“Copy that,” I say, and lower my face shield to lock out the knife-blade winds again.
A little while later, there’s a shrill roar overhead, and two Akula-class drop ships come swooping out of the driving snow overhead. They settle side by side on a landing pad on the far end of the drop-ship tarmac in an impressive display of skillful synchronized shit-weather flying. I think of Halley, probably one of the best drop-ship pilots in the entire fleet, and wonder what her critique of that landing maneuver would be.
I can see why the SRA designers decided to call their creation the “shark.” Next to the NAC drop ships, the Sino-Russian birds look more crude, but decidedly more predatory. Their fuselages are more narrow, their cockpits smaller, and the overall shape of the airframes is more streamlined. They’re bigger than our Wasps, although not quite as large as the Dragonflies. They do, however, bristle with an almost excessive array of air-to-ground weaponry—a nose turret with two multibarreled guns, large-caliber ground-attack cannons in fixed mounts on either side of the fuselage, and more cannons still in removable pods on the wing pylons. Autocannons are simpler and cheaper than intelligent guided munitions, and the SRA engineers sure used as many of them as they could cram into the design. I’ve been on the receiving end of Akula attack runs more than once, and those things can put an awful lot of armor-piercing high explosives on target very quickly. No matter how permanent our new alliance of necessity may turn out in the end, I will never lose the feeling of dread that settles in my stomach whenever I see the insectoid, angular shape of an Akula.
I watch as the tail ramps of the SRA drop ships open. From the tail end of the closest Akula, two figures in Alliance battle armor emerge, heavy-looking kit bags slung under each arm. They walk toward us across the expanse of the landing pad. The face shields on the SRA helmets are quite a bit bigger than ours, so it’s easier to make out faces. When the two SRA troopers are twenty meters away, I recognize the taller figure on the left. I raise my own face shield again and wave.
“Dmitry,” I shout.
Dmitry walks up to me and lightly taps my armor with his gloved fist.
“Andrew,” he says. His voice sounds slightly distorted through the speaker system in his helmet. “What are you doing in cold, awful place like this one?”
“We’re going up to the Indianapolis together. I’ll be joining you for this mission.”
Dmitry shakes his head with a smile and raps my armor again. “Iz ognya da v polymya, eh?”
“What does that mean?”
“We go from flame to fire.”
“Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” I agree. “Looks that way.”
He gestures to the trooper next to him. The face behind the helmet’s shield is Asian and very clearly female.
“Sub-Lieutenant Lin. My superior. She is here to make sure I get on Commonwealth ship safely.”
Sub-Lieutenant Lin looks at me and snaps a quick and sharp salute, her brown eyes looking into mine unflinchingly. I return the salute. She outranks me, so I should have been the one to offer a salute first, but cross-bloc courtesies are still fairly uncharted territory, and I assume she’s conceding that we’re on Commonwealth turf and that I am the NAC personnel in charge for this trip into orbit. Dmitry is a stárshiy serzhánt, a senior sergeant, which means he outranks me as well, if only by one rank and pay grade.
I gesture over to the open tail ramp of the nearby Dragonfly.
“Let’s get upstairs, then. Before the weather turns to shit again.”
“Weather is already shit,” Dmitry says.
I let Dmitry walk up the ramp first before following him into the cargo hold of the Dragonfly. At the top of the ramp, I take a deep, unfiltered breath of the cold air even though it hurts my lungs and makes my nostrils freeze. It’s a harsh and frigid place, and unfit for large-scale human habitation, but I’ll be damned if the air here isn’t the cleanest I’ve breathed in the entire settled galaxy.
I take a seat on the left side of the Dragonfly’s cargo hold. My SRA counterpart seats himself right across the aisle from me, mirroring our arrangement in the Akula during our planetary assault a week earlier. Five years of fighting these people, and I don’t even know what language they use to communicate on joint missions, or whether they just use their comms’ automatic translators.
I’m back on an NAC drop ship, so I get permission from the pilot in command to tie into the Dragonfly’s data bus. Then I tune out Dmitry and watch the feed from the optical sensors on the outside hull: dorsal, top bow, bottom bow, starboard wingtip, port wingtip, stern. My battle armor’s computer can stitch all the video feeds together into a seamless tapestry and project it on the inside of my visor sight. It pans with my head movements, so it almost feels like I am the drop ship as we go up through the clouds and above the horrible New Svalbard weather. Finally, at twenty thousand feet, we break through the top of the cloud cover, and the atmospheric bumps go from terrifying to merely teeth jarring.
New Svalbard has a wild, hostile beauty from above. Much of the ice moon’s visible hemisphere is covered in thick clouds, but there are clear patches here and there, and the light from the far-off sun glints on the icy mountain ridges and vast frozen glaciers of the surface below. In another fifty or a hundred years, this will be a prime chunk of galactic real estate if the Lankies don’t come in and take it all away from us. When I first went into space after joining the fleet, I used to be awed by the majestic, overwhelming beauty of the sight of a planet from orbit, but these days it mostly reminds me of just how unfathomably vast the universe is, and how very tiny and insignificant we are.