too often about Commitment’s unforgiving surface, which was invisible in the darkness below him. A final check confirmed that the drop shell was good to go. Michael gave the go-ahead. High-pressure gas drove reagents into containers of polymer smartfoam. Foam boiled in the vacuum. Foam expanded to fill the preformed plasfiber shell. Foam wrapped itself around Michael’s skinsuited body.
The foam hardened, and Michael was sitting in a crash-resistant cocoon inside a heat-resistant shield. The master AI orchestrating the process fired the solid-fuel boosters to align the shell for reentry. The deceleration kicked Michael hard in the back.
He steeled himself for the ride down and prayed that he would look like just another piece of debris from the ill-fated
It was a rough ride down, worse than anything the sims had put him through. It was so rough that Michael gave up worrying about the Hammers shooting at him, worrying instead about whether his brain would disintegrate under the pressure of a relentless battering, worrying about being consumed in the ball of fire marking his fall to ground, worrying that the flimsy shell would fall apart in the face of the unbelievable punishment.
But it did end. So slowly Michael was not even sure it was happening, the pummeling eased and the fiery trail thinned until the shell was no longer needed. The AI blew the shell off and dropped his body into a sickening free fall that ended only when the container on his back popped open. Michael came to a vicious stop as his parachute bit into air thick with cloud and rain, the AI steering him down through the murk toward a rendezvous that only it could see.
“Two hundred meters,” the AI told him, “one hundred … fifty … brace … thirty, twenty, ten, brace!”
Michael smashed down through a thin canopy of trees and hit the ground with a thud. His legs absorbed the impact, and he was thrown sideways onto the rain-soaked ground. “Fuuuuck,” he whispered. He flicked his visor up to let the rain fall cool and sweet on to his face, “I made it.”
Seconds later, a black shape thumped into the ground only meters from where he lay, followed by three more in quick succession.
Shinoda emerged out of the gloom. “You okay?” she said.
“Sure am,” Michael said. “Anyone not make it?”
“Spassky.” She paused and spit on the ground. “His shell never deployed; bloody thing was a piece of garbage,” she went on. “Next time I’m on Scobie’s, I’m going to kill that son of a bitch Chang.”
The loss of the lance corporal hit Michael hard. “The poor bastard,” Michael muttered. “He must have known he wouldn’t make it.”
“Yeah.” There was a moment’s silence. “Anyway,” Shinoda said, “now we need to get the hell out of here.” She looked around. “First thing, chromaflage capes on and weapons checked … all green? Good. Nugget, Mitch. Start digging. Give me a 2-meter-deep hole in ten minutes or I’ll kick your asses. Stick! Find everything we don’t need and put it in the hole.”
“Yes, sarge,” Prodi said.
Shinoda turned to Michael. “You get up that hill and keep an eye out,” she said. “I don’t think the Hammers were too interested in us, but you never know. They might send drones to have a look.”
“Yes, sergeant,” Michael said. Machine pistol in hand, he shouldered his pack and set off.
General Vaas looked up when one of his personal aides led Michael in.
“Lieutenant Helfort, sir,” Major Davoodi said.
“Thanks, Major,” Vaas said. He stood and came around the desk to where Michael waited. “Reentry drop shells!” He shook his head. “Insane, absolutely insane.”
“Not the way I planned to come back, General,” Michael said as they shook hands. He thought the man looked exhausted, the lines incised over prominent cheekbones deeper than ever. But the eyes had not changed. Even when the man smiled, they stared deep into Michael’s soul.
“I can’t tell you how good it is to have you back, Michael,” Vaas said. He put a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “You got my message that Anna’s alive and well?”
“I did, thank you, General. I’ve put in a request to join her. I think my spacer days are over.”
“We’ll talk about that later. The good news is that Lieutenant Colonel Anna Cheung Helfort has been a right pain in the ass. Not to me, of course. To the Hammers.”
Michael blinked. “Did you just say Lieutenant Colonel?”
“A well-deserved promotion,” Vaas said with a huge grin. “We’ve given her command of the 120th’s 3rd Battalion. That’s where most of you Feds have ended up.” He turned to the wall-mounted holovid screen that dominated one side of the limestone cell he called his office. “Let me show you how the war’s going.”
Vaas pulled up a tactical display that summarized the NRA’s current tactical situation. Michael drew in a sharp breath at the sight.
“No, it’s not pretty,” Vaas admitted.
It wasn’t. Michael didn’t bother to count the Hammer units arrayed around the half million square kilometers of limestone karst the NRA called home; there were too many. “Lot of Hammer marines out there, General,” he said. “That’s new.”
“Even the dumbest Hammer general was able to work out that Planetary Ground Defense Force troops are no match for the NRA. I’ve lost count of how many PGDF units we’ve torn apart. So Polk managed to convince the Defense Council that they had no choice but to send in the marines.”
“Is it as bad as it looks?”
“If you’re Jeremiah Polk sitting in your air-conditioned bunker staring at holovid screens, status boards, and tactical displays and you believe the reports you’re given, then yes, it looks bad for us.”
“I hear a ‘but,’” Michael said.
Vass nodded. “You do. Let me see … this is MARFOR 8’s area of operations. They sit across our resupply routes down from northern Maranzika, and here-” He pointed to the town of Daleel. “-is where their 8th Brigade is. Five thousand well-trained, superbly equipped marines. Best unit in the Hammer order of battle.”
“Where’s the ‘but,’ General?”
“You remember Operation Medusa?’
Michael grimaced. “How could I forget?” he said. The Hammer’s operation to take the NRA Branxton base had given him his first taste of ground combat. He’d hated it: the chaos, the dirt, the smoke, the noise, the sound of hypersonic rounds tearing the air around him, the way death lay waste to those around him, the dead so close that he could smell the metallic, coppery reek of blood hanging in the air.
“Well, as is the Hammer way, Polk had anyone even remotely responsible for Medusa’s failure taken out and shot. He started with the commanding general, Baxter, and worked his way down. These guys here-” Again he pointed to the icon that marked the MARFOR 8’s position. “-lost every officer above the rank of colonel.”
“Shit.”
“And Polk did not stop there. He even had a couple of platoon commanders shot.”
“Let me guess. Polk thinks the 8th is combat-effective, whereas it’s-”
“A fucking mess. The 8th’s commanding general and his staff are too frightened to pass any bad news back up the line, so they don’t. We have our people on the inside. They tell me that if we attacked them, they’d fold like the proverbial house of cards. And the rest of MARFOR 8 is not much better.”
“What about the rest?” Michael asked.
“MARFOR 6 is probably the best of them. Of all the force elements involved in the Medusa fiasco, they performed the best, so they got off lightly. MARFOR 11’s somewhere in between. But Polk’s kidding himself if he thinks these assholes are a match for us.”
“And Anna? What’s the 120th up to?”
“They’re dug in northeast of McNair, in the Velmar Mountains. They are part of 9 Brigade, and their job is to keep some of the pressure off the Branxtons. And thanks to your Anna and the rest of them, it’s working. They’ve
