“Good luck, Delta,” I said. “See you on the ground.”
The two-gravity thrust had been good practice, because now the real punishment began. Six gees, I guessed from the tunnel vision and the way the sounds in my helmet earphones faded away into the background. I didn’t try to follow the external cameras because I couldn’t have focused on them if I’d wanted to.
“Well, you got your wish.” I don’t know how Top managed to talk under the pressure, but there were a lot of things about Top I didn’t know. Like how she knew just how to wring the last second of connection we’d have to the troop transport’s comms before the drop-ships were out of range. “We’re off the fucking ship.”
She always got the last word.
25
I missed the flood of data. It had been overwhelming, but at least it had been something to grab onto, a measure of control. In the drop-ship, there was nothing. I was separated from half my company, and couldn’t keep track of their bird even if I could have overcome the punishing boost long enough to concentrate on the feed from the sensor suite. This close to the planet, the ECM jamming was thick enough to slice for sandwich meat, and the drop-ship’s laser line-of-sight comms were being dedicated to the assault shuttles running interference for us. I couldn’t even gather the breath to talk to the people in my own bird, and if there was any upside to the isolation and the crushing acceleration, it was that I didn’t have to listen to Major Geiger’s constant demands for status reports.
I think I must have greyed out. My eyes snapped open to a hypnic jerk, but this one wasn’t waking up from a dream, it was regaining consciousness after having the blood pushed away from my brain for too long. The boost had cut off abruptly and I sucked in a huge breath, trying to take advantage of the moment of weightlessness to get air and blood flowing, and almost didn’t register the flashing warning that we were about to experience a violent maneuver.
It was my favorite, a barrel roll at high gees, not just for the way it threw my stomach into a blender but for the knowledge of why we were doing it. A Tahni corvette, a dual-environment fighter, or orbital platform was trying to focus a weapons laser on us from long distance and the drop-ship pilots had thrown us into a roll to keep the enemy from hitting the same spot on the fuselage long enough to burn through. And if us passengers in the back didn’t like it, well, we’d like breaking apart and floating helplessly in high orbit even less.
“When are we gonna drop?” Cano asked, sounding as if he was desperately trying to keep his stomach contents down.
He could look at the damned tactical readout just as easily as I could, I grumbled silently. Then I realized I hadn’t looked at it in minutes. I assumed it was minutes. It felt like hours, but I’d done this enough times to realize that meant it had actually been minutes.
I couldn’t make sense of the optical cameras because everything in the picture was spinning crazily and so was I, and every time I tried to force the image to hold still, I felt as if I was going to pass out. I concentrated on the altitude reading instead, at least trying to get an idea if we’d entered the atmosphere.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
We weren’t just in the atmosphere, we were at 3,000 meters and I hadn’t even noticed the transition from the plasma drives to the turbojets. And then the roll ceased, the boost from the rear cut back to almost nothing and the belly jets roared their defiance of gravity.
Every organ in my body dropped into my lower intestines and tried to push their way out, and I was certain I heard something in the superstructure of the drop-ship crack and all I could do was hope it wasn’t something they needed to stay in the air. The vibration from the belly jets firing rattled my teeth in my skull as they pulled our nose up, bringing us to a near stop and letting a pair of assault shuttles shoot past us, their exhausts an angry red, shock diamonds stretched out behind them.
Proton cannons struck out with the fury of an ancient, angry god, splitting the sky apart, their thunderclaps audible even kilometers away through the fuselage of our drop-ship. I couldn’t see the enemy fighters the assault shuttles were targeting, couldn’t pick the incandescent fury of their deaths from the rest of the endless chain of explosions in the air, but the shuttles banked away, their job done.
Ours was about to begin. I recognized the terrain beneath us, the incredible scope of the capital city of Tahn-Khandranda. It was nowhere near as large as Trans-Angeles, was home to less than a quarter of the population of that hive of humanity, and yet I found it terrifying; huge and intimidating in a way I had never thought of Trans-Angeles. I suppose it was the concept of taking on a whole planet that hit me in that one instant. We’d fought the Tahni on colonies they’d settled, worlds they’d conquered, outposts they’d set up against the howling wilderness, but this was their home. It was like landing in Capital City and trying to conquer all of Earth. It was impossible, ludicrous, and yet here we were.
Monoliths and twisted spires and steppe pyramids were arrayed in ways that made no sense to my human eyes, yet still displayed a pattern, something deep beneath the surface, designed by an inhuman imagination. And at the center of it all were the brilliant white spheres of the temples. The Three Temples of the Faith was what the intelligence
