under the other wing. You they can drop with the bombs.”
“I didn’t say a word, Chief.”
Kris left the sailors to their work. For the better part of the next half hour, she and Jack had a nice long discussion about the stupidity of what she was about to do. As usual, when he had most of the strong points on his side, the argument went long.
But Kris had the strongest argument on her side. The lives of his and her Marines depended on her having the best possible knowledge of the situation and making the best possible call of where to land . . . or to call the whole thing off.
Grumbling, Jack finally gave up. “Why did I ever let myself get tied up with a Longknife,” he muttered, and went to check out what flight gear the Greenfeld folks had on hand.
A good thing, too. He rejected the first four sets offered, then called the chief in to do a thorough workup on the pressure suits that looked best.
Meanwhile, Kris checked in regularly with her team.
Chief Beni continued to have no success getting anything out of the alien site. They had hunkered down. Now there was nothing on the radio circuits. The chief could see footprints and vehicle tracks in the dust around the plant, but everyone appeared to have taken cover in the two sprawling buildings. The reactor was producing almost double its original power outputs. Several capacitors were charging up, but if there were lasers, they were still cold.
“Simply put, I know squat. Professor mFumbo and his boffins on the other ships, they know squat. These folks like to keep themselves a secret,” the chief finished.
After that report, Kris was not surprised to find out Penny’s persistent efforts to open some kind of communication with the aliens had borne no fruit. She’d enlisted the boffins in her effort. But her distributed brain trust had no more luck talking to the aliens than Chief Beni had taking their pulse.
“They really don’t want to get to know us,” Jack said, as Kris and he pulled on their green-camouflaged flight gear.
“Grampa Ray got into a long and bitter fight with the Iteeche because they could not figure out a way to talk to each other,” Kris muttered, half to herself. “Now I’m getting us humans and the Iteeche into a war with someone who will not talk to us, no matter how hard we try.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Jack agreed, checking the neck gasket of Kris’s suit.
“Maybe if we can capture someone from this site, we can sit them down and force them to talk,” Kris said, doing the same check for Jack.
“Somehow, I don’t think hamburger and fries is going to make it happen,” Jack said, as he handed Kris her helmet. “Even if you throw in a strawberry shake.”
“Yeah,” Kris said. “I’m afraid that if we did capture a few, they’d suicide just like the ship that attacked us. It’s crazy. Someone or something has scared the daylights out of these people. They’d rather die than live as prisoners. The question I can’t figure out is whether or not the fear is for some really honking-huge bug-eyed monster or if it’s what that guy on the video is telling them, and they all believe it?”
“It would be nice if we could figure out what that dude is saying,” Jack agreed.
Kris put on her helmet, dogged it down, and chinned the oxygen outlet. Gas whispered into the suit.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky this time,” Jack said. His own helmet on, their conversation continued as a kind of radio check. “Maybe someone will survive the mass suicide. Maybe someone will choose life over death.”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” Kris said. “Try something often enough, and you’re bound to get what you want.”
Both the Greenfeld officer and command master chief were there to strap Kris into her strange ride. That was good. She banged her elbow on something hard.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s always there,” the lieutenant answered, telling her nothing.
The chief ducked his head in the cockpit. “Oh, that’s a crowbar.”
“Crowbar?” Jack echoed from his seat behind Kris.
“Yeah, back in the war they had problems getting the canopy open when they crashed. The pilots took to carrying crowbars with them. In the later refits, they actually hooked one to the side of the cockpit.”
“Don’t worry, Jack. We aren’t going to crash,” Kris said.
The reply from the guy in back didn’t rise above a mumble.