Go! Go!” Joe matched action to words as he hoisted his ruck over his shoulder with one hand. With the other, he grabbed Amanda by the elbow and pulled.
The medic grunted as she wrestled with the half-inflated tent. The thermal camo pattern made the woman seem to appear and disappear as her hands frantically scrabbled to reach the tent’s auto-retract button while she kept pace with her team leader.
Training had kicked in for them all, each member of the special forces team propelling themselves forward instead of up, a tricky maneuver only someone trained in low-gee environments could pull off. A quick glance around confirmed their white-and-tan suits were fully active, transformation optics engaged.
Theoretically, the team should be undetectable to the terrorists camped out in the dome they were approaching. Theoretically.
Belatedly, a voice sounded inside Joe’s head. “Gumby Actual, this is Gumby Variable. Be advised, the dome is setting off its lasers.”
“Thanks for the warning, Variable,” Dee muttered under her breath, tone sardonic as she raced toward the lip of the trench she’d nearly sailed through moments ago. Risk of exposure was no longer an option; their choices had been ripped from them by the laser blast.
“Check your channels, Actual.” The dry rebuttal, a reminder that the team’s chatter wasn’t to be sent in the open, was typical of Holden. The captain who led their team was in orbit, on board a stealthed ship that served as their forward operating base.
With a glittering slide of ice hurtling toward them, Joe didn’t bother with a verbal response. He blinked a two-click instead.
Silence descended as the four-person team came to a stop. Joe felt uncomfortably exposed as they stood on Ganymede’s frozen tundra, their target just two klicks away.
The habitat was some twenty-five kilometers in diameter, shone like a beacon Its dome was made of three-meter-thick octagon-tetrahedron panels, each made of silicon-glass and inserted into a titanium frame. The effect resembled a high-tech version of an old leaded-glass window, arching gracefully over the settlement. Unlike its ancient predecessor, this structure was made to be impenetrable. Its inhabitants relied upon it to hold atmosphere in, while holding comets and meteors at bay.
“Think they spotted us?” Ramon came to a stop on Joe’s right, chin lifting in the direction of the dome. Over one shoulder was slung his ruck; on the other hung Amanda’s medic bag.
Joe’s gaze shifted from Ramon to a distant furrow as another spear of light caught his eye. “Nope. Just saw another ridge go down. Looks like the dome’s conducting a maintenance sweep of all the nearby trenches.”
A startled sound escaped Dee. “That’s not right. The dome’s not scheduled to run that until 0230 tonight.”
Joe grimaced. “They’re early.”
Ramon tilted his helmeted head. “Or they suspect someone’s out here and decided to bump it up in the hopes that—”
“That they might scare us out of hiding, like they just did?” Amanda cut Ramon off, her tone disgruntled.
Joe considered her words, then nodded. “Can’t rule it out.” He pointed to the dome. “New plan: contact Chaos. Tell him we’re inbound. ETA…” His eyes squinted as he mentally calculated the time it would take to close on the dome. “Thirty mikes.”
* * *
2: GANYMEDE
“Hope that doesn’t jack things up for him,” Ramon murmured, his eyes growing distant as he accessed the neural implant that allowed him to mentally access the comms equipment strapped to his back.
They fanned out, moving deliberately and slowly in a low crouch. It wasn’t the most comfortable way to traverse an icy plain, but it was the safest. Joe kept one eye pinned to his suit’s meter that indicated their pace was within the green zone of their suits’ masking systems. To exceed meant their closing speed exceeded maximum camouflage. It was painfully slow going, but the alternative—spotted by the enemy while exposed on the open plain with no cover in sight—was unacceptable.
He felt more than heard the crunch beneath his feet each time the spikes on his boots’ toes dug into the ice. He’d slipped on a pair of hand grapples which gave his gloves similar traction. What little atmosphere the moon’s magnetosphere held in was laughable, billions of times less than Earth’s and certainly not enough to transmit sound.
As they walked, he forcibly shoved aside his concern for Chaos and what the abrupt change might mean for the sniper who had infiltrated the dome days earlier. Tony ‘Chaos’ Ricci was damned good at his job. Operating as the team’s advance scout, it was his job to conduct a standard ISR, Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance, on their objective.
Joe had done it himself plenty of times. The job was painstaking, tedious, and dangerous as hell. There was no backup. The mission called for the operator to approach the domed habitat, skirt its circumference, and then ingress—all without being caught. Once inside, his entire focus turned to reconciling the intelligence they’d used to plan the mission against the current reality. What Chaos learned could mean the difference between success and failure.
The mission itself was straightforward. Get in, neutralize the terrorist cell, get the hell out. As usual, instructions regarding the cell’s leader was ‘capture if possible, eliminate if not.’
Simple. Routine. Just another day at the office, and the kind of mission Terra’s ODD Sabre squadrons did on the regular.
Operational Detachment–Delta was Earth’s best. The hunter-killer teams operated at the tip of the spear and on the black side of the wire. They took on the most dangerous missions, in the most austere locations known to humankind.
Like a domed habitat, on a frigid cold moon, orbiting a gas giant nineteen astronomical units—nearly three billion kilometers—away from the sun.
Piece of cake.
Joe’s attention was drawn back to his team when Dee’s muttered “damn frozen tundra” sounded over the team channel. He glanced over at her. Dee was the newest member of the team and this was her first deployment with them. Her actions today would tell Joe all he needed to know about the woman. If she could be trusted to have his six when things got heated. If she’d break under pressure.
He was pretty sure he knew the answer to the latter. No one who passed Selection and made it through probationary eval was likely to break. Whether or not she’d mesh well with Joe’s team was another matter entirely.
Dee’s helmeted head tilted up to look at the gas giant that hung above them, eclipsing all but a sliver of Ganymede’s black sky. Joe followed her gaze, his eyes pinned to the angry red that marked the eye of Jupiter’s hurricane, shifting in a never-ending swirl. The gas giant’s glowing hues added incrementally to the weak light of the sun, bathing the area with a glow some idiot back home had poetically tagged ‘the eternal golden hour.’
Get your ass up here, spend fifteen minutes suited up in this balls-shriveling cold, and then see if you can look me in the eye and wax all poetic about Ganymede’s golden hour, scoffed Joe mentally.
His head dropped back down to focus on their objective, three large tanks positioned between them and the dome.
“Got another ping.”
Ramon’s words had Joe turning back to the commo trudging through the ice to his right. The man spared Joe a quick glance. “Sending the feed over to you now.”
Chaos’s words scrolled across Joe’s lower third: Three ingress points identified. Status inside unchanged.
Following the words was an icon. Joe blinked it open and a map of the dome unfurled across his HUD, three red dots flashing at him. More words followed.
My vote for ingress: hydrogen reclamation plant, west side.
“Nice to see he agrees with our choice.”
At Amanda’s questioning look, Joe shared the missive with the others. There was a beat of silence as they caught up to him.
“That’s a hydrogen plant? We’re heading for?” Dee’s voice was incredulous. “Shit. That’s got to be busy.”
“Yes, but…” Amanda interjected. “There are more than nine thousand people in that dome. You know how it is; sometimes it’s easier to blend in with the crowd. Act as if you belong there and people won’t question it.”
Dee inclined her head, conceding the point. “Not that we can do much about it anyway, seeing as we’re almost there.”
Ramon chuckled. “That’s the spirit.”
* * *
Joe groaned silently when they reached the cover of the outermost hydrogen tank and he was finally able to roll to a crouch. Ganymede’s icy crust wasn’t just cold; it was hard. It made him glad for the extra insulation their suits had at knee and shin. As his gaze swept the horizon, seeking any indication they’d been spotted, he clenched and unclenched his hands, working feeling back into them.
Dee rolled up beside him two minutes later, followed by Amanda. The medic immediately flipped up the cover of her arm computer and began accessing more detailed vitals on each team member.
Dee worked the kinks out of her neck. “Gahhh, I hated that in basic, and I hate it now,” the intel woman muttered.
“Beats getting shot at.” Amanda’s reply was distracted, her attention on her HUD’s readout. Nodding in satisfaction, she snapped the cover shut and swung her attention to Ramon as he closed the final few meters and took a knee beside Joe.
“No chatter,” the commo reported. “Looks like we’re clean.”
Joe nodded silent thanks, pulling a remote sensor microdrone from a suit pocket. Setting it to relay whatever it saw to his HUD, both on visual and IR, he bent and sent it crawling out from behind the tank, its cameras pointed at the hydrogen plant and the airlock just beyond.
Ramon had joined the others in flexing stiff muscles, loosening them in preparation for any potential engagement they might encounter. That done, he sat back against the tank and grinned at Dee. “Come here often?”
The intel woman rolled her eyes and turned to Joe. “Care to share that feed, chief?”
Joe routed it to her comm’s ID and the woman settled back to watch the data steaming in from the drone. The spider bot, surfaced in winter digital camo made of the same thermal metamaterials as their suits, crested a small rise. Joe aimed its nose first at the hatch that would be their ingress, providing them with an up-close look.
His eye was caught by a figure dressed in a local worker’s hazmat suit. The man moved casually, confidently, but Joe would recognize that gait anywhere. It was Chaos. As the sniper headed for the airlock and waved the ID tag attached at his suit’s wrist to gain access, the flash on his sleeve returned an IR reflection. It gave Joe positive identification.
“Chaos is at the hatch,” he told them. He looked over his shoulder to where Ramon sat, leaning against the tank. “I think it’s safe to risk a line-of-sight ping.”
The commo nodded and crawled forward, pulling a long, narrow cylindrical object surfaced in winter digital camo from one of his pants pockets. He fiddled with it for a moment before bringing it to his eye. Pausing, he glanced over at Joe. “What do you want to send?”
“Standard iden confirm, and ETA ten minutes.”
“Copy.”
Joe hesitated before adding, “Wait’ll no one’s looking if you can. The beam would most likely be written off as a glint off the tank, but better to be safe.”
Ramon shot Joe a long-suffering look. “Yes, Mother.”
Amanda made a choked noise that sounded like a strangled laugh, but when Joe turned to glare at her, she met his lifted brow with a blank face. He gave her a mock-stern look, then turned his attention back to the drone.
He watched as the commo shot the IR whiskerbeam and tagged Chaos. The sniper gave a quick nod, followed by a flashed hand-sign.
Copy. Confirm.
The airlock doors slid shut, hiding the man from view. Joe turned the drone away from the hatch, maneuvering it in a tight circle to capture a panorama of the area. When nothing unusual stood out, he sent it forward to get a better look at the personnel filling portable tanks and hefting them onto the bed of a cargo hauler, bound for one of the listening posts scattered about the small moon.
Beside him, Dee tapped her helmet, a questioning look in her eye. Joe forwarded the feed to her. The intelligence agent spent the next few minutes catching up to him, scanning back through the drone’s recordings.
“Hold up,” she said suddenly. A moment later, she’d dropped a still frame from the feed over their shared network. It was a closeup of one of the workers. She zoomed in on the image, highlighting the man’s face. She must have run it through her database; in the next instant, data scrolled beneath the man, identifying him as one of the terrorists.
“That’s one of the tangos.” She shot Joe a concerned look. “Check out who he’s watching.”
Joe had the surveillance drone zoom out until they could track the man’s line of sight.
“Shit.” He turned to Ramon. “Tell Chaos he’s been made.”
* * *
