1
<Would you like to hear a joke?>
Corporal Reverent Pelletier, Pegasus Union Marines, shook his head, clearing out the cobwebs.
“So, I take it we’re here in one piece?”
<Affirmative. You’ve entered the atmosphere of Tenerife. You should hit the LZ in just over thirty-three minutes. Would you like to hear a joke?>
Rev stretched the best he could in the Personal Insertion Sphere-31, the “pisser,” yawned, and as the wake-ups took hold everything came into focus. The vibrations he was feeling was his pisser breaking through the planet’s exosphere. This had been a long insert: fifty-three hours since he launched from a nondescript in-system tramp.
“A joke? I’m just coming to, and you want to make me suffer through one of your jokes?”
<Yes.>
I never should have upped your PQ.
It had been six months since Rev, along with everyone else, had been involuntarily extended in the Corps, and he’d raised Punch’s PQ to one hundred percent at the time. In some ways, his battle buddy was no different than he was before. In other ways, such as his intense interest in humor, the difference was more pronounced.
“How long before power-up?”
The insertion sphere was almost totally inert as it plummeted to the planet’s surface. The only electrical impulses inside of it were those of his own nervous system and his battle buddy leeching from it. Everything else was off in the hopes that the Centaurs wouldn’t be able to pick the pisser up on their scans.
Rev hated not being in control, and his mind strayed to the surface of the planet, wondering if he’d been detected, wondering if a meson cannon was now being trained on him.
<Your pulse rate is rising.>
The drugs that had kept him out during the approach to Tenerife were being purged from his system, so that was no surprise. That and the fact that he was a big fat target, unable to take evasive action.
I’m going to regret this, I know.
But anything to take his mind off the Centaurs below.
“OK, tell me a joke.”
<Why is Peter Pan always flying?>
Does he sound eager?
It was getting harder to think of his battle buddy as simple crystals in a lattice lodged in his brain, but Rev hadn’t decided if Punch enjoyed telling jokes or if that was just part of his programming—something the psychologists thought Rev needed to perform at peak function.
“OK, I don’t know. Why?”
<Because he neverlands.>
It took Rev a second for it to sink in, then he groaned.
I knew I should have said no.
“I should lower your PQ to fifty.”
He made sure not to make that a direct order. He’d said that facetiously once before and didn’t realize for over a week that his battle buddy had followed that order.
Your jokes still suck, buddy. You’ve got a long way to go to catch up to the king.
The belief that his jokes were better than Punch’s oddly made him feel comfortable. With so much that his battle buddy could do better, it was good to know that, in this case, an organic brain could outdo a crystal one. Tomiko said his and Punch’s jokes were equally bad when he asked for her opinion, but what did she know about humor?
The pisser’s vibration turned to shaking, and Rev had to brace himself to keep from being slammed about. If Punch’s joke had been intended to keep his mind off the entry, it had failed. He just had to sit back and trust, which was difficult for him to do.
Just centimeters from where he was bracing himself, the surface of the capsule was ablating, slowing him down. Much of his speed had been bled away by using parabolic braking around the system’s second-largest gas giant. Now, the pisser was using the atmosphere to slow to the point to where Rev could survive the transition from the capsule into the atmosphere.
Rev fought with his stomach as the pisser lurched and shook. Some of the others made it a point of pride to be able to handle the descent. Rev cared more about puking, or not puking, as the case was. Despite the crap the others gave him for having a wimpy stomach, he wasn’t too proud to have his medinanos push antiemetics through him. Better than covering his flight suit with puke.
<Two minutes until power-up.>
Finally.
The pisser was violently shaking now, and Rev was being thrown about, banging his head and arms. Antiemetics or not, he was decidedly uncomfortable, and his ejection, despite the danger, was a welcomed prospect. He removed the power-up from the compartment by his right hand.
Punch counted him down. At zero, Rev snapped the power-up like a chem-light, allowing the three sections to intermix, then slid it into the recessed slot.
If the system was working, a tiny microwatt flicker of electricity was powering up the pisser’s sensors. They would measure its speed and location. The speed was to determine if it was going to be safe enough for Rev to be ejected. The location was because by adjusting the pattern of ablation, the pisser could make slight course corrections. All of this was being done without any input by him.
This was Rev’s second pisser insertion, so compared to most Marines, he was an old hand at it. That didn’t do much, however, to calm his nerves. Give him a Yellowjacket and put a Centaur in front of him, and he was at least in control of the situation. Here, he was just a slab of meat, a package to be delivered.
He couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed as if the shaking had abated somewhat. He stared at the spot where the LED would light, telling him he had only seconds before ejecting.
“We still good to go?”
<Affirmative, as far as I can tell.>
Rev didn’t like the “as far as I can tell,” but the capsule was entirely automated, and Punch had no control over it, either.
Come on, Reverent. You don’t need a battle buddy to hold your hand. Man up.
At last, the single green LED lit like a beacon in the dark. Rev got into the ejection position, pulling in his arms, tightening up his legs, and bringing his chin down to his chest while the LED pulsed down the seconds.
<Five seconds.>
Rev tightened his position, counting under his breath, then the pisser split open around him. The shock almost took his breath away as forces clawed at his arms and legs. Without his augments, he wouldn’t have been able to hold his position, and his survival rate would have been in the twentieth percentile. Even augmented, it was a struggle.
The atmosphere yanked at his arms and legs, but Rev managed to keep his position, and within a few moments, he had stabilized. Slowly, he extended into the age-old freefall position and deployed his flight suit.
Rev sighed with relief. He may be twenty-thousand meters in the air, plummeting to the ground in enemy-held territory, but he was in control of his actions.
That was what mattered to him.
* * *
Rev stomped on the dirt regretfully, flattening it out. He’d just buried his M-49 Assault Rifle, M554 Moray Missile, and battle kit under the forest floor, and he felt naked.
“You ready, now, Hansel?” Tomiko—no, “Leona”—asked.
“Sure, Gretel.”
“We’re on-planet now. Cut the shit and stay on script,” the lieutenant said.
“Sorry, sir,” Rev said, rightfully chastised.
Each of the team had been given identities of Tenerife citizens currently off-planet—and that included the highly illegal process of retinal matching. Rev had been given a brief as to the real Hansel Minik, and almost everything possible about the man was uploaded into his battle buddy.
Tomiko had been given the identity of Leona Galdós, but Rev had taken to calling her “Gretel” during their work-ups. His little act of rebellion had been merely annoying back at Camp Nguyen, but here, on mission, it could be a fatal mistake.
Rev still thought all of this was overkill. No one knew if the Centaurs had much in the way of security, and it was just as likely that if they did, it would be facial recognition. With the use of theatrical prosthetics that would make a New Bollywood production proud, Rev now sort of looked like Hansel Minik, but he had to squint really hard to get to the point where Tomiko, with her East Asian features, looked like Leona Galdós.
“OK, you two, take off,” Lieutenant Omestori said.
Rev waited a moment for some last-minute reminder of the mission’s importance or an admonition not to screw up, but evidently, the platoon commander thought the untold hours of prep had been enough. He gave one last glance at where his weapons were now buried, then he and Tomiko set off through the pine tree forest. They had a good five-hour hump in front of them.
“Looks just like New Hope,” Tomiko said after five minutes of silence.
“It is a Roher planet, just like home,” Rev said. “Look at all the laurel.”
“You’d think that with all the planets terraformed by humans, they’d have put a little variety into things.”
Rev shrugged. “If it works, don’t break it.”
He’d never given much thought to terraforming. It was just a fact of life, like Ponson Dam back home creating Ponson Reservoir to supply Swansea with water. Where Tomiko was always wondering about things, the why and the how, Rev was more accepting of life. As his stepfather was fond of saying, “Don’t worry about the things you can’t change. Worry about what you can.”
Tenerife was now his fourth planet, and if three of them had been terraformed by Roher, at least that made things more familiar. But familiarity could be a problem, as Gunny Thapa had warned them before the embark. Familiarity could breed complacency. The teams were in civilian clothing, and they’d be among other humans. But they couldn’t forget that Tenerife was an enemy-held planet. While the Centaurs hadn’t wiped out the planet’s citizens yet, no one knew why the people were still alive or what might set the Centaurs off on a genocidal purge.
The two fell into an easy silence, unerringly on course, guided by their navigational augments. Rev still didn’t quite understand the science behind it, which had been explained a hundred times if it had been explained once. He was beyond being grossed out about the ferrous molecules and pigeon DNA inserted into his hypothalamus. It wasn’t a process, like following a GPS back home. He just knew where he was and to where he was going.
A large bird, probably a partridge, blasted up from a laurel patch, making them both wheel around, hands reaching for weapons left back at the LZ.
“Scared the shit out of me,” Tomiko said with a rueful laugh.
“Me, too. Thought it was a tin-ass for a second there.”
“We’re just jumpy. No weapons.”
“And it sucks,” Rev said.
“I know, but we can’t really go marching into San Cristobal in our PAL-5s, armed to the teeth, right? Might stand out just a bit.”
Rev grunted. He knew that, but he didn’t have to like it.
“Miko . . . uh, Leona, what do you think of this mission? I mean, really?”
They’d been walking in a column, and Rev was currently in front. Tomiko stepped up beside him.
“It sure the hell isn’t what we’re trained to do.”
Which, Rev suddenly realized, was making him feel more uneasy than on any of his previous three missions. Rev was a Union Marine Raider, trained to close with and kill the enemy. It was a dangerous profession, but call it being self-assured, call it arrogance; in each previous case, he’d gone in with a degree of confidence that he was up to the task.
This mission was . . . well, quite a bit different.
The Centaurs had invaded Tenerife nine months previous, only the eighth Perseus Union planet taken. But instead of wiping out the planet’s humans, they had kept most of them alive, and that caused a problem.
Of course, it was great that the people hadn’t been killed. But it was almost as if they were human shields now. With hundreds of millions of people, what would the Centaurs do if humanity tried to retake the planet? That was what had stymied the Council of Humanity, and the Perseus Union Secretariat, in particular, from doing anything about it. Until now.
Under surveillance with tiny orbital drones that kept getting knocked out and replaced, humanity was monitoring the situation on the planet’s surface, and theory after theory kept popping up as to what the things they were observing meant. It looked, for all intents and purposes, as if much of the population was working, either at human facilities or inside vast buildings erected by the Centaurs. Initially, the consensus was that they were slave labor for some kind of project. There were reports from across the galaxy that humans had been put into forced labor, but nothing to this scale.
Then, the rumors started taking a more sinister tone. The humans inside the Centaur buildings were being experimented on as the Centaurs tested new weapons and ways to exterminate the human race. That humans were being genetically modified to become entirely new beings, and that they were simply being tortured for the amusement of their captors.
Rev wasn’t so sure about that last one, but it didn’t matter what he thought. Pressure was building on the government to act. People with relatives on Tenerife were a daily event as they protested outside the Government House on New Mars. It had gotten to the point that something had to be done despite the obvious danger to the captive humans should the planet be invaded by the Marines.
And so was born their mission. Those trained in surreptitious insertions—most of the Corps’ recon assets, SEALs, planetary rangers and commandos, and some Frisian and Manifest Destiny special forces—were to infiltrate the population centers and organize the citizens to act upon the coming assault. Once the Marine main force arrived, the citizens were to flee for safety.
Military and civilian specialists feared that the carnage among the civilians would be astronomical. Anything that could be done to minimize the number killed had to be attempted.
Rev and the rest had crowd control theory uploaded into their battle buddies, and they’d gone through some limited hands-on training, but he was far from confident that all the two-man teams scattered across the planet could first, escape detection, and second, actually herd civilians to safety while the planet was under attack.
Rev wasn’t afraid for his own life. He was afraid of failure and its consequences.