It took the Gurus a while to drop the other shoe. You can see why, looking back. It was a very big shoe, completely slathered in dog shit.
Just as we were getting used to the new world order—just as we were proving ourselves worthy—the Gurus confessed they were not the only ones out there in the dark light-years. They explained that they had been hounded by mortal enemies from sun to sun, planet to planet, and were in fact now stretched thin—left weak, nearly defenseless.
Gurus were not just being magnanimous with their gifts of tech. They needed our help, and we needed to step up and help them, because these enemies were already inside the far, icy margins of our solar system, were, in fact, trying to establish their own beachhead, but not on Earth.
On Mars.
Some pundits started to call this enemy the Antagonists—Antags. The name stuck. We were told very little about them, except that they were totally bad.
And so our first bill came due. Skyrines were volunteered to help pay. As always.
THE SUN SETS watery yellow in a pall of Seattle gray. Night falls and ships’ lights swim and dance in my tears. I’m still exuding slimy crap. Spacemen can’t use drugs the first few days because our livers are overworked cleaning out residue. It comes out of our skin and sits on our breath like cheap gin and old sweat. Civilian ladies don’t like the stink until we remind them about the money, then some put up with it.
It’s quiet in the apartment. Empty. Spacemen are rarely alone coming or going or in the shit. If we’re not in timeout, there’s always that small voice in the ear, either a fellow Skyrine or your angel. But I don’t really mind being alone. Not for a few hours. Not until Joe comes back and tells me how it all turned out. What the real secret was—about Muskies and the Drifter, the silicon plague, the tower of smart diamonds.
About Teal.
And the Voors, nasty, greedy SOBs who lost almost everything and maybe deserved to lose more. But they didn’t deserve us.
I curl up in the Eames chair and pull up the blanket. I’m so tired, but I’ve got a lot on my mind. Pretty soon, I relive being in the shit.
It’s vivid.
I HATE PHYSICS
Physics is what kills you, but biology is what wants you dead.
We’re wide awake in the pressure tank at the center of our space frame, fresh from timeout, being pumped full of enthusiasm while the Cosmoline is sponged off by rotating cloths, like going through a car wash except in zero g.
This drop, we’re told there are six space frames falling into insertion orbits. The first four frames hold two fasces, each fascis a revolving cylinder with three sticks like bullets. We call them rotisseries. Each stick carries a squad of Skyrines. That makes two hundred and forty of us, this drop. The fifth and sixth frames carry transport sleds with heavy weapons and vehicles and a couple of fountains. We won’t see any of that until we’re down on the Red.
Once we’re sponged, we pull on skintights, do a final integrity check, strap on sidearms, receive palm-sized spent matter cassettes, then slip on puff packs and climb back into our sticks. Precise, fast, no time to think. Waiting in the stick is not good. The tubes are tight and dark. Our angels play soothing music, but that only makes it worse.
I start to twitch.
What’s taking so long?
Then everything—and I mean everything—hisses and whines and squeals. I’m squashed against my tube on one side, then another, then top, then bottom, and altogether, we sing hallelujah, we’re off!
The fasces spin outward from the frame, cylinders retro-firing to slow and get ready to discharge our sticks. I can’t see anything but a diagram projected on the inside of my faceplate. Cheery. Colorful. All is well.
We’ve begun our drop.
The sticks shoot out of the rotisseries in precise sequence. Bite of atmosphere seems delayed. Feels wrong. Then it starts—the animal roar of entry. Just as the noise outside my stick becomes unbearable, thirty of us shoot from our tubes, out the end of the sticks, and desperately arrange ourselves, clinging to aero shields.
The shields buck in the upper atmosphere.
Over Mars.
The sky is filled with Red.
We ride ten to a shield for a few minutes in bouncy, herky-jerk free fall, at the end of which we all roll off. Comes a brief moment of white light and stove-grill heat. One side of my skintight flaps and then settles against my skin. Nice and toasty.
My drop pack spins out millions of threads like gossamer, almost invisibly thin. We call this puff. The threads expand to a lumpy ball fifty meters wide, which wobbles and snatches at Mars’s thin, thin air—and then gloms on to other balls, other Skyrines enveloped in puff.
All around our jammed puffballs, curling thread tips burn away. We’re suspended inside like bugs in flaming cotton candy. It’s spectacular—a lurid, artificial sunrise. I’m breathing like a racehorse at the end of its run. My faceplate fogs. I can barely see, but right away, I know for sure that there’s trouble. The big ball has split early. There are only three Skyrines in my cherry glow. Others have spun off in fiery clumps, and who knows where they’ll land?
The glow burns down closer and closer, brighter and brighter. With gut-check jerks we slow from four klicks per second to one klick per second to one klick per minute, until, just after the last of our puff burns out, just after our packs release and rocket away, smoking, sad, finished…
The three of us flex our knees and land with less-than-gentle thumps.
I pick myself up, surprised I’m still alive. Bad drops are usually fatal. Quick look around. Flat, immense.
Welcome to Mars.
The Red.
No immediate threat.
Time to freely scream fuck! inside my helm and figure out what the hell went wrong.
I’M WITH TAK AND KAZAK. I think it was DJ and maybe Vee-Def and Michelin I saw thrashing away through the last of our puff sunrise. They may be no more than a klick or two off. The fasces apparently shot our sticks at the apex of insertion rather than low orbit. We’ve been separated from the rest of our platoon, and I have no idea how far away our company may be. They likely came down in a north-south fan, spread across more than a hundred klicks.
We could take days to reassemble.
There are no transport sleds nearby, and therefore no vehicles—no Skells or Tonkas or deuces.
Looks like we’ll be hoofing it.
And no big weapons.
What’s left of our packs falls, still smoking, a few hundred meters north. That’s GPS north—no magnetic field on the Red. Good, I say to myself; sats are still up. We can receive our last-minute tactical and regroup in order. But then my angel loses the signal. The gyro is still good, however, and through my helm grid, I scope out the sun.
The Antags keep bringing down our orbital assets, nav and recon sats and other necessities. Newly arrived space frames keep spewing them out, along with Skyrines and transport sleds, but a lot of the time, when we arrive, we don’t know right away where we are or what we’re supposed to do. We’re trained to just git along. Staying mobile makes you a tougher target. We call it drunkard’s walk, but most of us drunkards are packed tight with prayer—that we’re in range of the rest of our company, an intact sled, maybe a fountain, or at the very least we’ll stumble over a stray tent box.