The recon team is four troopers strong: Lieutenant Graff, Staff Sergeant Humphrey, Sergeant Keller, and Corporal Lavoie. I’m the fifth wheel on this particular wagon, but nobody minds having me around, because I carry the radios that call down the thunder if there’s a need for it. We all drop in individual pods, to make sure the entire team isn’t wiped out if the launch crew miscalculates our ingress timing and shoots a pod right into the path of a Lanky proximity mine. The artillery people are good—the chance for a catastrophic pod-to-mine interface at ingress is only 1 percent—but two hundred missions mean rolling that particular set of dice two hundred times.
I strap into my bio-pod, which looks like an artillery shell carved out of rock. The mines don’t trigger for small, spaceborne inert objects such as asteroids, so our pods are designed to be a fair imitation of one. So far, they’ve worked as designed, but I worry before every launch that this particular one will be the drop where the Lankies have figured out how our recon teams get dirtside, and that my pod will be the first one to be blotted out of its trajectory by a newly updated mine.
“Final comms check,” the lieutenant says over the team channel. “Sound off, people. Give me a go/no-go.”
I listen to the team responding to the lieutenant’s challenge and add my own acknowledgment when everyone else is finished.
“Echo Five, copy and go for launch.”
“Echo One, copy we are go for launch. Comms go dark after this transmission until we are down in the dirt. I’ll see everyone on the ground in thirty. Echo One out.”
I give the launch tech standing next to my pod the thumbs-up sign. He returns the gesture and closes the lid of my pod. Immediately, my helmet’s low-light vision kicks in to compensate for the sudden darkness. There’s nothing to see in here except for the smooth inner surface of the pod’s lid, so I manually turn off the visual feed to conserve battery power.
The pod is loaded into the launch tube by an automatic feeder mechanism. At this point, I’m just like any other space-to-ground ordnance in the carrier’s magazines, except for the fact that I’m a biological weapon rather than a chemical or nuclear one. Ten of the Intrepid’s 144 launch tubes have been converted for bio-pod launches, so an entire squad can be launched at the same time. For the next twenty-odd minutes, my life will be entirely in the hands of the ship’s automated systems—the ballistic computer that calculates the proper trajectory for my pod to weave through the Lanky minefield and get to the target zone, and the launch mechanism that will fire my pod out of the tube at just the right velocity. One computer glitch, one power surge or bump at the wrong moment, one misplaced decimal point in a programming subroutine, and I’ll end up shooting past the planet into deep space, or finely dispersed in a cloud of organic matter in the upper layers of the planet’s atmosphere.
The worst part is always the moment just before the launch, when the pod’s bumpy ride on the ordnance carousel stops and you know you’re now chambered in a titanium-alloy missile tube like a cartridge in a rifle barrel. It’s the moment before the plunge, the last few seconds before the electric firing mechanism shoots the pod out into the cold darkness of space and right into the teeth of the enemy’s orbital defenses. Once the pod is on the way, my fear always subsides a little, but in those few heartbeats before a pod launch, I’m always nearly scared enough to shit my pants.
The launcher tube hums as the electric field is activated; there’s a loud whooshing sound made by the air rushing out of the depressurizing launch tube, and then I am pushed back into my cradle as the pod accelerates out of the tube at eight gravities.
I always hold my breath during a launch—not a difficult task at all, with the weight of the acceleration on my chest like a drop ship’s landing skid—and I only allow myself to breathe again when I feel the sensation of weight dropping away as the pod leaves the artificial gravity field of the carrier.
Some troopers start up their helmet displays on the way down, to bring up the tactical screen that shows them the precise location of their pod on the planned trajectory and the exact moment it will pass through the Lanky minefield.