“…yes,” Chavez said slowly. “There is wisdom in your words.”
“Even better,” Major Diaz said, “there is fire in his belly.”
“Let’s go!” Marten shouted. “We likely don’t have much time.”
Marten was more right than he knew. The destruction of the Ho Chi Minh sent a shock wave through the Battlefleet. The warship’s sudden death caused Blackstone to scream orders.
The Kim Philby accelerated at full speed for the planet. Toll Seven had a battle pod nearby and quickly launched it toward Mars. Three other ships maneuvered for a combat drop on Olympus Mons. Even in his aguish, Commodore Blackstone realized they needed that proton beam against the Highborn. With the Ho Chi Minh’s destruction, they needed that beam more than ever. He could have ordered a saturation nuking of the giant volcano. Instead, he screamed orders for the volcano’s capture, and he screamed to pump out lead aerogels to they didn’t lose more ships to that beam.
SU drop-troops and cyborgs donned battlesuits and then climbed into their drop shells. Machines and drop specialists used electronic trolleys to roll the drop-shells into firing position. Usually, a mass combat-drop from space took days of careful calculations. Precise entry points into the atmosphere were prefigured. Orbital spin, gravity, atmospheric density, wind velocity and other factors were each studied in detail. Today, there was no time for that. The selected ships roared for the entry point and then they braked hard.
The Kim Philby was the first to reach the upper atmosphere. It was a mine-laying ship but could second as a drop-assault vessel. At high speed, it entered an insertion orbit. Then, like an old-fashioned soldier with a bolt-action rifle, the ship loaded its tube, fired, worked the bolt, chambered another shell and fired. One after another, the drop-shells slammed into the thin atmosphere and screamed down at the immensely vast, waiting volcano below.
OD12 blinked in growing perplexity. She lay in a battlesuit and in a drop-shell, surrounded by combat equipment. That shell was on a conveyer. The conveyer jerked and from somewhere OD12 heard a BANG! And her shell trembled.
She knew from a thousand simulations that the BANG was from the ship firing a drop-shell at a planet. The shudder came from the same source. What had her perplexed was her luck. Until now, it had all been bad. She would not have been a cyborg unless her luck was horrible. After inserting jacks into the prisoners, she had been certain that a new, awful worsening of her fate would soon begin.
It had been difficult these last few hours standing in a roomful of cyborgs. They had all stood motionless and expressionless. None had shown boredom because likely none of them had been bored. Likely, none of them had possessed stray thoughts. They waited for instructions. Essentially, they had all been dead. No emotions, no boredom, no worry, no questions—they were good cyborgs waiting for Toll Seven. OD12 had stood among them, realizing that she was not a good cyborg. She was a bad cyborg, a bored cyborg and full of questions and changing emotions. She had known elation, joy, a chaffing of spirit, depression and then a growing sense of dread of what would happen next.
She had not wanted to enter Web-Mind. It would immediately know that her internal computer was damaged. Web-Mind would demand a new censor program. It might even demand she be deleted.
That had not happened. Instead, she had floated into the Kim Philby and waited longer. Then klaxons had wailed and she and other cyborgs had run to don battlesuits for an attack on Mars.
BANG!
In her drop-shell, OD12 jerked nearer the firing tube.
BANG!
Her stomach churned, which should have been impossible. She was a cyborg. No. I am Osadar Di. I am alive and I am going to escape Web-Mind.
A metallic clack occurred, the sound was loud and very near. She felt herself lifted and shoved somewhere and realized she was in the firing tube now. Seconds ticked by.
BANG! BANG!
The acceleration was brutal and badly jarred her. She lost her breath. She tried to think. Then weightlessness struck and everything seemed so peaceful. She knew that she was over the Red Planet.
The beautiful Red Planet, the one I love.
OD12—no, I am Osadar Di. Within the drop-shell, Osadar Di grinned. It was hard with her plastic-featured face, but she did it.
She dropped toward Mars, toward Olympus Mons. They were supposed to kill or capture everyone on the volcano and in it. Compared to the attack on the moon, this was going to be a mass drop, with every available cyborg and SU drop-soldier. The volcano had greater mass and size then both the Martian moons combined.
Because she was tougher than humans, her drop-shell fell fast. In a heavy atmosphere like Earth, her shell would have deployed successive chutes to slow her descent. But that made little sense in the thin Martian atmosphere because of lesser friction. Yet there was friction. Her shell pushed the thin Martian air ahead of it. That caused heat. The heat transferred to the shell and might have soon cooked Osadar Di.
The drop-shells were made, however, to shed skin as they heated. The hot skin joined the atmosphere instead of transferring its heat to the deeper ‘skins’ and eventually to Osadar Di. Inside the shell, Osadar felt the skins shedding. It caused her drop-shell to wobble. If it wobbled too much and flipped over, she would be in trouble. Either the pilot of the Kim Philby had known what he was doing or more blind luck had helped Osadar. Her shell wobbled. The wobbling increased and then slowly began to stabilize.
At that point, the last skin blew away and Osadar was freefalling toward the giant volcano. She had reached Martian terminal velocity, and that was too fast. She plunged through ice-crystal clouds and saw the vast base of Olympus Mons. She also saw the crater, her objective. Her computer told her she was going to miss the crater by twenty kilometers and land on the volcano’s side.
Instead of chutes, Osadar Di wore a modified jetpack similar to those worn by Free Earth Corps Hawk Teams. It took constant practice to use jetpacks correctly. Until this moment, Osadar had never used a real jetpack. However, she had practiced this type of drop over a hundred times in the Web-Mind simulator. She knew what to do, and she did so now.
She blasted the jetpack to slow her descent. In another life, she had been a first-rated pilot. So not only had she trained in the simulator doing this, but in her old life she’d loved this type of work. With the surfacing of her memories and emotions, the love emerged and gave her artistry.
As Olympus Mons raced up toward her, Osadar glanced around. Other cyborgs used their jetpacks. One, however, must have had a wobbling shell that had flipped. That cyborg plunged headfirst toward Mars.
Osadar wondered why the cyborg didn’t shift and assume a flying position to work himself upright. Then she wondered if something had happened to his internal computer. Had he regained enough of his old self that he now committed suicide? It was a sad thought, sobering and completely understandable. Not that she would commit suicide. As rotten as life was, she planned to live it to the very end, come what may.
Osadar blasted jetpack air again, using more thrust. The plunging cyborg now used his jetpack, but he used it to speed his descent, not slow it.
That brought a strange elation to Osadar. The Web-Mind could make more than one mistake. Or it was possible for the universe to sustain more than one glitch that went against the cold minds from Neptune. Did it follow therefore that it was possible to defeat Web-Mind and its cyborg soldiers? Osadar found that doubtful. Maybe she should simply be happy with her rebellion and call it a victory.