by C H Gideon
Hurry up and wait. I live for that shit.
She drew a cleansing breath, nervously checking her mech’s various data streams and triple-checking the manual controls. What had once been a mere pre-deployment ritual, learned after hundreds of hours of practice in simulators, was now seared into her brain after the deployment on Durgan’s Folly when she didn’t have a functioning neural link to her mech.
She looked down at her fingertips, seeing the traces of scars from the abuse she had put them through on that hellhole of a world. Doc Fellows had assured her that another couple rounds of nerve regeneration therapy would restore the last of her fingers’ sensation, except that therapy would have to wait.
Her comm board lit up with the launch countdown timer, showing three minutes to drop. The corners of her mouth twitched upward. The wait was over.
It was time to link up with her mech.
Activating the link required less thought than it took to blink an eye, and once active, the link washed her body with a familiar string of sensations. Just one in eighty humans had brain structures which permitted long-term linkage of the type used for directly controlling an external vehicle. Xi happened to be exceptionally suited to neural linkage, which combined with her extraordinary reflexes and focus made her a one-in-ten-million candidate. That was the reason they pulled her from prison and put her in a mech.
She went through the ritual of checking her direct neural inputs, seeing the correct indicators light up across her board as she completed a hundred and thirty-two distinct inputs in less than three seconds. Once satisfied her link was up, she raised the rest of the company on their dedicated channel.
“2nd Company,” Xi called, “link up and relay drop status.”
Her command board flared to life as each of the Jocks under her command verified their links and drop-readiness.
“All right.” She nodded approvingly. “2nd Company, sound off.”
Lieutenant Eugene Ford, her Company XO and 5th Platoon’s CO, was first to reply, “Forktail here, drippin’ venom.”
Next came Lieutenant Nakamura, 6th Platoon’s CO and Xi’s third-in-command. “Wolverine, snikt snikt.”
“Masamune, razor sharp.”
“Sam Kolt, makin’ us equal.”
“Eclipse here. The blacker, the better.”
“Cave Troll. Big and filthy.”
“Widowmaker, breaking hearts.”
“Gym-Cricket, wishing on a star.”
“White Zombie, more human than human.”
“Heavy Metal Jesus, thunder-strikin.’”
“Holy Diver, riding midnight seas.”
Xi nodded in satisfaction before finishing, “Elvira, clicking my heels.” She switched to Elvira’s closed-circuit intercom, “All crew report ready for drop.”
“Ready, Captain,” Chief Lu, her new Wrench, acknowledged. His voice was tight and anxious. Perfect.
“Ready, ma’am,” Private Staubach replied more confidently.
“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me, Blinky,” she quipped. “My twentieth birthday’s coming up in three months, which makes me the youngest person aboard this bug. Captain, Cap, or Elvira will do just fine on the closed-circuit.”
“Yes, m…I mean, yes, Captain,” Blinky replied nervously, causing Xi to grin with satisfaction. They were all on their toes, which was precisely where they needed to be.
The drop timer reached thirty-seconds-to-go, and the Bonhoeffer’s deployment clamps clanged loudly against Elvira’s drop-can.
“This is it, kids,” Xi called over the company-wide. “Watch your altimeters, velocity, and initial approach angle to adjust trajectory as needed to avoid burnup, but no maneuvering thrusters after drop-plus-twenty-seconds. Pop your chutes at the deck but don’t burn the brakes until you hit the red-zone. Let’s get wheels-down ASAP.”
A rapid sequence of acknowledging flickers appeared on the display before her. She could just as easily have piped the company reports directly into her neural linkage, but unlike most, she had little difficulty switching back and forth between her real eyes and Elvira’s myriad of cameras. In her mind, the less clutter she put in her combat-feeds, the better.
As the counter reached the last few seconds, she felt her own nerves begin to fray and she called out, “Drop in five…four…three…two…one… Drop!”
The drop-can released from the Bonhoeffer’s clamps, and the external video feeds sprang to life to show the white orb of Shiva’s Wrath below. Looming beyond the relatively tiny planetoid was the blue-green gas giant that served as its parent. Xi focused on her initial approach trajectory and, after a few seconds’ calculation, she fired her drop-can’s thrusters to re-orient the flat, rectangular container that held her mech.
The thrusters roared to life, pitching her bow up and rolling the can to an upside-down orientation per drop protocols. The pure-white horizon of Shiva’s Wrath loomed below as Xi worked to fine-tune her approach vector.
Suddenly, one of the can’s four thrusters died, causing it to briefly pitch as the other three continued burning for a quarter-second before she could cut their fuel supply.
“Get my thruster back, Lu,” she snapped before isolating control for that thruster and carefully re-igniting the other three. If she didn’t trim more off their angle, she would risk a fatal approach velocity that her parachutes and braking jets might not be able to overcome.
“On it, Captain,” Lu replied tersely, but the seconds ticked by and nothing happened. Her thruster-fire window was closing. Fast. She needed that last thruster angle.
“I need that thruster, Chief,” she growled, performing a quick calculation and finding there was nothing else she could do until he gave her back the fourth thruster. They were barely on the survivable end of the approach angle spectrum and had only another five seconds she could fire her thrusters before they would be unable to adequately compensate.
The thruster sprang back to life. “Three Thruster back online, Captain.”
He hadn’t spoken the second word before she was already burning all four at maximum. The can’s approach vector slowly climbed until it was just over one percent above the minimum-survivable angle for her drop can’s profile.
Going against her own pre-drop instructions, she let the thrusters burn for another two seconds before their fuel supplies were fully exhausted. “Yeah, yeah,” she muttered, imagining the razzing her company would give her when they found out about the breach of protocol, “sue me.”
The topside of the drop-can began to glow yellow-orange as it kissed the thin atmosphere of the frigid world below. The planetoid’s embrace intensified with each passing second, but thankfully, the icy worldlet’s atmosphere was thin enough that the display was rather less spectacular than drops into dense-atmospheres like those on nearly all of the Terran colonies.
The unfortunate side of the thin atmosphere was that it would provide significantly less braking effect as the drop-cans skipped through and accelerated toward the surface, which made drop-chutes and braking thrusters even more important.
To compensate, the cans had been put into extremely narrow and precise approach vectors, which kept them in the atmosphere for as long as possible.
But even Shiva’s Wrath had enough gas in its atmosphere to make the drop-can, and everything in it, begin to vibrate with worrisome intensity.
She performed a quick damage check of the can’s topside and found nothing remarkable. But the simulations had suggested this level of vibration would not take place for several more minutes.
“Diagnostics,” she barked over the intercom.
“It looks like Three Engine’s housing took some damage,” Private Staubach promptly replied, and Xi re-oriented one of the drop-can’s external cameras onto Three Engine to find that there was damage to its external housing.
“Manually isolate all feeds to Three Engine,” she commanded while doing so remotely. She didn’t like the idea of making her people get out of their drop-couches during approach, but they simply
couldn’t afford to have Three Engine’s pending destruction impact the rest of their systems.
Lu hesitated for a trio of seconds before acknowledging, “Yes, Captain.”
She gritted her teeth, knowing that Podsy would have jumped out of his drop-couch before she had ordered him to. Thankfully, Lu was technically competent and completed the task in twelve seconds, evidenced by a thrill of sensory feedback sent through her neural link showing that a handful of fuel and coolant lines had been manually closed off.
“Three Engine isolated,” Lu reported as he clicked back into his “crash-couch,” as they had come to be known.
“Good work,” she replied, and a few minutes later, the glowing, damaged engine was torn completely off its mount. With it gone, the vibrations temporarily abated, and the drop-can continued its parabolic trajectory toward the surface of Shiva’s Wrath. Xi hoped no one was coming in behind them to get clocked by the engine. Most of the times, the drop-cans maintained separation, but sometimes, atmospherics funneled them together.
The drop-can’s approach vector arced gently toward the surface of the planet, and eventually resumed its vibration, but this time, it did so in accordance with what the simulations predicted. Xi had no way of checking on the rest of her company until they touched down and freed their mechs, which would happen in another eight minutes if all went according to plan.
Consciously, she knew it was all a matter of physics that gave the vehicles no choice in how they manifested. Mass, velocity, gravity, air drag—these variables had been pre-calculated and were now playing out like some kind of unholy Rube Goldberg machine, which held her people’s fate in its convoluted machinations. She rationally knew that nothing could be done to change their date with the surface, but that didn’t banish her mounting anxiety during what was only her second combat drop.
The minutes thankfully ticked by as the company’s drop proceeded according to plan, and soon the surface of the world below dominated her fields of view. The “deck,” which was slightly different for each drop-can due to their physical profiles and drop characteristics, was less than thirty seconds away. It was time to flip the can topside-up.
“Flipping the coin,” she declared, using the same terminology she had employed during the myriad simulations.
She test-ignited the orienting rockets, found them all in working order, and waited for the ideal moment to flip the can with a controlled, asymmetrical burn of chemical drivers.
The drop-can slowly rotated, just like in the simulations. Once it had achieved landing orientation, it remained there by the force of a hundred micro-rockets automatically regulating the can’s orientation.
“Prepare for chute deployment,” she intoned over the intercom.
The “deck” approached, and when Elvira’s can hit that precise altitude, Xi deployed the drop-chute. Her deployment input was logged so precisely that she only missed the bulls-eye by one two-hundredth of a second, a personal best after three hundred simulated runs.
A swarm of parachutes, each connected to the drop-can via carbon-fiber lines, blasted up from the still-glowing topside and deployed in perfectly-coordinated succession. Twenty-one distinct chutes blossomed, filling the sky and causing everyone inside Elvira’s cabin to snap down into their crash-couches. If they hadn’t correctly braced for the lurch, someone might have lost a tooth. Or worse.
But the chutes’ deceleration was nothing compared to what they were about to experience.
The chutes slowed their descent, but their impact was far less than would have been on a world with a thicker atmosphere. They flashed through the green-zone deck in a matter of seconds and fell through the yellow-zone only marginally slower.
“Brace for braking thrusters,” she called, wincing in anticipation as the red-zone approached at a frantic pace.
This time when the drop-can fell past the red-zone marker, she missed by just under a tenth of a second. She would have snarled in frustration at such poor reactions, but the sudden jerk of the thrusters firing in unison was punishment enough. This was what made the couches crucial to so-called “hot-drop” deployments that required crews to ride their mech cans down instead of taking personnel shuttles.
She clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from shattering, and it felt as though her heart was being run over by a bulldozer. When the braking thrusters burned so loudly that even with several layers of armor between them and her ears, they were nearly-deafening. Then the drop-can struck solid ground. Hard.
“Touchdown,” she declared unnecessarily. “All systems check.”
Her board slowly began to flicker with confirmations as her Wrench and Monkey performed their post-drop checks. It took them twenty-two seconds, fully four seconds longer than their best run in the simulator to complete the checks.
“All systems green, Captain,” reported Chief Lu.
“Confirmed,” Staubach agreed. “All systems green.”
While they worked through their system checks, she swiveled the external cameras atop the tilted drop-can and saw that her best exit was to the left.
“Popping the left hatch,” she intoned, reaching out with her mind to blow that panel’s explosive charges. They blew in unison, and the panels fell away, allowing the frigid air of the snow-covered world to rush across Elvira’s external thermometers. Xi “felt” the sensation of cold air washing over the mech’s hull much as she would feel it on her own skin, though it was considerably less intense. “Crab-walking,” she declared, activating Elvira’s ambulation systems and causing the mech to rise a meter from the deck of the drop-can as the six legs engaged.
Her mech’s first step into the ice-field was one she knew she would never forget, just as she would never forget the first steps she had taken on Durgan’s Folly.
She slowly crawled her eighty-ton vehicle out of the drop-can, and once outside, she assumed a combat-ready posture. Her paired missile-launcher banks swiveled up and forward, locking into a fire-ready position. Her twin fifteen-kilo artillery guns ratcheted up off their cradles atop her Scorpion-class mech’s hull and assumed a ten-degree angle before locking in place. Xi cycled her anti-personnel chain guns, filling the cabin with a faint whirring sound as they spun through a hundred phantom cycles apiece.
She activated the company-wide net after seeing a handful of her mechs’ icons appear on the short-range tactical plotter. Soon she had accounted for each and every mech in her unit, which made her breathe a sigh of relief before she keyed her mic. “This is Elvira requesting encrypted status reports.”
The reports flowed in, and it seemed that hers had been the most eventful drop of the entire company.
“Good work, people,” she said approvingly. “You know the drill: Eclipse, put our birds in the air and establish P2P with Battalion Command. First, we hook up with 3rd Company and then rendezvous with 1st Company and the support vehicles. Roll out.”
“Birds in the air,” Eclipse’s Jock, Second Lieutenant Carl “Sargon” Benjamin replied promptly. “Estimate P2P in eight minutes.”
“All right, people,” Xi said with a grunt as she felt an insuppressible shiver when the cold air swept across her fast-walking mech, which crunched half-meter-deep footholes in the kilometers-thick ice covering Shiva’s Wrath. “I hope you remembered your winter clothes.”
“All pods touched down,” Deck Chief Arnold “Jay” Rimmer declared over the drop bay’s speakers. “Good work, people. Our crews have arrived on the surface and will rendezvous in two hours. First Shift, hit your racks. Second Shift, secure the vaults and visually confirm inventory before taking four hours” downtime. Third Shift, continue prepping a standard loadout of support cans; they need to be ready in six hours. Let’s move.”
A short-lived cheer erupted across the deck, and Andrew “Podsy” Podsednik shared the moment as he drove a forklift across the drop-deck. The lift was operable with manual inputs alone, and after much debate with Chief Rimmer, he had won the right not only to serve as Third Shift’s supervisor but to
help with the actual work of running the deck.
The drop-decks were typically served by teams of seven grease-monkeys and haulers, to go with three Wrenches who assisted with the tedious work or did actual machining when the need arose. Customizing replacement components before sending them to the surface via drop-cans similar to those which the mechs rode down was a crucial part of providing orbital support to armor on the ground. Without replacement parts, a relatively minor bit of battle damage could turn a mech into an oversized, useless “brick,” hence the term’s frequent use on the drop-deck.
For nearly an hour, Podsy helped his subordinates load a can of ordnance. It was mostly standard fare: high explosive and armor piercing (HE, AP) and incendiary shells, short-range missiles (SRMs), mid-range missiles (MRMs) and even a few long-range missiles (LRMs), heating pads, and relatively stable furnace fuels to keep the PDF—Planetary Defense Force—troopers from freezing to death, and of course, foodstuffs and water purification equipment. All in all, everything about this batch of cans was by the book, and thanks to Podsy’s direction and subtle modifications of established Armor Corps protocol, they were nearly an hour ahead of schedule.
“Attention all hands,” came Colonel Li’s iron-hard voice over the ship-wide. He was usually the epitome of a command officer: calm and stoic, but ready on a moment’s notice to rip something’s throat out.
But right now, Podsy heard unmistakable anxiety in his voice.
“Two minutes ago,” the colonel continued, “the Vorr and Jemmin forces in orbit of Shiva’s Wrath exchanged fire. Three ships are already down, but the Vorr and Jemmin appear to be disengaging, moving to a stand-off.”
As Li spoke, Podsy accessed the Bonhoeffer’s external feeds. At first, he saw nothing untoward, but then he noticed the faint trails of surface-bound vehicles headed for the same mountainous outcrop where the battalion was deployed.