Usually in space, the enemy is too far away to see except on sensors, but in the atmosphere, it’s a different thing. Electromagnetic jamming rendered missiles nearly useless, so everything was a knife fight at beam weapon range. The Tahni dual-environment fighters were daggers cutting through the sky, aimed right at our hearts, but our assault shuttle escort moved to intercept and we got the hell out of the way.
It’s hard to imagine a ship over a hundred meters long and nearly as wide going into a barrel roll, and it felt nearly as unimaginable as it sounded. There was a reason I was in the Marines and not a Fleet pilot, and it wasn’t just because I hadn’t had a chance at the Academy. My stomach rebelled after about ten seconds of pitching, yawing, and rolling, and abandoned me somewhere around ten thousand meters up, and I had to clench my jaws shut to keep down breakfast.
It would have been nice to shut my eyes, but that would probably have made the airsickness worse, so I was forced to deal with the chaos of the air battle, with the actinic lightning-bolt flares of proton cannons, and the scintillating plasma sheaths of lasers, and all of it seeming way too damned close to us. I don’t even know if I was scared of dying in a fight anymore, not after working so much instinct into my movements, but I was petrified of dying in the dropship. I’d had one shot out from around me on Brigantia and it was every nightmare I’d ever had squeezed into a neutron-star mass and dropped into the bottom of my gut.
I’d talked to a psych counselor about it, but she’d just told me it was the most common fear of all Marines and I’d have to deal with it. Which seemed awfully easy for her to say, since she’d never once set foot on a dropship, much less left one involuntarily.
Something exploded off to our left, a starburst of white light hundreds of meters across and I wondered if it was one of theirs or one of ours. There were so many aerospacecraft packed into the sky that I couldn’t have kept them straight if I’d been tied into the sensor readouts, and no one would bother to tell me unless it was something that affected our mission, like another Delta Company platoon burning in, or maybe one of our supporting companies. That was something of a relief, since I was fairly sure it wasn’t Vicky or Freddy.
Another explosion and we were rolling again, banking left away from it, seeking temporary safety in some unoccupied portion of the sky, if such a thing existed. Everywhere I looked was an enemy aircraft or the dazzling signature of an energy weapon, and I felt a dread certainty deep in the pit of my stomach that this was the drop where my luck would run out.
Sometimes, when I was feeling philosophical, usually after a few shots of tequila, I would consider the concept I’d read about in one of the Continuing Education courses they forced OCS-commissioned officers to take in order to maintain their rank. This course had been on quantum physics, and the concept had involved the Many Worlds Interpretation, the idea that every event from the quantum level on up both occurred and didn’t occur, and that both those realities existed, separate and parallel. The virtual instructor had suggested, only half-seriously, that maybe each one of us is living in the reality where we didn’t die in all those opportunities we had to die, that maybe each of us was immortal in our own separate timeline.
I wished I could believe that, particularly in times like these.
And maybe it was true. I hadn’t died yet. But the day was still young.
“Ten seconds to drop,” the crew chief announced, and I blinked. He had to have called it at two minutes and then again at thirty seconds, and I’d been so wrapped up in the gut-wrenching maneuvering that I hadn’t noticed.
“Ten seconds,” I echoed to my Marines. “Follow your squad leaders, stay in formation once we’re down.”
“Ooh-rah, sir!” Bang-Bang enthused, and the others echoed it. I wondered if any of the rest of them twigged to the fact that he was being ironic.
“Drop!” the crew chief said, a warning light in my HUD mirroring the command.
“Drop!” I ordered. “Drop! Drop!”
The drop control for the suit gantry was manual. To this day, I still don’t know the real reason it’s not an automatic function controlled by the pilot or the crew chief. I’ve had instructors tell me it’s because last-second faults can develop before the system has a chance to detect them and we didn’t want to drop a malfunctioning suit into the shit. I’ve had officers insist it’s for morale reasons, that the high command wanted Marines who went into battle to have to make a conscious decision to go, that it helped to keep them focused, which sounded as good as any other reason.
I yanked the lever and light flooded the drop gantry and I was falling. Below, a whole world wanted to kill me.
2
It was madness. There was no other word to describe dropping out of a spaceship at four hundred meters above an enemy city in broad daylight.
Sure, there were reasons for it. Day was no different than night when everyone has enhanced optics, and there wasn’t any hope of catching anyone asleep when the space battle had already been raging for hours before we hit atmosphere. And we were coming in from the east, backlit by the primary star, which might throw off their targeting.
I knew all that, and yet there I was, my ass hanging in the wind, the broad,
