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own.
       Melissa returned
his smile with an even more mischievous one. “Because you have wisdom beyond
your years, Commander.”
       He sighed deeply
and motioned his head over his left shoulder. “Come on. I’ll introduce you to
the team.”
    * * *
       Melissa watched as
a squad of Marines from the 92 nd Marine Expeditionary Unit unloaded
a small hover carrier from one of the two Pharaohs. The temperature was
beginning to reach its projected zenith for the day, and was already well past
ninety degrees by the time the Marines had finished setting up the makeshift
camp. Their dull green and black armor, covering every inch of their bodies
except for their heads, was thankfully cooled internally, and afforded them an
unparalleled freedom of movement in even the harshest of environmental
conditions. Melissa noted with approval that Sergeant Adams, who had been with
her and Shawn aboard the doomed Icarus ,
was with them again today.
       Once the Marines
had set up a two-hundred-square-yard patrol perimeter around the camp, Shawn,
Melissa, Raven, and two ‘grunts’—Sergeant Adams and one Private First Class
Ernesto Montoya—climbed into one of the two hover carriers. A second squad,
commanded by Lieutenant Burgess, filled the other carrier.
       The utilitarian
craft was moderately comfortable, with lightly padded seats and an open storage
compartment in the rear for all the equipment the team needed. Melissa was
sandwiched between the two Marines in the front of the craft, with Shawn and
Raven sitting on a bench seat behind them. They sped away from Sylvia’s Delight and the rest of the
camp under full power, the wind rustling their hair as it passed over the
transparent windshield that wrapped around the bullet-shaped front of the
craft.
       The first stop in
their investigation was the enormous twin hangars they had sighted while coming
down. One by one the team went in and inspected the crumbling remains. The
first of the structures yielded very few clues. The colossal space was
virtually empty, save for the occasional decrepit backup generator or portable
lights—none of which looked to have been used in quite some time. The thick
concrete floors had cracked in several places, and various ferns and other
greenery had begun to sprout up through the openings. The overhead was littered
with cobwebs and birds’ nests, and it gave Shawn and the rest of the team every
indication that it had been abandoned for some time.
       When the team moved
on the second hangar, however, there were definite signs of recent activity.
Vehicle tracks and numerous footprints could easily be seen in the silt-covered
floors. There was a water storage tank, used to refresh landing teams on the
surface of arid worlds, that was still half-full and covered with only a fine
layer of dust. Not far from the fifty-gallon tank was a garbage can full of
food ration wrappers.
       As Melissa leaned
down to investigate the boot prints, she withdrew her vid-recorder and took a
series of three-dimensional images with the recorder. “Sergeant Adams,” she
called to the Marine who was in a corner of the hangar conversing with Shawn.
       “Yes, ma’am?” the
Marine called out, just as one of the infantry crawlers sauntered into the
structure, its micro servomotors humming and filling the cavernous space with a
beelike buzz. The six-legged mechanical beast, about ten feet tall with a
Marine seated in the center of its body, came to a halt just inside the hangar
doors. A small scanner-recorder extended from the forward nose of the vehicle,
and its red beams swept across the entirety of the space, recording everything
so it could be recreated holographically at a moment’s notice. The way it moved
gave Melissa every impression that the huge techno-beast was hunting for its
next meal.
       “Sergeant Adams,
could you step over here for a moment?” she asked, turning her attention away
from the mechanized unit.
       The