"John!" I hail my commander through the comm link, urgently. "Trouble at Rustenberg!"
I relay the messages I have picked up from the Darknight's descending shuttle and from Unit SPQ/R-561 and his commander. I forward a second VSR outbound from Unit SPQ/R-561.
"—preliminary data indicate a type of rapidly acting neurotoxin. I have taken tissue samples for analysis. I have also discovered the carcasses of a flightless bird species which shares a probable 99 percent matching genetic material with the Tersae. The timing of their deaths indicates a high probability that these animals also died within three minutes of contact. All Units of the Line, be advised to use extreme caution when attacking any Tersae home base."
My commander snarls a curse through the comm link. This is, indeed, dire news. Not only are the colonists at Rustenberg at serious risk, it will be difficult to effectively neutralize the Tersae as a fighting force without the ability to attack their camps. My commander, voice rasping with tension, speaks brusquely. "I'm coming aboard, Rapier. Get your duralloy backside up this bluff, stat. And get me a link to General McIntyre. Patch it through the Darknight, if you have to, but get him."
I establish the contact while racing up the wide road to the top of the bluff. I am forced to relay through the Darknight, as General McIntyre's duty station is on a continent on the opposite side of the planet. The General's response is terse.
"McIntyre here. This better be good, Weyman, we've got one hell of a crisis under way."
"Request permission to depart Seta Point for Eisenbrucke Station immediately, sir. If the Tersae have biochemical weaponry, that research station is now our top priority. We need the scientists there, badly. It would take days to get another research team here—and with a weapon like SPQ/R-561 just described, we may not have days."
"God, I hate it when you're right, Colonel. How soon can you be there?"
"Rapier?"
"If we encounter no significant obstacles, we could reach Eisenbrucke Station within thirty minutes."
"Then get moving," General McIntyre responds crisply.
"Roger that. Darknight, has this damned weather cleared Eisenbrucke yet?"
The communications officer aboard the naval transport responds negatively as I reach the top of the bluff and slew around to a halt, waiting for my commander's arrival. "Afraid not, Colonel. They're deeper into the storm front than Seta Point and still under thick cloud cover."
"I was afraid of that." My commander's voice is breathy with the sound of running. He appears through the swirl of falling snow, moving fast. Several Seta Point civilians run with him while John issues final instructions for the town's defense in our absence. My commander clasps hands with the town's operations director, who wishes him luck.
"Thanks," my commander responds grimly. "I have an awful feeling we're going to need it."
My commander hauls himself up the ladder, climbing awkwardly with his elbow locked in a brace. I pop my hatch open and John clambers aboard, sliding down into the command chair.
"Go."
I turn cautiously while civilians stumble back to a safer distance, then launch myself down the slick road at the greatest speed I can safely make. Once we reach the flat river plain, I open up my engines, crossing the alluvial flatness at maximum sustainable battle speed, aware that I will be forced to slow the pace once into the badlands which surround Eisenbrucke Station. The ride jolts my commander badly, but there is nothing I can do to cushion him that the command chair is not already doing.
"Are there any maps of cavern systems on this ice ball?" my commander asks abruptly.
"No, John. The initial surveys conducted by the planetary scouts were not comprehensive enough for that. If the Thule Research Expedition has filed such reports, they were not available to Sector Command. The scientists have only been in place three months and may not have filed any reports at all." I consider another possible avenue of inquiry. "We could request the Ministry of Mineral Resources to check their archives. Given their sponsorship of the expedition as well as the colonies, they would be the agency most likely to receive such reports, if they exist."
"God, what a helluva way to run a war. We're thirty minutes away and the only way to ask is to send a SWIFT message all the way to the Inner Worlds. All right, do it. Relay through the Darknight, Code Delta Zulu One. And query Sector Command, while you're at it. Just on the unlikely chance Bessany overcame her hatred long enough to try contacting me."
I wince at the bitterness in my commander's voice as I send the communiqués, requesting the Darknight to expedite under the most urgent code a field officer can use to obtain critical data. It will take time for us to receive answers, even using SWIFT transmission. I leave the flat alluvial plain behind and climb into the badlands, angling toward Eisenbrucke Station at reduced speed.
The blinding snow worsens as we press deeper into the storm. High winds engulf my war hull, whistling past at speeds gusting in excess of 75 kilometers per hour. I am forced to a slow crawl, using radar to probe my way ahead, blinded in all my other sensors by the white-out conditions of the blizzard.
Eleven point three minutes after the CSS Darknight sent our messages via SWIFT, we receive a response from the Ministry of Mineral Resources. The team at Eisenbrucke Station has, indeed, filed reports. There is no mention of cavern systems in any of them. But the reports forwarded by Bessany Weyman leave my commander pale with rage.
"My God!" he explodes. "What in hell were those bureaucratic jackasses doing, sitting on these?"
Thirty-seven seconds later, we receive the response from Sector Command, and it is even worse. Bessany Weyman has attempted to contact my commander. Five times. Her reports, full copies of those sent to the Ministry of Mineral Resources, include further notations indicating copies have also been sent to the Ministry of Xenology. None of her messages were forwarded to our duty station at the front lines of the Deng conflict. The reason for this is as simple as it is devastating: Bessany Weyman, as widowed sister-in-law, lacks the status of immediate family. Her messages therefore languished in a no-man's land of electronic limbo.
John Weyman is unable to speak for nineteen point zero seven seconds after receiving these messages, the most recent of which were sent just after the Tersae attacks began, imploring John to make someone listen to her. When he is capable of speech, my commander whispers in a terrible voice, "Get General McIntyre again. Get him on the line and forward these reports to him, stat."
I comply instantly, appalled by the blunders which have left Bessany Weyman's urgent messages spooled in limbo at Sector Command and utterly disregarded by the Ministries of Mineral Resources and Xenology.
"McIntyre here. What is it, Colonel?"
"We got trouble, General. Oh, Christ, we got trouble. I'm sending you the reports Eisenbrucke Station filed, by priority bounce."
"Eisenbrucke Station filed reports? On the Tersae?" General McIntyre's question is sharp.
"Damn right, they did. The xeno-ecologist is my sister-in-law, General. She made contact with the Tersae three months ago and started filing immediate reports, which she copied to me at Sector Command. If anybody at either Ministry had actually read them, those reports would've been sent all the way to Central Command, covered with red flags. And nobody at Sector bothered to forward them to me on Sherman's World."
General McIntyre has a creative vocabulary. Even after fifteen years with John Weyman, I am deeply impressed. I do not fully understand the human compulsion to alter their language usage when under stress, but I have become conversant with much of this stress-induced vocabulary. General McIntyre puts my own meager knowledge to shame as he fires off commands to his adjutant to send a blistering message to the Minister of Xenology, demanding immediate and full analysis of Bessany Weyman's reports.
"Mother Bear," he mutters, "it's going to take time to plough through this stuff."
"I know," my commander agrees in a grim and angry tone.
"Get to Eisenbrucke as fast as possible, Colonel, and let's hope to God those people are still alive. McIntyre out."
John breaks off the transmission and begins to read. I compress the messages and play them for myself at higher speed, looking for critical information at a much faster rate than the human mind can absorb such data. Even so, I have not yet digested the lengthy reports, which are quite astonishing, before we reach the edge of the valley sheltering Eisenbrucke Station. I probe carefully with radar, looking for the ramp which our records show was constructed for egress of heavy equipment. I find it within zero point five seconds of arrival.
"I have located the ramp. ETA Eisenbrucke Station, three minutes."
My commander nods, pale with tension. He continues to read, which is currently the best use of his time, since we can see nothing through the blowing snow. I inch down the ramp, two hundred feet above the valley floor. I am deeply uneasy, for my treads are wider than the ramp, making the turns harrowing even without high winds buffeting my war hull. We lurch and grind our way downward, crumbling the edge and sliding on the occasional patch of thick ice which has accumulated in the corners of the sloping turns. My commander's knuckles show white where he grips the armrests of his command chair. He has stopped reading. When I reach level ground at last, I am nearly euphoric with the joy of having made it down without sliding off and crushing my commander. We have already crash-landed once on Thule. I do not wish to repeat the experience.
"My radar is picking up a great deal of debris," I am forced to inform him almost immediately.
"What kind?" His voice goes hoarse with stress.
I probe ahead as my treads grind across the first scattered remains of what appears to have been a substantial stand of trees. "Something has taken down a broad swath of the forest in this valley. This does not appear to be battle damage. I pick up no chemical signatures from high explosives. I do not detect the burn scars typical of energy weapons. If forced to guess, I would say these trees were hit by a violent wind force. There is a great deal of twisting damage to the trunks my treads are passing across."
"Twisting damage?" my commander echoes. "As in a twister? A tornado?"
"The type of damage is consistent with tornadic winds, yes."
"What about the research compound?" he asks grimly.
My radar signals bounce off the compound's buildings, which are one hundred twenty-seven meters away. "The compound is partially intact," I say, trying to put as much positive spin on the situation as I can manage, for my commander's sake. Several buildings have been completely flattened and others appear to be entirely missing. "I do not believe the Tersae can be responsible for what happened in this valley."
"No," John mutters, studying the radar echoes on my forward data screen. "But a tornado?" He scrubs his face with unsteady hands. "Any signs of life at all?"
"I detect several strong heat sources in various buildings," I respond hopefully, "and there are active power emissions from the research station's power plant." I continue to scan, speeding up to reach the broken compound more quickly. I detect motion and a moving heat source emerging from one of the damaged buildings. It clearly originates from a biological life form. It is too large to be human. I grieve. I rage. I target the hated heat source. "Enemy sighted," I am forced to say. "Shall I engage?"
A terrible sound breaks from my commander's throat. Then, raggedly, "No. I want the bastards alive."
"Understood, Commander."
I rush forward to engage the Tersae who have come like carrion crows to fight over the remains. In the idiom of Old Earth, the time has come to go crow hunting.