Aquino nodded to himself. The boy had dedication. And a set of brass balls. “Behind the cockpit is a recess that you should be able to squeeze yourself into. It is outside the fighter’s gravity control system, so you will have to hold up to the gee’s we pull. Understood?”
“On my way.” Eustus was already jetting toward them. In a few seconds, Jodi heard him clambering over the hull behind them. “I’m here, sar-major. Let’s go.”
“Find Gard, Lieutenant Mackenzie,” Aquino ordered before he told Eustus the rest of what he planned. He did not tell either of them that his interest in Reza was far more than academic. He was an old friend and confidant of one Admiral Zhukovski, who had provided Aquino with information that someone within the cadre was going to try and kill Reza. Where he had gotten such information, he would never say. However, Aquino was almost sure it was Thorella, although there was certainly no shortage of other likely candidates. But he had no evidence. Yet.
Jodi rammed the throttles forward, momentarily forgetting that Eustus had no protection. “Shit,” she hissed to herself as Eustus yelped, and she dropped the thrust back to something she thought he might be able to handle. “Sorry, Eustus,” she said. “You still with us?”
“Barely,” he breathed, his fists clenching even harder to the recessed handholds. Had it not been for the augmented strength the suit gave to his own body, he would have been left behind the leaping fighter.
Scanning her instruments, Jodi picked out Reza’s tumbling form. “Reza,” she said over the comm link, “do you read me? We’re coming to get you. Hang on.”
Not surprisingly, he didn’t answer. Jodi bit her lip, wondering if he was even still alive. As puny as the thrusters were on those suits, they were still plenty powerful. At least it had finally burned itself out of fuel, she thought bitterly, wondering how such a thing could happen. The armored space suits the Marines used were probably the safest pieces of military hardware next to the common rock. While a thruster lighting off like that was not impossible, it was sure damn unlikely.
Behind her, Captain Markus Thorella sat silently.
The short time it took to close on Reza’s spinning form passed like hours, and their time was quickly running out. “Altitude, ten kilometers,” her ship’s computer reported in Nicole’s voice.
“I know, goddammit,” she hissed, trying to keep the fighter stable in the increasing buffeting from the atmosphere. She followed the little blip on her head-up display like a bloodhound, but she could not yet see Reza visually, and she could not go much faster for fear of losing Eustus. “C’mon, Reza,” she whispered to herself “Where the hell are you?”
“Got him in sight,” she said, easing the throttles forward a little more, but not too much: if she was going too fast when she reached him, her ship would overshoot, and there would not be time for a second pass before Reza hit the ground. “Stand by, Eustus.”
“Any time,” Eustus breathed. He was getting sick from being bounced around while hanging onto the fighter’s back like a parasitic insect, and his hands were beginning to cramp from holding on for dear life to the thin bar aft of the cockpit, even with the suit augmentation.
“Altitude, five thousand meters,” the computer warned. “Warning… warning,” it went on as a steady warbling tone sounded in Jodi’s headset. If she did not pull out soon, she never would.
“Go, Eustus!” she shouted.
Without hesitation, Eustus flung himself into the air stream screaming around the fighter, trusting that his suit’s screens would keep him from being smashed into jelly against the ship’s hull. At the same time, Jodi separated away in the opposite direction, leaving him tumbling in her wake.
“Holy Jesus,” Eustus breathed as he felt himself being grabbed and pummeled by the atmosphere. A beep was going off in his ear. Altitude. Quickly righting himself with his thrusters, he pointed himself like an arrow at Reza’s inert form and shot toward him, closing the dozen or so meters between them in only a few seconds.
“Gotcha!” he huffed triumphantly as he grabbed one of Reza’s flailing arms. Pulling his friend to him, he linked their suits together at the waist with the built-in safety tethers. Then, fumbling at Reza’s sides with his hands, he fought to separate the bulk of the equipment attached to Reza’s suit. If he could not get rid of it, they would be too heavy for his own suit’s jets to put them safely on the ground. “Come on,” he muttered angrily as the altitude warning tone sounded faster and faster. When the tone become a continuous sound, the suit’s thrusters would not have enough time to slow them to an acceptable landing velocity, and the most elementary laws of physics would take over. They would be splattered like eggs over the ground below.
With a sudden snap, the molded combat pack and the fifty or so kilos it represented popped away.
“Burn!” Eustus shouted into his helmet, initiating the preprogrammed firing sequence that Aquino had told him to use. Canted at a ridiculous angle to account for the asymmetrical thrust condition imposed by the weight of Reza’s body, the two jets of Eustus’s suit flared and fired at their full thrust.
Grunting at the force of the suit’s thrusters, Eustus kept his eyes glued to the suit visor and the scene beyond as he and Reza continued to plummet toward the ground. “Please, Lord of All,” he hissed through clenched teeth over the roar of the straining jets and all of six gees, “Come on… come on…”
The whirling numbers that indicated their descent velocity gradually slowed as the jets fought against the force of Quantico’s gravity. They flashed through one thousand meters, still falling like a rock. The trees and hills below, so beautiful from higher up, held all the beauty now of a trap of sharpened bamboo stakes.
Through his faceplate and his rapidly dimming vision, his blood drawn away by the force of the thrusters, Eustus caught a glimpse of Jodi Mackenzie’s fighter nearby as she brought it down in a matching spiral descent.
At five hundred meters, the fuel caution warning began sounding in his ears. The jets were going to run out of fuel before they hit the ground. “Shit,” he muttered bitterly. He closed his eyes.
A few seconds later, the jets flared one final time and died. Eustus felt himself seized by the sickening sensation of free-fall. They weren’t going to make it–
With a roar of snapping branches, he found himself tumbling through the middle of a stand of trees, their limbs tearing at his arms and legs, hammering his back, and whip-cracking against his helmet. Before he had any time to react, he found himself in a short free-fall again.
He hit the ground. Hard. The wind was knocked out of him like a child who had fallen from a swing, and Eustus fought back tears of surprise and pain.
But he mostly felt relieved. He was alive.
“How’s your head?”
Reza blinked away the stars that clouded his vision, only to see Eustus’s concerned face.
“Fuzzy,” he answered quietly as he took stock of his body. Obviously, they had survived their fall. “What happened?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” Eustus said as he removed the palm-sized mediscanner from Reza’s forehead. It did not register any damage more serious than a very mild concussion and some hellish bruising. “It looked like one of your thrusters went berserk and sent you tumbling. Sergeant Major Aquino came up with the idea of me hitching a ride on Lieutenant Mackenzie’s fighter to come pick you up. And, well, here we are.” He smiled sheepishly.
“I owe you my life, my friend.”
“Stow it, Reza,” he said, smiling more brightly now. “I promised Commander Carre I’d keep your butt out of trouble, remember?”
Reza nodded, tried to smile at his friend’s humor. “What are we to do now?”
Eustus snorted. “Well, I already reported that you looked like you were going to be okay, at least according to this thing,” he held up the scanner. “Captain Thorella said that unless you needed a medevac out of here, we’re supposed to move our butts back to the battalion op zone or we’d have to E & E through Second Battalion when they land.” A wry smile curled his lips. “A mere forty klicks away, and through Second Battalion’s training lanes.”
