“Weddle? I got hit. I’m tumbling. What do I do?”
Nothing.
“Weddle? Goddammit, chin on your suit-to-suit!”
Another object tumbled into view, smaller and darker than the flying icebergs.
It was an Eternad helmet, dented. Probably by the impact of a falling ice chunk.
“Oh, fuck.”
The helmet disappeared from view as I spun. “Weddle?” They say there are no stupid questions, but that one was close.
I made another revolution and glimpsed the helmet again. Something red and white flapped out of the helmet’s neck ring.
Weddle’s spinal cord, or what was left of it.
I squeezed my eyes shut and gagged.
When I opened them, Weddle’s head was gone. Mercifully for both of us, I suppose. I couldn’t spot the rest of him, which, along with the ice storm, seemed to have fallen away from me, below.
A small favor. With each revolution I glimpsed the black space above me. Emerald River soon shrank to rice-grain size as the gulf between us widened.
But as Emerald River shrank, another speck, gray against the blackness of space, grew. Something was gaining on me.
Again, I said, “Oh, crap.”
Eleven
One minute later I was twenty miles closer to Tressel and to impersonating Humpty Dumpty. My visor display pegged my speed at four hundred miles per hour. The sky was more deep purple than black, and the speck chasing me had swollen to the size and color of an orange.
The speck wasn’t Weddle’s decapitated corpse. It was the equipment drone that had hung in the cradle between him and me, and dropped seconds after us.
The ED was an unpowered, streamlined pod packed with the team’s weapons and equipment. It was equipped with a parachute system in its tail similar to the ones that were supposed to waft us down in one piece.
It’s hard to land parachuted objects, human or inanimate, close together even when they’re dropped from an airplane. Dropped from a hundred miles up in space, keeping Weddle, the ED, and me usefully close together at landing was like dropping three olives into the same martini glass from a skyscraper’s observation deck. But that was just the kind of challenge that Howard’s geeks relished. So they had repurposed another obsolete, cheap, on-the-shelf technology, then let my life depend on it.
The ED was a dumb-bomb casing sans explosives, but the spooks had fitted it with a smart-munition kit.
Smart-munition kits had revolutionized Trueborn warfare during what they called Cold War I. A dumb bomb’s nose was fitted with an eye that detected a specific frequency of laser light. When the eye saw the light, it signaled fins fitted on the bomb’s ass end. The fins ruddered the bomb so the eye kept pointing at the light source.
That light source, back during the Cold War, was a laser beam reflecting off a target. The beam was shot at and kept on the target by an aircraft or even by a GI on the ground aiming a glorified flashlight. Smart bombs were so accurate that they could literally fly down a chimney, if the target was properly laser-illuminated. Smart-munition kits worked. Even better, they worked cheap. There were moments when the hype about Trueborn cleverness seemed justified.
Since I was the target that the ED needed to steer toward, and I was falling headfirst, the spooks had installed a laser beacon on my boot sole. Weddle’s suit had a secondary beacon, but the thought was that a master parachutist could steer toward me and the drone easier than I could steer toward either of them.
The spooks had also put a laser range finder on the ED that measured the distance to my beacon, then deployed or feathered the ED’s dive brakes if it began catching up too close to me.
The ED would follow me down until both my chutes and its chutes popped. We would then be so close to the surface that my equipment would land within shouting distance, but not on top of me. The briefing spooks hand-waved a bit about the not-on-top-of-me part, but otherwise the concept seemed sound.
During the
Nothing.
“Weddle? Goddammit, chin on your suit-to-suit!”
Another object tumbled into view, smaller and darker than the flying icebergs.
It was an Eternad helmet, dented. Probably by the impact of a falling ice chunk.
“Oh, fuck.”
The helmet disappeared from view as I spun. “Weddle?” They say there are no stupid questions, but that one was close.
I made another revolution and glimpsed the helmet again. Something red and white flapped out of the helmet’s neck ring.
Weddle’s spinal cord, or what was left of it.
I squeezed my eyes shut and gagged.
When I opened them, Weddle’s head was gone. Mercifully for both of us, I suppose. I couldn’t spot the rest of him, which, along with the ice storm, seemed to have fallen away from me, below.
A small favor. With each revolution I glimpsed the black space above me. Emerald River soon shrank to rice-grain size as the gulf between us widened.
But as Emerald River shrank, another speck, gray against the blackness of space, grew. Something was gaining on me.
Again, I said, “Oh, crap.”
Eleven
One minute later I was twenty miles closer to Tressel and to impersonating Humpty Dumpty. My visor display pegged my speed at four hundred miles per hour. The sky was more deep purple than black, and the speck chasing me had swollen to the size and color of an orange.
The speck wasn’t Weddle’s decapitated corpse. It was the equipment drone that had hung in the cradle between him and me, and dropped seconds after us.
The ED was an unpowered, streamlined pod packed with the team’s weapons and equipment. It was equipped with a parachute system in its tail similar to the ones that were supposed to waft us down in one piece.
It’s hard to land parachuted objects, human or inanimate, close together even when they’re dropped from an airplane. Dropped from a hundred miles up in space, keeping Weddle, the ED, and me usefully close together at landing was like dropping three olives into the same martini glass from a skyscraper’s observation deck. But that was just the kind of challenge that Howard’s geeks relished. So they had repurposed another obsolete, cheap, on-the-shelf technology, then let my life depend on it.
The ED was a dumb-bomb casing sans explosives, but the spooks had fitted it with a smart-munition kit.
Smart-munition kits had revolutionized Trueborn warfare during what they called Cold War I. A dumb bomb’s nose was fitted with an eye that detected a specific frequency of laser light. When the eye saw the light, it signaled fins fitted on the bomb’s ass end. The fins ruddered the bomb so the eye kept pointing at the light source.
That light source, back during the Cold War, was a laser beam reflecting off a target. The beam was shot at and kept on the target by an aircraft or even by a GI on the ground aiming a glorified flashlight. Smart bombs were so accurate that they could literally fly down a chimney, if the target was properly laser-illuminated. Smart-munition kits worked. Even better, they worked cheap. There were moments when the hype about Trueborn cleverness seemed justified.
Since I was the target that the ED needed to steer toward, and I was falling headfirst, the spooks had installed a laser beacon on my boot sole. Weddle’s suit had a secondary beacon, but the thought was that a master parachutist could steer toward me and the drone easier than I could steer toward either of them.
The spooks had also put a laser range finder on the ED that measured the distance to my beacon, then deployed or feathered the ED’s dive brakes if it began catching up too close to me.
The ED would follow me down until both my chutes and its chutes popped. We would then be so close to the surface that my equipment would land within shouting distance, but not on top of me. The briefing spooks hand-waved a bit about the not-on-top-of-me part, but otherwise the concept seemed sound.
During the
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