The certainty of plummeting through the yawning hole to tumble and spin, shrieking, into the gulf of air, was a falsehood: thick connector joists held the battle-suits securely to the drop hold’s ceiling. They began to extend with a piston hiss, the four hulks lowering from the belly of the dropship like string-suspended wind-chimes. Lusha marvelled at the strangeness of it alclass="underline" his mind was convinced it could feel the cold air rushing past despite the chassis’ encapsulating presence.
“Status checks,” he commanded.
“Ready.”
“Ready.”
“Ready.”
He grinned. “Kor’vre?”
“Standby, Shas’el... Umbilicals will disengage in five, four, three, two, one...”
The connector parted from the upper chassis of the battlesuits with a half-heard click. There was a jolt, spinning the world sideways. A half-formed impression of the dropship sailed overhead and was gone. And then gravity reached out and pulled, tumbling madness overwhelming his senses. The ground was on all sides at once.
Stability returned quickly, arms outstretched, gyroscopes locked off and balance reasserted. The silence was endless.
“Steady descent,” Vre’Tong’ata reported, breaking the airy quiet with a hint of nervousness in his voice. This was only his second high-altitude drop.
“Drones?”
“Maintaining position.”
“Good. Unit three?”
“All signs are good.”
“Four?”
“Fine, Shas’el.”
“Coolant regulators are holding out, Kol’tae?”
“Clean and efficient, Shas’el.”
He nodded happily. “Stay alert. Engage packs at five hundred tor’leks. Not a second after. And easy on the deceleration — I don’t want any mid-air liquidations.”
The cloud layer dissolved around him, its ethereal paleness replaced by the sudden visual shock of the ground beneath, approaching at impossible speed.
The onset of evening rendered the sand rose red — a sea of embers stretching across every horizon. Lettica, directly below them now, was a jagged ulcer marring the desert, uneven surface casting its clawlike shadow in an ever-extending clutch as the sun lowered.
The four suits hurtled earthwards, like misfired bullets cruising along their curvaceous trajectory. Slaves at the whim of gravity. A blue light flickered twice at the corner of Lusha’s HUD, informing him that terminal velocity had been reached.
Pinpricks of light dappled and criss-crossed the black city, weaponsfire and explosions seeming somehow unreal under the influence of distance: bright festival lights against a dark background.
“Shas’el?” the comm chimed. This is the Or’es Tash’var!
Lusha rolled his eyes. “Make it quick,” he replied, “or I’m a ge’ta-flatbread.” The other team members chuckled quietly, reassured by their leader’s joviality.
The voice on the comm sounded perplexed. “S-shas’el?”
“Never mind. You’ve caught me at a bad time, Kor’ui, that’s all.”
“It’s just something O’Udas thought you’d want to know, Shas’el...”
“Understood. Squad — eight hundred tor’leks, brace for firing.”
“Shas’el, should I contact you later?”
“No, no...”
“It’s Shas’la Kais.”
What?
“You said you wanted to know if there was any news.”
Lusha’s stomach turned over.
Pragmatism. Detachment. Efficiency.
He frowned. Pragmatism be damned — he’d known Kais’s father. He’d watched the youth’s progress all rotaa. He owed the shas’la his concern. “And?”
“We think we’ve found a trace. On the surface.”
“You think?”
“It’s patchy, but we’re confident.”
“Be sure, Kor’ui. Is it him or not?”
“Uh...”
Is it him? Lusha struggled to control his eagerness, aware that his squad were listening.
“Probably” The Kor’ui replied hesitantly. “It’s as if his signal’s being blocked by so—”
“Shas’el!” Vre’Wyr’s voice cut in urgently. “You’re too low!”
Lusha glanced at his altimeter, heart racing. The kor’ui’s news had short-circuited his attention for too long: he’d dropped below the five hundred tor’lek limit.
Hissing in alarm, he brought the jetpack online quickly, overfeeding the anti-grav bursts to compensate for his tardiness and ignoring the chorus of protest chimes from the AI. The rest of the team grew more and more distant above him, decelerating at a far more sensible speed.
He overrode the jet dampeners with a rank command, ignoring the squeal of metallic protest as the burners kicked in and aided the anti-grav. The ground came up to meet him inexorably, altimeter blinking red in alarm.
“Shas’el?” the comm chimed. He was too busy sweating and fighting for control to discern whether it was one of the team or the kor’ui.
At an altitude of two hundred tor’leks, with the city’s buildings fully formed and ugly beneath him, he was fairly certain he was going to make it. The jetpack was moaning like an infant at the exertions placed upon it, anti-grav distorting the very air in a long column of shimmering diffracted light. He strengthened the field higher still and felt a glut of blood rush to his head. His organs sat heavily inside him, crushed indelicately by the force of the deceleration. He choked back on the nausea and brought himself under control.
“Shas’el — are you all right?” The rest of the team were now just fifty tor’leks above.
“Fine,” he grunted, trying to sound unruffled. A bright stream of ordnance rattled past him, tracers peppering the sky.
Great, he thought sourly. Just what I need.
He tried to fix on the firing position but it was lost in a riot of explosions and gunfire. Until he was down amongst the violence and madness it was difficult to appreciate its reality — being detached from it by distance made it seem almost laughable, a lightshow for his own amusement.
“Setting down in ten,” he hissed, hoping the battlesuit could take the strain. It was going to be a bumpy landing.
“Good fortune, Shas’el,” Vre’Kol’tae mumbled from somewhere above, voice thick with concern.
The ground came up like a battering ram, a clear street overshadowed by wrecked buildings. He pushed every remaining drop of power to the jetpack and flexed the absorption pads on the base of the suit’s lower limbs, angling his body shallowly to avoid a ruinous cartwheel splashdown. He’d seen it happen before.
The neural interface was supposedly unconnected to his pain centres. It should, in theory at least, be possible to lop off his mechanical limbs, fire bullets into his chassis, electrocute or burn or maim or behead the unit, without him feeling so much as a twinge of discomfort. In theory.
In practice, a veteran user of Crisis XV8 technology often developed ho’or-ata-t’checlass="underline" sympathetic ghost-pains. Phantom reactions to external damage.
He’d seen shas’uis so traumatised by losing their sensor-cluster “heads’ they’d spent kai’rotaas in a coma. He’d seen a shas’vre who, shot in his biological leg by a lucky armour-piercing round, couldn’t understand why he was unable to walk normally when he exited the suit, since its lowest limbs were perfectly intact. He’d seen shas’vres at the end of their careers, minds addled by a lifetime of war, by tau’cyrs of bounding effortlessly across cities on thrumming jetpacks, trying to fly...
The altimeter read 15t’l, 10t’l, 5t’l...
“T’au’va protect,” he said.
And then there was only sand and dust and a bone-jarring jolt that overrode the interface and left him gagging for breath, pushing red-hot splinters up his shins and knees. The suit wobbled forwards, base pads digging ugly gouges from the city street, recoil absorbers moaning in untaulike protest at their unkind treatment. He fought for calm, grimacing through the pain, and killed the jetpack. He’d seen novice suit-users drop neatly and forget to cut the power, launching vertically again like a bouncing ball straight into the rest of their squad. He’d seen just about everything there was to see, at one time or another. None of it was pretty.