Goodbye was always hard, but this time there was the promise of swift reunion. Sam, Vig and Crash had had no trouble smiling and hugging Mr and Mrs Kelly goodbye this time. Mrs Kelly even seemed happy that they were now based on-world again, rather than flung to the distant corners of Confederate space—or beyond.
A CNF cargo shuttle picked them up at a Naval Air Station on the outskirts of New Melbourne. Sam, Vig, Crash and Jock were all once again in uniform, and any one of them would have gladly admitted that it was good to be back. Vig got more than a few glances from girls as they walked through town, with his burgundy beret perched rakishly on his head. Sam had resisted the urge to tell him to straighten it up, but Crash had had no such reservations; as soon as they had left public transport and were walking toward the front gates of the NAS, she pulled rank and had him square it up.
The Atlas-type shuttle’s cargo bay seemed large enough to hold a tank or three, but it was completely empty. Sam commented on this to the aircrew loadmaster. “Seems like a waste of fuel, using a bulker like this to run five passengers out there.”
The loadie shrugged, cradling his helmet under an arm. “Maybe, sir. We’ve been running this route for about the last week, along with another Atto and a few helos. We’ll be taking on some perishables for this leg up. Three or four crates. It was vehicles yesterday, almost all day. Day before that, I remember something about three crates of SR-8 variants, among some other stuff. Guns, bombs, trucks, food, water… if I was the type to ask questions, I’d be asking whether someone was setting up a new Special Forces base out there.”
“But you’re not the curious type, huh?”
“If I was, they wouldn’t keep giving me these kinds of jobs, sir,” the loadie laughed.
Within a half hour, five crates had been loaded into the hold and the shuttle’s engines were spooling up with a whirling, whining roar that made conversation difficult. A few minutes after that, once the aircrew were satisfied that their passengers were safely accommodated in jump seats along one sidewall of the massive hold, the shuttle took off and roared away into the afternoon sky. It cleared the city, the suburbs, and the outer green belts in minutes, cruising up in an arc as through it had been launched from a catapult. The parabolic flightpath would save a heap of fuel, something that was prized during wartime. The shuttle wasn’t about to go into orbit—though it could have, with an assist from a specially-designed ground station—and it arced back down toward the reddy-brown surface from 170,000 feet. The fifty kilometre fall took only a couple of minutes, and the pressure rise was noticeable even inside the pressurized shuttle. Everyone’s ears popped as the shuttle levelled out and they worked their jaws and yawned furiously to equalise their inner ears. One of the aircrew came into the hold and beckoned for them to come up to the cockpit. They released their gravity webs and followed the crewman through a pressure hatch at the front of the cargo bay. The shuttle’s forward area was split into two very simple decks; a lower deck that had man-sized doors at either side and space for the aircrew to work, and an upper deck where the flight crew sat and actually flew the craft, linked by a very steep, narrow set of steps. The five of them trooped onto the top deck and clustered behind the pilot and copilot’s seats. With them, the pilots, and a navigator at the right hand wall, the upper deck became very crowded. Through the windscreen, they could see a small compound sitting all alone in the desert. It was about the size of an average Australian school, the boundary fences perhaps a couple hundred metres long on each side, with half a dozen buildings clustered at one end.
“Much as I’d love to drop you right inside the compound, sir,” said the pilot, a young-looking Lieutenant, “I’m afraid the Atto needs a bit of elbow room when landing.”
“No problem. This being a desert, there’s going to be an almighty cloud of red dust in a few seconds. I’d rather not risk dropping in blink and wiping out a building. Carry on, anywhere near the front gates will do fine.”
Sure enough, as the bulker skidded to a stop the braking thrusters kicked up a billowing cloud that spread out in all directions. Some of the buildings closest to the fence seemed to have already gained a few coats of dust from landings all through the last week.
The compound gates were already open and a UM-2D flatbed truck was on its way out to meet them by the time they dragged their bags out through one of the doors on the lower crew deck. The truck, a stretched version of the LM-2 light general purpose truck with a flat cargo platform at the back, swung out in a wide arc and slid up alongside the shuttle. The front of the truck, like every other LM-2 variant, had an open cabin with a rollcage and a bullet-resistant windscreen, and a long bench seat that could fit as many as four if their shoulders were narrow enough. At the wheel of the ‘Two Delta’ flatbed was a figure in a CNF camouflage uniform. Sam grinned as the driver pushed a pair of sand goggles up his forehead and slid out of the truck.
“G’day, Case,” laughed Sam, hurling his duffels into the cargo tray.
Lt.Cmdr. Casey shook his hand warmly. “Welcome back, Sam. You four must be his new crew. I’m John Casey. Welcome to JDF Buffalo.”
Life on the Fringes 