I grimaced. I thought about telling them that we’d done it, and that was how we were able to carry this equipment ourselves. I decided against mentioning these facts as I felt sharing that information might very well backfire. Who knew how they might react? They might rethink our entire tenuous alliance.
“Sir,” Miklos said, standing nearby.
I turned to him irritably.
“I might have a solution. They say they are willing to be harnessed to carry the weapons. Perhaps we can build even larger projectors and have them drag the units on carts.”
I considered the idea, but I didn’t really like it. They wouldn’t be able to move as fast that way. One of the big advantages of these Centaur troops was their natural agility on mountainous terrain. If they were dragging a cart behind them in teams, bumping along over the rocks, we’d be greatly slowed down.
“I’ve got another idea,” I said. “We’ll put a repeller dish on every pack, countering that single crushing weight.”
Miklos nodded. “That should work.”
“It will work,” I said, “but it will cost us production materials and time. We’ll end up being able to field less troops per hour. But it can’t be helped, I suppose.”
I relayed the plans to the Centaurs and after a few suspicious questions, they agreed with the plan. After all, it only involved altering the kit slightly, not the soldiers themselves.
My next difficulty turned out to be more serious. The Centaurs were claustrophobic. This was something I’d known from the start, but I’d hoped that if they were willing to close their eyes and take a five minute drop-ship ride down to the planetary surface, we shouldn’t have much trouble. I was quite wrong on that point.
Experimentally, we loaded up a squad of veterans into one of my deployable drop-ship containers. These were not all that different in design from their original configuration. Back on Earth, we’d filled oblong structures that looked rather like freight train cars with about a hundred marines each and carried them on long arms dangling from the bottom of our Nano ships. Now, the systems were slightly different. I’d shaped them like teardrops for improved aerodynamics, and hopefully a faster drop-time from space.
Our ships were able to get into and out of orbit much faster than traditional spaceships. This was essentially because our engines had a lot more powered lift than rocket-propelled systems. A ship like the old NASA shuttlecrafts had to come down in a slow, gentle glide. They had to slow down the entire time, starting the drop at a very high velocity. They largely used friction to provide this braking action, rather than engine power. The shuttle engine burn that started this process only lasted three or four minutes. After that, it was a long gliding process that took about an hour to get the ship all the way down to a dead stop, sitting on a long runway.
Our engines weren’t limited to short duration burns, and therefore we didn’t have to rely on friction to slow ourselves down. We were able to come down out of orbit much faster by utilizing a much shorter path-essentially straight down. The main limit on our approach speed was atmospheric friction. It was all a matter of how fast we were moving versus how close we were to the planet’s surface, and thus how thick the atmosphere was. The closer we got to the surface at high speed, the hotter things would become inside the landing vessel.
That was what I originally wanted to test. Going down at about five thousand miles per hour to an altitude of about twenty miles from the surface, then throttling back hard to prevent vaporizing the vessel-that was the problem I intended to solve.
So, I loaded about twenty Centaurs into an egg-shaped landing pod and attached it to a destroyer. I’d ordered them to calmly stand in the module, and think happy thoughts of open skies, rivers, wind and honorable matings. They were to turn their goggles to full black and wait a few minutes-the supposed duration of the drop.
We decided to come down in a remote part of the planet about a thousand miles from the southern pole, far from any of the enemy domes or any other Macro units. We’d long ago knocked out all enemy satellites and other remote observation equipment, so I was pretty sure they wouldn’t detect the landing at all. Even so, I was tense in the command chair next to Captain Miklos. We had Kwon there, and Marvin. We watched the screens intently as we dropped straight down like a rock toward the ice-capped polar region.
Things were going well, until we hit the friction layer, about two miles from the surface. The ride got bumpy at that point, and I worried about the Centaur troops we were carrying down.
“Ease off on the throttle, Miklos,” I ordered.
“Yes sir, but I must point out, we need to do the drop as quickly as possible. Enemy anti-air can’t be allowed a long period to lock onto us and bring us down. We don’t have enough ships to take losses-”
“I’m well aware of all that, but this is a test, not a combat drop. Slow down.”
We decelerated harder, and the lurching of the ship continued. We bounced and almost flipped over as a high altitude wind shear struck us.
“Dammit,” I muttered. “Kwon, how are the Centaurs doing? Ask their Captain.”
Kwon spoke into the com-box. “No answer, sir.”
“What do you mean, no answer?”
Kwon shrugged in his suit. “The Centaur Captain isn’t responding.”
I gritted my teeth and turned to Miklos. “Can we abort this thing now?”
“Not really, sir,” Miklos said. “We’re almost down. But I’ll slow down to a crawl and crank up the stabilizers so we don’t hit anymore spots like the last one.”
When we finally reached the ground we set the egg-shaped landing module on the ice and the big arm slid away from it. I ordered the ship to dissolve a circular section of the floor and jumped out.
A new planetary surface met my eyes for the first time. It wasn’t anything to write home about. There was a flat, gray-white expanse of ice that seemed infinite, only to be broken up by looming black crags on the western horizon. The surface of the ice blew with a fine mist about two feet deep. I looked down, and realized I couldn’t see my legs. My heavy armor had broken through the crust and I was left wading in snow that came up to my waist.
“Sir,” Miklos said in my helmet. I could hear his breath blowing over the microphone. He was stressing.
“What’s wrong, Captain?”
“Incoming barrage, sir. The Macros must have spotted us.”
“How much time do we have?”
“About forty minutes.”
I cursed and moved to the landing pod. So much for sneaking down out of orbit. The Macros knew we were here, and they’d fired their equivalent of a flock of ICBMs to keep us company. This training exercise wasn’t going exactly as I’d planned.
I reached out and touched the surface of the landing pod, causing it to open. That’s when I found out just how far from “planned” this mission had gone.
A Centaur bolted out into the open. He charged past me, his horn blades clacking against my chest plate as he passed. One of his short arms was broken and bleeding, dangling and flopping against his forelegs as he run.
“What the-” I began, leaning into the opening.
Smoke poured out of it. Black, rolling fumes swirled up into the clear blue sky behind me. I couldn’t smell them, but they looked thick and unpleasant-like an oil fire. I had to dip my helmet down below the smoke to see anything. I’d been about to demand my team tell me what the hell was going on, but I didn’t bother. The scene inside the pod explained it all. I flipped on my suit’s floods and examined the details.
About half the Centaur troops were dead. A number of their corpses were charred black and smoldering. A few live ones stood against the walls, shivering. A few more flopped and twisted on the floor, grotesquely injured. One kicked his hooves at his own discarded generator pack, goring it with his horn blades as if it were a mortal enemy. Perhaps, from his point of view, it was. His eyes rolled in his head and one of his horns had been torn loose. Blood welled and ran down his face and into his foaming mouth, where it outlined his teeth in red. I thought I recognized him: he was large with darker fur than most. Then I had it. He was the Captain.