“Good luck, human.”
“You too.” Husher ran out of the cockpit toward the troop compartment, where Darkstream’s suit awaited him. As he did, he felt the ship lurch off of the platform, and he heard the Wingers’ gunfire as they tried to shoot it down.
Then they slipped below the platform, and the sound of gunshots faded away.
Chapter 84
Descent
Husher made his way through the stealth ship to the troop compartment as quickly as he could. As he went, he clung to anything available—instrument panels, safety tethers, and finally the side of the hatch into the compartment itself. Very soon, Blackwing would successfully counteract their momentum, and they would enter free fall.
A few seconds after thinking it, it happened. Husher’s feet left the deck, and if he hadn’t been holding one of the crash seat’s straps, he might have ended up suspended uselessly in midair.
Instead, he used the straps to fling himself from crash seat to crash seat, until at last he reached the onyx reentry suit. This needs to happen fast. If he didn’t finish by the time they started tearing through the atmosphere, he doubted he’d make it out of the ship.
He shed his pressure suit as quickly as he could, though it felt like it took forever as he fumbled with clasps and tore at straps, periodically jerking himself back toward the bulkhead before he drifted away.
Finally, he was free. Using his thumbs and forefingers, he pressed the four buttons simultaneously that told the back of the reentry suit to fold downward, allowing him to scramble inside. The buttons resided in shallow depressions, and the simultaneous pressure needed to activate them meant the suit wouldn’t pop open during his fall. In theory.
The interior of the suit felt like slipping into a giant sleeping bag, but the exterior was covered in ablative armor plating meant to protect him from the intense heat and pressure that awaited him in his near future.
He tried to close up the back of the suit manually, but his reach was severely limited. A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead, and a wave of claustrophobia made him spend a few frantic seconds straining against the stiff frame. The fact that the front of the suit was still attached to the bulkhead didn’t help.
Finally, the suit detected his presence, and the heads-up display lit up, transposing green text over his view of the wall: “WELCOME TO DARKSTREAM SECURITY’S PATENTED ATMOSPHERIC REENTRY SUIT. SEAL SUIT?”
“Yes,” he said, already panting. The back of the suit rose up of its own accord to meet the sides, and a hissing sound ensued.
“PRESSURIZING. CALIBRATING ANEROIDS.”
What’s an aneroid?
“DECOUPLE SUIT FROM BULKHEAD?”
“Yes.”
The reentry suit immediately detached itself, and he started to float away, having forgotten about being in zero-g. Heart rate skyrocketing, he kicked out with his legs, hoping to float back toward the crash seats. Instead, with the suit limiting his mobility, he succeeded only in propelling himself backward through the room, flying blind.
Shit. Shit.
After a few seconds he crashed into the bulkhead near the ceiling on the opposite end of the troop compartment. Luckily his right leg floated near the hatch, and he managed to hook the upper lip with his toe, jerking himself down to it. The compartment that contained the nuke was attached to the bulkhead near the hatch, and he opened it, extracting the container that held the bomb. The container was a gray cylinder with rounded ends, a little larger than a traditional letterbox. He secured it to the reentry suit.
Finally, he hit the button to open the hatch and then pulled himself through. That done, he set his feet on the side of the hatch and pushed himself down the gangway toward the airlock.
“WE SEE YOU ARE IN FREE FALL. PLEASE MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE VESSEL’S AIRLOCK AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE.”
“I’m on it,” Husher muttered, catching himself on the handle of a storage compartment within reach of the airlock controls. Before opening it, he spared one last glance back toward the cockpit. His thinking had been that Blackwing could use the ship for protection until he reentered the atmosphere. Then he could fly out of the airlock. But the Winger’s chances of survival seemed a lot lower than they had during the final panicked moments on the orbital platform.
I may have asked him to die. And he agreed to it right away. The sheer selflessness of it struck Husher, and he realized the pirate was the last person he’d have expected it from.
The suit allowed him enough mobility to bring his hand to his temple in a clumsy salute. Maybe he’ll see it on the cameras. If not…the gesture of respect meant something to Husher, however paltry it actually was.
Opening the airlock, he used the edge to pull himself inside. He instructed the control panel to close the hatch and begin depressurization. Then he waited, and tried not to think about the only person ever to attempt using one of Darkstream’s reentry suits for survival.
The company claimed that tragedy had been a fluke—that the suit had been tested and retested, the science was sound, and the shuttle pilot had merely been incredibly unlucky. Husher trusted that story about as much as he trusted its source. And yet here he was.
“BODY TEMPERATURE RISING. ENGAGING VENTILATION SYSTEM.”
Wow. I haven’t even entered the atmosphere yet. Clearly he hadn’t succeeded in forestalling anxiety. His entire body felt like it was coated in sweat, and he trembled with the mounting tension.
The outer doors opened. He took a deep breath and pushed himself out into space.
He didn’t part company with the stealth ship nearly as quickly as he’d expected. It still appeared to float next to him. It didn’t even feel like either of them were falling. It felt like nothing—no wind whipping at his suit, no change in the sky around him. If the dark of space could be called a sky.
“PLEASE ASSUME THE DELTA POSITION.”
The what?
Below him, the planet did not seem to grow any larger. For a moment, Husher worried that Blackwing hadn’t succeeded in exiting orbit.
“YOU MUST DISTANCE YOURSELF FROM YOUR CRAFT. PLEASE ASSUME THE DELTA POSITION AND BEGIN MANEUVERING AWAY FROM IT.”
“What the hell is the delta position?”
The heads-up display showed him a neon-green representation of someone wearing a reentry suit and falling through the air in what was almost a dive, with the head angled down twenty-five degrees or so. “IF YOU DO NOT ASSUME THE DELTA POSITION YOU WILL SPIN OUT OF CONTROL SOON AFTER BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER. WOULD YOU LIKE TO DEPLOY THE DROGUE?”
“No. No drogue.” If he used the braking device now, he’d give the Wingers more time to find him in the sky and shoot him down.
“ASSUME THE DELTA POSITION.”
He tried shifting his weight, carefully, to avoid sending himself into a spin he couldn’t stop. Gradually, he came closer to the correct posture. Then he spun right past it.
“Damn it.”
“ASSUME THE DELTA POSITION.”
“Shut up.”
He made waving motions with his arms and legs meant to slow his spin, and he managed to stop, but in the wrong body position. Frustrated, he tried again—too enthusiastically. He began to rotate, faster than before.
The heads-up display flashed more text at him, this time in red, but he didn’t have the focus to read it just now. He had a pretty good idea what it was saying, though. “No drogue,” he told it. “Do not deploy the drogue!”
His spinning sped up, and soon he was flipping rapidly, the planet trading places with space, flashing around and around him.
Too fast. It reminded him of enduring high g-forces in his Condor. He flexed his stomach and legs to encourage blood flow.
He spun faster. A tremendous rushing sensation filled his head, making his ears roar with a sound similar to that from inside a seashell.
Husher blacked out.
Chapter 85
Flockhead Bytan
Flockhead Bytan was smothered with paperwork in her already clutter
ed office. Keeping the Fins in the dark about their war efforts meant the government wanted everything documented and justified in triplicate. If she went to the washroom, they expected her to submit a detailed plan of action, along with a careful tally of resources used.
Her napping nest sat in the corner of the office, and she could almost hear it calling to her. Not yet. Not for a while, actually.
She glanced up from her desk to see First Fledgling Cooper entering her office, twitching nervously, his feathers standing at attention all over his body.
“What is it, Cooper?”
“Ma’am, I’ve just received a report that at least one of the humans has made it past our orbital defenses.”
The sudden tension she felt at Cooper’s words made her wings unfurl slightly. “Impossible. The last I heard, the stealth ship they stole had its engines taken out.”
Cooper bowed his head with a jerky motion. “It did. But apparently the cold-gas thrusters were still operational. Which will be useless when it comes to a safe landing, but one human has left the craft wearing a reentry suit. We expect the human to reach the surface in fourteen minutes.”
Bytan clacked her beak softly in thought. “What’s its angle, here? Why is it so desperate to get to the surface?”
“Should I scramble Talons to kill it before it arrives?”
She considered the idea for a moment. “No. I want you to continue tracking its trajectory. Where is it projected to land?”
“In the sea.”
My God. “Contact whatever Fins live near the coordinates of his landing site. Ask them to apprehend him if they can, and bring him to Cape Pinion. I plan to lead a platoon there myself.” Bytan stood, pushing her chair back. “As far as I can tell, there are two possible reasons for this human’s strange behavior. Maybe it has a desperate need to communicate with us.”
By the time Cooper spoke again, Bytan had crossed the office and had almost reached the hallway.
“What’s the other possibility?”
Drawing to a halt, She turned back to face him. “It has a nuke, which we risk detonating by attacking him with Talons.”
Cooper’s feathers stood even straighter, if that was possible. “You still plan to go meet it?”
“Yes. And you’re coming with me.”
Chapter 86
Overridden
When Husher awoke, he was falling much slower than he remembered. Also, the sky around him had lightened to a dark gray, and he could see an indistinct layer of white, far below him, toward which he hurtled headfirst.
“YOUR ORDER TO NEGLECT DROGUE DEPLOYMENT WAS OVERRIDDEN. DARKSTREAM RESERVES THE RIGHT TO IGNORE ORDERS THAT WILL NEGATIVELY AFFECT USER SAFETY.”
His head was pounding. “This negatively affects my safety even more.” Falling at a slower speed meant offering himself up to the Wingers as an easy target. On the other hand, if the suit hadn’t stilled his wild revolutions, that would have likely killed him, too.
Despite its fresh success, he still didn’t trust the reentry suit to keep him alive. There was still the parachute it could mess up.
At least the nuke wasn’t affected by all that spinning. Its container was designed to prevent accidental explosions in pretty much any situation, but all the same…having a nuke attached to him made him a little nervous.
As he drew ever closer to the planet’s surface—though not nearly fast enough for his liking—he spared a thought for Blackwing. The ship was nowhere in sight. Maybe it had already breached the clouds he could see far below.
The prospect of taking off from a speeding ship and flying…it seemed impossible, now. Blackwing would have to wait until the ship got low enough for the atmosphere to be breathable, and then he’d have to leap while it screamed toward the earth at incredible speed. Don’t Wingers need to run before taking off? He supposed momentum wouldn’t be a huge problem for the Winger. The main issue would be redirecting that momentum in a direction other than down.
At last Husher broke through the cloud cover, at what the suit told him was eleven thousand feet above the planet’s surface. He still couldn’t see any Talons coming to neutralize him, nor could he see any incoming missiles, though he doubted he’d have much time to contemplate it if the Wingers did fire on him.
“PREPARE TO DEPLOY PARACHUTE IN 30 SECONDS.”
“No. Override.”
“DEPLOYING PARACHUTE IN 25 SECONDS.”
“Do not deploy that chute. It’s too early.”
“IT IS STRONGLY RECOMMENDED THAT YOU DEPLOY YOUR PARACHUTE IN 20 SECONDS.”
“I said override, you bastard.”
“ACKNOWLEDGED. PARACHUTE DEPLOYMENT OVERRIDDEN.”
“Good.”
Husher had never skydived before, but even he knew it was probably ill-advised to land in the middle of the ocean, which seemed to make up most of what stretched below him, horizon to horizon. To the right, however, he spotted a sizable landmass, and he tried to angle himself toward it. He had no idea whether he had a hope of making it anywhere near shore, but he was determined to get as close as possible.
Presumably this thing has some way to keep me from drowning.
The ocean expanded below him, and the wind whistled past as he fell. Despite his stomach turning back flips, it was refreshing to experience a sense of motion. Much preferable to falling through space, which reminded him of stories about people going crazy from being left in sensory-deprivation tanks for too long.
“IT IS DANGEROUS TO DEPLOY YOUR PARACHUTE BELOW THIS ALTITUDE. DEPLOYING PARACHUTE.”
“No. Belay that.”
“DARKSTREAM RESERVES THE RIGHT TO IGNORE ORDERS THAT WILL NEGATIVELY AFFECT USER SAFETY.”
“The Wingers will shoot me out of the sky if I float down like a dandelion seed. Stop. You’ll kill me if you deploy that thing.”
“DEPLOYING PARACHUTE.”
“Do not deploy the parachute.”
“DEPLOYING PARACHUTE.”
A mass of white blossomed from the back of his suit and into the sky.
“God damn it!” Husher waved his arms over head, trying to foil the parachute by tangling up its strings. When that didn’t work, he popped the suit’s utility knife out of its holster and began hacking.
He managed to cut away the leftmost strings, making the parachute flap wildly above him.
“DANGEROUS INCREASE IN SPEED DETECTED. DEPLOYING EMERGENCY PARACHUTE.”
“Not yet. I need more—”
The emergency chute popped out of his back, and its strings became tangled with the primary’s, rapidly twisting around each other until they offered next to no air resistance at all.
Oh, shit.
The water rushed up to meet him, and when he hit the surface he felt his right leg break. Pain lanced through his body as the reentry suit dragged him farther underwater.
“Deploy flotation device,” he grunted through clamped teeth.
“FLOTATION DEVICE MALFUNCTION. WOULD YOU LIKE TO EXIT DARKSTREAM SECURITY’S PATENTED ATMOSPHERIC REENTRY SUIT?”
There’s no way I can swim with a broken leg. There’s oxygen left in the suit…
But he would die when it ran out.
I should eject.
Husher twisted his head upward to see the surface of the ocean sparkling far above.
He’d waited too long.
Chapter 87
Diplomacy
The water around him grew dimmer as he sank deeper. Detecting the change in lighting, the suit switched on a beam that shone out from near the top of his helmet. Oh, well at least that’s still functional. He’d get a glimpse of what this planet’s ocean looked like before he died.
He would also stay comfortable. The suit kept track of the pressure change as he descended, and it adjusted the internal environment accordingly. Warmth washed through the suit too, which made sense. Providing the user survived, there was a pretty good chance of ending up in a harsh environment, so Darkstream had installed more than just the ability to stay cool while passin
g through a planet’s atmosphere.
It’s going to hurt, hitting the bottom with this broken leg. He was just starting to consider maneuvering himself to land hands-first when he noticed the water around him growing brighter.
He looked down, and his breath caught in his chest. Below him, a glowing city stretched across the sea floor, as far as he could see. Streets lined with what he assumed was bioluminescent coral crisscrossed each other in a neat grid, adorned with structures that looked too beautiful to be functional. It took him a few seconds to realize that these were broad, tree-like plants that must have been trained to grow as they had.
A few kilometers to his right, several of the structures reared up as high as skyscrapers, but the ones directly below him looked like residences. Then he noticed the creatures entering and exiting them, and his notion that the buildings were ornamental evaporated.
They look like Ek. Without the metal legs.
Many of the creatures were staring up at him, and now a group of four pushed off the seafloor, cutting through the water toward Husher an at alarming speed.
Oh God. I’m done.
But once the foursome reached him, they did not attack. Instead, they each grasped one of his limbs. When one took hold of his right leg, Husher’s entire body spasmed in pain, and the Fin quickly released it. It gripped him by the hips instead, and together the Fins carried him through the water.
Their trajectory trended upward, but not by very much. They brought him along a shallow diagonal, and it didn’t take him long to figure out that they were taking him to the shore. To the Wingers.
“Start a timer,” he told the suit, and it complied instantly. According to the clock, their journey lasted for twenty-seven minutes and three seconds, but to Husher it felt much quicker.
His head broke the surface, next to what appeared to be a metal wharf. Atop it stood an armed party of Wingers, who quickly trained their guns on him.
“Do not move, human,” said the most fearsome Winger Husher had ever seen. Its huge, metal-gray wings showed her tension, partially unfurled as they were. But otherwise, the Winger showed much more self-control than he’d ever seen from members of its species.
Supercarrier: The Ixan Prophecies Trilogy Book 1 Page 26
