The jump door was empty. The bay of the Bonnie Parker lighted with crackling brilliance as one of Second Platoon’s newbies hit his manual deployment switch while checking his jump reel one last time.
The wire lashed about like a demented cobra, shorting its juice every time a coil touched metal. Within two seconds, the sparks vanished into a net of purple afterimages. The Marine stood stricken—and his wire lay limp and useless.
“I’ll get him, Placido,” Kowacs said, stepping to the newbie before the Second-Platoon lieutenant could. Kowacs let the sling hold his assault rifle. His right hand slipped his own jump reel from his belt, fingers working the catches with the ease of smooth practice, while his left stripped the newbie’s dead unit.
“Go! Beta,” Kowacs ordered. Placido hesitated between the door and the newbie. Not all of his platoon was in position; those who were, jumped—and the remainder followed raggedly, each Headhunter lunging out as soon as there was open space before him.
The newbie would have jumped too, jerking himself away from Kowacs before the fresh reel was in place. Instinctively the kid preferred to die rather than to be left behind by his unit.
No problem. Corporal Sienkiewicz gripped the newbie’s equipment harness, and nobody she held was going anywhere. Kowacs finished hooking the reel, slapped the kid on the shoulder and shouted, “Go!” as he turned to take the spare unit Bradley had snatched from the equipment locker five meters away.
Sienkiewicz flung the kid across the Bonnie Parker’s bucking deck, putting her shoulders into the motion. He was bawling as he sailed through the hatch with Lieutenant Placido beside him.
“Here, sir!” Sergeant Bradley shouted, lobbing the replacement discharge reel toward Kowacs because the Bonnie Parker had begun to vibrate like the blade of a jackhammer. Kowacs raised his hands, but the gentle arc of the reel that would save his life changed into a cork-screw as the landing vessel tried to stand on her tail.
One of the bay doors torqued off into the airstream. Kowacs couldn’t tell where the discharge reel went because all sixteen of the bay’s emergency lights blew up in simultaneous green flashes. Kowacs was tumbling, and when he could see anything it was the great cylinder of the Bonnie Parker above him, dribbling blazing fragments of itself as it plunged through the dark sky.
The Bonnie Parker’d been a good mount, a tough old bird. To the Marines she carried into one part of Hell after another, she’d been as good a friend as hardware could be to flesh and blood. But this was a business in which your luck ran out sooner or later. The Bonnie Parker’s luck had run out; and the only difference between the landing vessel and Captain Miklos Kowacs, dropping unsupported through the atmosphere of a hostile planet, was the size of the hole they’d make when they hit the ground.
“Location,” Kowacs ordered, and his helmet obediently projected a hologram read-out onto the air rushing past. Three kilometers from the intended target area, which didn’t matter now, and, according to the laser altimeter, forty-seven hundred meters in the air.
Very shortly that wouldn’t matter either, but the numbers weren’t spinning down as quickly as Kowacs would’ve thought. Spreading his arms and legs slowed him enough that, even with the weight of his gear, he might not be travelling more than, say, thirty meters a second when he hit.
The commo still worked, though there was a hash of static from jamming, other communications, and the band-ripping petulance of plasma weapons.
“Six to all Headhunters,” Kowacs said on the unit push. “We’re going to be landing south of the target, most of us. Attack the south face. See if you can get some support to knock down a section of the wall. I don’t want any unnecessary casualties, but remember—unless we move fast, the Weasels won’t’ve left us anybody to rescue.”
Kowacs took a deep breath without closing the communication. Then he said the rest of what he had to say. “Delta Six, I’m passing command to you. Acknowledge. Over.”
“Roger, Six,” said Lieutenant Woking in a voice as calm as Kowacs had tried to keep his own. He wasn’t the senior lieutenant, but he’d been in the 121st longer than the other three, and Weapons Platoon would be on the ground first.