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Chapter 1 Stormfall
We roar into Jupiter in a torrent of fire and light. All around us, blinding white light pours off into contrails stretching back above us and pointing up into space. There’s no point in trying to look through that, so all the shutters are down over my various cameras. Radar is almost useless, too, with an envelope of ionized atmosphere around me, and all the jamming filling the air right now. Everyone else is in the same position, falling blindly into the depths of the giant planet.
There’s nothing to see outside. Locked inside the confined cabin of my Guardian, and in my armored space suit, there’s nothing to see inside, either. No damage readings or malfunction indicators, just data streams pouring into my visual cortex through my implants, telling me that everything is proceeding as planned; external temperature in thousands of degrees, trans-sonic wind speeds, and a deceleration of 9G. Nothing to worry about.
Sure, on my first drop everything was all excitement and adrenaline, but by now it’s all pretty routine. The Guardian’s ablative plating keeps the blowtorch winds out, and with all the shock padding inside, the Gs aren’t too bad, either. Nine Earth gravities isn’t all that bad for a native Jovian in the first place, and with all the cybernetics and mods a warrior-pilot needs, it’s actually pretty mild.
Still, something could go wrong, anyway. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. Heat shields could fail, a wing could come off, or a system could fatally malfunction. I tell myself if anything happens, it’ll be over so fast, I’ll barely feel it—but that’s not necessarily true. I could get slowly baked alive, trapped in my suit, as heat relentlessly builds up. There could be a breach, and super-hot jets of air could sear right through me. I could just keep falling, trapped in my Guardian—falling forever, for thousands of kilometers, until the air pressure increases past the crush depth of my hull…trapped, hearing the metal creak and groan around me as it begins to buckle…
An explosion shakes the whole Guardian as the ablative plating blows off. Finally, something to do. Sensation pours in from hundreds of sensor eyes in my Guardian, and from the dozens of remotes falling along with me. I am one with my exo-frame, and I can see, hear, and feel everything my Guardian can. My vision expands to superhuman levels, letting met see with telescopic precision, and into the infrared and x-ray bands. I can hear radio and actually feel the winds roaring around the wings of my frame. The world comes alive in brilliance and wonder.
It’s sunrise over Jupiter. The endless sea of clouds below is lit up in gold and white and blood-red. Above, the sky darkens to a deep purple, with the crescents of three moons visible, and the blue stars from spacecraft torch-drives move with apparent slowness. The Sun is behind us, helping blind sensors, as we come roaring in on a path in line with the dawn’s light. The atmosphere around us is filled with chaos—burning streaks of other Guardians aerobraking, and the trails of drones and decoys following us down in a rain of fire and smoke. Huge flashes light the air; dazzler cluster warheads sent down with us are going off and confusing sensors to give us a chance to reach our targets. The upper atmosphere is beginning to fill with shifting bands of transparent colors, clouds of countermeasure nanotech confusing and warping signals. Jamming is everywhere, and the radio frequencies are pure chaos, screaming electronic madness sent out by our jamming systems, decoy drones, and beamed in from near orbit.
All that jamming only allows me to get information from our nearest remotes. Dozens of viewpoints come together to form a three-dimensional map in my brain. The view goes from super-rich imagery in full surround 360° vision, to a composite understanding of exact distances and vectors, with me floating in the middle of all of it. It feels like I can just reach out and touch the distant clouds, knowing exactly how far away they are, how fast everything is moving, and exactly what the temperature and density of the air around me is like. I love being out here, flying.
The enemy has a different opinion about my being up here, though. Streams of darts, scramjet-shells, micro missiles, and other projectiles are coming up in a glowing, upside-down rain. White flashes light up the clouds below as the rising munitions burst into cluster aero mines, loiter missiles, feather shrapnel, and other hazards we’ll have to fly through. So much for surprise.
I can’t see the other members of my flight through all of this, of course. If we could be picked out, we’d be eliminated immediately by targeted fire from below. Even if I saw another Guardian, there’d be no way to tell who it was among the hundreds falling around me in Operation Thunderfall. We couldn’t drop or fly in any kind of formation for the same reason—everything had to be random to cause maximum confusion to the enemy, which also causes a lot of confusion for us. The other four members of my flight are out there somewhere…depending on me.
A loud scream in microwave frequency splits the air—an anti-ship beam erupting from the cloud banks below. Instantly, the systems in my Guardian target the location in the cloud banks and type the weapon: it’s a Type-93 maser cannon we call the “Torch.” That’s going to have to be taken out if our landing ships are ever going to get here.
“Delta Flight, this is Thunderbolt, we’re taking out this Torch.” I send the targeting data out, then dodge the rail cannon fire from below that’s homing in on my transmission. I relay the
