19
Twenty-two hours later, Rev was waiting in the cramped cargo hold of the Amethyst. The skiff had been refitted with a pisser launch system, which took up the bulk of the hold. The bulkheads were lined with the pissers themselves, all the track, ready to be fed into the launcher like linked rounds in a crew-served weapon.
Only in this case, Rev and the other Raiders were the rounds. Three recon platoons, the Raider platoon, and two sapper squads were out in the black like them, ready to be inserted in advance of the assault. A couple of Rev’s Direct Combat company mates, Jonah Wisteria, Rafer d’Agonstino, and Giselle Norris-Alein, would be out there somewhere, ready to cocoon in as well: Rafer and Giselle with recon, and Jonah with a sapper squad.
Other than Krissy—respect for the fallen—the five of them would be the first of their DC class to actually go into combat. The rest of the class would land with the regiment in another twenty-nine hours.
Their target was Preacher Rolls, a once bustling planet of three billion, and now there were possibly a hundred thousand to a million humans hiding out in the hills and forests. The planet had been one of the first taken by the Centaurs, and the death toll had been horrendous. Well over two billion humans had been killed. The planet was then one of the first that humanity had retaken, and the COH had ordered it evacuated against the will of most of the survivors.
Another couple hundred were evacuated before the Centaurs retook the planet, scorching about thirty percent of the land masses. It was assumed that there were no survivors from those sections.
When Intel reported that two-thirds of the Centaurs left, leaving somewhere between six and eight hundred on the planet, the regiment, along with the Fifth and Seventh Marines, was embarked to retake it. Over nine-thousand Marines to take on possibly eight hundred Centaurs. It should have been two divisions, according to the lieutenant, given the mortality rate of about two hundred human soldiers for every dead Centaur. The Perseus Marines liked to think of themselves as more elite than most of the rest of humanity’s armed forces, but still—humanity was stretched thin, and the Gryphons, Lancers, and Bucks got the call.
“You’re next,” the Navy launch master, a grizzled senior chief, told Rev.
Rev hesitantly lowered himself into the pisser—the Personal Insertion Sphere-31. He’d never been in a real pisser in training, only virtual ones. The training had only been for a ten-hour simulation, and that was bad enough. This time, their insert would take more than sixty hours. Luckily, he’d be out for most of that. Still, the thought of hurtling through space in what was essentially a three-meter-long cocoon was more than a little disconcerting.
The launch master hooked up the pisser to Rev’s jack, then checked the readings. “I’ve got you all green.”
Rev gave him a thumbs-up. He tried not to think about the millions of calculations necessary to not only get him to Preacher Rolls over the vast amount of space, but also of having to hit the planet’s atmosphere at just the right angle. Too shallow, and he’d bounce back up into space. Too steep and he’d burn up in entry.
“See you on the ground,” Tomiko said from behind him.
Rev twisted to see her standing by her pisser just as his cover shut, closing him off from everything and cloaking him in darkness.
“How are we doing? Are the readings good?”
<All readings are within parameters.>
“Time to launch?”
<Forty-nine minutes, thirty-two seconds.>
Damn, that long?
Rev took a couple of deep breaths, wishing he could just be put out now. But regulations were regulations, and he couldn’t go under until launched. Not that he understood why. If something went wrong with the
launch, there was nothing he could do about it but pray the Amethyst could rescue him.
Hell, getting shot through space in an unpowered coffin. What could possibly go wrong?
Rev couldn’t even talk to anyone else. The pisser was shielded and inert. The tiniest trickle of nanowatts connected him to the pisser, and even that would be cut after he was launched. It wasn’t until he hit the stratosphere that he’d break apart a chemical battery, allowing electricity to generate. Only then would he have any capabilities.
So, for now, he was left alone with his thoughts.
“How much time?” he asked again after waiting at least twenty minutes.
<Forty-one minutes, twenty-two seconds.>
Hell.
He shifted his body, then reached around to smooth his flight suit where it met the seat. Most of the pisser’s velocity would be coming from the Amethyst itself, like the old Twentieth Century aircraft carriers launching planes. However, the launcher would give them an added boost, one that an unaugmented Marine would find tough to survive. The older hands had warned Tomiko and him that the slightest wrinkle would dig into their body, and they’d feel it upon waking up at their destination.
He tried counting down, and when he reached two hundred, he asked his AI for the time again.
<Thirty-nine minutes, twenty-seven seconds.>
I counted to two hundred. Shouldn’t that be at least three minutes?
Rev shook his head. This sucked, and he felt alone. If he could only call up Tomiko. That wasn’t going to happen, however.
But—
Rev considered his AI. It wasn’t a real person, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to give it a little personality?
Feeling stupid, Rev said, “AI, I want you to up your PQ to ten . . . no, fifteen percent.”
<Confirmed.>
There wasn’t much of a difference, Rev thought. Maybe the voice wasn’t quite so flat.
Stupid. It’s not like it’s going to become a person.
Rev thought about telling it to revert, but he guessed it wouldn’t make any difference. He lay on his back, stewing in his thoughts before he asked for the time again.
<You have thirty-one minutes, eight seconds remaining.>
Rev sighed, and unexpectedly his AI said, <Your heart rate is slightly accelerated. I cannot recommend a suppressant before launch. Would you like some music?>
“What, you can do that?”
<I have over ten million recordings on file. I can download more once connectivity is restored.>
“Well, hell, why didn’t you tell me that before?” Rev started. Then he said, “That’s not a question,” before his AI could answer.
He had probably been told that during his initial briefing, or he would have found out as he got accustomed to using his AI, but he’d put it to sleep whenever he wasn’t officially required to use it.
“Can you play . . . uh . . . ‘Descent Into Madness?’”
Almost immediately, the heavy bass riff began, almost as if he were right there in the front row of a Blazing Ants concert. It was hard to believe there wasn’t really any sound being made. The music was being inputted directly into his auditory cortex. It was like having the best sound system ever.
The song increased in volume. With its driving beat and screaming lyrics, it probably wasn’t the best choice to calm him down, but Rev didn’t care. It took his mind off his claustrophobic pisser and the upcoming voyage.
From “Descent Into Madness,” Rev went to “Lost,” then “Red Horizons.”
“How didn’t I know I could do this?” he asked himself as he bobbed his head to the beat.
Before he knew it, his AI cut “Nice Guys Don’t Finish” to say, <You have four minutes. I am beginning final prep. Do you wish me to continue the music?>
“Uh, no. I’m fine. Let’s do it.”
Within seconds, his combat suit started to cool, and cardiovascular constrictors flooded his body. Between the lower temperature and the drugs, his blood pressure was going to climb to 450 over 300, which would be deadly for an unaugmented Marine, but he’d handled it during testing. It hadn’t been comfortable, but neither had it been as bad as he’d thought it would be.
After two minutes, his combat suit, which was on under his flight suit, began to constrict around his arms, legs, and pelvis, forcing blood into his thorax and head. This was worse than the drugs.
<You have one minute.>
The pisser lurched, and Rev grabbed the two handles by his side and jammed his feet into the footplates. He could feel the pisser make its way to the launcher, and once again, dark thoughts of being lost in the deep black of space began to creep into the nethers of his consciousness. The thought of facing Centaurs was not as daunting as what he was about to experience. At least in facing a Centaur, he’d have some degree of control. Now, he was only a package to be delivered.
The pisser stopped, probably inside the launch arm. All Rev could do was to hope the crystal brain inside of it was making the right calculations. Even a slight miscalculation, something as minor as having the wrong combined weight of the pisser with Rev aboard, could end up in a bad way.
Rev held his breath, momentarily afraid that if he exhaled, it would change his mass, and then he laughed at his foolishness. He was in an enclosed environment.
<Ten seconds . . . nine seconds . . .>
Rev grasped the two handles alongside him and tensed his arms.
< . . . eight seconds . . . seven seconds . . . six seconds . . . >
Rev extended his thighs, muscles capable of lifting nine hundred kilos straining. It wasn’t just to fight G-Loc. If he failed, he would fail catastrophically. The amount of G’s he’d face could be deadly.
< . . . five seconds . . . four seconds . . . three seconds . . . >
Rev took a deep breath.
< . . . initiate AGMS . . . >
Rev exhaled, tensing his belly and limbs.
< . . . one second . . . launch.>
And God’s own hammer came crashing down on Rev. This wasn’t a simulation, as real as that had been. This was far worse.
Rev kept his isometric pressure, trying to keep as much blood in his brain as possible as he accelerated off the Amethyst. Five seconds, ten seconds, twenty seconds, and he didn’t know if he could keep it up.
Suddenly, the pressure was gone. Rev took a deep breath of air, almost afraid to relax his death grip.
<Acceleration has ceased. I will commence scrubbing the drugs from your system.>
Not that he could see it, or even check it somehow, the acceleration harness would have dropped off. His pisser was now an unpowered, unguided coffin. The die was cast.
His nanos cleaned up the cardiovascular constrictors, and Rev felt lightheaded as his blood pressure dropped.
Then he broached the question he was almost afraid to ask. “Are we on course?”
< I have no way to know for sure, but from the internal gyros, it appears the PIS-31 followed the planned acceleration and timing.>
“Couldn’t you just have told me everything was fine?”
His AI didn’t respond. Maybe it could tell a rhetorical question from a real one.
It took a good ten minutes until his body was scrubbed of the drugs and he began to feel normal. Not for long, however, he knew. He’d be put under soon.
It wasn’t just to keep him from going stir-crazy in the dark, though. There was limited O2 in the pisser, and this would keep him from consuming too much of it. Theoretically, if he missed the planet, he’d be kept under, almost in hibernation, as it were, in hopes that a Navy ship could track down and recover him.
<Are you ready to sleep?>
No use delaying.
“Yes, go ahead.”
Another wave, far gentler this time, started to flow through him.
“Can you give me some music on the way out?” he mumbled.
The soft strains of “Wild Roses” followed him as he faded away.
* * *
Rev slowly emerged from the cottony cocoon. He was shaking and wasn’t quite sure why.
<You are entering the atmosphere of Preacher Rolls.>
“Already?”
He stretched and yawned, and as the wake-ups took hold, everything came into focus. He felt vibrations as his pisser broke through the planet’s exosphere. At least he’d hit the target. Now, the questions were if he was at the angle to actually make it to the surface and then if he’d land near the rest of the team.
That is, if he wasn’t shot down first. But the Centaurs, for all the technological advantages, didn’t knock down many insertions. That meant they were either lax or that the humans had developed some stealth tech in the pissers that worked.
“How do we look?”
<I am not able to determine that.>
Of course, we’re inert.
The only electrical impulses going on now were those of his nervous system, and if the Centaurs could pick that up, he would be in for a world of shit.
The pisser’s vibration turned to shaking. Rev strained his eyes, trying to pick up the glow of entry. If he saw it, though, it would be a very bad sign, but the interior remained thankfully dark.
The shaking became more violent, and Rev had to brace himself to keep from being slammed about. This was normal, or so he’d been told, but once again, the reality was different from the simulations. He just had to sit back and trust, which was difficult for him to do.
Outside, the surface of the pisser was ablating, slowing him down, but he was still booking it. Much of his speed had been bled away by using parabolic braking around first a gas giant, then a smaller, but still huge planet before slinging toward his target. Now, the pisser was using the atmosphere to slow to the point to where Rev could survive the transition out of it.
But the act of slowing down further had its own associated problems. There was no way to hide the fact that something was entering the atmosphere, so the intent was to make it look like a meteorite. The ablation supposedly mimicked how a hunk of rock burned up.
The Gs created through slowing down were not quite as pronounced as with the launch, but they lasted longer, and coupled with the shaking, Rev thought the experience was worse.
<Two minutes until power-up.>
Finally!
Without the antiemetics, Rev was sure he would have puked by now. For all his augments, he would have loved to have had something done to calm his “wimpy stomach,” as Tomiko called it.
She’s probably doing fine out there somewhere.
The pisser was shaking now, and Rev was being thrown about, banging his head several times on the side of it. Even with the antiemetics, he was decidedly uncomfortable, and the idea of his launch, despite the danger, was a welcomed prospect. He removed the power-up from the compartment by his right hand.
His AI counted him down. At zero, Rev broke the power-up like a chem-light, allowing the three sections to intermix, then slid it into the recessed slot . . . at least he tried to. In the dark it took him several tries to find it and align the power-up.
And he waited. No lights lit to tell him it was a success.
If everything worked as planned, a tiny microwatt flicker of electricity was powering up the sensors. They would measure his 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.
None of this was passed to Rev. He would find out soon enough.
The extreme violent movement of the pisser abated a few degrees while vibration increased. Rev became aware of a dull sound growing, penetrating his helmet. After so long without real auditory inputs, the sound seemed inordinately loud. And, while he might be hallucinating, Rev thought he could begin to see a glow as the pisser’s outer layers burned away. After a few more minutes where the glow seemed to grow in intensity, it ceased. The velocity had slowed enough to stop the burn.
Getting close now.
He watched a spot in the dark, just in front of his eyes, willing the signal to appear. An image of auguring it in, what the pilots called hitting the ground, making a smoking hole, fought to the front of his thoughts, and he had to force it back.
At last, when he thought something had to have gone wrong, the single green LED lit like a beacon in the dark. Rev got into the ejection position, pulling in his arms and tightening up his legs. The green LED pulsed down the seconds.
<Please bring your chin down to your chest.>
Shit!
Rev hastily shoved his head down farther. He knew better than that, but in the pressure of the moment, he’d forgotten, his eyes locked on the light. Not the recipe for success.
Rev wasn’t being ejected, per se, even if the term was still in use. It was more like the pisser was going to come apart around him.
<Five seconds.>
Rev tightened his position, counting under his breath, when the entire side of the pisser split open. The shock of hitting the atmosphere was huge, despite the ablative slowing of the capsule. Rev had been ready, but his position was almost flung apart. Without his augments, he wouldn’t have been able to maintain any semblance of control, and he now understood why Marines before the war, before augmentations, had more than a few times been killed upon ejection.
The atmosphere yanked at his arms and legs, but Rev managed to keep his position, and within a few moments, he had stabilized. Slowly, and as taught, he extended into the age-old freefall position, deploying his flight suit, and started the next phase of the long insertion.
Rev had entered the atmosphere over daylight, but by the time he had ejected from the pisser, he had traveled into night. Rev could see the light on the horizon, but beneath him, the planet was shrouded in darkness. He glanced around, trying to get his bearings.
Preacher Rolls had been a human world, and its magnetic fields were well-documented. A map of those fields was part of Rev’s uploads. There was a momentary mental fart, as he liked to think of it, as his hippocampus took in the data, and suddenly he knew exactly where he was and where he had to go.
He was off course by over fifty kilometers. Not bad considering the distance he’d traveled to get here and more than acceptable. Not that he wasn’t going to take action to cut that distance.
Rev widened his arms, and an additional foil surface clicked into place. He raised his right arm and immediately banked to the right. Ahead of him, a low range was between him and the Assembly Area. He had to clear it, or he’d be faced with a long hump to reach the others before they stepped off.
The flight suit had a glide ratio of 9-to-1, which meant for every meter of drop, he had nine meters of forward movement. Rev knew he was about eight kilometers from the lowest point of the range in front of him. What he didn’t know was how high he was, yet.
He twisted his altimeter, which read 21, 464 meters above sea level.
That can’t be right.
He looked again: 21,464.
It wasn’t changing.
He broke his position to tap on the dial with his left hand. No change.
He snapped back into position, feeling his forward momentum pick up again.
“Do I have a backup?”
<Negative. Not on this planet.>
Rev didn’t know quite what his AI meant by this planet, but he did understand that he didn’t have anything to tell him how high he was. There was nothing to do but head for the lowest spot and pray for the best. With most of his flight suit training done on the simulators, this was only his third real flight, but with his augmented reflexes, he was able to make the micro-adjustments to squeeze grams of lift and centimeters of forward progress. And still, he didn’t know if it was enough. The wind shifted at different altitudes, pushing, then pulling him off course, trying to upend him. He fought to keep his course as the pass rapidly approached. Each meter lost in altitude was a personal insult.
The last kilometer was a race against nature. Swirling winds were his enemy as he passed the lower slopes. And he had a decision to make. At this speed, he risked serious injury, at the minimum, if he burned it in trying to make it through the pass. But if he flared to a safe landing, he wouldn’t be able to link up with the team. He’d have no part in the mission.
That’s what decided it for him. He had to try. Whether he crashed trying or gave up and flared for a landing made no difference.
Rev fought to keep his position as the ground rushed up. Just ahead, the lowest point in the pass mocked him.
“Bite me!” he shouted as the last hundred meters closed.
For a second, he thought he’d made it, just clearing a rocky outcrop, when a tree on the other side loomed up. With a shout, Rev dropped his left arm and swerved to the side, just clipping the branches as he shot past.
But that cost him speed, and there was very little room on the other side to gain it back. Rev dove as much as he could, his legs hitting trees twice as he tried to regain speed and lift. As the steep slope started to level out, Rev slowly leveled out again, struggling to maintain lift.
And then, he was through. The slope fell beneath him, and he shot out into open sky.
“How about that?” he asked his AI, relief making him giddy.
His AI didn’t reply.
Shooting for the gap had put him off course, so, while he still had elevation, he came around to a direct azimuth. There was no way he’d be able to cover the forty-plus kilometers to the AA, but he fully intended to cover as much as he could before he was forced to land.
He scanned the sky as he flew, wondering if he could spot someone else from the team. But the flight suits, while not exactly stealthy, were made to be hard to spot, and even with his night vision capabilities, it was still a moonless night.
That, or they didn’t make it, the unwilling thought intruded. Just concentrate, dammit.
Each nine meters forward was nine meters less he’d have to walk, but it cost a meter in height. Rev sank lower and lower until he was only a couple of hundred meters above the ground. He had to find a landing spot, but all he could see was a dense canopy of trees. No clearing, no road, nothing that could serve as an LZ. And still he descended.
At fifty meters up, he knew he was going to have to do a tree landing. He’d done exactly one in a simulator, and it hadn’t gone well. The sim’s AI had given him a sixty-eight percent chance of a significant injury.
Most of the trees were about the same height, which was going to make things difficult. But there, just to the right and up ahead, a single evergreen stuck out of the canopy by a good five meters or so.
“That’s as good as any,” he muttered, turning and diving to pick up enough speed to be able to go at it on a level plain.
The tree loomed as he rushed up. At the last moment, Rev pulled up, almost to a vertical position, and slammed into the treetop. It was like getting kicked by a mule, and the top of the tree broke off under his impact. Rev flailed wildly, clawing at the tree top, he and it fell, crashing into the canopy below with a series of staccato cracks.
Rev just hung on for dear life, and he jerked to a stop a moment later. Around him, leaves and bits of wood showered down. He gathered his breath and tried to take stock of himself. His chest and one leg hurt, but he seemed whole.
He tentatively raised his head, and that started him sliding again. Something hit him hard in the shoulder, and he twisted to catch the branch. The top of the evergreen kept falling into the darkness below while Rev clung to the branch for dear life.
“Hey, anything you can do to help?” he asked his AI.
Once again, his AI was silent.
“I thought not.”
Rev pulled himself up onto the branch, which was creaking ominously. He was afraid it was about to go. Too many branches beneath him blocked his view of the ground, so he didn’t know how high up he was. He knew he could take pretty impressive falls, especially when he was ready for it, but without knowing his height, and with the branches below that could knock him out of position, he didn’t want to chance it.
That left climbing.
Rev inched along the branch, expecting it to give out at any moment, and made it to the trunk. Once there, it really wasn’t that difficult to climb down, using branches when he could, shimmying when he had to. Within a few moments, his feet were on terra firma.
Or Preacher Rolls firma, he thought, chuckling at his lame joke.
That he was relieved was an understatement. Somehow, he was down and mostly in one piece.
Rev stripped off his flight suit and rolled it into a ball. It would disintegrate within thirty hours, breaking down into its component molecules, to be scattered in the breeze. It had done him well, though.
He took a quick inventory and asked his AI for a physical check-up. Whatever interference had been present-- if any-- was gone now, and he got a near instant report on his overall health. As expected, he was only bruised, but it was good to confirm that. Already, his nanos were rushing to the spots to combat inflammation and repair the minor damage.
Once he was ready, Rev checked his position. He still had twenty-three-point-nine klicks to the RP and just under four hours to make it. Easy-peasy. He started off through the forest at a slow jog.
The insertion had been the easy part. Now the real work was about to begin.