Enemies & Allies (Earth at War Book 4) by Rick Partlow

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pramantha Publishing
Published: 2021-09-30T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

“How’d we draw the short straw on this one?” Pops wondered.

“Short straw?” I repeated, frowning. “I thought we drew the long straw. We get off the ship, get to stretch our legs, check out some cool alien stuff. Isn’t that why we’re all here?”

“Croatan was stretching our legs,” he countered, twisting around in the shuttle’s passenger seat to face me. “That planet with the fancy Persian horses, that was stretching our legs. This shit….” He motioned with a gauntleted hand at the display in the rear of the passenger section of Gunfighter One, to the image of the rocky, lifeless moon and the orange and white gas giant beyond it. “This is just another airlock mission where we gotta stew in our own stink the whole time and ride herd on the scientists.”

He carefully did not motion toward the Alliance research crew. Last time someone had waved at them, I’d had to spend ten minutes explaining to the Vironian that it wasn’t a challenge to a death duel.

“Someone was going to have to check out the energy signature the Jambo detected on this moon,” I pointed out. “If it turns out to be some weird alien creature again, do you want to listen to Evans crow about his Rangers were the one to do it? Because he hasn’t shut up yet about the Bug.”

“Point,” Pops acknowledged, his tone still grudging. “But I hate working in a damned vacuum.”

“I think we got a problem,” Major Lee said, breaking in on our conversation. He didn’t turn to look at me, but the HUD in my suit’s helmet was suddenly filled with a magnified image from the Hammerhead’s external cameras.

The moon was dark, with a low albedo to the sloping cliffs, but the enhanced image showed the edges of them clearly enough. They crumbled into dust at the bottom, and there, in a huge valley between what had once been volcanoes, there was something constructed. I’d almost thought “man-made,” but we didn’t know who had made it. Or what. It did have a humanoid feel to it, though. I couldn’t explain what I meant by that, not in words, but looking at the dome-shaped structure with its thick, oval base, something about it made me picture it being built and used by people not too different from us.

We were still ten thousand feet up, but the magnification of the scope brought the place into clear focus, and it looked like a tomb. Nothing moved, no lights shone from inside or out, and I couldn’t see any sign of an entrance…and suddenly, I realized that might have been the problem Phillip Lee was telling me we had.

“No way in,” he confirmed. “You seeing this, Jambo? Am I missing something? Any energy readings? Signals? This place is like two klicks across and I’ve circled it twice. I got nothing.”

There was a hesitation after Lee’s transmission and I wondered if Shah was passing on the question to his commander. Olivera proved me right by answering.

“Gunfighter One, this is Jambo.

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