Eight
Twenty minutes later, Howard and the other briefing spooks adjourned for coffee and probably a game of chess.
Weddle and I stood in the empty, echoing bay with our respective trainers, arms outstretched like scarecrows.
The redhead, who turned out to be an Airborne School jumpmaster, knelt alongside me. He was fitting an Eternad armor suit he had unpacked from one of the plasteel crates. As he worked he tapped suit features and lectured. “Thigh scabbard. One each twenty-four-inch synthetic koto-steel bush knife—”
I sighed and tapped my opposite thigh pocket. “One each search-and-rescue pyrotechnic canister.”
He stood, slipped the helmet down over my head like a coronation. “I gather you’ve worn Eternads before, Lieutenant?”
I nodded.
“When last, sir? The latest evolution’s had a couple tweaks.”
Successive evolutions of the Eternad fighting suit had been saving Trueborn GI lives, including mine, since clear back at the start of the Slug War.
“Couple years.” I sniffed the prior occupant’s sweat in the helmet pads. “I think somebody’s been wearing this suit ever since.”
He smiled. “We’re fitting each of you to a suit that’s broken in. Seventy percent of new suits experience out-of-the-box glitches. Can’t tolerate that when we’re already pushing the equipment’s limit.”
I frowned out through my open faceplate. Pushing my equipment’s limit? Eternads store a GI’s body-movement energy, then use it to run their computers and sensors, and to heat and warm the GI. They synthesize or purify air, and water if necessary. They keep out any water that isn’t necessary, such as the kind one might fall into. They also keep out vacuum, bullets, shrapnel, chemical and biological agents, and the occasional mosquito. But they’re light enough and supple enough to let the GI double-time a marathon. Eternad armor’s limit is hard to push.
He snapped my visor shut to pressure test the seals, so I was talking to myself when I asked, “What the hell does that mean?”
Ten minutes later, my suit was fitted and cooling me. Meanwhile, the spook had unpacked another plasteel. The jigsaw he had laid out on the floor was sleek and radar-absorbent black. He held a cylindrical section alongside my suit’s thigh, cocked his head, then replaced it with a different one.
I popped my visor as he said, “The fairing pieces look different outside the wind tunnel.”
“Wind tunnel?”
He stared into my helmet. “General Hibble didn’t tell you?”
I sighed. “Why don’t you?”
He glanced at the closed hatch, then back at me, and lowered his voice. “Sir, Weddle’s a master parachutist. But they did say you’re Airborne qualified?”
I nodded. “Made it through jump school.”
He smiled and raised a fist. “Air-borne!”
I bumped his fist with mine while avoiding a visible eye roll. “All the way.” I left the military for many good and sufficient reasons. Somewhere on my reason list was gung-ho phobia.
The jumpmaster ratcheted the suit’s right forearm until it matched the length of my own. “Basically, sir, this jump will be just like a static-line school jump. Only from a little higher altitude.”
My heart skipped. “Jump?” I had graduated jump school because my military operational specialty required it, but it scared me green. Now it was clear that Weddle and I weren’t going to step out onto Tressel’s surface from a Scorpion, like exiting a taxi. We were going to parachute to the surface.
I frowned. “A little higher” meant something different to someone wearing paratroop jump boots than to sane people. “Not a HALO jump?”
Super spooks like Kit Born, and special-operations troops since long before the Slug War, often jumped High Altitude-Low Opening. HALO jumpers exited an aircraft in the frozen stratosphere, breathing bottled oxygen and bundled against the cold, then fell arms and legs splayed and belly-down for most of ten miles before they opened their chutes. While falling they attained a terminal velocity of one hundred twenty miles per hour. Very stealthy. Very scary.
He raised his palm and shook his head. “HALO? Oh, no, sir!”
I exhaled. “Good.”
“A Scorpion that low might be detected.”
This time, I rolled my eyes visibly. “Detected? The Tressens only invented aerial searchlights six years ago. They couldn’t detect a Scorpion if one fell on them.”
He shrugged. “General Hibble’s afraid the Yavi might have smuggled in modern air-defense detection systems, and crews to operate them, to help the Tressens.”
There was no paranoid like an Intel paranoid. But I sighed. After all, something had tripped Kit up. If I hoped to get her out, Weddle and I had to avoid whatever it was.
The jumpmaster pointed at the bay outer doors, which, because of rotational gravity, we were actually standing on. “It’s really pretty simple. A cruiser moves by gravity manipulation. It doesn’t really orbit, just mimics orbit to match speed and trajectory with conventional shuttles that actually do need to maintain orbital velocities to stay aloft. So the ship will simply drop down and circle the planet twenty-five miles lower, for a brief interval.”
“You’re afraid the Tressens will notice a four-place stealth aircraft. So you’re going to use a mile-long spaceship instead?”
“We’ve already told the Tressens that the Emerald River will be varying her altitude this trip. As a humanitarian favor. The diplomats won’t let us drop off satellites around Tressel. So we’re doing atmospheric research, to increase the accuracy of Tressel weather forecasting. Perfectly logical.”
Spook logic was not Aristotelian logic. One minute paranoia drove them. The next they were overconfident enough to hide in plain sight behind some obvious lie.
The jumpmaster said, “While the ship’s at the lower altitude, we’ll open the bay doors. Low-thrust boosters attached to your suits will kick-start you two out into space. Then you’ll just fall through the atmosphere until your altimeter reading opens your chute.”
“Uh-uh.” I shook my head. Bad logic was arguable. Bad physics wasn’t. “That won’t work. We’ll burn up like old space capsules.”
He shook his head back at me. “Nope. The old space capsules actually were in orbit. They used atmospheric friction to decelerate them from orbital velocity so they could fall back to the surface. Friction absorbs speed energy by turning it into heat energy. Like car brakes. But this ship will be moving geosynchronously. Moving at the same speed as the atmosphere. For you two it’ll be like jumping out of a stationary balloon’s gondola. Just from higher up.”
I glanced over at Weddle, the master parachutist who was barely old enough to shave. He and the other jumpmaster were chatting it up, smiling.
I cocked my head. I had bet my life on Eternads before. If white-bread Weddle could do this, I could. But the jumpmaster had mentioned pushing the suit’s limits. “Can the suits stay pressure tight at a hundred twenty miles an hour?”
The jumpmaster frowned. “One twenty? Sir, that’s where things get a little complicated. Terminal velocity is the speed at which a free-falling object’s atmospheric drag equals gravitational acceleration. For a parachutist jumping from ten miles up, terminal velocity is about a hundred twenty miles per hour You’ll be falling through near vacuum at first. So atmospheric drag won’t retard your acceleration much for the first hundred miles or so.”
My eyes popped wider. “I fall a hundred miles?”
He wrinkled his nose. “Give or take.”
“How fast?”
He turned his palms up. “Well, the density of Tressen’s upper atmosphere’s different from Earth’s, fortunately.”
“How fast?”
He shifted his weight. “We’ve calculated that you shouldn’t break the sound barrier.”
I smiled. “No, really.”
“Really. Actually, if you did go supersonic, that could be a problem. The fins we’re adding to the suit’s thigh plates will keep you falling headfirst—”
“Headfirst? Nice touch. Thanks. But no.” Spook jump school had included one sky dive–style belly-flop familiarization jump. “I’ll just belly flop. That’ll slow me down.”
He paused and stared at me. “—Headfirst. In practical vacuum you can’t stop spinning if you start. If you belly flop, then start to spin, you’d spin flat, like you were an old holodisc on a turntable. When you reached one hundred forty-five rpm, centrifugal force would pancake your brain flat against the top of your skull.”
“Oh.”
“That would snap your brain off of your brain stem.”
I swallowed. “Which would kill me.”
He shook his head. “Actually, no.”
“Great news.”
“You’d already be dead. Increased pressure in your cranial blood vessels would have ruptured them before that.”
I nodded. “Okay, then. Headfirst.”
He paused again, hands on hips, and sighed. “Sir, this will go smoother if you just trust us. We’ve thought this through.”
I nodded. “Sorry. It’s just that I’m the one doing the falling.”
He grinned at me and pumped his fist. “And what a ride, huh? Air-borne, sir!”
I sighed. “Yeah. All the way.”
He wrinkled his forehead. “As I was saying, the problem if you go supersonic in the headfirst attitude is that your head becomes supersonic first. A moment before your torso does.”
“So?”
“So the buffeting instability of an object’s transonic passage can cause the object to disarticulate along planes of weakness.”
I stared at him.
He said, “Uh, back in the day, experimental aircraft used to break up. After all, we still call it the sound barrier. The human body, even in armor, is weaker than an old jet fuselage.”
I frowned. “I’d break when I hit the barrier?”
He nodded. “Ever shoot a chicken into a boulder?”
No, but it sounded like some of Howard’s twisted minions had.
He thrust up his index finger. “But we’re attaching speed-sensitive dive brakes to the suit. They’ll slow you automatically. Heck, you won’t exceed six hundred miles per hour. Probably.”
“Probably?” My voice rose. “Probably?”
He turned his palms up and cocked his head. “Given budget and time, we’d have tested this technique better, Lieutenant. But this case requirement just came up. We needed technology that was already on the shelf, and—”
I sighed. Everybody who works for Howard sighs a lot. “And cheap?” Spook budgets had been unlimited during the Slug War, when human existence hung in the balance. Mankind had mortgaged its future to build Mousetrap and the cruiser fleet. But now we were still paying off the debt decades later.
He flicked his eyes down at the deck plates, then looked up. “This concept was developed clear back in the space-capsule days, so the old astronauts could escape from a malfunctioning reaction-propelled spacecraft. After we got C-drive, spacecraft didn’t really need the technology.”
I raised my eyebrows. “But back in the space-capsule days it did work?”
“The odds of a successful outcome are five in ten.”
“This saved five astronauts? I never heard of even one.”
“Our simulated odds. Nobody’s ever actually done this and lived. General Hibble prefers to say that nobody’s actually done this and died.”
“Yet.” I stared up at the bay roof plates. I scuffed my boot toe across the deck.
Then I sighed, unclamped my helmet, and tugged it off. I stripped off the rest of the suit, dropped it to the deck plates, and stood there barefoot in my skivs.
“I know, sir. I jump out of perfectly good airplanes every week back home, for fun and for jump-pay qualification. Weddle’s a better jumper than I am. But if I were in your boots, sir? Honestly?” He shook his head.
I sat down at the table and crossed my arms. “I want to see Howard. Now.”