Straker heard chuckles on the Guard channel, and he said privately to Loco, “Feisty minx, isn’t she?”
Loco replied, also privately, “Yeah, who wants a sheep for a girlfriend? Ah, don’t answer that. We ready?”
“Ready.” Straker went public again. “Guard mechsuits, prep for drop. We have no idea what the opposition looks like, except it’s unlikely to have heavy weapons or vehicles. Even so, don’t be complacent. You’re vulnerable to ADA during the drop. Spread out from each other, but stay near your squad leaders. Pop your canards as soon as you jump, and use them to reduce your terminal velocity. Do not burn fuel for jets unless you absolutely need to. You may need it to land, and it’ll only highlight you if they do have any big guns pointed at the sky. Ready?”
As soon as all acknowledge ready, he stepped out above the plantation marked below.
And floated there, of course, as there was no effective gravity. If he weren’t in a suit, he’d have performed a face-palm.
Fortunately, he still had line-of-sight down the tube to the outside. “Straker to Caribou.”
“Desautel here.”
“We’re stepping off. Start sending your landers in. Watch out for us—our drop will start very slow.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Straker out.” He used his thrusters to roll over, faced the ground and then gently triggered his jets. “I assume the first thousand klicks or so will be a slow acceleration,” he said to the mechsuiters.
Loco broke in. “Hey, boss... my HUD drop projection is drifting off target already. It says I’m heading toward the star instead of the ground!”
“Shit... mine is too. What the hell is going on?”
Zaxby’s voice broke in. “Physics, Derek Straker, that’s what.”
“Zaxby, where are you?”
“Hovering one kilometer from you, inside the cylinder. Underspace is quite convenient for passing through walls.”
Straker used his HUD to look in all directions until he spotted Zaxby’s new skimmer. “Good thing they didn’t have some kind of anti-underspace shielding.”
“I moved slowly, in case I struck a barrier. As there is only a trace of atmosphere here in the hub area, I decided to risk it. I’m glad I did, as you failed to take elementary physics into account. I’m now available to freely advise you.”
Straker realized what Zaxby meant. “Coriolis force, right?” As he fell toward the ground, the ground was moving under him. He’d have to lead his target.
“That’s not your only problem. Unless you accelerate yourself toward the ground, the star will pull you in with its gravity. Even if you do, it will influence your trajectory. There are multiple forces at work here.”
Straker tried to work it out in his head. “What’s the rotation period of the cylinder?”
“About twenty-five hours.”
“And our drop duration is about...” Straker told his SAI to calculate it. “Fourteen hours? Shit!”
He could hear Zaxby’s amusement through the comlink. “You’re 20,200 kilometers above the floor. Fortunately, the atmosphere is very thin until the last fifty kilometers. Un-fortunately, however, you will hit that last layer like a ripe melon strikes concrete, unless you use up a great deal of fuel controlling your descent—even if you manage to overcome all the forces affecting your accuracy.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” Straker said, almost panicking before he realized he’d barely moved two hundred meters from the axis. “Return to the rim.” He jetted easily back and planted his magnetic soles in the tube again, as did the rest of the mechsuiters.
“A wise decision,” Zaxby said.
Now that he was standing again, Straker could see Zaxby’s skimmer floating there like an elegant letter H, with her long twin engines and connecting hull between. “Okay, brainiac, what do you suggest?”
“I suggest you step out of the way,” Zaxby said.
“What? Oh.” Straker and the mechsuits stepped over the rim and onto the wall, changing orientation ninety degrees. Suddenly, instead of perching atop a wall, he seemed to be standing on a vast plain, looking into the circular pit of the access tube—through which a lander was rapidly progressing.
“We have twelve landers,” Zaxby continued. “I suggest two mechsuits ride each lander to a point fifty kilometers above the target, at which point they can drop normally.”
“Can the landers handle the tonnage?”
“As long as they don’t have to actually land with that weight on them, they will do fine—just like a small ship in space can push a million-ton asteroid. As long as the atmosphere is thin and the landers remain floating inside this construct. The fact that it is rotating around them is irrelevant to the physics of the situation. In fact, the biggest danger to a non-spinning, unpowered object within this construct is its tendency to fall into the starlet.”
“Gods and monsters, this is too complicated!”
“Ah, those words are music to a Ruxin brainiac’s ears,” Zaxby said smugly. “They confirm our inherent superiority.”
Straker ground his teeth, unable to win a contest of rhetoric with Zaxby and forced himself to remain above it all—figuratively as well as literally. “Okay, we’ll do as you say. Zaxby, take charge of this lander flotilla and guide us down to drop altitude. What’s our ETA?”
“About four hours. The landers will match rotation with the ground, but I will provide all the parameters to the pilots and the lander SAIs as it is a complex flight plan—a form of orbital mechanics in reverse.”
“Great, great. Get it done, Zaxby.”
“Of course, I shall save the day yet again. Step aboard this first lander, please, General Straker, and one other mechsuiter as well.”
Straker stepped carefully onto the landing skid, magnetizing his soles and gauntlets. One of his squad took the other side. “Once you’re on a lander and the lander pilot’s happy with the mass distribution, freeze your mechsuits and relax,” he instructed his mechsuiters. “Take a nap or play a vidgame, because we’re stuck in position until drop time.”
Chapter 27
Straker, in his mechsuit, inside Utopia
“All landers, report when ready for drop,” Straker said as the landers approached fifty kilometers in altitude. Below him he could see a landscape spreading from the nearby world-wall out into the distance toward the far side.
At this height details were scarce, but his SAI and HUD allowed him to zoom in and see the plantation below—a semicircle backed up against the rising world-wall. “Wall” was a deceptive term at ground level, for it curved and blended into the flat surface like a mountainside falling away to a plain. In fact, the mechsuits could probably land on the mountains many kilometers above the settlement and run down the steep slope, but that would waste time.
The lander engines had been firing intermittently for some time, matching rotation with the Dyson cylinder. Now, they led the movement of the surface by the precise distance needed to drop the mechsuits.
But even “drop” was incorrect, Straker knew. He’d spent the last four hours getting his mind around the idea that the surface generated no significant actual gravity—not that those inside could feel. Instead, it was centrifugal force that kept things on the ground, just like in a spinning hab—so the suits wouldn’t actually fall when released. They had to be aimed and pushed toward the surface laterally, at an angle intersecting the landing zone.
Once on the ground the centrifugal force would act in most ways like gravity, indistinguishable to the average being. Until then it was a tricky, multi-body problem in motion.
“All landers ready. You’re lined up, sir,” the lander chief comlinked. “You need to step off in twenty seconds.”
“Roger, Chief. Thanks for the ride. Straker out. Break-break: Straker to all mechsuits. Release magnetics and step off gently in ten, nine...”
When the countdown reached zero, Straker demagnetized his suit and leaned outward. The thinnest of atmosphere wafted him away from the lander, a
nd suddenly he found himself sailing at an angle toward the ground. He oriented his body and his suit like a skydiver and waited until all the landers had thrustered upward, letting the suits lead.
“Canards out,” he said, and popped his drop winglets for extra control and drag. “Match my motion and stay in formation. Wherever we land, we land together.”
His HUD showed all the mechsuits with canards out, under control. With SAI assistance, he aimed his suit down the virtual pipeline his HUD showed. When he started to drift off target, a burst of jets brought him back to his proper trajectory.
Forty kilometers, then thirty-five... he was traveling at high speed, approaching the ground obliquely. Really, he and the other suits were traveling in straight lines, but the ground itself, the inside of a wheel, was curving up to meet them. To compensate, the aiming pipeline also curved, flatter and flatter.
At thirty kilometers, the atmosphere thickened enough to feel its bite on his suit and canards. Terminal velocity fell with the drag, slowly, slowly. At twenty kilometers—20,000 meters—he started to feel as if he were truly dropping as the ground hurried toward him. His HUD pipeline rose and he struggled to stay in it, buffeted by cloudy air. Finally, he found himself in true atmosphere with winds and weather, the sky around him turning bluish with refraction effects.
His HUD told him the landers were following the drop down without difficulty now the mechsuits—each actually heavier than a lander—weren’t attached. The mechsuit battle-net hadn’t spotted any ADA below—no sensors questing for skyborne targets to shoot down.
Why should they? Utopia, or whatever the Korveni named it, was well hidden, and defended from the outside. Why waste effort on ground-based ADA?
That’s what Straker hoped, anyway. That’s what his brainiacs assessed.
But that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be resistance. The Korveni were no pushovers. That was why he’d brought mechsuits, and not merely marines. Expend ammo and fuel, not lives.
Belatedly, he wondered how he’d get the mechsuits off Utopia. Probably with skimmers, shuttling them out through underspace. Diving into that strange dimension from within atmo was no problem, unlike emerging into atmo.
10,000 meters. 5,000, the altitude where people could skydive for fun without oxygen or special protection on most planets. This kind of drop was exciting, but not what he would call “fun.”
Now he fired his jets, again and again, matching vectors with the ground and killing his approach speed like a winged aerospace plane coming in for a landing. One minute to touchdown. Drops burned fuel, and mechsuiters liked to immediately resupply from co-dropped modules... but there were none this time.
No resistance, no flak came up at him. His pilots kept excellent formation above the settlement below, which had three semicircles, three arcs like half of a three-tiered wedding cake. Each arc’s ends were anchored against the rising wall.
There wasn’t enough room to land safely within the walls—too many houses, barns and structures. His telescopic optics showed him humanoids working in fields and gardens, wagons pulled by animals, some mechanized farm equipment and a few groundcars... Trying to land there might crush or burn civilians.
Therefore, Straker’s chosen landing point was necessarily outside the third wall, in what looked to be crop fields extending out into the wilderness and eventually merging into savannah. A river paralleled the world-wall some five kilometers out with irrigation canals connecting it to the fields. Near the river he spotted large herds of animals watering and throwing up clouds of dust.
“Boss, I see gun emplacements on the walls,” Loco comlinked. “Light artillery or autocannon. Korveni manning them.”
“Got ’em,” Straker replied, zooming in. “All suits, go active now. You are weapons free. Take out those gun emplacements.”
He used his last thirty seconds of flight to pump two force-cannon shots into two separate gun emplacements. They blew with satisfying secondary explosions.
And then he was down, stalling on jets and canards before retracting the winglets as he landed on his feet. Around him, the crop caught fire—not something he’d thought of until now.
“Deploy into line, facing the settlement,” he told his pilots. “Move in, kill any Korveni you see. Watch out for friendlies.”
He strode toward the first wall, which had gaps ripped in it where the gun emplacements had been. Scanning ahead he saw nothing heavier than a few Korveni combat cars mounting heavy slugthrowers and light lasers—racing to meet them. A few well-aimed gatling shots ripped the vehicles to shreds and slaughtered the Korveni troops.
A human crawled out of one of the burning armored cars and collapsed—the driver, it seemed. “Shit. We might have friendlies driving their vehicles.”
“Or maybe they’re pirates too—collaborators,” Loco replied. “These people have been here twenty years, boss. Damn, look out!”
This last exclamation was prompted by Jilani’s ship swooping low and landing in a blast of jets just inside the wall, laser turret spitting beams at a squad of Korveni taking cover behind a wooden barn that wouldn’t have been out of place a thousand years ago on Old Earth. The barn caught fire immediately.
Return fire peppered Jilani’s ship, and then a rocket shot by—narrowly missing as she landed.
“What the hell does she think she’s doing?” Loco snarled. “She’s gonna get herself killed!”
“Go cover her, Loco. Resistance is light—nothing we can’t handle without you.”
“Roger that, boss.” Loco raced forward to riddle the Korveni squad with gatling fire. Once sure the threat was eliminated, he stood next to Jilani’s ship looking for more targets. A ramp dropped, and the woman stepped out onto the soil of Utopia clad in unpowered combat armor. Her blaster was at the ready.
“Everybody hold up inside the outermost wall,” Straker ordered. The settlement rose up the hill in front of him. This allowed him to see most of it with his suit sensors. “We have visibility on the area, and it looks like they have nothing that can touch mechsuits.”
Behind the line of mechsuits, the landers set down in the burning fields and disgorged battlesuited Hok.
“Straker to Major 24,” he comlinked. “Deploy and secure the settlement by squads. Eliminate all Korveni and all other resistance. Spare any noncombatants you find, and take prisoner any surrendering non-Korven. The mechsuits will back you up and provide overwatch. Lander chief, see if you can put out these field fires, or at least keep them from spreading inward.”
An hour later, Major 24 reported the settlement secured. The field fires were out. The mechsuits stood like sentinels around the village with its dusty streets and low buildings. The Hok patrolled and killed stray Korveni. Most of the pirates had come out to aggressively attack the invaders, which allowed the Breakers to shoot them down that much faster.
Now, the people of the settlement appeared in windows, on porches and sidewalks, staring with obvious curiosity as it became clear the military machinery wasn’t hurting them. Many were thin and downtrodden with haunted eyes and fear etched on their faces. Others, mostly men, seemed hard-faced and angry.
A mix of people gathered in the village square around a large square and three-storied stone keep. The smoke and flame of battle still sputtered from it. Standing at the edge of the plaza, Straker examined it from within his mechsuit, and then asked Major 24 about the structure.
“Apparently it’s a guardhouse and command location, sir! Quarters for fifty Korveni, small arms and weapon emplacements, sir! It also mounts primitive public announcement equipment—loudspeakers, sir!”
“Thanks. Straker out.”
“Roger that, sir! Major 24 out, sir!”
This must be where the overseers had dictated their orders to the populace. Despite the thinness of some people, the settlement seemed reasonably prosperous. Then he noticed a horizontal line of wooden crosses mounted on all four sides of the square keep. Some of them were occupied with decomposing bodies, nailed to
the thick wood with spikes through their wrists, pelvises and feet.
Straker figured Jilani’s people should be jumping for joy at being liberated, waving banners and throwing flowers, but they weren’t—not even when she walked among them toward the keep. Once she removed her helmet they crowded around her, the only human figure with a visible face. As Straker watched, they chattered and touched her with their fingertips as if to confirm she was real, but they seemed in a daze.
“Loco, let’s you and me dismount and join Captain Jilani,” Straker said. “The rest of you pilots, keep on your toes. Remember how the Korveni base was booby-trapped. There still might be surprises.”
“Now you’re talking, boss.” Loco cracked his suit and leaped down to the flagstones of the plaza in his battlesuit, startling some locals. He retracted his helmet and said loudly, smiling and waving, “Buongiorno! Buongiorno! Come va? Come va?”
Straker did the same, without the banal Italian greetings, and then stepped out of his battlesuit before telling his mechsuit SAI to retrieve it remotely for security. The mechsuit opened and obediently walked the battlesuit into its cockpit before closing.
It was a small risk to walk among the people without the powered armor, but his skinsuit was proof against most hand weapons, and there were Hok all over the area. He wanted to show the people he was human—not a conqueror but a liberator.
“Hello—hello, anyone speak Earthan?” he said as he strolled. Most of the people gawked fearfully and stayed back, except for a few curious boys who laughed and called out unknown words. Few girls were visible, and those he could see had their hands firmly held by suspicious elders or were hustled back into the buildings out of sight.
When he reached the base of the keep, he found Loco and Jilani talking to a thin, beaten-down older man who stood clutching a crude straw hat and bobbing his head.
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