“My first,” Borden admits.
“Welcome to Vertical Limit,” Jacobi says, then settles in, closes her eyes—clams up. No sense getting acquainted. In a few minutes we might all be dead.
Up front, the cockpit hatch is open. I see Clover strap in and expertly slide the navigator into its slot beside his couch. He looks back, flashes a nerveless smile, and says, “Release in two.”
The hatch to the cockpit slides shut.
Chomsky calls out, “Suck guts and grab ankles, cadets!” She settles back, seals her faceplate, and closes her eyes. We seal our own plates, hook patch cords into the couches, bend until helms touch a rear seat pad, shove both hands between our legs, grab our curtain handles, and finally, lay thumbs over the plastic covers on the emergency switches—the diddles.
With a jerk, the couches whir and roll into landing config, spaced around the cylinder beside assigned pods variously at eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, and sixteen of the clock.
Drop Chief, eyes still closed, runs down the seconds to release. The whole damned orbiter makes scary noises, and they’re getting louder.
“Crap,” Borden murmurs.
I ignore the angel boot-up rolling across my faceplate. Focus on my gloves. Flex my fingers. Steady respiration, in one two, out one two. Even. Calm. God, I hate physics. From here on down, physics is God.
“Orbiter checks prime,” Clover announces through our helms. “Sled checks prime. Lander checks prime plus. Release from cluster…now.”
The orbiter shudders and lurches free. I feel motion along the axis between my shoulder and my butt. I’m good that way; I somehow know which way I’m going just from sensing inertial vectors. Our descent is smooth, only a little buffet. Then—a low, piggy groan, filled with hypersonics, chords, nasty little demon tunes—
We tense.
And shoot off toward the Red. Our plunge takes five minutes. When upper Martian air begins its low banshee wail, I look left through a palm-sized port and watch the ionized glow, like dying coals, torch to brilliant cherry. Inside, all is smooth and cool and dull. Dropping in puff is so much more amusing. Grunts have all the fun.
“Down in three,” Clover says. “Sled reports no G2O. We’ll descend through our corridor until we pass two klicks—then hard DC. Stay strapped until I give thumbs-up. If we get painted in corridor, tug on your grips, flip the plastic cover, double press the diddle—curtains will drop, you’ll spin into your pod, pod will punch free—orbiter will be history. Be ready for anything.”
As always.
“Sled is safe on the Red,” Clover announces.
Final DC—deceleration—rattles my bones like a cartoon skeleton. I hear the lander stage interact with the orbiter, loud squeals and nerve-racking bangs, like maybe it wasn’t strapped on too well. Spent matter plasma retros deliver a final quivering kick up my spine, all the way into my skull—
Our backs and butts sink deep into the couches—
The lander shivers like a horse stung by a bee—
Drops a meter or two—
And settles with a deep, final crunch, like a boot stomping gravel.
“Beautiful!” Clover shouts over the mournful decline of the plasma turbines. “Exceptional if I say so myself. And I do.” His relief is a little obvious. Follows ten seconds of comparative quiet while angels assess our health. “Will three of our passengers kindly remove their thumbs from the diddles?” Clover requests. “That’s two demerits. We’re down firm, we’re alive, and better yet, we’ve been recognized by resident authority. Such as it is. Welcome to Mars.”
The pods retract. Rope ladders unwind and fall down the core between the couches. I look at Borden and Jacobi, peer around my seat and along the pods—rubberneck fore and aft. Behind her faceplate, Borden is pale and shiny. Kumar looks asleep. Beyond them stretches a descending spiral of impassive grunt faces, all the way down to the Winter Soldier. We’re all going to be great friends, I just know it.
Thanks for the excitement, thanks for liberation from Madigan, thanks for saving my life, maybe—but even with all that, I just want to know why the fuck we’re here.
BATTLEGROUND
First we tap up from the orbiter’s gasps and sips, each of us making sure we get a day or so if the welcome wagon doesn’t show. We pass through the orbiter lock in phases and I stand in a group of six on the fenced-off platform between the lander and the orbiter, feeling the cozy warmth radiating from the lander’s rainbow-scorched skin.
A metal ladder unspools and our group descends. I reach bottom, third in line after two Skyrines, then step back to let Borden and Kumar join us. Next group, and then the last, until we all stand on the dust.
Our skintights hold suck. Readout is optimal. The angel in my helm—quiet until now—perks up with a puzzled report that all is well but there are no instructions, no maps, nothing. As the sled pilot said, pure snake: Brief On Arrival.
I have to note again that I have never dropped like this in my life. All told, it’s less exciting than aero and puff and no doubt more expensive. Plus sheer group suicide if the Antags are waiting.
I look through heat shimmer over the pebbly ground and locate the sled about a hundred meters off, still vertical and attached to its lander. The landscape is eerily familiar. Flat—monstrously flat, with high, filmy ice clouds obscuring much of the pinkish-brown sky and more than the usual number of dust devils twisting far to the south. I know this place. This is where I was hoisted from the Red over two years ago, right in the middle of a pitched battle with the largest force of Antags I’d ever seen. On the northwestern horizon lies scattered wreckage: Tonkas, Chestys, and Trundles broken and burned in a ragged line about a klick and a half away.
We’re back on Chryse. Our dead are still out there. Hundreds of them. My whole body shudders. We’d just broken out of the Drifter, or what was left of it—trying to avoid flying, crushing chunks of rock as everyone in the universe seemed dead set on blowing that old piece of moon to rubble. We beat a retreat, leaving a lot of comrades behind. Skyrines can’t bring back the fallen with the fidelity we once guaranteed our troops on Earth. I’ve said that before, but you just may not know how much it hurts.
I slowly turn, letting my helm map the local features. Angel also tallies the wrecks in the middle distance, those that can still be identified.
Borden leans in like she’s going to kiss me and taps her helm against mine. “War grave,” she says.
I’m too choked to answer. A lot of Mars is sacred ground.
FORMING A THIRD point with the two landers is a half-buried line of red-and-tan depot storage tanks, like those erected when a base plans to stick around a few months. Beyond the tanks are revetments like molehills that probably conceal fountains, used to draw moisture from the Martian atmosphere. But there’s no sign of domiciles. Maybe they’re dug in away from the depot. I picture the enemy sitting like Indians on the surrounding hills, but there isn’t much out there in the way of hills, and as cavalry goes, our force is puny compared to the Antag brigades that once smothered this theater.