“Third platoon!” I said, counting on laser-line-of-sight to reach them, since no microwave transmission was going to make it intact through the static charge crackling in the air, sending yellow halos off the metal of my suit like St. Elmo’s Fire. “Form on me! Execute Emergency Landing Fall on impact!”
The ELF was something we trained with rarely and never used. Until today. The theory was, if one of us had an emergency drop that wasn’t at some impossible altitude like the one we’d faced on Brigantia, but something just over recommended safe drop, we were supposed to hit in the ELF form. It was based on the way our predecessors, the paratroopers of hundreds of years ago would try to land, the appropriately named Parachute Landing Fall, or PLF. Balls of the feet, side of the calf, side of the thigh, side of the hip, side of the back, to spread the impact out over as great a surface area as possible. For us, it meant avoiding critical damage to the armor before we took it into battle.
I had no fucking idea if it would work in practice, because it wasn’t something you could practice to full effect. No one wanted to drop a Vigilante at a hundred meters over optimum altitude, then let a clumsy Marine break their legs and damage an expensive piece of military hardware in the process, so all practice was done either at recommended drop height or in a simulator.
I always did great at it in the simulator.
I’d thought the fog would clear as I dropped lower, but it went all the way down to the street and I had to make last-second shifts in my suit’s attitude to keep from bouncing off the side of a two-hundred-meter-tall building, something shaped vaguely like a wedge of quartz I’d seen as a hallway decoration in the Marine Headquarters on Inferno. I blew out a breath, thinking I’d cleared it, but I abruptly realized the thing broadened out substantially as I neared the base and I had to dodge again, losing track of my altitude and nearly slamming into the ground flat-footed.
The Emergency Landing Form was not as easy to pull off in real life as it was in the simulators, mostly because the Vigilante’s feet were very flat, and it took a shitload of effort to make the damned thing topple over sideways. I pulled off something close to textbook…well, in the general area of the textbook, anyway. As long as that included skipping the whole leg part and falling straight on my armored ass.
Stars filled my vision and other yellow flashes I thought might have been residual effects of the hit turned out to be my armor’s damage control systems informing me I was a moron who shouldn’t do that again. But when I rolled to my feet, the suit worked, and I guess that was as much as I had a right to expect.
The rest of the platoon came down in the street around me, some of them remembering to do an ELF, some just hitting flat-footed and falling to their knees. Where First Platoon had come down, I had no idea and probably wouldn’t find out until we reached the objective.
“Squad leaders, status,” I snapped, feeling the temptation of taking a minute to simply revel in disbelief at our own survival or descend into terror at what we had passed through and realizing we had the time for neither.
“First squad,” Valerie Medina reported, her words clipped and precise, “all Marines present, all suits operational. Delp has minor damage to his left hip actuator, Slattery has a warning light in her right knee motivator.”
“Second squad, all Marines present, all suits operational, sir.” Bradley Houghton was the youngest of the squad leaders and he sounded a bit shaky. He also didn’t offer any more details, but that was all right, I’d never remember the exact damage to everyone’s suits, anyway.
“Third squad…,” Christian Majid trailed off, his voice breaking. “Sir, we lost Private Carroll. He dropped but then…something hit him. I couldn’t see what it was. He went offline a few seconds ago and I’m not picking up a transponder, so he must have landed somewhere out of line of sight.” He sucked in a ragged breath before he continued. “Umm, all others present and operational.”
Shit. There was nothing we could do about it. Carroll could have come down anywhere, and going to search for him now would kill the mission.
“I’ll let Search and Rescue know as soon as we have comms again,” I said, because what else was there to say?
“Fourth squad all here,” Kreis told me. “Hoagland has a frozen ankle joint but she can still run on it. Everyone else is good to go.”
“My suit is operational, sir,” Bang-Bang told me, his voice neutral. He’d slipped into his game face and he wouldn’t be showing any emotion until the game was won.
One MIA, probably dead, and we’d just landed. But it could have been so much worse…and it probably would be before the night was over.
“First squad,” I said, “take point. Bang-Bang, you’re on drag.” I waved an arm forward. “Move out, Third. We got a war to win.”
12
The streets of Deltaville were quiet.
Above us, lightning crackled from cloud to cloud, and explosions glowed orange and white like the sun breaking through the haze here and there, but the fog was so thick, it all seemed a world away. Down among the residences and shops and temples, there was no sign of habitation at all, as if the Tahni had simply decided to abandon the planet in the face of our invasion.
I knew better than that, knew their method of operation. They’d had hours of warning that we were coming between the time we’d Transitioned into the system to the first of us setting foot on the planet. The civilians were well-disciplined enough to stay off the street,
