“Holy Jesus,” Eustus breathed as he felt himself being grabbed and pummeled by the atmosphere. A beep was going off in his ear. Altitude. Quickly righting himself with his thrusters, he pointed himself like an arrow at Reza’s inert form and shot toward him, closing the dozen or so meters between them in only a few seconds.
“Gotcha!” he huffed triumphantly as he grabbed one of Reza’s flailing arms. Pulling his friend to him, he linked their suits together at the waist with the built-in safety tethers. Then, fumbling at Reza’s sides with his hands, he fought to separate the bulk of the equipment attached to Reza’s suit. If he could not get rid of it, they would be too heavy for his own suit’s jets to put them safely on the ground. “Come on,” he muttered angrily as the altitude warning tone sounded faster and faster. When the tone become a continuous sound, the suit’s thrusters would not have enough time to slow them to an acceptable landing velocity, and the most elementary laws of physics would take over. They would be splattered like eggs over the ground below.
With a sudden snap, the molded combat pack and the fifty or so kilos it represented popped away.
“Burn!” Eustus shouted into his helmet, initiating the preprogrammed firing sequence that Aquino had told him to use. Canted at a ridiculous angle to account for the asymmetrical thrust condition imposed by the weight of Reza’s body, the two jets of Eustus’s suit flared and fired at their full thrust.
Grunting at the force of the suit’s thrusters, Eustus kept his eyes glued to the suit visor and the scene beyond as he and Reza continued to plummet toward the ground. “Please, Lord of All,” he hissed through clenched teeth over the roar of the straining jets and all of six gees, “Come on… come on…”
The whirling numbers that indicated their descent velocity gradually slowed as the jets fought against the force of Quantico’s gravity. They flashed through one thousand meters, still falling like a rock. The trees and hills below, so beautiful from higher up, held all the beauty now of a trap of sharpened bamboo stakes.
Through his faceplate and his rapidly dimming vision, his blood drawn away by the force of the thrusters, Eustus caught a glimpse of Jodi Mackenzie’s fighter nearby as she brought it down in a matching spiral descent.
Well, he thought with a detached part of his panicking consciousness, they won’t have long to wait.
At five hundred meters, the fuel caution warning began sounding in his ears. The jets were going to run out of fuel before they hit the ground. “Shit,” he muttered bitterly. He closed his eyes.
A few seconds later, the jets flared one final time and died. Eustus felt himself seized by the sickening sensation of free-fall. They weren’t going to make it–
With a roar of snapping branches, he found himself tumbling through the middle of a stand of trees, their limbs tearing at his arms and legs, hammering his back, and whip-cracking against his helmet. Before he had any time to react, he found himself in a short free-fall again.
He hit the ground. Hard. The wind was knocked out of him like a child who had fallen from a swing, and Eustus fought back tears of surprise and pain.
But he mostly felt relieved. He was alive.
“How’s your head?”
Reza blinked away the stars that clouded his vision, only to see Eustus’s concerned face.
“Fuzzy,” he answered quietly as he took stock of his body. Obviously, they had survived their fall. “What happened?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” Eustus said as he removed the palm-sized mediscanner from Reza’s forehead. It did not register any damage more serious than a very mild concussion and some hellish bruising. “It looked like one of your thrusters went berserk and sent you tumbling. Sergeant Major Aquino came up with the idea of me hitching a ride on Lieutenant Mackenzie’s fighter to come pick you up. And, well, here we are.” He smiled sheepishly.
“I owe you my life, my friend.”
“Stow it, Reza,” he said, smiling more brightly now. “I promised Commander Carré I’d keep your butt out of trouble, remember?”
Reza nodded, tried to smile at his friend’s humor. “What are we to do now?”
Eustus snorted. “Well, I already reported that you looked like you were going to be okay, at least according to this thing,” he held up the scanner. “Captain Thorella said that unless you needed a medevac out of here, we’re supposed to move our butts back to the battalion op zone or we’d have to E & E through Second Battalion when they land.” A wry smile curled his lips. “A mere forty klicks away, and through Second Battalion’s training lanes.”
Reza frowned. “E&E” was better known as escape and evasion, a convenient acronym for one of the most hellish aspects of Marine training. As part of the ENDEX, all of the trainees would have to go through a ten-kilometer long stretch of “enemy territory,” doing whatever they could to keep from being captured by the mock enemy forces that would be gunning for them. Not surprisingly, very few ever made it through without being bagged. Everyone who was caught had to spend the remainder of the E&E exercise in a mock prisoner of war camp, undergoing unpleasant but harmless “torture” and lectures on how to do better next time, in the real world. The best motivator, however, was the fact that the Kreelans did not take prisoners. In combat, anyone who was caught was killed. Period.
“I take it then,” Reza said slowly as part of his mind began directing his body toward repairing itself as rapidly as possible for the long travel ahead, “that we had best move quickly and soon?”
“That would seem the prudent thing to do, if you’re up to it.” Despite the reassuring signs the mediscanner gave him – apparently enough to satisfy Aquino, as Thorella could not have cared less – Eustus was not at all sure Reza was really up for this. They had a long way to go.
“Do not worry, my friend,” Reza said, sensing Eustus’s mood as he collected up his rifle – which miraculously had survived undamaged – and other gear. The now-discarded armored suits would be left where they were until one of the dustoff crews came to pick them up. “Come, Eustus. We are wasting time, and have far yet to go.”
“They’ve finally decided to get a move on,” Thorella muttered to himself as he watched the two icons representing Eustus and Reza move off toward their battalion’s drop zone. He frowned to himself as he stood up from the display and stretched his cramped back muscles. Aquino had gone back to the main base in a shuttle after determining that Gard was all right. Thorella knew that the little Filipino bastard was going to try and pin something on him, but there would not be anything for him to find. In the meantime, Thorella had to play out the game as it was scripted. It would not do to call too much attention to himself by trying to take Gard out again. For now.
“You know something, Thorella,” he heard a silky voice behind him, “you’re a real fucking sleazeball.”
“One of these days, Mackenzie,” he said just loud enough for her to hear, “I’m not going to have to take that from you anymore.” Unfortunately, Thorella did not have control over the cadre roster. Mackenzie seemed forever glued to him, a thorn in his side. But someday…
“Is that a threat, you ox?” she challenged in the comparative silence of the empty command post. Only she and Thorella were on duty right now, the rest of the cadre out wreaking havoc among the struggling trainees. She knew Thorella could probably beat her in a hand-to-hand match, but not by much. She was good, and had had a good teacher. She wished that Tony Braddock were here with her now. “You know, I just don’t understand why Tsingai doesn’t just send you to the rock pile where you belong. You hate your own people as much or more than you hate the Blues, and yet they just keep bailing you out of all the trouble you seem to make for yourself. Now, why is that?” She didn’t expect more than an epithet in reply.