‘You gotta—’ Still panting from the sprint, no breath to yell. ‘—stop watching all those old movies, Zed. This is gonna be a, fucking punt around the deep-water mark. Scaring the shit out of some idiot, plankton farmer who’s forgotten to, upgrade his clear tags for the month. Fucking waste of time.’
‘I don’t think, Joe.’ Zdena nodded out along the line of shuttles. ‘Is four boats they got powering up. Lot of firepower for plankton farmer.’
‘Yeah, yeah. You’ll see.’
The dust-off went pretty smoothly, for their ship anyway, last month’s practice drills paying off, it seemed, despite the groans. Eight troops in, standard deployment strength, all webbed into their crash seats along the inner walls of the shuttle’s belly, grinning tension grins. Joe had his tactical vest all hooked up by then, vital signs wired in, though he wondered if anyone bothered to look at that shit any more now they’d downgraded cockpit command crew from three to two. But at least the automeds would look after him in a fire-fight, and in the final analysis the vest was somewhere to hang all the spare XM magazines and boarding tools.
Briefing came in over the comset in his ear, drummed from the speakers set in the roof of the shuttle like an echo.
This is a class two aerial breach incursion, repeat class two incursion, we expect no combat-
He leaned out and nodded triumphantly down the line at Zdena – told you fucking so.
–but maintain combat alertness nonetheless. Mask and gloves to be worn throughout mission, apply anticontaminant gel as for biohazard operations. Please note, there is no reason to assume a biohazard situation. These are precautions only. We have a downed COLIN spacecraft, repeat a downed COLIN spacecraft inside coastal limits–
Zdena shot him the look right back again.
‘Fucking space ship?’ someone yelped from the row of seats on the other wall.
–medical teams will stand by until Blue Squad completes a sweep. Be prepared to encounter crash casualties. Squad division in deployment teams as follows, Team alpha, Driscoll on point, Hernandez and Zhou to follow. Team beta……
He tuned it out, old news. Current rotas put him at the sharp end of deployment for the next three weeks. Now, he couldn’t make up his mind if he was pissed at that, or glad. This was going to be a fucking trip. Outside of TV, and a couple of virtual tours of the COLIN museum in Santa Cruz, he’d never seen a real spaceship, but one thing he did know – they didn’t land those fucking things on Earth. Not since the nanorack towers went up everywhere, disappearing into the clouds like black and steel beanstalks from that stupid fucking story his gran used to tell him when he was a kid. The only spaceships Joe knew about outside of historical footage were the ones that occasionally cropped up at the slow end of the news feeds, docking serenely at the mushroom-top flanges of those fairytale stalks into the sky, their only impact economic. Just returned from Habitat 9, the haulage tug Weaver’s cargo is expected to make a substantial dent in the precious metals market for this quarter. Measures requested by the Association of African Metal-Producing States to protect Earth-side mining are still before the World Trade Organisation, where representatives of the Hab 9 Consortium contend that such restraint of trade is-
So forth. These days, spaceships stayed in space where they belonged, and everything they carried went up or came down on the ’rack elevators. Perfect quarantine, he’d heard some late-night talking head call it once, and extremely energy efficient into the bargain. A spaceship coming down was the scenario from some cheap disaster flick or even cheaper paranoid alien invasion experia show off the Jesusland channels. For it to happen for real could only mean that something, somewhere, had gone super wrong.
Oh dude – this, I’ve got to fucking see…
He was still applying the biosealant gel to his face when the shuttle banked about and the tailgate cracked open. Cold Pacific air came flushing in with the scream of the turbines and the grey dawn light. He unbuckled and shuffled down the line to the cable hoist. His pulse knocked lightly in his temples. Something that was too much fun to be fear coursed in his blood. He wrapped the T-mask across his face, pulled down the breathing filter to his chin, pressed the edges of it all into the bio-sealant. The wind whipped in off the ocean outside, chilling the newly pasted skin of his cheeks where they were still exposed at either side of the mask. There was an illusory sense of safety behind the curve of impact-resistant one-way glass and its warm amber heads-up projected displays, as if his whole body were sitting back here, instead of just bits of his face. They got warned about that shit all the time. Some crudely rendered virtual drill sergeant in the bargain basement Texan software that was all Filigree Steel Security’s training budget ran to. Inexplicably, the badly lipsynched figure had a British accent. Whole body awareness, you ’orrible li-uhl man, the construct was wont to bellow whenever he tripped one of the programme’s stoppers. Are your legs on loan? Is your chest a temporary appendage? Whole body awareness is the only fucking thing that will keep your whole body alive.
Yeah, yeah. Whatever.
He snapped the cable onto his vest, turned back to the belly of the shuttle and the observation camera fixed in the ceiling. He made the swab-O with finger and thumb. Coughed into the induction mike at his throat.
‘Point, ready to deploy.’
I hear you, point. On my mark. Three, two, one… drop
The cable jolted into motion and he fumbled his XM to readiness in both hands, leaning out so he could peer down at what lay below. At first, it was just the endless roll and whitecap slap of the Pacific, outward in all directions. Then he got a fix on the ship. Not what he’d been expecting, it looked like a huge plastic packing case, awash in the water, barely floating. The hull was mostly a scorched black, but he could make out streaks of white with the remains of nano-etched lettering, some kind of corporate insignia that he supposed must have skinned off in the heat of re-entry. He dropped closer, saw what looked like an open hatch set in a section that was still above water.
‘Uh, command. Are we sure this thing isn’t going to sink?
Affirmative, point. COLIN specs say she should stay afloat indefinitely.
‘Just, I’ve got an open hatch here, and with this wind and the waves, I figure she’s got to be shipping some water.’
Repeat, point. Vessel should float indefinitely. Check the hatch.