by Dan Davis
Cassidy’s top lip curled as he turned back to face the rest of the compartment. “Any real questions?”
Ram looked at Milena. “I was serious about the presentation.”
“Initiate your AugHud,” she said, her voice calm and familiar in his ear, in his head. “You should be tapped into the network.”
Ram felt around inside his head until he found the glaring activation node and concentrated on it. Control of the implants came to him easily, despite being in a new body, and the AugHud flickered into life over his vision, linking to the Company network.
Data streamed, unfiltered. Information about the shuttle’s airspeed and altitude, lists of names for the Marines and their assigned fire teams, individual competencies, text and audio orders and informal conversations flying back and forth between them all.
For the briefest moment, it was like being back on Earth, logging into his Avar server and speaking to his cooperative. But the craft lurched and he forgot his nostalgia, selecting exterior cameras on the shuttle and expanding the images to fill his vision.
He was astonished to see how high up they still were. High enough to perceive the curve of the planet and the infinite blackness above. Below, swirling cloud covered the globe and the sunlight reflected off water. What little land he could see was black and dark gray, in the shape of chains and clusters of islands, glimpsed through the swirling ribbons of the cloud layer.
Cassidy stopped and tilted his head, listening. “Alright,” Cassidy said. “Lieutenant Xenakis says we’re having trouble raising the outpost. We’re coming into thicker atmosphere now, people. Make sure your straps are tight and your suits are sealed.” Cassidy grabbed hold of the seat backs and pulled his way to his own place, front and center.
Ram’s stomach lurched again and a noise like a distant monsoon sounded around the hull of the craft.
“This is crazy,” Ram said to Milena, or tried to. His teeth chattered in his head and he barely heard himself over the sound of the atmosphere outside. She nodded all the same, no doubt understanding something of his sentiment.
It felt like the shuttle was diving down, then levelling out and occasionally turning, over and over. They passed through the cloud layers so quickly that he barely noticed. Perhaps such maneuvering in a descent was perfectly standard or perhaps the pilots were attempting to avoid ground fire or enemy fighter craft.
“There are weapons on this thing, right?” Ram asked Milena during one of the relative lulls. “Rockets and lasers and stuff?”
Milena clutched her straps tight with her gloved hands. “It’s a shuttle, Ram. A single stage to orbit transport shuttle.”
Ram nodded. “Is that a no?”
On the exterior view, he could make out an enormous plateau of black rock extending for hundreds of klicks. On one side, it ended in a jagged coastline. Opposite that, a curving line of peaks and rolling hills that disappeared out of sight.
“Are we heading for those mountains?”
“The outpost was established just beneath them,” Milena said. “Strong winds over most of the surface. This position shelters the outpost from the prevailing wind. And that’s why they changed the layout into a four-sided box shape instead of separate buildings spread out in a complex, as originally intended. Lucky they did. We accidently built ourselves a fort.”
They jerked downward, violently, and the rattling and banging grew louder and more intense. The whir of large motors sounded and a short series of bangs sounded on the hull. The shuttle banked, violently and went into a dive.
“What’s happening?” He asked Milena, using the comms system. “Is this normal?”
His AugHud told him to prepare for hard landing, on screen and by a simulated woman’s voice in his ear.
It told him to assume the crash position in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. His screen flashed the word BRACE at him and he knew to check his helmet was locked into the seat back, his boots were clicked into the foot rest and he hooked his crossed arms into the straps over his chest.
Close your mouth, his suit said in his ear, close your—
A mighty bang and the impact of the hard landing jarred his spine. His head bounced around inside his helmet but the suit and seat kept him secure. The deceleration pulled him forward, so hard against the straps that he couldn’t get a breath. Landing, landing, his suit said.
No shit.
The shuttle vibrated, shaking around while engines roared outside and the deceleration continued while the suit spoke in his ear, urging him to brace for landing. As the speed bled away, the suit spoke again, in that infuriatingly calm computer-generated female voice.
“Please remain harnessed until-”
“All units.” Cutting her off, Captain Cassidy’s order came in loud and clear. “Prepare to disembark under fire.”
CHAPTER TWO
Lieutenant Kat Xenakis eased the shuttle downward to the smooth, black surface of the outpost landing strip, flaring back to bleed off every ounce of speed she could.
Coming in fast over the outpost she had descended quickly through the last layer of light cloud cover and dropped to the planed-flat black rock below. Every time she saw the fledgling outpost through the external camera feeds, she was reminded of flying over mining operations in her native south and west Australia. Instead of clusters of buildings perched next to vast open-pit mines gouged with step-sides deep into the earth, this outpost was a single square structure sitting on the surface of a plain, in the shadow of hills.
Those hills had been thrust up by some volcanic process in the past, and were now cracked and broken into long gorges with overhanging sides that tumbled billions of tons of scree down toward the plateau in undulating piles that zigzagged into the distance for hundreds of kilometers.
It had just been dumb luck, or bad planning, to site their outpost so close to those gorges and cliffs that sliced their way into the uplands. It meant no direct lines of sight for the people in the outpost and even aerial drones had to be almost directly above the enemy position to see them when the aliens attacked.
Erosion of the land was so rapid because, unlike Australia, the surface was wet and cut with hundreds of streams and thin rivers that rushed down the gashes in the hills where they spread out and mingled and broke apart again as they flowed toward the sea in the west. There, many of them fell from the great shelf of rock in waterfalls toward the ocean below where the waves boomed ceaselessly against the basalt walls. Others flowed so lightly that the waters were caught in the updrafts off of the ocean and blasted up into a spray of water that reached hundreds of meters into the air.
It was a new surface, less than a million years, so Kat had heard, formed through some huge volcanic outflow and being eroded almost as quickly as it had formed.
It’s nothing like Australia. I must be homesick if this water world makes me think of the ancient desolation at home.
She had to concentrate on the task at hand.
The Lepus was heavily laden with people and cargo and the gear hit hard, crunching the suspension on the rear wheels with a series of juddering bangs. Kat grimaced and forced the front gear down while the brakes slammed on.
Kat’s pilot’s seat dampened the impact but it was a hard landing. In the seat on her right, her copilot Flight Officer Mehdi Moreau grunted and swore.
“Enemy detected,” Sheila the shuttle’s AI said through the comms in Kat’s ear. “Approximately two thousand kilometers northeast.”
“Not now, Sheila,” Kat said to the AI while she reversed thrust on the atmo engines. “Let’s just land this thing, shall we, sweetheart?”
“We’re too fast,” her copilot Mehdi Moreau said in the chair next to hers, his voice clear in her helmet comms. “Firing retros.”
“Wait, Mehdi,” Kat shouted at her copilot as the Lepus bounced its way along the outpost landing strip.
Mehdi hesitated, staring out the front window, then back at her. She watched his indecision with her peripheral vision while the view of the planet poured
in through the cockpit’s front windows.
Below the blue skies and wispy cloud, the peaks of the jagged, black volcanic horizon ahead were more like foothills than they were mountains but they were not her main concern. The airstrip under her wheels had been planed clean but even a rock the size of a molehill could take out their landing gear, stranding them on the surface for hours. That was assuming they could repair the damage before an alien army overran their position.
“The strip’s too short, Kat,” Mehdi shouted, the comms system reducing the volume of his voice so it did not blow out her ear drum. “It gets rough in less than—”
“Leave it,” she snapped. “And be quiet.”
Kat Xenakis had no need for anyone to tell her about the situation. She had data streaming on her control consoles, at arms’ reach in front and to either side of the pilot’s seat. She could see the planet out of the front window. She had data overlaid on her AugHud. They were eating up the length of the strip and the flight AI and Kat’s human copilot Mehdi were both panicking, in their own ways. Panicking that the shuttle was destined to smash nose-first into the rough ground beyond the end of the prepared ground if they did not fire their retro rockets and release the drogue chutes.
“Recommendation,” the AI said, in her perfectly clear tones. “Reduce braking, thirty percent. Immediate.”
Warnings flashed on her panels that the brakes on the landing gear wheels were over maximum recommended temperature. But Kat knew the maximum temperatures were conservative ones, set in part to prolong the life of the braking system. A system that could be replaced, if they ever made it back up to the Victory.
“Leave them, Sheila,” Kat said. “We’ll be okay.”
The AI was able to keep up with Kat’s decision-making speed. Rather, Kat’s nervous system had been surgically enhanced with the ERANS to speed up her physical reaction time, reduce her decision-making time and generally decrease the subjective passing of time.
Beside her, Mehdi seemed to Kat to be moving with painful slowness. Every move he made was like the man swam through invisible treacle. The bouncing of the gear suspension on the rugged surface was for her more like riding a sine wave than the boneshaking roughness the Marines in the back had to be feeling.
And Lieutenant Kat Xenakis had something that neither the AI nor her copilot Flight Officer Mehdi Moreau had.
With the adrenaline pumping, her enhanced mind ran almost as quickly as the AI and she could read the data streams almost as seamlessly but Kat had a greater risk tolerance than an AI did. But a tolerance tempered by her experience and her professionalism.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Mehdi, take your hand away from the retros. Don’t need them.”
“What about using RCS?” Mehdi said. “We got tons of fuel.”
“What’s the point?” Kat said. “You know they won’t do anything in-atmosphere, for God’s sake.”
“Twenty-five seconds until impact,” Sheila the Shuttle AI said.
The Lepus was slowing but the projection said they would overrun the landing strip by twenty meters, assuming the shuttle did not flip or roll immediately when it hit the unprepared area.
“Don’t say impact, sweetheart,” Kat said. “It’ll just be a tiny bump, if it’s anything.”
“A tiny bump straight into those mountains,” Mehdi said, through gritted teeth, hands hovering near the switches for the chutes and engines. He was exaggerating because the Lepus would certainly break apart before it hit the rising ground of the black hills.
The shuttle banged and swerved, hitting rough ground.
Warning lights flared: main engine fuel lines, battery compartments 4-6, and the rear right gear motors.
“Leave retros,” Kat said. She had no time to explain why. “We don’t need them to stop in time.”
“Overriding pilot control,” Sheila said, in her perpetually calm tone and perfect voice.
“No, you’re not,” Kat said, outraged. “Back off, Sheila, you traitorous bitch.”
Mehdi shouted over the noise of the warning alarms. “No point saving the retros if we rip the hull open on the surface.”
“Calm down, Mehdi,” Kat said. “Just keep your eyes out for those bloody aliens.”
It wasn’t about saving the retro rockets. The Lepus, her faithful shuttle was over its weight capacity yet again and the strain was beginning to tell. The shuttle was a marvel of engineering but it had never been tested for so many descents with such rapid turnarounds over the previous few weeks while the outpost was built. Just now, pulling out of the dive on the way down, she had put stresses on the frame that had threatened to rip off an engine or a wing. But the Lepus had held together. Now, she just had to ease the deceleration along the four-kilometer landing strip. Stopping too abruptly with the retros might finish the old bird off, break something structural that could not be easily fixed on the surface of this alien world.
Still, she had run out of landing strip.
The atmo engines gimballed fully into reverse position and she fired them up again, ten percent thrust for two seconds. The engines roared and the hull groaned.
Hold together, old girl.
Kat slammed hard into her harness and the shuttle vibrated hard with the stress, wheels sliding over the gravelly stone of the landing strip.
Sheila compensated automatically for the drift, behaving like a good AI for once and the shuttle straightened out as it came to a rolling stop.
Right at the end of the strip. A few meters ahead, the ground was uneven and strewn with boulders.
“Coolant leak, wheels five and six on rear right gear,” Mehdi said. “Sheila, reroute additional coolant to—”
“She knows her job,” Kat said. “Leave her to it and you do yours.”
“Alright, boss,” Mehdi said, slapping his quick release and scrambling out of his copilot’s chair and to the back of the cockpit where he shimmied up the ladder to the observation lock on the roof of the shuttle.
“Sheila, love, get the doors open.”
“Confirmed, beginning equalization sequence.”
“Captain Cassidy,” Kat said into the command channel. “We’re about get the doors open. Ten seconds. You may disembark your people.”
“Acknowledged,” the Marines Captain said, as calm as an AI. “Can you raise the outpost?”
“No way,” Kat said. “You should see the electromagnetic spectrum out here, Cassidy. It’s like pea soup.”
“Enemy forces?”
With all the interference, Kat could not get a clear reading. But Sheila had seen the enemy massing on the shuttle’s approach.”
“Still on the far side of the outpost, in the hills,” Kat said into the comms while she checked her systems. “But they would have seen us coming in to land and I’m willing to bet they’ll be rolling this way. Mehdi’s heading up to take a look.”
She had come in as low over the horizon as she’d dared and had to use the air breathing engines to boost them to the landing strip but the wheelhunters, approaching the outpost in their vehicles from out of the hills beyond, could not have missed the enormous human shuttle roaring out of the skies.
“Lieutenant Xenakis,” Cassidy said, “I’m sending up a couple of my guys with the copilot to provide overwatch while we unload the shuttle.”
“Alright,” Kat said, “I’ll try to remember they’re up there when I’m ready to take off.”
“ETA on your turnaround time?” Cassidy said.
“Sheila, what do you think? How are we doing?”
“No significant damage, turnaround time rated unsupported optimal.”
“Alright, Cassidy, I can be in the sky before your gear is out of my hold.”
“Glad to hear that, Lieutenant,” Cassidy said. “We’ll get the evacuees to you asap.”
“I’m heading back to help unload,” Kat said to Sheila while she unstrapped herself. “Keep an eye on things.”
“Affirmative,” Sheila said. “Taking full pilot control. Resisting u
rge to flee for orbit.”
“Hilarious,” Kat said as she climbed out of her chair. “Sometimes I think you’d be happy if I didn’t come back. Don’t bother to deny it, just keep your engines warm, alright, darling. Won’t be long.”
Checking her helmet was sealed tight, she let herself out of the cockpit door, heading for the cargo hold. Instead, the way was blocked by the most gigantic person to ever wear an armored combat suit. He was a little hunched over, ducking his head, and even so the top of his helmet grazed the ceiling. She’d not spoken to him much ever and she had barely seen him in person. Like all the subjects, the man was ridiculously huge but he was the biggest even of them. Kat tried to remember the standing orders about what she could say to him and what she had to avoid. She couldn’t remember clearly. She had drugged herself quite heavily during that briefing.
“Rama Seti,” Kat said. “You’re humanity’s most famous living hero. What the hell are you doing just standing there?”
He jumped, turned and peered down at her like she was a child underfoot. “Oh yeah. You’re the pilot, right? I was going to help but they told me to keep out of the way. Captain Cassidy, Sergeant Gruger. They said to keep out of the way until my team was deployed.”
Some hero. I don’t have time for this shit.
“Well, Mr. Seti,” Kat said, putting her hands on the armor plates at his hip and pushing him back from the cargo hold hatchway. “I have a shuttle to unload before I can take off again. My deck crew is up on the Victory so you can help me, come on.”
“Alright.”
“No time to waste. The aliens are coming,” she said and leapt down the ladder to the hold. The hero was surprisingly nimble, for an eight-foot giant in an armored combat suit.
The rear cargo hatch was fully open, exposing the black surface of the landing strip beyond, the wind of Arcadia tugging at the straps and cargo nets. That wet wind was endlessly gusting across the plateau, colliding with the nearby hills and tumbling in chaotic eddies around the outpost. She imagined what it would be like to feel that cold wind cutting into her exposed skin. Wet spray whipped up from the surface into her hair.
