Dragon Two-Zero (Fury's Fire Book 1)

by William McCaskey

  Turning his head to check the status of his team members, Reaver could see that both their sets of ghillie suits had been secured. While Harlequin had settled the long profile of his sniper rifle across his chest, like Reaver, Bull had opted not to carry his weapon until he absolutely had to and rested it against his locker. Catching the smirk on his squad leader’s face, Bull shrugged his shoulders and motioned toward his weapon as if to ask what Reaver expected. The look on Bull’s face was clear enough: the Ogre was a heavy son of a bitch. Usually a crew-served weapon, Bull’s size and muscle control allowed him to put the Ogre to use as a single operator system.

  When the landing pad locked into place in the hanger, Bull reluctantly shouldered the weapon, and Reaver’s team headed toward quarters and some well-earned showers. Closing, Bull clapped Reaver on the shoulder. "There and back, no scratches. I owe Scar drinks for the demo plan. Pricks are probably still crashing through the woods on the south side of the city."

  A laugh from behind them turned the two men's attention to Harlequin who was rolling his shoulders as if loosening up for a fight. "That, or the Renks are wondering what hand of God just bitch slapped them." Harlequin stopped, his face taking on a serious mien as though suddenly lost in thought. "Do they even believe in God?"

  Reaver shook his head. “Even if they did, worship of any kind is illegal down there. To them, a Party member’s only loyalty should be to the Party and the progression of their message through the stars. On Corporate Planets, worship who you want, how you want, don’t infringe on another citizen’s liberties. One of the big differences between us and them."

  Harlequin looked ready to either ask another question or make a smart-ass reply, but the rising wail of alarm klaxons killed any words before they could leave his mouth.

  Chapter Five

  The rise and fall of the emergency alert siren filled the vast cavity of the Fury’s hangar, and the rush of activity behind the Recon team drew their attention to the Hawk they had just left. The crewmembers, who had moments ago been opening maintenance hatches for post-flight checks, were slamming them shut, the female crew member moving behind the male, using her key to lock the panels down tight. The pilot's canopy on the left side swung open, and the pilot leaned out, waving his arm at Reaver. Reaver sprinted to the open door and turned his head so that his right ear was directed to the pilot. The pilot, who had retracted the facemask of his helmet, cupped a hand around Reaver's ear and shouted over the din of the klaxon. “Bent bird incoming, need recovery in air. Get on.”

  At those short, shouted words, Reaver's eyes went wide as he turned to look into the face of the pilot. A bent bird meant something had gone wrong. With operations wrapping up on the planet below, chances were good something had happened hardside, and the pilots had managed to burst from atmo. Every Marine trained in recovery operations; using the training was rare. Vacuum recovery jeopardized all involved, but the alternative was standing by and watching a bird burn in. The Marines expected the Army Warrants to provide them with air support and rescue. The realization that now the Warrants were asking Marines for help didn’t escape Reaver, and that made his decision for him. He answered with a half step back, a thumbs-up, and a sharp salute before turning and sprinting to the clamshell door of the Hawk.

  Bull and Harlequin, having seen his salute, were quick to join him at the door. His words were chopped and to the point. “Vac Recovery. Just like we've drilled. Load up and get strapped." Reaver pointed Bull into the Hawk then led Harlequin over to where the lockers awaited transport. The uncertainty in Quinn’s initial steps and the nervousness in his eyes wrote the story for anyone with enough experience to see that this cruise was turning into a trial by fire for the kid.

  Bull hauled himself silently into the Hawk, secured his Ogre, and began opening the storage compartment doors laid flush into the aircraft’s floor. Four compartments were set in front of the rearmost seats, with the two central compartments holding the equipment necessary for emergencies, up to and including providing in-flight assistance to another aircraft. Bull lifted four coils of cable from one of the compartments. With a speed that only comes from practice, he uncoiled and rewrapped each length after inspecting them for any breaks, burrs, or bends that would threaten the strength of the cord. These cables would act as tethers to join the rescue Hawk with the broken aircraft, and lives would depend on them; he wasn’t going to simply trust they had been checked.

  Next out were the vac-litters, referred to as "coffins" or "cubes" by just about anyone. Hoping they wouldn’t be needed but having spent more than a day in the Corps, Bull understood the reality of situations like this. He stretched straps over the coils of cable and waiting litters to hold them in one place for flight and quick action. Once done, Bull slammed the first container hatch and twisted its handle to reseal it. A slap on his right shoulder pulled his attention to Harlequin, already wearing a vacuum-suit, as he entered the Hawk.

  Harlequin had slapped Bull with Bull’s own suit pulled from his personal rucksack; a benefit of Recon packing their rucks all in the same manner, everyone knew where everything was kept in their teammates’ packs. Bull and Harlequin traded places, Bull dropping down from the Hawk’s passenger compartment to get changed and store his uniform in his ruck as Harlequin clambered in to finish pulling out the last of the needed gear.

  Reaver dragged the top half of his vacsuit on over his bare chest, having stripped off his soiled combat uniform and boots before slipping on the bottom half of the single-piece suit up high enough so that he wouldn’t be standing bare-assed in the hangar while he assisted Harlequin in donning his suit. With both arms slid into the sleeves, Reaver rolled his arms and shoulders forward to stretch the material far enough that the inner membrane of the suit could slide over and around his torso, the latex-like outer layer of the suit’s shell constricting down as soon as he ceased flexing. Before latching the retention straps at his chest, Reaver shifted and smoothed the suit in some places, ensuring that he had good skin-to-membrane contact over the entirety of his body; he wanted to make sure he got his money’s worth when it came to the warmth and oxygen the suit produced. A tingling sensation, like static electricity, flowed across his body for a brief instant. When it had passed, he could feel the cool, gel-like material of the interior membrane flexing and moving with his body’s shifts in position. Slipping his hand down into the crotch of his suit, Reaver adjusted how his balls were sitting. Once he started on the straps, they would all tighten simultaneously, and working a recovery op with his balls pinched in a vise was not his idea of a good time.

  The final step of ‘hoovering,’ as donning a vacsuit had come to be called, was laying the left flap of the torso portion over the right and securing the magnetic-clamp back onto itself at the front of the throat. Earlier Reaver had had to unlock and reseal Harlequin’s clamp. Quinn had left the clamp loose for a little more comfort; while more comfortable, a loose clamp risked a poor helmet seal and a potential blowout when introduced to a vacuum. A death sentence for the kid. With his suit sealed and the mag-clamps tightened down around his throat, wrists, and shins, Reaver bent over and pulled on his boots, each bare foot sliding through a membrane like the interior of the vacsuit. As soon as his heel pressed into the bottom of the boot, the top of it sealed with the clamps at the middle of his shins. Grabbing his gloves from atop his ruck where he’d laid them, Reaver used them to smack Bull’s arm as he passed him on the way toward the Hawk; with their manufacture, the helmets were one size fits all and to save space were always stored aboard; those and gloves would go on after they were airborne.

  Reaver paused when he heard Bull call after him. “Hey Boss, Harlequin’s supposed to be pulling out the Skeleton. Do me a favor and make sure he doesn’t fuck with the attachment points.”

  Reaver laughed, picking up his and Quinn’s rucks. “You gotta start trusting people more. Besides, I really don’t think Bard meant to tweak them that much. Secure the lockers, we don’t want them fod’ing th
e deck when the Hawk takes off.” He turned and pulled himself into the Hawk, ignoring the muttering coming from behind him as Bull finished donning his vacsuit and joined him and Harlequin.

  Inside the Hawk, Harlequin had made good use of time. The second compartment had been emptied, and the hatch closed. The equipment that had been within now laid on top: a collection of what appeared to be wire mesh and thin strips of metal. Harlequin was examining the bundle as Reaver climbed into the Hawk with Bull less than a minute behind him. Looking up at his squad leader and the other veteran Recon member as they webbed in the rucks and Reaver’s RAW beside the Ogre and his sniper rifle in the first compartment, Harlequin motioned to the apparent tangle. “What gives? Every demonstration we got of the Skeleton in action showed it as a rigid frame; this is junk.”

  Bull glared at the rookie with a gleam in his eye that Harlequin had seen from plenty of Drill Instructors; his life was about to suck, and he was out of Recon. Bull’s demeanor changed, and the gleam disappeared as he moved over to the pile and motioned for Harlequin to get strapped in to his seat. Deftly, Bull shifted the pile and stretched the materials out so that it formed the vague outline of a skeleton, minus the head. As he began lifting the equipment into place, Bull raised his voice to be heard over the wail of the alert siren. “What they used in training was a Skeleton plugged into a frame, rather than plugging it into the wearer. Remember how it would boost your strength, speed, etc.?”

  Harlequin nodded, but Bull didn’t even bother to glance up and continued explaining,

  “On the frame, it only increases by a set amount, controlled by the program in the frame. Plug it into me, and it increases everything exponentially. Frame is easier to work with but has set limitations.”

  Bull finished attaching the lower half of his body, the wire mesh wrapping around his thighs and shins between the strips of metal laid on either side of his calves and thighs, cables joining the dual strips on either side of his knees. The mesh ended at a simple metal band encircling his waist. Reaver stepped up behind Bull, lifting a length of segmented metal strips to press against Bull’s spinal column while the larger Marine reached across his body to lock the mesh material around his upper arms with a maglock clamp above his elbow. A second clamp below his elbow coupled with another around his wrist and secured the material around his forearm.

  As Reaver locked the final clamp around Bull’s neck, Bull completed his explanation of the Skeleton to Harlequin. “This way, I control the input into the mesh and regulate the output. Takes more control and a lot more practice, but more bang for the buck. Frames are good around garrison and for straight up grunt work, but for working in Vac and doing our kind of wet work, drop the frame.”

  Reaver ran one last check over the connections on the Skeleton. When everything was good to go, he slapped Bull on the back. The two Marines moved to open seats and pulled their shoulder straps down to meet the waist straps and snap into the retaining lock. Once secured, Reaver pulled the earbuds from the collar of his vacsuit and hooked them over his ears before seating them comfortably in place. The buds would allow him to have comms with his team and the Hawk’s crew throughout the flight.

  The Hawk’s crewmembers climbed in through their respective doors, called their sides clear, and smacked the door controls near each station. The clamshell doors began closing within half-seconds of one another, and the Hawk's crew secured their helmets. The seal of the doors locked out the keening wail of the Fury’s alarms.

  "Angel, you are cleared for Looking Glass." Flight controllers, most often, were female, and this one was no different, with a no-nonsense tone to her voice. With their earbuds secure and operational, the Marines could listen in on the traffic between the pilots and the operations center clearly. Hawks working a Vacuum Recovery Operation were designated Angel and maintained that call-sign until the operation was complete. Reaver counted in his head and realized this would be his fifth Angel flight.

  Reaver heard the click of the radio in his ear signaling a change in speaker and the voice of the pilot who had told him about the rescue came over the radio. “Copy. Cleared for Looking Glass. Angel is on the go."

  A second voice, the other pilot, cut across the first pilot's traffic on the aircraft's internal radio. “We're cleared to launch. Strap in tight, going through the glass is never smooth."

  The internal radio clicked off, and Reaver could once again hear the female flight controller; her voice had softened. "Bring them home." As the transmission clicked off, the Marines felt the ship pick up from the deck of the hangar.

  Harlequin shifted in the straps of his chair and looked at Reaver. Unlike in the hangar, there was no need to shout as the hull of the aircraft silenced not only the alarms of the Fury’s Fire but also the rising roar of the Hawk's engines. “What the hell is Looking Glass?"

  Bull answered before Reaver could respond. "We're going out the bay doors, through the kinetic shield. Using a launch tube would take too long."

  "But why call it 'Looking Glass?'" Harlequin questioned.

  Reaver cut in, “Old Earth children's story. Apparently, someone thought they were funny. Now, tighten your straps, it gets rough." Following his own advice, Reaver gave a sharp twist to the strap lock centered at his chest, causing the shoulder and lap belts to cinch down even tighter. Bull and Harlequin followed suit.

  The Hawk picked up speed, racing down the length of the hangar bay. With the struts drawn tight up to its belly, the pilots could keep the aircraft low, mere feet above the deck. The pilots understood that the faster their airspeed, the easier the transition through the shield would be. The trade-off was that the faster they went, the more the Hawk wanted to soar. The pilot on the controls kept his attention outside the aircraft, judging the distance off the deck with quick glances out his side canopy while watching the bay door shield grow out the front. The other pilot called out speed and distance, noting engine operation and fuel levels. Both pilots recognized fuel was going to be an issue; they had flown a full mission with no time to recharge the cells. If this went pear-shaped, there would be two birds in need of rescue. The unstated mission statement included buying time for other birds to be prepped in case of that eventuality.

  With ever-increasing speed, the distance to the bay shield closed rapidly. The pilot not on the controls completed the final checks to ensure they were prepared for the exit from the manufactured atmosphere of the Fury’s interior into the unforgiving vacuum of space. With the shield growing larger in the front canopy, the pilot maintaining the Hawk's flight path keyed the internal radio, his voice controlled. “Brace for shield exit."

  Kinetic shields were an amazing invention; they took the kinetic energy of an approaching object and turned it back on itself. It was, in effect, impenetrable to most moving objects. Laid over and around the ships of the Alliance Fleet, the kinetic shields constantly shifted and distorted like a lake’s surface during a rainstorm. The weakness of the shield lay in that if too many projectiles struck at the same time, or a few large projectiles connected in rapid succession, then multiple feedbacks would overload the shield and break it down. The Navy brass had done its best to keep quiet the few instances of lone ships being caught in the midst of meteor showers, but sailors talked, and rumors spread.

  From the interior of the shield, the protective boundary could be escaped using a high amount of kinetic energy. There had been several accidents when the shields first came into use where Navy and Army pilots had brushed the edges with a wingtip and cartwheeled their aircraft back into their wingmates and launch vessels. Pilots from both services had discovered a head-on approach at high speed was the safest course of action; this also had the added effect of attaining a slingshot from the outer edge of the shield. As the Hawk breached the shield’s inner side, time seemed to slow while reality stretched, and though the passage through the energy of the shield took only a split second, to the inhabitants, it felt like minutes of the most extreme pressure exerted on their bodies. Joints sc
reamed in protest as the worst mixture of nitrogen poisoning and high g-forces assailed the pilots, crew, and Marines within the Hawk. Where earlier they had fought off unconsciousness, here spots appeared in vision and tension headaches built behind the eyes. As quickly as the pain had set upon them, it disappeared, and the Hawk catapulted away from the shield at speeds unattainable from the engines alone.

  Harlequin groaned and twisted the lock on his straps, loosening them enough to allow him to grip his knees and dig his fingers into the muscles on either side in an attempt to assuage the pains caused by passing through the shield. "Fuck me. Never want to do that again." He grunted out between clenched teeth.

  Bull agreed as he popped the straps holding him in place with a sharp slap to the locking reel and let his body float free in the zero gravity. "A recovery op or abandon ship is the only reason you'd want to go through that bullshit." Grasping a handhold above his head in the ceiling of the cabin, he pulled himself along to where the recovery gear was locked to the floor. With ease only possible in the forgiveness of space, Bull flipped upside down and locked his feet into the slots where his hands had been. This allowed him the use of two hands, rather than just one, to manipulate and prepare the gear for use.

  While Bull readied and checked over their equipment, Reaver and Harlequin removed their helmets from the storage racks above their seats and moved to the left side clamshell door. Reaver briefed Harlequin as the two Marines readied the harnesses that would keep them attached to the Hawk and the tethers to join their aircraft with the one to be rescued. Reaver’s professional tone lacked the humor shown in the hangar bay. “Remember, the pilots are going to bring us parallel to the bent bird, out the left door. Nothing's going to open until they have us locked in place and helmets are locked on. Once the doors open, hang the door and jackknife to the other bird. Feet first, I don't need you denting them any more than they already are. If you miss, Bull will reel you back in to try again, and you buy the drinks for a month. Any questions?"