Dakota flashed a smile over her shoulder. ‘You’re a machine-head too, right?’
‘Wow, how could you tell?’ he replied in mock amazement. ‘Worse. I’m a pilot as well, though this is gonna be the first time I do my job inside an atmosphere. Maybe you should hold my hand ‘case it gets rough on the way down?’ he leered, brushing a hand across the rough stubble of his scalp.
Dakota grinned and shook her head. Severn laughed at his own wit, and she noted they’d be landing in just under thirteen minutes, give or take the vagaries of ground control, and whether they’d managed to find enough secure landing spots for all the hardware currently on its way down from orbit. It would have been easier to ride down on the skyhook, but there was no telling whether the Uchidans might strike again with more nuclear mortar fire. Apparently there were still one or two pockets of resistance holed up down below.
‘I’m Dakota.’ She shoved one hand behind her seat for him to shake, and felt Severn grasp it after a moment’s hesitation. ‘Dakota Merrick.’
‘Chris Severn.’
‘Yeah, you see I knew that.’
‘Mind reader.’
‘Manifest reader.’ She tapped the readout screen printed on the thigh of her trousers. ‘Same thing, just more boring.’
‘Lean forward again so I can see more of your butt, and then I’ll stay interested.’
‘I could tell from how much your hands are sweating. Hang on.’
During the final descent, tortured air ripped around the tiny craft as she manoeuvred them into a tight spiral that factored in Ghost-fed random shifts designed to make it harder for any enemy forces to target them on their approach. She’d heard rumours that the Consortium were bargaining with the Shoal to acquire the same kind of inertialess technology they used on the coreships that had brought her and the rest of the fleet to Redstone, and fervently wished they’d get the hell on with the deal as her insides rattled in their bony cage.
‘Listen, I got a confession to make. This is my first time on the surface,’ Severn murmured.
Dakota took a moment to process this information before it made sense to her.
‘On a planet, you mean?’
Severn nodded.
‘Ever?’
‘Ever,’ he repeated excitedly, a grin spreading across his face. ‘Seventh-generation Rocker. My daddy never set foot on nothing more Earthlike than Mesa Verde. Said he didn’t like the smell of the place. Figured anything green that grew outside of a hydroponics tank wasn’t natural.’
Dakota merely nodded, and sank once more into the multiple Ghost-mediated conversations flowing between herself and traffic control, and included several other pilots at once. Sometimes a dozen separate strands of conversation would merge for a few moments into one babbling cacophony, at other times unravelling and becoming more distinct, the words flowing like some arcane magical tongue.
‹Sittin’ steady guys, can you give me an update on local conditions?›
‹Roger that, your delta vee is good by the way. Patching in weather feed-uh oh…›
‹їCuбl es йl?›
This last from Severn who, Dakota had not noticed until that moment, was hooked into her comms feed. She could hear the tension in his voice, and she realized his Ghost must have picked up on the weather feed reference, subsequently pulling fresh data from a string of appropriated local weather sats.
‹Got converging thermals off the coast,› came the report from Kirov, one of the traffic control staff. Projections show a storm is likely by 1400 hours local time. You’ll be here way before, but we might suggest some course corrections just to stay on the safe side.›
‹Roger that, thanks for the info.›
‹Hey Dakota, last time I saw you you looked like you stuck your head up a bear’s butt and fell asleep-›
‹Fuck you too, you lousy shit,› this followed by a braying laugh from Kirov that made her smile. ‹That was your mother’s butt.›
‹Yeah, you need to stop drinking so much, we’re taking bets down here how many bits we find by the time you hit the ground.›
The ride got yet bumpier, the craft tilting nose-up as her Ghost (or was it her? It was almost impossible now to tell the difference) implemented the re-entry procedures. The glow beyond the windscreen brightened, then darkened again as the filters compensated once more: the ship was slicing through the atmosphere at an increasingly sharp angle. Dakota pictured themselves as they might appear from the surface, burning their way across the sky in a fiery hypersonic parabola.
A few moments later heat shields slid down over the windscreen, cutting off any view of the landscape or sky beyond.
Smoke trails bled across the sky around the base of the skyhook, which rose into the blue exactly like a neverending tower. Dakota had been warned that following it with your eyes up and up to its visible vanishing point could make you dizzy. She brought her gaze back down: the advice had been sound. Instead, she kept her eyes fixed more or less on the horizon, where the building housing the lower end of the skyhook-until recently a major military target for the Uchidans-took centre stage. Distant mountains were painted white with snow; even the winters on Bellhaven couldn’t have prepared her for the arctic blast of the Redstone winds or the sheer size of the distant canopy trees, towering over the landscape stretching beyond the buildings and streets.
Severn had called for transport, and Dakota followed him on board an automated vehicle that pulled up next to them. He looked distinctly wobbly from all the chem they’d provided to help him adjust to planetary gravity.
‘Some sight,’ said Dakota, nodding towards the skyhook. Her breather mask felt heavy and uncomfortable. Worse, the relatively higher density of the atmosphere made their voices, as they emerged, sound unnaturally low-pitched. In fact they both sounded ridiculous, which didn’t encourage elaborate conversation.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Severn replied tightly, his knuckles white as they gripped a handhold next to their seats, the ground rolling past them at about forty klicks an hour. Command control lay somewhere up ahead, in a warren of emergency bunkers the Freehold had built beneath the skyhook.
‘Problem?’ asked Dakota.
Severn nodded stiffly. ‘Too big.’
‘What is?’
‘Everything.’ He scowled at her. ‘Why’s it so cold when the atmosphere’s so dense? Shouldn’t that make it warmer?’
Dakota glanced up and saw some kind of vast bird flapping its way slowly across the sky-a one-wing, her Ghost informed her, its vast bulk supported solely by the dense atmosphere.