Politics
Politics is always lousy in these things. Some guy with rank wants something done, and whether it makes any sense or not, some poor slob with no high-powered friends gets pushed out front to do it. Like Mac… he wants a fuzzball spit-polished, some guy like me will have to shave it bare naked and work it to a shine. Not that all his ideas are stupid, you understand, but there’s this thing about admirals—and maybe especially that admiral—no one tells ’em when their ideas have gone off the screen. That landing on Caedmon was right out of somebody’s old tape files, and whoever thought it up, Mac or somebody more local, should’ve had to be there. In person, in the shuttles, for instance.
You know why we didn’t use tanks downside… right. No shields. Nothing short of a cruiser could generate ’em, and tanks are big enough to make good targets for anyone toting a tank-bashing missile. Some dumbass should have thought of shuttles and thought again, but the idea was the cruisers have to stay aloft. No risking their precious tails downside, stuck in a gravity well if something pops up. Tradition, you know? Marines have been landed in landing craft since somebody had to row the boat ashore. Marines have died that way just about as long.
Now on Caedmon, the Gerin knew we were coming. Had to know. The easy way would’ve been to blast their base from orbit, but that wouldn’t do. Brass said we needed it, or something. I thought myself it was just because humans had had it first, and lost it; a propaganda move, something like that. There was some kind of garbage about how we had this new stealth technology that let the cruisers get in real close, and we’d drop and be groundside before they knew we were there, but we’d heard that before, and I don’t suppose anyone but the last wetears in from training believed it. I didn’t, and the captain for sure didn’t.
He didn’t say so, being the hardnosed old bastard he is, but we knew it anyway, from the expression in his eyes, and that fold of his lip. He read us what we had to know—not much—and then we got loaded into the shuttles like so many cubes of cargo. This fussy little squirt from the cruiser pushed and prodded and damn nearly got his head taken off at the shoulders, ’cept I knew we’d need all that rage later. Rolly even grinned at me, his crooked eyebrows disappearing into the scars he carries, and made a rude sign behind the sailor’s back. We’d been in the same unit long enough to trust each other at everything but poker and women. Maybe even women. Jammed in like we were, packs scraping the bulkheads and helmets smack onto the overhead, we had to listen to another little speech—this one from the cruiser captain, who should ought to’ve known better, only them naval officers always think they got to give Marines a hard time. Rolly puckered his face up, then grinned again, and this time I made a couple of rude gestures that couldn’t be confused with comsign, but we didn’t say anything. The Navy puts audio pickups in the shuttles, and frowns on Marines saying what they think of a cruiser captain’s speechifying.
So then they dropped us, and the shuttle pilot hit the retros, taking us in on the fast lane. ’Course he didn’t care that he had us crammed flat against each other, hardly breath-room, and if it’d worked I’d have said fine, that’s the way to go. Better a little squashing in the shuttle than taking fire. Only it didn’t work.
Nobody thinks dumb Marines need to know anything, so of course the shuttles don’t have viewports. Not even the computer-generated videos that commercial shuttles have, with a map-marker tracing the drop. All we knew was that the shuttle suddenly went ass over teakettle, not anything like normal re-entry vibration or kickup, and stuff started ringing on the hull, like somebody dropped a toolshed on us.
Pilot’s voice came over the comm, then, just, “Hostile fire.” Rolly said, “Shut up and fly, stupid; I could figure out that much.” The pilot wouldn’t hear, but that’s how we all felt. We ended up in some kind of stable attitude, or at least we weren’t being thrown every which way, and another minute or two passed in silence. If you call the massed breathing of a hundred-man drop team silence. I craned my neck until I could see the captain. He was staring at nothing in particular, absolutely still, listening to whatever came through his comunit. It gave me the shivers. Our lieutenant was a wetears, a butterbar from some planet I never heard of, and all I could see was the back of his head anyway.
Now we felt re-entry vibration, and the troop compartment squeaked and trembled like it was being tickled. We’ve all seen the pictures; we know the outer hull gets hot, and in some atmospheres bright hot, glowing. You can’t feel it, really, but you always think you can. One of the wetears gulped, audible even over the noise, and I heard Cashin, his corporal, growl at him. We don’t get motion sickness; that’s cause for selection out. If you toss your lunch on a drop, it’s fear and nothing else. And fear is only worthwhile when it does you some good—when it dredges up that last bit of strength or speed that we mostly can’t touch without it. The rest of the time fear’s useless, or harmful, and you have to learn to ignore it. That’s what you can’t teach the wetears. They have to learn for themselves. Those that don’t learn mostly don’t live to disagree with me.
We were well into the atmosphere, and dropping faster than my stomach liked, when the shuttle bucked again. Not a direct hit, but something transmitted by the atmosphere outside into a walloping thump that knocked us sideways and halfover. The pilot corrected—and I will say this about the Navy shuttle pilots, that while they’re arrogant bastards and impossible to live with, they can pretty well fly these shuttles into hell and back. This time he didn’t give us a progress report, and he didn’t say anything after the next two, either.
What he did say, a minute or so later, was “Landing zone compromised.”
Landing zone compromised can mean any of several things, but none of them good. If someone’s nuked the site, say, or someone’s got recognizable artillery sitting around pointing at the strip, or someone’s captured it whole (not common, but it does happen) and hostile aircraft are using it. What landing zone compromised means to us is that we’re going to lose a lot of Marines. We’re going to be landing on an unimproved or improvised strip, or we’re going to be jumping at low level and high speed. I looked for the captain again. This time he was linked to the shuttle comm system, probably talking to whatever idiot designed this mission. I hoped. We might abort—we’d aborted a landing once before—but even that didn’t look good, not with whatever it was shooting at us all the way back up. The best we could hope for was an alternate designated landing zone—which meant someone had at least looked at it on the upside scanners. The worst—
“Listen up, Marines!” The captain sounded angry, but then he always did before a landing. “We’re landing at alternate Alpha, that’s Alpha, six minutes from now. Sergeants, pop your alt codes…” That meant me, and I thumbed the control that dropped a screen from my helmet and turned on the display. Alternate Alpha was, to put it plainly, a bitch of a site. A short strip, partly overgrown with whatever scraggly green stuff grew on this planet, down in a little valley between hills that looked like the perfect place for the Gerin to have artillery set up. Little colored lines scrawled across the display, pointing out where some jackass in the cruiser thought we ought to assemble, which hill we were supposed to take command of (that’s what it said), and all the details that delight someone playing sandbox war instead of getting his guts shot out for real. I looked twice at the contour lines and values. Ten-meter contours, not five… those weren’t just little bitty hills, those were going to give us trouble. Right there where the lines were packed together was just about an eighty-meter cliff, too much for a backpack booster to hop us over. Easy enough for someone on top to toss any old kind of explosive back down.