Why’d I ever agree to serve on a drop ship? Every man who served on one was required to train as replacement crew for whatever was being dropped. And since Bonaventure Royale’s job was dropping LRH intel-teams onto occupied worlds, his training had led him to this: replacing a dead engineer on a Mark XXI Special Unit headed into potentially the worst battle of the whole damned war. Common sense and a healthy dollop of terror told him to stick to the Bonaventure Royale like a tick to a dog’s back.
You’re no Marine, Willum told himself for the millionth time. Yeah, well, you weren’t hired to be one for this drop, either, so quit wetting yourself. Engineering you know. And you’ll be staying inside the Mark XXI. . . .
Trouble was, that scared him too. Willum was a ship’s engineer, accustomed to interacting with and maintaining FTL ships and their psychotronic systems. He’d studied Bolo configurations, enough to be familiar with their general systems; but he wasn’t a specialist and he’d never really believed it would come down to this. Confident in his ship’s ability to avoid trouble coming out of FTL, Willum DeVries had sloughed off. It didn’t matter that Bonny’d destroyed that Deng sentry; the damage was done, the Bolo crew had lost two men, and here he was, harnessed for drop after a scant three-minute warning to get his terrified backside aboard.
Willum was afraid the whole crew might pay the price for his carelessness. He didn’t think he could handle that. Nor was he psychologically prepared to get as close to dirtside battle as a Mark XXI’s crew inevitably went. Willum had never run from a fair fight, but the Deng had never heard of fighting fair. And nobody was nice to an enemy spy. Maybe that was another reason his skin was crawling.
Or maybe it was just that Mark XXI Special Units had generated intense debates in both military and political circles almost from their development. Screwball programming, it was whispered, odd behavior patterns, almost incestuous relationships with their crews—relationships a Mark XXI crewman would cheerfully hospitalize a man over if he were stupid enough to speculate about them in a crewman’s presence. Just what, exactly, a Mark XXI’s programming might be, to inspire such loyalty and widespread controversy, Willum didn’t know. Secrecy surrounded just about everything connected with the Mark XXI Special Units. Whatever it was, Willum figured he’d find out soon enough.
If the Deng let him live so long.
Which reminded him to be scared all over again.
A glance at the other officers brought no reassurance. The MC, a grim-faced guy named Hart, didn’t look frightened, exactly; but the pallor around the edges of his lips wasn’t natural, either. If a combat veteran like Hart who’d participated in multiple successful missions was spooked . . .
The man everyone called “Banjo” was the only member of the original crew Willum felt might tolerate him. Assistant Mission Commander Aduwa Banjul, with only a year in this crew himself, had given Willum a whirlwind orientation after he’d climbed through the open personnel hatch—
They dropped away from Bonaventure with a lurch. Freefall . . . Willum swallowed bile. He’d never been space sick, but battle sick . . . That was a possibility he hadn’t yet tested. Don’t be sick, DeVries, don’t be sick. . . .
He knew what was going on around him—theoretically. An infiltration force of two ships would be blowing Deng satellite systems, stripping away the enemy’s orbital monitoring capability as part of a decoy operation with longer-term benefits. Meanwhile, two LRH Bolos and several hundred similarly cocooned decoys dropped from orbit toward BFS-3793-C’s pitted, canyon-scored surface. . . .
Willum tried unsuccessfully to loosen his grip on the drop harness. He glanced at the vid screen which gave the Command Compartment a view into the Crew Compartment. Willum wanted to see how the other crewmen were holding up. Dismount Team One was in harness on the left. “Gunny” Hokum, the crew’s gunnery sergeant, was whistling under his breath. Eagle Talon Gunn’s dark eyes met Willum’s in the vid pickup. The AmerInd grinned briefly, teeth gleaming white against bronzed skin. “Great ride, huh, tekkie?”
Despite the veiled insult, Willum tried to smile back. At least someone had talked to him, making an effort to include him in this mission. “Yeah.”
“Icicle” Goryn eyed the vid lens with open hostility. His silent glare seemed to say, “You’re not Honshuko Kai, damn you. Who gave you the right to talk to us as an equal?”
He held Icicle’s gaze long enough for the veteran to shrug and glance away. It wasn’t Willum’s fault their friends had been killed; but that wouldn’t help a damn bit when they hit the ground running and had to work together.
DT-2 had harnessed in to the right. He’d never met the man whom Danny Hopper, a Bonaventure shipboard Marine, had replaced. The Bolo’s crew had called him Specter. They’d spoken the nickname with reverence even before his death. Hopper looked more nervous than Willum, swallowing so often he reminded Willum of a bullfrog in full song. Sergeant “Milwaukee” Petra, harnessed to Danny’s left, was DT-2’s team leader.
Crazy Fritz, a lean, hollow-eyed man hanging in harness on Hopper’s other side, glanced at the ship’s Marine as though to say, “We needed Specter. Not a goddamned fancy-pants Marine.” But he didn’t quite voice it aloud. Hopper, a courageous twenty-year-old who’d spent most of his duty tour as a ceremonial guard, returned the older man’s look levelly—but he lost a few shades of color and did a good bit more swallowing.
Great. We’re screaming toward Enemy lines and the whole damn crew is rattled before we even leave orbit.
Willum had a desperately bad feeling in his gut, and it wasn’t called space sickness.
We fall. Encased as I am in a sphere of foam-form heat-repellent tiles, I am blind during the initial stage of drop. Inertial sensors transmit a phenomenon I have never shared with my Commander: I am dizzy. Drop always does this to me. I wonder if humans experience the same sensation. Speculation along such lines is not productive. I devote my attention to the mission at hand.
Ablative foam tiles begin to shed mass. We have reached atmosphere. I am aware when the ribbon drag deploys, slowing our speed. My crew is unharmed by the change in velocity, although I detect higher-than-normal levels of stress chemicals in the bloodstreams of my two replacement crew members. Danny Hopper, in particular, suffers during this drop. I will suggest corrective medication once we achieve landing. The ribbon drag functions perfectly. More heat-resistant tile boils away. A series of seven small parachutes deploy, slowing our velocity further. An outer sensor array tip clears. I am able to see. Dizziness disappears instantly; inertial sensors match visual input perfectly.
We are still high in the atmosphere. I am able to track one hundred forty-three of the decoys as well as my sister LRH-1327. She is encased as I am in a glowing sphere that shrinks with each passing picosecond. Her drag chutes have also deployed. Deng weapons discharge from the planet’s surface. Missiles arc upwards. One decoy explodes. A second decoy is destroyed. We drop lower. LRH-1327’s main chute deploys. Her descent slows sharply. Decoys deploy main chutes and some begin sensor scans. These broadcast their findings back to Bonaventure Royale, reporting terrain features and Enemy activity in order to provide good data for the landing force as well as make themselves higher priority targets. Two seconds before I drop below the horizon line, LRH-1327 explodes.
I mourn.
“Doug,” I say in my softest voice, “mission parameters have changed. LRH-1327 has been destroyed. I am sorry.”
My Commander does not respond for 0.89 seconds. An eternity of grieving. “Understood, Red. Delay deployment of main chute.”
I execute the command, overriding automatic settings. “A wise decision, Doug.”
I wait to deploy the main chute which will slow us to speeds at which our para-wing can be deployed. A slower drop provides too great a risk of destruction. We are humanity’s last hope for reconnaissance of Hobson’s Mines before the main invasion fleet arrives. Thousands of human lives will be spared or destroyed depending on the success of this intelligence-gathering mission. We cannot risk being shot down.
I wait until sensors tell me we have reached the critical edge of our margin for error. I deploy the main chute. The shock of drag slows us. My crew members jerk in their harnesses. I check their vital signs for injury, but detect only expected mission-level stress. We drop. Deng weapons destroy five more decoys still visible to my sensor array. I search the terrain below for potential landing sites and coordinate visual data with on-board maps.
My maps of BFS-3793-C, nicknamed Hobson’s Mines, are excellent. This was a human mining colony until the Deng invasion two months and four days ago. We cannot allow the Deng to hold this world. It provides critical war materiel that would give the Enemy a strategic advantage over humanity. We must retake the mines. I note that we drop toward a large river. Preliminary scans reveal that it lies at the bottom of a canyon 0.82 kilometers wide. Water depth varies. The deepest spots are more than adequate for a camouflaged landing site, particularly if Bonaventure Royale’s efforts to neutralize the Enemy’s satellite reconnaissance abilities have been successful.