Atlas (25 page)

There was a fire in the berthing hall. I leaped down from my rack. Everyone had already made it out. Except Alejandro and me.

I forced him awake.

"What's going on?" Alejandro said.

"We're under attack! Torpedo strike!"

We hurried to the door. It wouldn't open. Lockdown.

I checked my HUD map. Most of the crew seem congregated on the bridge and outlying corridors.

I heard a distant explosion, and the ship rocked. I lost my balance but Alejandro caught me.

"What are we going to do, Rade?" he said.

I coughed. The smoke inhalation was getting to me. The entire far bulkhead was on fire.

"Gotta get suited up!" I told him.

The two of us retreated to the armory, and we put on the spare jumpsuits.

I just finished securing my helmet when the bulkhead failed.

The explosive decompression sucked the two of us into space.

I was still facing the ship, and watched it recede. I instinctively reached a hand toward it, grasping at the empty space in front of me as if I could somehow clutch the privateer. I hadn't had time to attach a jetpack.

"Alejandro. Did you get a jetpack? Alejandro?"

The hull of the ship was blackened in several areas, and one exposed region was sparking repeatedly. That was the bridge.

Shaw.

I tried a message to her Implant.
Shaw, can you read? Shaw!

The ship drifted away. Or rather, I did.

I had to get back to the bridge, somehow. Find Shaw. I hadn't seen any of the lifeboats launch. She was still aboard. She needed me. "Alejandro, where the hell are you? We have to get back to the ship. Alejandro?"

No answer.

"Alejandro?" I was starting to get a sinking feeling in my stomach.

I
f he hadn't secured his helmet in time...

A torpedo struck the
Royal Fortune
and the privateer split in two.

"No."

Another torpedo. Another.

Each strike felt like a physical blow to my own body.

"Alejandro. Shaw. Anyone. Do you read?'

No answer.

I was alone. Trapped, immobile in a jumpsuit, waiting for my oxygen to run out.

My ship gone.

My friends, probably dead.

And then I had a 9mm pistol in my hand.

I was standing at the edge of some sort of obsidian cliff, in the heart of a volcano. A stream of lava geysered beside me.

Alejandro was on his knees before me. He
was looking up at me, his eyes entreating.

"Please Rade, don't kill me," he said.

My 9-mil was pointed right at his head.

Of its own
volition, my finger applied pressure to the trigger...

I woke up drenched in sweat.

* * *

The end of the forty days finally came.

I was doing PT in the gym with the rest of my platoon when Facehopper, who was leading us in a series of body-weight squats, abruptly froze. His eyes seemed to defocus, then he nodded.

When he glanced at us his expression was grim.

"It's time."

Every member of Alfa Platoon stood in the
Royal Fortune's
launch bay, which had been retrofitted with long magnetic tracks for the upcoming drop. All of us were in jumpsuits, jetpacks fully fueled, rebreathers charged. The only thing left was to wait the designated hour for our bodies to adapt to the suits.

"This is the worst part," Ghost said. "The time before the drop. Being on the drop is fine. You know, taking fire. Dishing it out. Performing your mission. But right here, right now, this is the worst. The waiting."

"Sure mate," Facehopper said. "But it always ends quick."

"Not always," Ghost said.

Beside him, I started tapping out a staccato rhythm on my jumpsuit leg assembly.

"Stop fidgeting," Manic said. "You're making me nervous."

"Definitely don't want that," Fret said. "When Manic's nervous, he shoots his mouth off. Better stop, Rade."

"Man, he shoots his mouth off anyway," TJ said. Beyond his facemask, I could only see a small part of the Atlas moth inked to his neck. He didn't seem so tough when he was cocooned like that inside the suit. The same was true of everybody else. Inside the bulk you couldn't tell the strong from the weak, and it didn't really matter because the jumpsuits boosted everyone's strength to near identical levels. Jumpsuits, the great equalizer.

"I've never shot my mouth off," Manic said. "Well, sure, sometimes when the fighting gets heavy, maybe I have a tendency to flap my lips, but that's only because I'm trying to distract the enemy."

TJ snorted. "What, you think the enemy can hear you?"

"Well sure, not every target is far off you know."

"Dude, if you've let them get that close, then something is very wrong," TJ said.

Manic folded his arms. "I'm taking a nap now. Goodbye." He inclined his head and closed his eyes.

"Don't know about you guys, but I sure hope I don't get stuck babysitting Fleet," Bender said.

I glanced at the two Fleet scientists who stood off to one side in jumpsuits. They'd be coming with us.

"What do you think we'll find down there, Chief?" Snakeoil said.

Chief Bourbonjack shrugged. "Couple of empty whiskey bottles. Couple of uneaten MREs. Maybe a few bodies. Who knows? We land, insert the scientists, look around, take the scientists home. Back before dinner."

"I like the sound of that," Skullcracker said. He had a detailed picture of a screaming skull spray-painted on his jumpsuit. It complemented the tattoo on his face quite nicely. "Speaking of dinner, I've already placed my order with the galley. Got a steak in line. Mashed potatoes. Gravy. The works.
"

"You know that stuff's all reconstituted, right?" Lui said
, a look of disgust on his face.

Skullcracker shrugged. "Tastes good to me."

The airlock of the hangar bay irised open and Lieutenant Commander Braggs entered. He was wearing his service khaki and nothing more—he obviously wasn't coming down with us. Alfa platoon immediately mustered in front of him.

"All right boys," Lieutenant Commander Braggs said. "Listen up. Operation
Dead Cat Bounce is a go. The HS3s report no occupants in the SK base, living or dead. I repeat, no occupants." HS3s were those basketball-sized, Hover Squad Support System drones we always sent ahead for scouting purposes.

"Maybe the SKs truly abandoned the place," Braggs continued. "Or maybe they're just out for lunch and will return with a couple of ATLAS mechs in a few hours. As of this moment, we have a bunch of Centurions performing a sweep of the base and the immediate area, but I want Alfa platoon to follow up. Chief?"

"Thank you sir." Chief Bourbonjack stepped forward to address us from inside his jumpsuit. "Alfa platoon will touch down in the relative center of the outpost." An overhead map overlaid my vision. I saw the outline of the different buildings in the outpost. A flashing dot in the middle indicated where we would land. Looked like some kind of courtyard. "We're going to augment the Centurions down there, do a building-by-building search until we've secured the entire outpost. Big Dog, Skullcracker, and Tahoe, you're on the heavies. Ghost, Trace, Rade, Alejandro, you're our snipers. TJ and Bender, drone ops. Snakeoil and Fret, commos. We're going in without Weavers to make room for the scientists and their survey equipment, so we're going to need a couple of you to double as corpsmen. Since Trace and Rade are the fastest runners in the platoon, they win that role by default. As for the ATLAS 5s, I'm giving Manic and Lui the authorization to ride Ladybug and Aphid down."

"Thank you sir!" Lui said.

I still got a bit jealous whenever someone else got assigned to the mechs, but I'd assume whatever role my Chief needed me to. If he wanted me to be a sniper first and a corpsman second, I'd do it without question. Someone had to assume those roles. And if he thought I was the best man for the job, that was a complement.

"Bomb," Chief said. "No mech for you this time round. I want you to be grenadier."

I could tell Bomb wasn't too happy about that—he was one of the platoon's official ATLAS pilots after all—but he took it in stride. "Yes sir!"

"This will be a hot drop," Chief Bourbonjack said. "We're treating it like a warzone. Any questions?"

There were none.

"Well," Lieutenant Commander Braggs said. "You heard the man. Get yourselves equipped!"

I hurried to the loadout area and grabbed a Mark 12 rifle from the rack, as did the other snipers. The heavy gunners took the M60 machine guns, and everyone else picked up the standard M4 rifle. One thing I did was swap out the lower receiver of the Mark 12 for one from the M4. 

I collapsed the stock and slung the Mark 12's strap over my shoulder, then stowed a 9-mil pistol in my belt, stocking up on armor-piercing rounds for both. I also loaded up on grenades.

"Enough grenades there for you, Rade?" Facehopper said. "I thought the Chief assigned Bomb the role of grenadier?"

I glanced at Facehopper's belt. He'd only taken two.

I shrugged. "Figured I have the room, so why not."

"If you accidentally blow yourself up don't say I didn't warn you, mate."

I considered putting some of my grenades back, but pride wouldn't let me.

Fret piled on the grenades just like me. Grinning widely, he said, "You can never have too many grenades."

I grabbed a bunch of extra magazines, maybe more than I should have, filling up almost every available pouch in my jumpsuit. Since I was also corpsman this time out, I grabbed a full medbag off the rack and tossed it over my shoulders—it fit easily over my jetpack. The bag had various medical supplies including four one-liter IVs filled with blood substitutes, SAM splints, all-purpose tape, pressure dressings, jumpsuit seals, etc. You'd think a lot of it would be difficult to apply to a man in a jumpsuit, but not so: There were injection slots above the gloves where you could attach a vial or IV tube, and inside the suit a needle would extend directly into the dorsal venous network of the hand. There was no breaching of the suit, no chance of depressurization. There were also SealWraps, these self-sealing, translucent funnels I could wrap around one wrist to form a seal between my glove and the suit of a patient. Using the surgical laser in the index finger of my glove, I could then cut a hole in the patient's suit without depressurizing the whole thing. When I was done, I just left the funnel on the suit until the patient could get back to a safer environment.

Everyone carried a smaller medkit, affectionately called a suitrep (suit repair) kit, because it had mostly jumpsuit seals and patches, though it also had a few bandages, one IV, a SealWrap, and some clotting agents. This went into the left-hand cargo pocket on the jumpsuit leg assembly. You always used someone else's suitrep kit if they were wounded in the field and you got there before the corpsman
or Weaver, because if you used your own kit, how would you help the next guy, or yourself?

I hesitated beside the Carl Gustavs. Those things packed a mighty powerful punch. I still remember what happened when Bender fired one of those in the apartment back at Mongolia. Took out the entire side of the building.

What the hell. Never hurt to have a portable rocket launcher with you. I grabbed one of the Gustavs and looped its strap over my shoulder, then clipped two "high-explosive dual purpose" rounds to my belt—the kind that fragmented on impact, useful when you wanted to shred a lot of soft targets at once.

"You're acting like you've never been on a drop before," TJ said, rather snarkily. "A bit nervous today, caterpillar?"

"I'm not a caterpillar," I said.

"Facehopper ain't given you a callsign. You're a caterpillar."

I ignored him and went over to Fret, who was struggling to fit the heavy communications rucksack down over his jetpack. I told the tall man to bend over, then I helped him secure it, making sure no part of the sack blocked his jumpjet nozzles.

I approached the MDV (MOTH Delivery Vehicle). Basically a shuttle on steroids, the MDV was made of a variety of heat resistant materials, including reinforced carbon-carbon, toughened fibrous insulation tiles, felt reusable surface insulators, and so on. Design-wise, it had wide parabolic wings on either side and a stabilizing fin on top. There were small windows lining the left and right sides. Near the center of the fuselage a small hook allowed the drop arm to latch on. Black nozzles on the rear provided forward thrust, and similar nozzles on the underside added lift. Thrust outlets on the left and right of the fuselage allowed the MDV to make lateral adjustments during flight. A swivel-mounted gatling turret hung beneath the cockpit.

"Warning," a female voice echoed in the hangar. "Depressurization commencing. Hangar atmosphere venting overboard. Warning."

Robotic arms were loading the scientists' survey equipment into the MDV storage compartment. I sidestepped those arms and hurried up the ramp, heading straight to my designated drop space. Clamps automatically wrapped around my shoulders and my waist.

I received a message from Shaw just then.

Come back in one piece, you hear?

Yes ma'am
, I sent back.
Keep the ship safe for me while I'm gone.

You know I will.

Alejandro clamped in across from me. He was grinning. "See you planetside,
puta
!"

By then everyone else was onboard, except Manic and Lui, who would drop directly in their ATLAS mechs.

The ramp closed. I felt the compartment shake as the drop arm latched onto the MDV (though I couldn't see the arm, of course) and the craft slid forward on the magnetic rails, which now extended out from the hangar and into space.

I watched through the small window across from me, between the shoulders of Big Dog and Alejandro, as the MDV passed the open doors at the end of the bay. The metal bulkheads of the hangar slipped away, replaced by the stars of open space.

I felt the weightlessness instantly. It was like my stomach jumped. I had no sense of balance or direction at all. I was upside-down. No, I was sideways. No, rightside-up. I'd experienced this sensation many times before in training, and I concentrated on ignoring the confused feelings my inner ear was sending to my brain.

The rails supported the weight of the MDV as we slid forward. When we were three meters from the ship, the advance ceased. I knew that the rails were withdrawing right now. The craft abruptly shifted, which meant the robotic arm alone held us in place.

That arm must have opened, because through the window the
Royal Fortune
shot skyward.

I could see the planet nearing below, this spherical object that quickly became planar and swallowed the horizon. I started to feel some Gs—when I moved my head my inner ear reacted, reinforcing my sense of balance and of up and down. The forces increased to around two Gs as the atmosphere of the planet abruptly (and temporarily) slowed our descent.

The sky outside the window changed colors, going from light pink to red-and-orange in a matter of seconds, as I looked out from the fireball that the outer surface of the MDV had become. I always got this slight panicky feeling here, like I was inside a box at the center of a raging bonfire. You'd think there would be some shaking, or some vibrations, but I felt nothing.

Thankfully the compression shockwave of reentry never lasted very long, and the sky soon turned gray as the MDV fell into the upper atmosphere.

The G-forces picked up, pulling me left, then right, then left again, locking my facial muscles in fixed positions each time. This was new and unexpected. It was like the MDV had flown directly into a hurricane and we were being battered in all directions.

"Hang on people,"
Mordecai said. "Some strong winds in the upper atmosphere." He was our MDV pilot today. A Special Warfare Combat Crewman. Basically someone who failed BSD/M. I remembered him actually. He had been one of the overly muscular dudes whose weight had worked against him in training. Still, Mordecai was one of the best pilots out there, and if anyone could land us in a hurricane it was him.

The G's picked up again, and the impromptu rollercoaster ride of tight turns, corkscrew inversions, and steep loops got so bad that I almost passed out.