“Oh, yeah!” Abanks crowed, and steering jets took us out of our spin as if the drop-ship was celebrating with its own drumbeat. “Thank you, Assault Flight!”
He whooped and then so did I as a dagger-sharp assault shuttle burned past our right wing, another on our left. And then we were in the clouds. I hadn’t even noticed because it was a coal-black night over Deltaville and only the absence of stars had provided a clue we’d entered the atmosphere, but the clouds shut out the nightmare battle and I almost thought we were safe.
But the presence of an atmosphere was a cruel trick by God to make it even plainer exactly how much danger we were in. Lasers weren’t invisible threats only revealed by distant alarms, they were sheaths of crackling fire rising up through the clouds like reverse lightning, seeking us out and finding something, if not our bird. The cumulonimbus lit up, not with the violence of a thunderstorm, but with the death of a human flight crew. I could only pray it wasn’t one of the drop-ships, and felt like shit doing it, because that would mean it was one of the assault shuttles that had just saved our asses.
More lightning crackled downward, our own birds striking back, followed by the firecracker flare of igniting rocket engines as missiles streaked out of a weapons bay and sought out enemy defenses, or maybe hunted down a Tahni dual-environment fighter.
This is insane. How could anyone hope to survive this?
I couldn’t stop thinking it, over and over. They’d sent us into this knowing what could happen, knowing how much it would cost. Who’d made the decision? Had it come from the High Command, Generals and Admirals who hadn’t heard a shot fired in anger since the Pirate Wars, or maybe since the First War with the Tahni? Or never?
Had it come from President Gregory Jameson, that slick-haired weasel puppet of the Corporate Council? The man had never spent a day in combat, had never so much as set foot on a colony world, much less a military ship. I was half convinced he didn’t exist, that he was an AI simulation, a long con run on the few citizens who bothered to vote by the people who held the real power.
Would anything change from this war? Would Earth pay any more attention to the colonies now? Would the people who buried their nose in the scansheets as they walked from their train to the Zocalo in Trans-Angeles even give a shit who had won? Would they even know or care about the Marines and Fleet pilots and crews who’d died today?
And I could only afford to wallow in that self-pity for about five more minutes until I had to lead a bunch of kids who had no dreams beyond living through the day into the biggest infantry battle on another world in human history, and try to pretend I could make that dream come true. How the hell did the Skipper do this? How had he done it for decades? Top had been doing it even longer, but all she had to do was teach the kids to survive. He had to lead them into hell and pretend they’d come out the other side.
Turbulence tossed us like a feather on the wind and I couldn’t be sure if it was the incredible heat and ionization of the air or if we’d felt the concussion of a missile warhead, and wasn’t sure if I cared. Belly jets roared and pushed us into a trajectory no airframe was meant to follow, and only the incredible power of the fusion-fed turbines kept us in the air.
How much longer? Mother Mary, how much longer?
I should really learn to keep my mouth shut. Another concussion, closer this time, and just above the roar of the rush of superheated air, the patter of something smacking against the hull rang through, like hail on a roof. The bottom fell out from beneath us and left my stomach somewhere a thousand meters higher, and we were in a spin and I couldn’t tell which way was up.
“Drop!” Abanks screamed in my ear. “Emergency drop!”
“Emergency drop!” I echoed the order without thought. “Third Platoon, drop now!”
I didn’t have time to check altitude or position. I just yanked the lever and the ship spat me out like a watermelon seed into a night afire with explosions, engine flares and the actinic glare of energy weapons. The plane had been in a spin and now I was, cartwheeling into the sky with very little idea of where the ground was or my position in relation to it.
Luckily, the suit knew, and the jacks implanted in my head shared the knowledge with me as if it was something I’d known all along, like an instinct I’d been born with. I hit the thrusters and cried out at the pain of the sudden cessation of the spin, the deceleration pounding me into the suit’s padding with bruising force.
The suit’s jets slowed the drop, but I couldn’t make out a damned thing through the helmet’s optics through the sea of static discharge and particulate haze, so I checked the altimeter and the dead-reckoning map instead.
It was bad, I decided in that split-second, but it could have been worse. We were about ten kilometers off-target of our drop zone and more importantly, just over 550 meters up. Which meant a painful, potentially damaging landing but not a
