left to fit. The kid was sitting on the bench, frozen with worry. Lawrence went over and stood directly in front of him. He flashed the kid a quick thumbs-up, unseen by the rest of the platoon. 'You need a hand?' his amplified voice bounced round the aluminum walls.
'No, Sarge,' Hal said gratefully. 'I can cope, thanks.' His suited hands scrabbled round slowly and awkwardly behind his head, finding the helmet. Then he was pushing himself into the dark covering.
The platoon trooped out of the suit armory and lumbered down the corridor to the munitions store. Each Skin's AS linked directly with the quartermaster AS to issue the weapons authorization. When he received his allocation, Lawrence's Skin split along the top of his arms, revealing various mechanical components that were melded with muscle bands to form hybrid guns and microsilos. He slotted his magazines into their receiver casings and watched as the thin muscle bands undulated, moving missiles and darts into their sacs and chambers. The punch pistol he'd been given was clipped to his belt, ironically the largest weapon and the least lethal.
For some unfathomable bureaucratic reason, the Cairns base AS had decided that the munitions store should also distribute Skin bloodpaks. Lawrence collected his four and secreted them in the abdominal pouches. They'd give him another few hours' endurance should they hit physically demanding conditions. Nice to have. Although, frankly, if the Memu Bay ground forces hadn't established their headquarters and barracks at the end of the first day, it wouldn't matter anyway.
Now that the squad was active, they took a lift up to the life support wheel's axis, then transferred down the wide axial corridor to the cargo section. The radial corridor that led out to their drop glider was even narrower, making life difficult for the bulky Skin suits. Not that the interior of their little landing craft—a short cylinder filled with two rows of crude plastic chairs—was much of an improvement. They strapped themselves in amid curses about lack of space and bumped elbows. Lawrence took the single chair at the front. It put his head level with a narrow windshield. A small console with two holographic panes was provided in case anything glitched the AS pilot and he needed manual control. For a vehicle intended to deorbit and deliver them to a specific ground coordinate with only a fifty-meter margin of error, the whole arrangement seemed totally inadequate.
Amersy closed the hatch and strapped himself in. Short trembles running through the fuselage indicated the other drop gliders were leaving their silos. Eight minutes to go.
'Hey, Sarge,' Jones called out in their general channel. 'I think Karl's testing out his vomit tube. Aren't you, Karl?'
'Fuck the hell off.'
'Knock it off back there,' Lawrence said.
His optronic membranes alerted him to a call from Captain Bryant, which he admitted.
'Tactical have completed the cartography of Memu Bay,' Bryant said. 'It's accessible now. Get your platoon to install it'
'Yes, sir. Any major changes?'
'None at all. Don't worry, Sergeant, we're on top of this one. I'll see you down there. Meteorology says it's a beautiful day; we might even have a barbecue on the beach this evening.'
'Look forward to it, sir.' He canceled the link. Asshole. The suit's AS gave him the platoon's general channel. 'Okay, we've got the current map. Get it installed and integrated with your inertial navigation. I don't want anyone getting lost.'
'Has it got any decent bars marked on it?' Nic asked.
'Hey, Sarge, can we have access to the Durrell guys?' Lewis asked. 'Like to know how it's going.'
'Sure. Odel, set it up.'
'Absolutely, Sergeant.'
Five minutes until their flight Lawrence began installing the new cartography into his Skin's neurotronic pearls. Out of curiosity, he accessed the traffic Odel was pulling out of the Durrell force's datapool. His membranes displayed a small five-by-five grid, with thumbnail videos from different drop gliders. He expanded one, seeing a shaky picture from the nose camera. A splinter of dark land rocked from side to side in an ultramarine void. Terse voices barked short comments and orders.
'No groundfire,' Amersy observed. 'That's good.'
'Have you ever seen any?' Hal asked.
'Not yet. But there's always a first time.'
Three minutes.
Lawrence dismissed the video grid and requested the new map of Memu Bay. It looked very similar to the settlement he remembered from the last time he was here: big features like the stadium and harbor were still there. Smaller, somehow. He superimposed the old map and let out a shallow breath of aggravation as he took in the new sprawl of outlying districts. Memu Bay had grown beyond Z-B's projections. A larger population would be harder to keep in line. Oh, great. No battle plan ever survived engagement with the enemy, but it would be nice to have one that was vaguely relevant when they hit the beach.
He opened a link to Captain Bryant. 'Sir, the settlement's a lot bigger than we thought.'
'Not really, Sergeant. A few percent at most. And physically there's been no change to the center since last time. Our deployment strategy remains effective.'
'Are we getting any additional platoons?'
'From where? It's Durrell that's really grown over the last decade. If anything we should be supporting our forces there.'
'Are we?' he asked in alarm. He'd never dreamed that the platoon might be switched. That would screw up everything.
'No, Sergeant,' Bryant said wearily. 'Please monitor your status display. And stop worrying. A bigger population just means more behavior collateral. We're carrying enough units down with us for that.'
'Sir.'
One minute.
The intermittent vibrations he could feel through the fuselage suddenly grew more pronounced. When he did check his status display, he saw the captain's drop glider had left the silo beneath them. Icons flashed an alert. Then Platoon 435NK9's drop glider was shaking as it slid down the silo's rails.
'Hang on to your hats, ladies,' Edmond sang out 'We're going bungee jumping with angels, and someone just cut the cord.'
Light burst in through the windshield. Lawrence saw the edge of the silo falling away from them, a dark hexagon framed in lusterless silver-white metal that shrank into the middle of a honeycomb of identical silos. Their retreat brought the rest of the starship into view. Once again, he could only smile at its functional beauty. Drop gliders and pods were being spat out of the silos at a furious rate. They retreated from the Koribu in an expanding cloud, dropping ass-first toward the planet below. Pods were just squat, rounded cones, with a collar of small rocket motors secured around their peaks. Drop gliders were also cones, but flattened into a standard lifting body shape and fitted with swept-back fins. They'd been coated in a thick pale gray foam of thermal ablative to get them through atmospheric entry. A rocket motor pack had been attached to their rear. Those he could see falling beside them were puffing out streamers of grubby yellow gas from the reaction control nozzles, turning as they fell.
