seat. At this point in his career, trans-atmospheric flight was slightly more exciting than riding a commuter train.
“Man, hell of ride, ain’t it?” Corpsman Walters asked. He was trying to sound cheery, but the quivering in his voice hinted otherwise.
Jack didn’t bother to look up. “Skip, right? Nothing but a little turbulence. You just hang tight and everything will be peachy.”
The cabin lurched up and then back down again accompanied by a rumble like nearby thunder. “Jeeez-Us. You ever… ever wonder what would happen if something went wrong?”
“What’s to wonder about? The tranzat is biting back into the atmosphere at twenty times the speed of sound. If anything went wrong, we’d be hamburger. Wouldn’t even know what hit us.”
It occurred to Jack that last part might have been a faux pas. He lifted his head and looked over at Walters, who was strapped into an identical seat to his right, with both white-knuckled hands clenched around his shoulder restraint. This was Skip’s first drop and it showed.
Jack gave him a little pat on the shoulder. “Relax, newbie. I’ve been through more drops than I can count, and this is nothing out of the ordinary. Right, guys?”
The twenty members of the San Jose Bravo Brigade ignored him. Each was strapped into their own seat on either side of the leviathan’s cabin, separated by five meters of floor filled with equipment. A few were checking their gear like Jack had been, while others were thumbing through magazines. Lisa Albright had her headphones on and was listening to some band no one else had ever heard of, and Leonid Nikitin was sound asleep and snoring.
“See,” Jack said, as if his question had been met with unanimous agreement, “nothing to fret your little head over.”
Right about then, the blue lamp at the front of the cargo bay came on; drop was imminent. “Oh boy. Now Skip, I want you to take a nice deep breath and try to relax. Can you do that for me?”
Skip nodded his head rigidly.
“And if you gotta puke, you damn well hold it until we’re back on terra firma, or I’ll watch you scrub down the whole boat.”
A quick series of loud mechanical thuds echoed through the cabin as the docking clamps released, and then the leviathan shifted and slid free of its cradle. The windows along the length of the cabin, which had been black throughout the rest of the trip, were suddenly filled with blindingly bright blue sky, the javelin shaped trans- atmospheric transport that had dropped them, and a half-dozen other glimmering orange leviathans also in free-fall. Jack thought the view was just marvelous.
Skip Walters screamed. Thinking back, Jack had screamed his first time, too.
Not today, though. Not for a half-dozen years. These days, he loved plummeting out of the sky. It meant the trip was nearly over, and he’d soon be pounding dirt in another foreign land.
Skip screamed until his lungs were spent, but before he could take his next breath, the cabin was filled with the sound of the leviathan’s twin rotor blades rhythmically chopping at the air. The free-fall was complete, and the helicopter was flying under its own power. Another second later, it leveled off and began its approach.
As the leviathan descended and came around, the rear door opened to reveal forested hills and a monstrous plume of smoke rising high into the air. The helicopter tilted back, providing a good view of the grassy Earth below, while the two heavily laden pallets at the back of the cabin slid down the ramp, sprouted parachutes and drifted away.
Then it was down, down, down to the ground. The leviathan slowed, and its suspension groaned as the landing struts dug into soil. The pilot’s voice broke in over the loud speaker, “Welcome to lovely Santiago De Compostela, Spain. Once your restraints pop, you’ve got five minutes to disembark. No more. Take your crap with you, and thanks for flying Emergency Response Corps Air.”
The U-shaped restraints audibly popped and then raised themselves over-head, and the brigade stomped down the ramp. Skip charged out ahead of them, and after three long strides across the ground, he was on his knees and evacuating his stomach violently in the grass.
Lisa Albright nudged Jack’s shoulder to get his attention. “First drop?” she shouted over the thunder of the leviathan’s rotors, motioning toward the new corpsman.
Jack nodded and said, “Another fine day in the Corps.”
He glanced into the cabin to make sure his people were out and transmitted an all clear, then motioned toward Skip. He and Albright flanked the vomiting corpsman and moved him over to the side, while the emptied leviathan lifted back into the air and was away.
They were in a clearing at the southern mouth of a two kilometer valley, surrounded by densely forested hills on the other three sides. The sky above was thick with leviathans, the biggest swarm of which buzzed around the smoke plume to the North. They’d be dropping smoke jumpers and loads of fire retardant. Another steady stream of the helicopters headed east over the city of Santiago De Compostela, and Jack supposed the local air field was off in that direction.
His brigade stood in a rough circle waiting for orders, and a dozen other groups of orange jumpsuits were clustered throughout the clearing. It had taken them a full hour to come in from Vandenberg, which meant they were last to the party yet again. The whole summer had been that way.
Jack flipped through channels on his wristset until Logistics came up, opening a direct line to whoever was hosting the party. Then he tapped his headset and began transmitting. “San Jose Bravo Brigade present and requesting assignment.”
A voice with a thick Spanish accent came back. “Roger that, San Jose Bravo. What’s your specialty?”
“Wilderness search and rescue, and first aid. We have surgical personnel on hand.”
“Hold. Report to Med Station Three for triage detail. Coordinates are as follows…” The voice rattled off a long string of numbers that Jack hardly paid attention to.
“Roger, over and out.” He took a deep breath and clicked his headset off. The Bravos weren’t going to like this. With any luck, they wouldn’t shoot the messenger. “Good news, folks. We’re on triage again.”
“Again?” the lot of them asked in chorus.
“Come on, Jack. I didn’t join up to stick band-aids on boo-boos,” Leonid Nikitin said before jamming a cigar in his mouth. The man was pale and towered over the rest of the brigade like an old fashioned lighthouse. He had a point; he had extensive experience in tracking and wilderness survival, skills that were totally wasted at a triage station.
The same went for the rest, who all had first aid or first responder certs, but were specialists in other fields. All except for Dr. Lisa Albright who was a real bona-fide MD, but even she preferred to be in the bush. Jack couldn’t do anything about it, though. He’d tried before, and it was a lost cause.
“Cut me some damn slack, Nicotine. It’s hard work ignoring you all day. Hows about you complain to someone higher up the food chain, and let them ignore you for a change?”
Nikitin’s lip quivered until he couldn’t contain it any longer, and then he let out a huge belly laugh that flung his cigar to the grass. The rest laughed, too. That was a good sign. Tedious work was bad enough with a good attitude. With the wrong attitude, it could be torture.
From there on in, the Bravos were all business. They descended on the tent that was Med Station Three and didn’t so much relieve the exhausted Madrid Echoes as push them out of the way. They came up to speed in minutes and dug into the work of examining, sorting and usually treating the refugees who had fled the raging wildfire.
The bulk of their patients had cuts and scrapes, and few suffered anything worse than a touch of smoke inhalation and first degree burns. There were plenty of oxygen tanks on hand, and the Bravos were surprisingly good at putting pseudermal band-aids on boo-boos, so those patients moved through the system quickly. The fact that they had a physician meant they could also treat the few who required real care, instead of sending them on to the busy ICU tents or the city hospital three long klicks away.
By the time sunset rolled around, the Bravos were running on empty. Up above, the billowing clouds burned bright magma orange in the setting sun’s light, made starkly visible against the pallid and darkening sky. The raging fire stretching across the low hills could now be seen like a great glowing serpent, hungrily digesting the blackened trees within it. The crews couldn’t stop the fire, but word came through that they had contained it, and the remaining danger to the area was negligible.
