Eleven
One minute later I was twenty miles closer to Tressel and to impersonating Humpty Dumpty. My visor display pegged my speed at four hundred miles per hour. The sky was more deep purple than black, and the speck chasing me had swollen to the size and color of an orange.
The speck wasn’t Weddle’s decapitated corpse. It was the equipment drone that had hung in the cradle between him and me, and dropped seconds after us.
The ED was an unpowered, streamlined pod packed with the team’s weapons and equipment. It was equipped with a parachute system in its tail similar to the ones that were supposed to waft us down in one piece.
It’s hard to land parachuted objects, human or inanimate, close together even when they’re dropped from an airplane. Dropped from a hundred miles up in space, keeping Weddle, the ED, and me usefully close together at landing was like dropping three olives into the same martini glass from a skyscraper’s observation deck. But that was just the kind of challenge that Howard’s geeks relished. So they had repurposed another obsolete, cheap, on-the-shelf technology, then let my life depend on it.
The ED was a dumb-bomb casing sans explosives, but the spooks had fitted it with a smart-munition kit.
Smart-munition kits had revolutionized Trueborn warfare during what they called Cold War I. A dumb bomb’s nose was fitted with an eye that detected a specific frequency of laser light. When the eye saw the light, it signaled fins fitted on the bomb’s ass end. The fins ruddered the bomb so the eye kept pointing at the light source.
That light source, back during the Cold War, was a laser beam reflecting off a target. The beam was shot at and kept on the target by an aircraft or even by a GI on the ground aiming a glorified flashlight. Smart bombs were so accurate that they could literally fly down a chimney, if the target was properly laser-illuminated. Smart-munition kits worked. Even better, they worked cheap. There were moments when the hype about Trueborn cleverness seemed justified.
Since I was the target that the ED needed to steer toward, and I was falling headfirst, the spooks had installed a laser beacon on my boot sole. Weddle’s suit had a secondary beacon, but the thought was that a master parachutist could steer toward me and the drone easier than I could steer toward either of them.
The spooks had also put a laser range finder on the ED that measured the distance to my beacon, then deployed or feathered the ED’s dive brakes if it began catching up too close to me.
The ED would follow me down until both my chutes and its chutes popped. We would then be so close to the surface that my equipment would land within shouting distance, but not on top of me. The briefing spooks hand-waved a bit about the not-on-top-of-me part, but otherwise the concept seemed sound.
During the early free-fall moments the ED’s eye was locked on to my boot-sole laser beacon. Therefore the ED had, as a matter of physics, slid into the same imaginary elevator shaft I was falling down, plummeting directly behind me. Good thing, because the ED’s fins had no air to rudder against anyway at super-atmospheric altitude.
Then I had started tumbling through the barely thickening atmosphere. As far as the ED’s eye could see, my sole beacon had disappeared. When we were both falling streamlined, our speeds would have matched. Now I was spinning like a lazy snowball, so I was accelerating slower than the drone was. But the drone didn’t slow itself down to avoid me because it couldn’t see me. It just barreled down toward me like a runaway bus with a sleeping driver.
The gap between me and the drone shrank so that I could make out the four-inch–diameter ceramic nose cone. Through it the laser sensors peered but saw nothing.
My heart pounded. Collision with an ice chunk had killed my junior case officer less than a minute into the mission. Another collision had set me tumbling, which was probably going to kill me. Now I was about to get rear-ended by a runaway bus, which would make things worse. Or would it?
At my current speed, even the whisper-thin Tressen atmosphere screamed by my helmet and warmed my suit’s outer skin. Twitching an arm was like lifting weights, but I just managed, and my attitude in the slipstream twitched, too. Not much. But maybe enough.
My twitch shifted my trajectory so that the ED didn’t hit me, but drew alongside me like a bus passing in the fast lane. The shock waves spreading off the drone’s nose, like swells off a boat prow, interfered with the waves I was throwing, and buffeted me.
I gasped as my head-over-heels tumble corkscrewed into a yawing, off-axis spin.
The mental picture of Weddle’s bloody cervical vertebrae forced itself into my consciousness. My head pounded and my stomach rebelled.
“Gaakk!” I spewed bile and Meals Utility Desiccated onto my inner visor. The ventilator shrieked as it sucked puke, but for critical seconds I was blind.
The drone wasn’t moving much faster than I was. My only chance was to grasp one of the ED’s tail fins as it passed me, then hang on so that I stopped spinning and resumed a headfirst dive, following behind the drone like a hitched trailer.
But even with the rigid support of the Eternads, reaching out into the slipstream at almost five hundred miles per hour could tear my arm from its socket.
I panted inside my armor. If I reached, I might die in moments. But if I missed this bus, if the drone passed by and left me tumbling, I would just keep tumbling. Even if the slipstream didn’t “disarticulate” me, the chute, which was designed to deploy freely, would foul. Tangled lines and canopy would simply form a pretty carbon-fiber–reinforced streamer behind me. I would slam onto Tressel and explode in a shower of bone, tissue, and puked-out desiccated turkey.
I gritted my teeth, made a gauntleted fist, and inched it toward the drone.
The new irregularity to my profile made me yaw worse.
Pop.
I yelped inside my helmet as the slipstream dislocated my wrist. My reach had been too aggressive. The Eternads’ rigidity kept things attached, as far as I could tell, but the pain was knife-edge.
Now my chances depended on just one hand. I waited until my tumble corkscrewed me around, so that the good hand was alongside the drone’s fins.
The drone’s rear fins were passing my head now. Three heartbeats from now my last chance would be gone.
The sky had bloomed indigo, and the slipstream of the still-thin atmosphere boomed as the shock waves bounced me against the drone.
I grabbed for a tail fin and caught something.
I tried to tighten my fingers around it and realized I had hold of the left access-panel release.
The panel peeled back like banana skin. Then the slipstream ripped it loose. Items of spy crap spewed into the troposphere, then tumbled alongside me like a highly classified meteor shower. A four-inch gap opened between the drone’s fin and my fingers.
“Arrr!” I forced my hand back and death-gripped the fin.
This time, I held on. The speed differential between my slower fall and the drone’s fall yanked me into the wind shadow behind the ED.
Pop.
I yelped. I had separated my shoulder once before, falling off a hovertank fender onto a boulder. I got chewed out by a sergeant for clumsiness and had to route-march behind the tank for six miles so I would learn to be more careful next time. This time the separation felt more severe, but so were the consequences if I let go.
The drone, now with me flapping behind and screaming inside my armor, flashed into high clouds. Ice crystallized on the outside of my vomit-smeared visor.
“Dammit.” Blind again. I chinned the visor’s defroster. By the time my view cleared, the drone and I had popped out of the clouds into an overcast day.
Below me was supposed to be the Eastern Sea of Tressel, off the coast of the part of Tressen that had once been the Unified Duchies of Iridia. A boatload of Iridian partisans, of questionable friendliness, was supposed to fish me, Weddle, and the drone out of the sea after I landed.
The sea was blue. What I saw below, through a film of Turkey With Giblet Gravy Paste, was only half twinkling blue. That was the sea, muted sunlight reflecting off waves. Half my field of vision was scum green laced with barf brown. The drone’s trajectory was dropping it and me too far toward shore.
I clung to the drone’s fin. The thicker atmosphere down here was slowing the drone and me. The plan had been that in the thicker air I would “steer” myself toward the target landing zone in the sea, while the drone followed. Unfortunately, I had wound up behind the drone, so instead the drone and I remained a trailer following a runaway bus, bound wherever wind and gravity took us.
The landing, it became clearer with each yard of free fall, was not going to be in the twinkling blue sea, where a boatload of friendlies would rush to collect me. The drone and I were plummeting inland. I had to correct course.
Crack.
The altimeters on the drone and on my chute pack popped the small drogue chutes off my back and out the drone’s tapered tail.
“Crap!” I let go of the drone’s fin like it had caught fire and spun myself away. Either the drone’s drogue chute or the main chute that the drogue was tugging out would foul my own chute. If that happened, being off target or losing my equipment wouldn’t matter. The drone and I would hit like dropped rocks.
Whomp.
I screamed as the shock of my main chute’s deployment jerked my wrecked shoulder.
Happily, my chute’s opening separated me clean from the ED, which dangled beneath its own intact chute a hundred feet below and four hundred feet to my left.
A mere thousand feet below, too close for meaningful course alteration, Mother Tressel rushed up to greet me.
Unhappily, her kiss was going to be sloppy.