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 anymore now they’d downgraded cockpit command crew from three to two. But at least the automeds would look after him in a firefight, 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 rotations 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 fairy-tale 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 Organization, 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 superwrong.
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 gray 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 the breathing filter down to his chin, pressed the edges of it all
“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 anymore now they’d downgraded cockpit command crew from three to two. But at least the automeds would look after him in a firefight, 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 rotations 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 fairy-tale 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 Organization, 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 superwrong.
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 gray 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 the breathing filter down to his chin, pressed the edges of it all
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