Ten
Fifteen hours and fifty-nine minutes later I hung head down in my Eternads, festooned with fins and dive brakes that were supposed to keep me from disintegrating at six hundred miles per hour. I hung in a drop cradle that the spooks had bolted above the centerline of the launch bay’s doors. Twenty feet away, in an identical cradle, Weddle hung. Between us in a third cradle hung a man-sized, finned object that looked like a day-glo orange, old-fashioned gravity bomb.
The bay had already been evacuated, first of spooks then of air, so the only sounds I could hear were on the hardwired intercom that was plugged into my suit’s thigh connector, and any sound that was conducted through the solid cradle connected to my suit.
I must have looked as vicious as a bat big enough to bite rhinos, but I felt like vomit waiting to happen. Eighteen inches below my helmet’s crest, on the opposite side of the bay-door plates, things began going bump, even louder than the blood pounding in my ears.
I chinned my intercom mike. “What’s that noise?”
Howard’s voice crackled in my ears. “Don’t worry. It’s abnormal, but it’s according to plan. The ship’s dropped twenty-five miles. That puts it into atmosphere just dense enough that frost condenses on the shaded portion of the outer hull. When the ship’s rotation brings the frost into the sun and heats it, chunks break off.”
“Why the hell would you plan that?”
“The main reason the ship’s altitude has to be lower is so your free-fall velocity doesn’t reach the sound barrier. The condensation chunking’s a phenomenon that we hadn’t anticipated until last week. But we realized that the chunks will be a bonus. They’re about the same size as you two, and of the equipment drone. When you drop, any radar analyst should dismiss you as just chunks of ice.”
Eye roll. “Radar analysts? Howard, I’ll blow every radar analyst on Tressel.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
“What if either of us collides with an ice chunk?”
There was the deer-in-the-headlights pause of a spook who just thought of something too late. Then Howard said, “Well, the suits are very tough.”
He didn’t add “probably,” which I was tired of hearing anyway.
A third, distant voice crackled. “Bay doors will open on my mark.”
I drew a breath and closed my eyes.
Howard said, “Be careful down there, Jazen.”
“Mark.”
The bay doors rumbled, I opened my eyes, and the last remaining air blew hull-plate dust out into blackness. The intercom’s crackle cut off knife-sharp as the cradle clamps released me and the hardwire jack unplugged.
Bang. Hissss.
The rocket booster that pushed me toward the planet below really was gentle. At least gentler than a jump-master’s boot on a reluctant student jumper’s ass.
A jolt smacked me through the armor’s backplate as the spent booster separated itself from me. I felt myself fall in silence while I stared down at white, swirled clouds. They looked to have been painted above blue ocean that stretched to a curved horizon in every direction.
As the jump-master and I had practiced while I hung in the cradle, I kept my body rigid, hands tight to my sides, ankles together.
Twenty yards to my right I could just make out Weddle falling in formation like a wingman. I wasn’t about to crane my neck to look at him, much less wave.
I shot down toward Tressel like a plasteel arrow. The only sound audible in the suit was my rapid breathing. I spoke out loud inside my helmet. “Not so bad.”
Then I noticed another object tumbling along at the edge of my vision, between Weddle and me. White and ragged.
Blam.
Something struck my left boot. One of Howard’s bonus ice chunks. Probably.
“Goddam your science projects, Howard!” My view changed to blackness, then back to the planet, alternating. The collision with the ice chunk had set me somersaulting, head over feet, at a slow and constant rate.
As I rotated, I saw a half-dozen ice chunks flying in formation. Above, alongside, and now below me.
“Oh, crap!” I wasn’t flat-spinning toward cerebral hemorrhage, but there was nothing, not even air, to grab hold of as I fell. I couldn’t stop my tumbling. Within minutes the atmosphere would thicken. My speed would increase, maybe not beyond the sound barrier, but even at a modest four hundred miles per hour the wind would tear an extended limb off my body the way a Visigoth tore a leg off a roast goose.
Howard had the uplink to Emerald River blocked, so I couldn’t ask for advice. I couldn’t spot Weddle, but he was a master parachutist. So I chinned the emergency suit-to-suit. “Weddle? I got hit. I’m tumbling. What do I do?”
Nothing.
“Weddle? Goddammit, chin on your suit-to-suit!”
Another object tumbled into view, smaller and darker than the flying icebergs.
It was an Eternad helmet, dented. Probably by the impact of a falling ice chunk.
“Oh, fuck.”
The helmet disappeared from view as I spun. “Weddle?” They say there are no stupid questions, but that one was close.
I made another revolution and glimpsed the helmet again. Something red and white flapped out of the helmet’s neck ring.
Weddle’s spinal cord, or what was left of it.
I squeezed my eyes shut and gagged.
When I opened them, Weddle’s head was gone. Mercifully for both of us, I suppose. I couldn’t spot the rest of him, which, along with the ice storm, seemed to have fallen away from me, below.
A small favor. With each revolution I glimpsed the black space above me. Emerald River soon shrank to rice-grain size as the gulf between us widened.
But as Emerald River shrank, another speck, gray against the blackness of space, grew. Something was gaining on me.
Again, I said, “Oh, crap.”