by B. V. Larson
Lately, I’d had a new set of problems. Not all my marines were human now. I found that the Centaur troops operated best on modified versions of our self-mobile disks. We’d changed the name from skateboard to surfboard, as they were longer and more powerful. These units could carry a marine with full kit across a star system if necessary, but we rarely went more than a few million miles on them.
The Centaur troops liked them a lot, because they could travel in space without having to be confined in a tight compartment. Even after the Microbial baths Marvin had worked out to change their brains slightly, the Centaurs still shied away from being crammed into a troop pod. Riding the surfboard gave them freedom of movement and more wide-open vistas than anyone could want.
The problem with surfboards came into play when dealing with a large planet that possessed an atmosphere. They simply couldn’t drop fast enough to the target. As any old-fashioned paratroop will tell you, dropping from a high altitude into a battlefield is not a fun experience. You’re completely exposed up there. In a modern combat environment with automated anti-air weaponry that could pinpoint a missile and fire in less than a second, floating down on the breezes was unacceptable. You had to get down to the ground in a hot LZ as fast as technologically possible in order to survive the enemy AA.
I knew the machines would be gunning for us when I left Eden, so I’d left most of the Centaurs behind. I’d come out with human marines and our latest designs for encapsulated drops.
The men had a special term for these new contraptions. They called them “torpedoes”—or, if they were in a sour mood, “flying coffins”. I’d decided to stick to the first term as it was more positive and slightly more accurate. The units actually looked like torpedoes or old dumb-bombs when they were dropped from space. They were about ten feet long with sleek ceramic exteriors made to absorb heat. That was their primary purpose: to allow our troops to drop from orbit at extreme speeds without burning up in the target planet’s atmosphere. They were designed for single use and used simple materials, so they could be mass-manufactured by our Macro factories.
We had two kinds of alien production units: Macro systems and Nano systems. Our Macro units were big, dumb and amazingly powerful. They produced things like the hulls of our ships and our biggest generators. The smaller factories, courtesy of the Nanos, were much smaller and produced finer goods. Most of these were made up of nanites, which could be used to make almost anything from intelligent brainboxes to smart metal walls. Of the two, the Nano units were probably more valuable to Star Force, but I always wanted and needed both types of factories.
I decided to go down with the first wave. Sandra wasn’t happy about this, and she let her feelings be known about ten minutes after I’d made my decision.
She found me in the main passageway less than a hundred yards from the sally port. I was wearing my heavy exoskeletal armor, and trotting happily for the exit when she appeared in front of me, hands on hips and eyes blazing.
I pulled up short, clanking and screeching to a stop. Around me, about five hundred other troops kept thundering by. They gave me smirks as they went by, no doubt knowing what I was in for before I did. My relationship with Sandra was well-known among the troops. Few of them talked about it in my presence, but I found it slightly embarrassing anyway.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded.
“To Yale,” I said, “the hard way. Now, please step aside so I can invade this moon, Sandra.”
“I would like to have a little talk with you first.”
I hesitated. As always, probably since time immemorial, I weighed my options when confronting my girl. Sure, I could blow her off and soldier on. But sometimes putting up the pretense of listening carefully to her complaints could defuse a major blowup later on down the line.
Against my better judgment, I stepped into an alcove stuffed with emergency equipment. There were fire hoses, med-packs and nanite injection kits strapped to every surface. I had to place my foot-wide armored boots carefully to avoid smashing anything with them.
“These suits are getting more bulky every day,” I complained. “I think the next generation should be lighter and more mobile.”
“Whatever they look like, I don’t want you wearing one,” she said. “At least not without a very good reason.”
It was about then another person wandered into the alcove with us. It was none other than Lieutenant Alexa Brighton. Her eyes were wider than ever. I wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen a company of marines in full battle-kit before. She looked stunned. Unfortunately, she also provided the marching line of men something interesting to look at. They paused at the alcove, examining the scene. They looked at the two women in confusion for a second, then suddenly brightened. Several of them grinned and gave me the thumbs-up behind Sandra’s back. It took me a second to realize what was going on: they thought Sandra had caught me with the girl. It had happened before, and the results were legendary.
I did my best to ignore them as they tramped steadily by. This was difficult, as the level of noise a line of power-armored marines made was near that of a passing freight train.
“This discussion will have to wait,” I told her. “I’ve got a planet to save.”
“Why do you have to go down there personally?” Sandra hissed at me.
I heaved a sigh. Lieutenant Brighton stared at the two of us with an expression of dazed curiosity, but didn’t interrupt.
“I’m a marine, first and foremost,” I said. “I’m going down with the troops to personally oversee the defense of Yale. I can’t do that as well from space.”
“Yes, but you’re risking your life for a small benefit,” Sandra argued.
My face twisted in annoyance. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I always am.”
“No you’re not always fine. Sometimes you lose an arm, or something.”
“We’ve got the best medical now,” I chuckled. “I’ll grow a new one.”
The women studied me for a moment. I had to wonder what Alexa was thinking.
Two more passing marines paused and made a slightly obscene motion behind the women. Then they high-fived one another and trotted away. I frowned, but decided to pretend I hadn’t noticed.
“You know what I think?” Sandra said. “I think you just can’t keep out of the excitement. I think you love it too much, Kyle. It will kill you one day.”
“What do you think, Lieutenant?” I asked, turning to her.
Alexa thought about it for a second. “I think I’d like to go down with you. It does look exciting.”
This wasn’t the response either Sandra or I had expected.
“No way,” Sandra said, eyes blazing. “You’re staying up here with me.”
Alexa dropped her eyes and nodded. I felt a moment of compassion for the girl. Sandra had probably been a harsh woman to follow around. If Alexa wanted to drop with me, Sandra had to be giving her hell.
“That’s right,” I said, “it’s out of the question. You have no armor training, no nanites, and no place in ground-based operation.” I turned to Sandra. “Has she been giving you any good information about Earth?”
“Yes,” Sandra said. “Her father is very highly ranked. She has a lot of stories to tell. Things aren’t going well back home, Kyle. It’s turned into some kind of crazy cult-of-personality dictatorship.”
I nodded, unsurprised. Crow had always been big on himself and he’d wanted total power since day one. Now, except for the stellar frontier, he had it.
“When I get back in a few days, we’ll go over it in detail,” I said. “Thanks for your help, Lieutenant.”
She nodded, and I turned to go.
A thin arm like a steel band blocked my way. I could have tossed Sandra aside, but I didn’t. I turned back to her.
I had my visor open and she pushed her face into it. It wasn’t easy to kiss a man in full power-armor, but she managed it. She practically had to climb onto my suit to do it.
Hooting broke out f
rom the hallway full of streaming marines before we disengaged. A general cheer arose as I finally turned and trotted with the rest of them before she could think of another way to delay me.
I stepped onto a circular pad about twenty feet in diameter. Above me, a loud hissing sound erupted. I knew this was the hydraulics issuing a new pod. Just in time, I snapped down my visor and put my arms flat at my sides.
There was a crashing sound and everything went dark for second. If seemed as if someone had dropped a safe on my head. It was the drop-pod being lowered by powerful nanite-arms. The pod snapped into place and I felt as if I were being picked up—because I was.
Inside full power-armor it’s easy to feel claustrophobic under the best of circumstances, but when they seal you in a flying coffin on top of it all and throw you out into space, the sensation is inescapable. The circular pad was really a smart metal door. Once the pod was in place, the pad had disintegrated and let me fall through it into the firing chamber.
Dropping us like bombs wasn’t good enough for Star Force. Some underling of mine had determined more speed was needed. Under the launch pad was a long tube that essentially served as a cannon. I, inside my tight ceramic pod, was the cannonball.
There was spinning, rolling sensation for a moment as I was aimed downward, headfirst. Then the cannon fired.
A terrific shock of force struck my shoulders and skull as I was hurled out of the bottom of the ship. Accelerating at about thirty Gs for a brief period, I knew what it felt like to be a bullet. I shot downward, encased in darkness.
The acceleration was painful, but brief. The pod was carrying me downward with fantastic speed toward the planet’s surface. As I dropped, the speed slowly increased.
It was a grim sensation, being locked inside this thing. There were no screens to look at, just a few readouts from my helmet’s HUD. Except for numbers like altitude and speed printed in colored digital numbers on the inside of my visor, I was cut off from the world.
When falling into a planet’s atmosphere from space, there was always a few minutes of radio blackout. It was an empty, gnawing feeling. You were already alive or you were already dead, and there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.
Those few minutes passed, and I was still breathing. The pod tumbled until I was falling feet-first. The next question in my mind was easy: was I over the right target?
Finally, data began streaming into my helmet. A few details about the ground flashed up, displayed in 2D as elevations. Piled shapes spiked up toward my descending rear-end. The spikes grew and my feet hurt just looking at them. The protrusions were mountains, of course. Rugged mountains crusted in coral and lime deposits. They’d been at the bottom of a black ocean a few weeks ago. Now, I was about to walk on them.
The retros fired next, and slammed up into my feet. I wasn’t really ready for the shock, even though I should have been. I made a mental note to add a warning buzzer when this transition was five seconds from hitting the men riding in these tin cans. If my knees had been locked at that moment—well, it would have hurt.
Massive G forces slammed up into my boots, shocking my entire body. I’d been relatively comfortable and weightless a second before, freefalling at about ten thousand miles per hour. Now, that velocity had to be reduced. I gritted my teeth and strained my muscles. Everything hurt. The burn seemed to go on longer that the initial firing had, primarily because I’d been building up some velocity on the long fall into Yale’s gravity-well.
I almost had a heart attack when the final stage began. The pod around me blew apart. It flashed open and fell in eight twirling, burning pieces.
I was freefalling now, and since I hadn’t really been ready for it, I inverted, then rolled right side up, then found myself inverted again. I was in a tumble.
I fought the suit’s controls and cursed myself for not having done practice jumps with this new drop-pod system. The ground was alarmingly close.
About a second after I got my feet under me and the automatic stabilizers kicked in, I hit the ground. I landed on an ancient seabed, which was now dry for the first time in probably a billion years. My boots hit the surface and kept on going, punching through the crust and into the slimy mud beneath. When I was about three feet down, my boots found solid rock.
That stopped me.
I could move my arms, but not my legs. They were buried like a spearhead from space in the mountainside. There was something all around me, something that looked like drifting snow.
It took me a dazed second to realize it was salt and sand and dried-out crap from the ocean floor. I’d hit with such force I’d fired up a plume of debris.
I was on the surface of Yale.
I wondered hazily how many alien worlds I’d walked on in total—I’d lost count by now.
-16-
“You okay, sir?”
To me, in my slightly dazed state of mind, the question seemed to come from inside my helmet. I didn’t immediately associate it with anyone in my surroundings. The voice was familiar, but my brains were addled—it took me a second to think about who it was… After a moment, I had it.
“Kwon?”
“Of course, sir,” he said.
A big shadow fell over me. Something grabbed my gloves and pulled.
“Just let me get you out of there, Colonel,” he said. “You’re gonna be fine.”
I realized that Kwon was standing over me, tugging at me as if I were a nail sunk halfway into a chunk of wood. It was an embarrassing situation, and I forced myself to get going. I knew that if Kwon was there, others were close by. I didn’t want to look as bad off as I felt.
I had to appear to know what the hell I was doing, at least. Half of leadership, in my opinion, entails appearing to be strong and confident—even if you aren’t. If you’re feeling weak and you let the men know it, they get nervous.
I began churning my power-suited knees. White dust plumed up. Brownish-green slime from under the crusty surface layer came up next, fountaining out of the growing hole around my legs.
“You must of hit pretty hard, sir,” Kwon said when he had me out and standing on the mountainside.
All around us, Marines were busy helping one another, securing equipment and looking for targets. Nothing threatened us immediately, but I was sure the machines knew we were here and would be taking action against us soon.
“Did we lose anybody?” I asked.
“No sir. Not in this unit.”
“Excellent!” I said, trying not to sound too surprised. “Let’s form up the company and head downslope. I want us dug in around the waist of the mountain, then we’ll call in the next battalions.”
“They already coming down, sir,” Kwon said, pointing upward.
I tilted back my helmet to the limit. The neck region on these power-suits only rotated so far. The sky was full of burning, falling objects. They moved too fast to be flares, but too slow to be meteors. They were drop-pods, hundreds of them.
“All right, everyone move downslope!” I roared. “Get them moving, Kwon. Those drop-capsules will make quite a dent in the helmet of any marine left in this LZ.”
Kwon gazed up at the falling stars overhead. His big mouth gaped open. “You think they might hit us?”
“The chances of a direct collision are small, but I want everyone moving downslope just in case. We can setup firing positions in case the enemy is deploying to contain us.”
Kwon began roaring and clapping his metal gauntlets together. The sound was teeth-jarring, even through the thick helmet I was wearing. I couldn’t argue with his results, however. The marines responded as if kicked, trotting down the salt and brine crusted mountainside. They created a small avalanche of dead seabed materials which was kicked ahead by their pounding metal boots.
I joined the herd and trotted downslope, using my suit’s grav-power now and then. In these new, heavier suits it wasn’t a good idea to fly unless it was really necessary. The armor was thicker and therefore the mass to be moved was
greater. Power consumption during flight was an issue and I didn’t know how long it would be before I was able to get a fresh charge.
The atmosphere became steadily thicker as we descended and was so full of dust and steam by the time I reached the rocky spur we were planning to call home, I couldn’t see more than a hundred yards in any direction. It was as if I’d been immersed in a massive, clinging fog.
“This is good enough,” I told Kwon. “We’re about four thousand feet above the new sea-level. That’ll give the enemy a hard climb to get up to our positions. I want everyone digging in right here. Once he has a trench large enough to cover himself, each man is to keep right on digging. Every marine is to dig enough trench-space to shield three men. We’re expecting more companies from above soon, and they might not have time to dig their own foxholes.”
There was some grumbling as Kwon relayed these orders. The officers of the company we were embedded with were doing most of the grousing. They felt I was taking direct command of their unit—which I was. But I didn’t lose my temper with them as they didn’t offer any direct objections. I could understand how they felt. Having brass in the middle of your team taking your decisions away wasn’t fun.
Digging the holes themselves was nothing like the grim chore of yesteryear. We had powerful, whining suits of armor on that did most of the work. Every movement was accentuated and exaggerated. We bent, we lifted and we moved massive mouthfuls of loose earth with every scoop. Even if we’d been doing the job without power-suits, our nanotized bodies would have found the work acceptable. Wearing what amounted to a forklift folded around your arms and legs made it positively easy.
Joining the fun, I deployed two scoops, which fanned out from my gauntlets. Each of these was smart metal and about a foot across. I felt like I was pantomiming the motions as I shoved the blades into the ground and heaped up an earthen wall in no time.