“Want to swap?” asked Deneuve.

  “Ninety klicks to the installation,” said Grisham, in two minds about whether to accept. “Thanks, but no.”

  The desert dunes gradually lessened in height. At the same time, the winds blew stronger and the sand struck the transport’s hull with such vigour that it was audible within the cockpit. The noise of it reminded Grisham of pelting rain upon a solid roof.

  “What’s that?” asked Lopez suddenly. She pointed at something on the portside feeds.

  Gripped by curiosity, Grisham reduced the transport’s velocity. A few kilometres south, a row of pillars, partly shrouded by the wind-blown sands, rose thirty metres from the desert. Unable to prevent himself, Grisham banked that way, his eyes locked on the feed screen.

  As the transport came closer, Grisham could see that the pillars were of a dark grey stone of a type he hadn’t seen anywhere near here. These pillars were set upon a plinth, most of which was hidden beneath the desert, and they were so badly eroded it seemed as if they might collapse at any moment.

  “There was life here,” said Deneuve.

  “Those pillars could be a hundred million years old,” said Grisham, pulling a figure out of his ass. “They must have been buried until recently, else they’d have been worn away to nothing by all this sand.”

  He stared for a time. The ever-shifting sands had revealed this ancient example of alien architecture and in doing so, ensured these pillars would soon be lost in history.

  “At least we saw them,” said Deneuve.

  “This is what space exploration should be about,” said Grisham, with a surge of anger. “Unearthing the secrets of the past. Learning about the universe. Instead, we’re fighting this stupid war.” He took a deep breath. “Let’s get on with the mission.”

  Grisham resumed the journey to the Kijol installation. He saw no more signs of ancient life and no more of the surface-to-air launchers.

  “Another twenty klicks and we should be over the area hit by incendiaries,” said Lopez.

  The first Grisham saw of that area was a faint glinting on the western horizon. He held the deployment shuttle on course and soon it was flying over a new landscape. The incendiaries had fused the sand into a material that was like the roughest of glass. In no place was it smooth or level. Instead, the glass rose and fell unevenly, its surface more like a semi-transparent red stone than anything else. It was a bizarre sight and one not comparable to anything Grisham had seen before.

  “Not far to the installation outskirts,” said Lopez. “By my reckoning we’re approaching the midpoint of the western perimeter. Most of the buildings were north and south. Which of those is our destination, sir?”

  “Let’s try south once we get there,” said Grisham. The transport’s engines, along with the audible wind and the noise of sand striking the deployment vessel meant he had to speak loudly to be heard.

  An enormous dune, its surface fused by the incendiaries, lay across the shuttle’s path. Unwilling to increase altitude, Grisham piloted the shuttle around it. Soon, he could see the wasteland of the Kijol installation. It had once been surrounded by an enormous wall, but that wall had been melted by heat and when it re-hardened it was into a mound rather than a fortification.

  Looking south, Grisham could see the tops of other mounds – what had once been structures in the base. North was the same. West was the main landing strip, this being little more than an expansive area of levelled ground clad with alloy slabs. Aside from hundreds of nondescript lumps – doubtless the remains of personnel cabins and shuttles - this area was relatively unscathed. While the metals were pitted and blackened, they would likely be usable as a landing strip with some remedial work.

  In the time since the base was incinerated, the sands had blown in and they were piled in heaps here and there. More sand blew across in stinging sheets and the winds were becoming stronger as the minutes went by. The surface – already an inhospitable place – would likely soon be intolerable.

  “Heading south,” said Grisham.

  “There could be a hundred comms hubs on this base and I might not recognize them amongst this mess,” said Lopez.

  “Let’s wait and see,” said Grisham. “I have a feeling the Kijol used their incendiaries to wipe out opponents on the ground. Maybe this damage is more superficial than it appears.”

  He guided the shuttle over the perimeter wall. It wasn’t so high that the shuttle would end up in the firing arc of a surface launcher, but Grisham nevertheless watched the feeds anxiously. He saw nothing that resembled a ground battery, and in moments the shuttle was flying across the landing strip.

  Maintaining a twenty-metre altitude, Grisham aimed for the southern buildings. Once or twice he was forced to bank around an obstacle on the landing field, but otherwise it was a straightforward flight over level ground.

  With attention to spare, Grisham found himself looking at the feeds for signs of dead aliens, or anything else he might recognize. Aside from many smears of carbon – which could have originally been almost anything - he saw nothing.

  Crossing the landing strip didn’t take long and Grisham brought the transport to a halt on the outskirts of the personnel area of the Kijol base. From twenty metres up, the view wasn’t great, since many of the structures had once been higher and even when partially melted, their tops were above the shuttle.

  Reluctantly, Grisham increased altitude to fifty metres. From here, the view was much better. Like he’d thought, the Kijol had dropped incendiaries to kill biological life forms, rather than to obliterate their own base. Every one of the visible structures – the domes, the towers, the warehouses, was badly damaged. Their walls and roofs had sagged. Many had buckled or outright collapsed. On the eastern edge of the base, an explosion had ripped dozens of buildings apart and flattened many others.

  “Looks like a holiday resort I once stayed at,” said Lopez.

  “Now we’re here, do you think you could identify a comms hub among all this crap, Lieutenant?” asked Grisham.

  “Maybe if you flew past it slowly,” said Lopez. “You should ask Lieutenant Bishop to join us.”

  Grisham twisted awkwardly in his seat. “Lieutenant Bishop, get your ass into the cockpit,” he yelled.

  “Yes, sir,” came the muffled response.

  Bishop arrived and Grisham explained the situation.

  “That’s a lot of buildings to search if we can’t spot what we’re looking for from the air,” said Bishop.

  “It’s a twenty-eight-by-four-klick area,” Grisham said. “That’s why you are going to spot a comms hub from the air.” He smiled without humour. “Because if we have no comms, we aren’t going to be rescued anytime soon – if at all. And without comms, we can’t transmit details of whatever we find as we explore this place.”

  “That’s a comms hub,” said Lopez in surprise, tapping the feed screen. Her initial certainty faded. “Maybe.”

  “Increase the zoom on that,” said Grisham.

  “Here you go, sir.”

  What Lopez had spotted was a tower, about 150 metres high and three kilometres west. Only its upper third was visible, with the rest being hidden by two immense warehouse structures. The warehouses had been badly affected by the incendiaries and they looked near to collapse, while the tower itself had a pronounced lean.

  “Looks like a good bet,” said Bishop, leaning between Grisham and Lopez in order that he could see the screen.

  “Let’s check it out,” said Grisham.

  Hoping Lopez was right, he rotated the shuttle and aimed it for the tower.

  SEVEN

  The journey took less than a minute and Grisham brought the shuttle to a halt again, over the southernmost part of the landing strip. From here, he could see the eighty-metre-wide base of the target building. It was set back about fifty metres from the northernmost walls of the flanking warehouses. The gap between those warehouses was about two hundred metres, leaving plenty of room in front of the tower.

  Numerous vehicles had once been parked here and they were now reduced to scrap like almost everything else on the base.

  “This here might be the entrance,” said Lopez, narrowing her eyes at the feed.

  She had the forward sensor aimed at the tower’s lowest level. Parts of the wall had melted and dripped to the ground, leaving hardened patches of metal. When he squinted, Grisham saw something that might have once been a door.

  “That’s not going to open without explosives,” he said.

  “Private Chau has a pack full of those,” said Deneuve.

  “These warehouses are open as well,” said Lopez. She peered at the feed. “In fact, it looks as if every door is open, though it’s hard to be sure with a few of these worst-affected buildings.”

  Grisham turned to face Lopez. “You think this could be the place?”

  “Yes, sir. The more I look at it, the more I’m convinced. The Kijol don’t normally expose their comms antennae – usually they erect a building around them, just like this tower. I guess it makes it easier to connect all the other hardware that goes into a comms hub.”

  Grisham shouted for Sergeant Maxwell. The soldier’s arrival left almost no space in the cockpit.

  “See that building, Sergeant?” said Grisham. “We need to take a look inside. If it’s a comms hub, we might be able to use Corporal Barkley’s booster pack to send a transmission to an HF proxy hub.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Maxwell. “I see all the doors are open.”

  Grisham nodded. “I’m sure the Kijol issued a base-wide command to do that. Incendiaries don’t work so well against vacuum-sealed buildings.”

  “The Kijol wanted to burn everything inside as well as out,” said Maxwell. “I wonder if they were more concerned about the enemy or their own dead.”

  “If the incendiaries were effective enough, we might not find out,” said Grisham.

  “I’ll order my squad ready.”

  “Not so fast,” said Grisham. “I checked Private Law’s personnel files. He’s flight trained.”

  “Yes, sir, he is.”

  “He can handle the shuttle. The rest of us are going with you to the hub. If there’s Kijol hardware in that tower, my crew and I are best trained to make it work.”

  If Maxwell had feelings on the matter, he didn’t betray them. “I’ll let Private Law know,” he said.

  “My crew and I are all combat trained, but I’m under no illusions that we’d be underfoot if we were heading into a combat situation,” said Grisham. “However, this place was incinerated and the Kijol are long gone. I’m not expecting trouble.”

  “No, sir.”

  “We’re setting down, Sergeant,” said Grisham. “Make your soldiers aware.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Maxwell. He turned and ducked beneath the door leading into the passenger bay.

  “Here we go,” said Grisham.

  He landed the shuttle carefully, about a hundred metres from the base of the tower and with the vessel’s nose pointing west.

  “Are you sure this is the right move, sir?” asked Deneuve.

  “Do you have any concerns, Commander?”

  “No, I guess not. I could recommend we scout the installation from the air before we deploy, but—” Deneuve shrugged.

  “This is a crappy situation,” said Grisham. “There’s no right answer, so let’s do what we can to send that comm to base.”

  He ordered his suit comms to connect to the squad open channel. It sounded like Chau and Lowe were talking explosives, but they shut up once Grisham entered the channel.

  “Sergeant Maxwell, you’re in charge. My crew will stick close by and will follow your orders. If this tower contains a comms antenna, we need to find a place we can link Corporal Barkley’s booster pack.”

  “How would we know where to link, sir?” asked Maxwell.

  “One step at a time, Sergeant. First, let’s find out if we’re in the right place.”

  “Yes, sir. We’re ready to go.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  An alarm chimed softly to indicate one of the flank doors had been opened. Grisham heard a howling wind and the rattle of sand against hard surfaces. Through the cockpit door, he saw the soldiers jumping out of the exit. When there was room, Grisham followed, carrying a gauss rifle he’d taken from the rack on the cockpit rear bulkhead.

  On his way to the exit, he passed Private Law in one of the seats near the cockpit. The soldier was waiting to take over when the crew left it empty. Grisham didn’t ask the soldier if he was confident. A deployment vessel like this could be easily operated by a single person with only a few hours of training. From his record, Private Law was competent to pilot vessels of far greater sophistication than this one.

  Grisham didn’t pause at the flank exit and he jumped straight onto the ground outside. The wind beat against him, threatening to knock him from his feet, and the sand raced by, thick all the way up to his knees, but less so above them. That same sand reduced the light reaching the surface, making it gloomy.

  The deployment vessel blocked the view north, but east and west, Grisham could see the shapes of melted vehicles and transports, along with the structures that way. From here on the ground, he felt suddenly small and vulnerable.

  Already, the soldiers were on their way to the target building and Grisham got his feet moving. Behind him, the other members of his crew followed and once they were a short distance from the deployment shuttle, it lifted off vertically, the sound of its engines whipped away by the wind.

  As soon as the transport was in the sky, Grisham twisted so that he could look to the north. The sand limited his vision, but he felt a sense of the unseen distances across the installation.

  The gravity on Ovintus was little different to that found on Earth or Loxor, and Grisham’s breathing remained steady as he followed the soldiers. Soon, he entered the space between the warehouses. Their walls were bowed out, and he heard them creaking in the wind. What they contained, he neither knew nor cared.

  Directly ahead, the tower seemed taller than it had from the deployment vessel, or perhaps it was just because Grisham’s perspective from the ground seemed to exaggerate the lean, as if it were looking down upon him in readiness to finally topple. Twin rows of window openings on the second and third storeys – their polymer windows shattered and gone – stared out like square spider eyes, while the rest of the visible side was featureless and grey.

  The soldiers made their way single file between the melted vehicles parked in front of the tower. Grisham didn’t stop to stare – these gravity cars wouldn’t be going anywhere and he found the sight of them disquieting, like this was the aftermath of a nuclear war, rather than the planned destruction of a facility which had surely already been abandoned when the incendiaries fell.

  Grisham arrived at the base of the tower. He couldn’t help looking up, and then wished he hadn’t. The entire structure looked as if was ready to fall over and he was right underneath where it would come down.

  “Lieutenant Lopez, if there’s a comms antenna in this building will it definitely function with this much deformation?” Grisham asked on the crew channel.

  “That’s a maybe, sir,” she said. “As long as its internal structure remained intact, it should be fine.”

  Grisham turned his attention elsewhere. Nearby, Sergeant Maxwell and Private Chau were engaged in a discussion about how best to gain entry.

  “What’s the problem?” asked Grisham, hurrying over.

  He could clearly see where the door had once been, but molten alloy had dripped thickly down and hardened in place. A faint blue light was visible through a gap and Chau peered through. On the left-hand side, the access panel had shattered with the heat. If the backend security system was still providing it with power, Grisham had no way of knowing.

  “It looks as if the door was already open,” said Chau. “And then the incendiary melted the wall above and that blocked it up. I’m not sure placing pack charges here is a good idea. You can hear the noises the building is making. It won’t take much to bring it down.”

  “I doubt a few pack charges will cause this tower to fall over, Private.” The building groaned and Grisham glanced upwards. “But we don’t need to take the risk.”

  “Let’s run a circuit of the building,” said Maxwell. “The doors on the other buildings are open, so maybe we’ll find a second entrance we can walk straight through.”

  Maxwell gave orders and the soldiers headed around the building. As he followed, Grisham asked himself if the best course of action was to return to the shuttle and go hunting for a more stable comms hub. He rejected the idea for now, though there wasn’t much in it.

  This building isn’t going to fall. Its internal supports are strong enough to keep it standing.

  The wind blew with even greater strength along the north-south road separating the comms hub from the adjacent warehouse, and it pushed Grisham along like it was impatient for him meet whatever fate had in store. Here, the creaking of metal was bone deep and the warehouse had sagged so much that stress fractures were visible on its walls.

  A scorched lump of metal blocked part of the road and from its size and overall shape, Grisham guessed it had once been an armoured ground transport. As he ran by, he caught a faint scent of char, but couldn’t be sure it wasn’t imagined.

  “No entrance visible here,” said Maxwell on the comms. “We’ll continue to the south wall.”

  The south wall of the comms hub was sheltered from the wind, though it continued to blow in powerful gusts. Grisham saw a door ahead and it was open.

  Halting to one side of the entrance, Maxwell glanced inside. “Clear,” he said, beckoning Private Diaz to follow him inside. The two soldiers vanished into the building.

  Grisham approached. The structure’s interior was lit in a blue so dim he was sure the lighting was running off a backup supply that was either failing or designed only to offer the absolute minimum of power. The access panel was online and it displayed a green light.