by J. N. Chaney
The pisser’s vibration turned to shaking. Rev strained his eyes, trying to pick up the glow of entry. If he saw it, though, it would be a very bad sign, but the interior remained thankfully dark.
The shaking became more violent, and Rev had to brace himself to keep from being slammed about. This was normal, or so he’d been told, but once again, the reality was different from the simulations. He just had to sit back and trust, which was difficult for him to do.
Outside, the surface of the pisser was ablating, slowing him down, but he was still booking it. Much of his speed had been bled away by using parabolic braking around first a gas giant, then a smaller, but still huge planet before slinging toward his target. Now, the pisser was using the atmosphere to slow to the point to where Rev could survive the transition out of it.
But the act of slowing down further had its own associated problems. There was no way to hide the fact that something was entering the atmosphere, so the intent was to make it look like a meteorite. The ablation supposedly mimicked how a hunk of rock burned up.
The Gs created through slowing down were not quite as pronounced as with the launch, but they lasted longer, and coupled with the shaking, Rev thought the experience was worse.
Finally!
Without the antiemetics, Rev was sure he would have puked by now. For all his augments, he would have loved to have had something done to calm his “wimpy stomach,” as Tomiko called it.
She’s probably doing fine out there somewhere.
The pisser was shaking now, and Rev was being thrown about, banging his head several times on the side of it. Even with the antiemetics, he was decidedly uncomfortable, and the idea of his launch, despite the danger, was a welcomed prospect. He removed the power-up from the compartment by his right hand.
His AI counted him down. At zero, Rev broke the power-up like a chem-light, allowing the three sections to intermix, then slid it into the recessed slot . . . at least he tried to. In the dark it took him several tries to find it and align the power-up.
And he waited. No lights lit to tell him it was a success.
If everything worked as planned, a tiny microwatt flicker of electricity was powering up the sensors. They would measure his speed and location. The speed was to determine if it was going to be safe enough for Rev to be ejected. The location was because by adjusting the pattern of ablation, the pisser could make slight course corrections.
None of this was passed to Rev. He would find out soon enough.
The extreme violent movement of the pisser abated a few degrees while vibration increased. Rev became aware of a dull sound growing, penetrating his helmet. After so long without real auditory inputs, the sound seemed inordinately loud. And, while he might be hallucinating, Rev thought he could begin to see a glow as the pisser’s outer layers burned away. After a few more minutes where the glow seemed to grow in intensity, it ceased. The velocity had slowed enough to stop the burn.
Getting close now.
He watched a spot in the dark, just in front of his eyes, willing the signal to appear. An image of auguring it in, what the pilots called hitting the ground, making a smoking hole, fought to the front of his thoughts, and he had to force it back.
At last, when he thought something had to have gone wrong, the single green LED lit like a beacon in the dark. Rev got into the ejection position, pulling in his arms and tightening up his legs. The green LED pulsed down the seconds.
Shit!
Rev hastily shoved his head down farther. He knew better than that, but in the pressure of the moment, he’d forgotten, his eyes locked on the light. Not the recipe for success.
Rev wasn’t being ejected, per se, even if the term was still in use. It was more like the pisser was going to come apart around him.
Rev tightened his position, counting under his breath, when the entire side of the pisser split open. The shock of hitting the atmosphere was huge, despite the ablative slowing of the capsule. Rev had been ready, but his position was almost flung apart. Without his augments, he wouldn’t have been able to maintain any semblance of control, and he now understood why Marines before the war, before augmentations, had more than a few times been killed upon ejection.
The atmosphere yanked at his arms and legs, but Rev managed to keep his position, and within a few moments, he had stabilized. Slowly, and as taught, he extended into the age-old freefall position, deploying his flight suit, and started the next phase of the long insertion.
Rev had entered the atmosphere over daylight, but by the time he had ejected from the pisser, he had traveled into night. Rev could see the light on the horizon, but beneath him, the planet was shrouded in darkness. He glanced around, trying to get his bearings.
Preacher Rolls had been a human world, and its magnetic fields were well-documented. A map of those fields was part of Rev’s uploads. There was a momentary mental fart, as he liked to think of it, as his hippocampus took in the data, and suddenly he knew exactly where he was and where he had to go.
He was off course by over fifty kilometers. Not bad considering the distance he’d traveled to get here and more than acceptable. Not that he wasn’t going to take action to cut that distance.
Rev widened his arms, and an additional foil surface clicked into place. He raised his right arm and immediately banked to the right. Ahead of him, a low range was between him and the Assembly Area. He had to clear it, or he’d be faced with a long hump to reach the others before they stepped off.
The flight suit had a glide ratio of 9-to-1, which meant for every meter of drop, he had nine meters of forward movement. Rev knew he was about eight kilometers from the lowest point of the range in front of him. What he didn’t know was how high he was, yet.
He twisted his altimeter, which read 21, 464 meters above sea level.
That can’t be right.
He looked again: 21,464.
It wasn’t changing.
He broke his position to tap on the dial with his left hand. No change.
He snapped back into position, feeling his forward momentum pick up again.
“Do I have a backup?”
Rev didn’t know quite what his AI meant by this planet, but he did understand that he didn’t have anything to tell him how high he was. There was nothing to do but head for the lowest spot and pray for the best. With most of his flight suit training done on the simulators, this was only his third real flight, but with his augmented reflexes, he was able to make the micro-adjustments to squeeze grams of lift and centimeters of forward progress. And still, he didn’t know if it was enough. The wind shifted at different altitudes, pushing, then pulling him off course, trying to upend him. He fought to keep his course as the pass rapidly approached. Each meter lost in altitude was a personal insult.
The last kilometer was a race against nature. Swirling winds were his enemy as he passed the lower slopes. And he had a decision to make. At this speed, he risked serious injury, at the minimum, if he burned it in trying to make it through the pass. But if he flared to a safe landing, he wouldn’t be able to link up with the team. He’d have no part in the mission.
That’s what decided it for him. He had to try. Whether he crashed trying or gave up and flared for a landing made no difference.
Rev fought to keep his position as the ground rushed up. Just ahead, the lowest point in the pass mocked him.
“Bite me!” he shouted as the last hundred meters closed.
For a second, he thought he’d made it, just clearing a rocky outcrop, when a tree on the other side loomed up. With a shout, Rev dropped his left arm and swerved to the side, just clipping the branches as he shot past.
But that cost him speed, and there was very little room on the other side to gain it back. Rev dove as much as he could, his legs hitting trees twice as he tried to regain speed an
d lift. As the steep slope started to level out, Rev slowly leveled out again, struggling to maintain lift.
And then, he was through. The slope fell beneath him, and he shot out into open sky.
“How about that?” he asked his AI, relief making him giddy.
His AI didn’t reply.
Shooting for the gap had put him off course, so, while he still had elevation, he came around to a direct azimuth. There was no way he’d be able to cover the forty-plus kilometers to the AA, but he fully intended to cover as much as he could before he was forced to land.
He scanned the sky as he flew, wondering if he could spot someone else from the team. But the flight suits, while not exactly stealthy, were made to be hard to spot, and even with his night vision capabilities, it was still a moonless night.
That, or they didn’t make it, the unwilling thought intruded. Just concentrate, dammit.
Each nine meters forward was nine meters less he’d have to walk, but it cost a meter in height. Rev sank lower and lower until he was only a couple of hundred meters above the ground. He had to find a landing spot, but all he could see was a dense canopy of trees. No clearing, no road, nothing that could serve as an LZ. And still he descended.
At fifty meters up, he knew he was going to have to do a tree landing. He’d done exactly one in a simulator, and it hadn’t gone well. The sim’s AI had given him a sixty-eight percent chance of a significant injury.
Most of the trees were about the same height, which was going to make things difficult. But there, just to the right and up ahead, a single evergreen stuck out of the canopy by a good five meters or so.
“That’s as good as any,” he muttered, turning and diving to pick up enough speed to be able to go at it on a level plain.
The tree loomed as he rushed up. At the last moment, Rev pulled up, almost to a vertical position, and slammed into the treetop. It was like getting kicked by a mule, and the top of the tree broke off under his impact. Rev flailed wildly, clawing at the tree top, he and it fell, crashing into the canopy below with a series of staccato cracks.
Rev just hung on for dear life, and he jerked to a stop a moment later. Around him, leaves and bits of wood showered down. He gathered his breath and tried to take stock of himself. His chest and one leg hurt, but he seemed whole.
He tentatively raised his head, and that started him sliding again. Something hit him hard in the shoulder, and he twisted to catch the branch. The top of the evergreen kept falling into the darkness below while Rev clung to the branch for dear life.
“Hey, anything you can do to help?” he asked his AI.
Once again, his AI was silent.
“I thought not.”
Rev pulled himself up onto the branch, which was creaking ominously. He was afraid it was about to go. Too many branches beneath him blocked his view of the ground, so he didn’t know how high up he was. He knew he could take pretty impressive falls, especially when he was ready for it, but without knowing his height, and with the branches below that could knock him out of position, he didn’t want to chance it.
That left climbing.
Rev inched along the branch, expecting it to give out at any moment, and made it to the trunk. Once there, it really wasn’t that difficult to climb down, using branches when he could, shimmying when he had to. Within a few moments, his feet were on terra firma.
Or Preacher Rolls firma, he thought, chuckling at his lame joke.
That he was relieved was an understatement. Somehow, he was down and mostly in one piece.
Rev stripped off his flight suit and rolled it into a ball. It would disintegrate within thirty hours, breaking down into its component molecules, to be scattered in the breeze. It had done him well, though.
He took a quick inventory and asked his AI for a physical check-up. Whatever interference had been present-- if any-- was gone now, and he got a near instant report on his overall health. As expected, he was only bruised, but it was good to confirm that. Already, his nanos were rushing to the spots to combat inflammation and repair the minor damage.
Once he was ready, Rev checked his position. He still had twenty-three-point-nine klicks to the RP and just under four hours to make it. Easy-peasy. He started off through the forest at a slow jog.
The insertion had been the easy part. Now the real work was about to begin.
20
Rev stepped cautiously through the undergrowth, senses straining to pick out anything that didn’t belong. It was difficult. Preacher Rolls had plenty of wildlife, and unlike most planets, some of that life was alien.
Or native, he corrected himself.
Earth life was alien here. Normally, once a planet was terraformed, any native life was either eradicated or was subsumed by the Earth invasion. Preacher Rolls was one of the relatively few planets where enough native life survived to live together with Earth stock. Odd, fungus-looking stuff hung from Ponderosa Pines, and brightly colored fuzzy things flitted between Mountain Laurels.
Much of the native life could be eaten, if it came to that. Not that Rev intended to try it. As much as he disliked Sludge, the high caloric paste he carried, he would be sticking with the Marine issue sustenance.
All the life made for a busy environment, and that made picking out possible signs of Centaurs difficult. But that was his job. He was there to make sure the rest of the team didn’t stumble on a Centaur and get wiped out in one fell swoop.
He had a feeling that the only way he was going to be able to warn the rest of the team was if he was to eat a beam. Humans tended to sizzle when hit, which was rather hard for anyone else to miss.
Rev turned around. Thirty meters behind him, Sergeant Nix gave him the encircled-fingers sign for a question. Rev gave him the negative slash. He just wanted to make sure he hadn’t strayed too far in front.
The rest of the team, minus Hussein Černý, would be following Nix. Hussein hadn’t shown up at the assembly area, and after waiting an extra hour, the lieutenant had made the difficult decision to move out. The mission had the priority.
Hussein not making it didn’t mean he was dead. A meter or two less altitude flying over the pass and Rev wouldn’t have made it either. He had to hope that he’d faced something similar and was now heading for their rally point.
The brush got thicker, thorns digging at his PAL-5. They looked like Earth life, and Rev wondered why some long-ago terraformer had decided that they needed to be in the planet’s package. What possible benefit did they offer?
Rev could just bull through, of course, but that would cause more noise and commotion than he was comfortable making. Then there were his Yellowjackets. If a Centaur was lying in wait, he needed more space if he was going to engage one of his missiles. They need thirty-six meters to arm, and that was if he could avoid hitting trees or branches, knocking it off course. No, he didn’t want to go much farther into the thickets.
No problem. He wasn’t committed to following an azimuth where he had to offset. He always knew where he was heading. He turned and signaled to Nix that he was deviating. They wouldn’t be getting lost either, but if he was supposed to be running point, they needed to be following in his trace.
“Any Centaur sign?” he asked.
Which was stupid. His AI would tell him if any of the sounds being picked up could indicate Centaur presence.
“What about our target?”
Which wasn’t surprising. They were still almost two klicks away.
Rev crossed a small creek, then moved up along the other side. The undergrowth was a little less dense, and he could see farther into the trees. There might even be distance enough to arm his Yellowjackets if need be, and he could see sky through the towering canopy, even if it was fifty meters above.
A squirrel ran out onto a branch and scolded him for a moment before darting away. He was tempted to drop it, but he really didn’t have it in him. The squirr
el was just being a squirrel. He just hoped that the Centaurs were not attuned to animals being disturbed. Even a Marine moving at full stealth couldn’t overcome all of the natural alarms in the forest—the churring bark of a squirrel being one such giveaway.
But there were many more.
Rev bent his course back, heading for their target. As he closed the distance, he slowed, sweeping his eyes across every bush and tree. Every rustle, every small critter darting by, made his nerves shout.
At seventy meters out, he focused forward, trying to see what was up there . . .
. . . and about shit himself when a figure rose ten meters to his right.
He spun around, his M-49 ready, and the raggedy looking woman held up a hand, palm out, and said, “Easy there, big boy.”
She was slim, almost gaunt, with long silvery hair. Her face was one of those ageless kinds—she could be forty or eighty, for all he could tell. She had on a cloak of sorts, adorned with torn strips of cloth, and in her hand was a cannon of a shotgun, the barrel looking huge as it pointed at him.
“You must be my Marines,” she said, lowering the monster weapon.
Rev had never seen a weapon of that type, but he would have bet credits to doughnuts that whatever it fired would have done a number on him, combat suit or not.
“Private Rev Pelletier, Union Marines. And you must be our contact.”
She nodded, then asked, “Where’s your commander?”
“Coming up.” Rev stepped back, then as soon as Sergeant Nix came into view, signaled objective.
Rev’s heart was still racing. How had he missed her? Admittedly, he was on passive scanning, but still—
“What are you wearing?” he asked, his curiosity piqued.
She looked like some of the homeless back in Swansea, but while her appearance was a mess, her jacket had a kind of purposefulness about it.
The woman laughed and asked, “You’ve never seen a ghillie suit?”
“No, ma’am, never.”
“You military-types, you all love your tech, don’t you,” she said, leaving it at that.
