“Target destroyed,” Arkhangelsk reports.
For a heartbeat, the world seems to come to a standstill. Then another cheer goes up, and this one doesn’t just come from the neighboring compartments of this ship, but also over the fleet’s tactical command channel. On my screen, there are no orange icons remaining, just our cluster of blue lozenge shapes, and nothing between us and Mars but empty space. The sucker punch worked beyond my most cheerful expectations. In just a little under an hour of combat, we have wiped out the entire fleet of Lanky ships guarding Mars. There may be more out there, patrolling the Alcubierre nodes or prowling deep space, just like last year during Indy’s stealth run back to Earth. But wherever they are, they won’t keep us from landing our troops. Right now, the door to Mars isn’t just open—we took a running jump and kicked it right off the hinges.
“All units, all units. The beaches are clear. Repeat: the beaches are clear. Initiate Phase Two. Execute Battle Plan Quebec.”
Overhead, the ascending two-tone trill of an all-ship announcement from the bridge cuts through the radio chatter and ends our courtesy narration of the unfolding battle.
“Now hear this: all hands, seal your suits. I repeat: all hands, seal your suits. We are advancing toward the Lanky minefield. All bio-pod personnel, prepare for launch.”
Up ahead on the forward bulkhead, the readiness light changes from red to green. I get out of my sling seat, grateful for the opportunity to stretch my legs again briefly before having to wedge myself into the tight bio-pod.
“That’s us,” I say to Dmitry. “Remember, just like in the simulator. The pod flies itself.”
“Too much sitting in chair,” Dmitry says, and stretches with a groan. “But I do not think we will be bored again very soon.”
We do a last-minute armor check and walk over to our pods. The pod riggers help us into the tight containers and strap us in with quick and practiced movements. The rigger working on my pod connects my suit to the life-support system and the data bus and gives me a curt thumbs-up, which I return.
“Give ’em hell, sir,” he says, and I nod.
The pod doesn’t have a hatch, because it would be a weak point for superheated plasma to enter during the atmospheric descent. Instead, the top third of the pod is a separate part that gets lowered by a mechanical arm and then sealed into place with titanium bolts from the outside. Until I pull the handle for the explosive separation charges once I am on the ground, I am sealed into the pod as if it’s a natural chunk of space rock. It’s a supremely claustrophobic setup, but I’ll take the discomfort for a little while if it decreases the likelihood of burning up in the planetary atmosphere or getting shot out of space by a Lanky mine. The most unnerving part during a pod launch is that my fate is totally out of my hands and dependent on the ballistics computer of the dorsal missile tubes.
I turn on my helmet’s data display again and cycle through all the systems to make sure I don’t have a last-second malfunction. Going through the checklist again gives me something to do while waiting to be loaded into the cruiser’s launcher magazine like a piece of ordnance. Some guys claim they can take naps in their pods throughout the launch process, but I know they’re full of shit. Getting fired at a planet is an unnatural act, one that tends to remind one of the fragility of the human body and the many ways it can break irreparably. I’ve not done a proper pod launch in over a year, but I find that I didn’t miss this feeling in the least.
When the lid of the pod closes on top of me, it has an air of finality to it. The fleet just pulled off the biggest surprise victory in our military history, but we don’t have the time to celebrate or even reflect on what just happened. For us podheads, the battle hasn’t even begun, and the hard part is still ahead.
The pod is airtight, and the hull is so thick that I can’t hear the warning klaxon in the pod bay, but I can feel the bump and the upward and forward motion as the loading arm of the rotary launcher picks up my pod and feeds it into one of the chambers.
One last drop, I think. Let me make it down to the deck just one more time. If I’m going to die today, let it be on the surface with a gun in my hands. But I know that the gunnery computer can’t hear my thoughts, and it wouldn’t give a shit even if it could.
CHAPTER 13
PODS AWAY
Early on in my podhead career, I used to keep my situational displays up and running whenever I dropped in a pod. After the third or fourth drop, I switched to running dark, all screens turned off, because I didn’t want to know when I’d be passing through the Lanky minefield. I didn’t want to see death coming if I ended up colliding with a mine or triggering its quills. For over two hundred drops, I rode down into the atmosphere blind and deaf, with only the buffeting from atmospheric entry signaling that I had once again made the gauntlet.
For this drop, I don’t want to be unaware.
When Phalanx launches my pod out of its dorsal missile tube and toward Mars, my suit’s visor display is on, the abstract tactical map that shows my trajectory and the space around me side by side with the feed from the camera in the nose of the bio-pod. Phalanx launches our pods at the very edge of her range, to keep far away from the Lanky minefield surrounding the planet, and I have plenty of time to reflect on the rashness of my decision to switch career tracks five years ago. The northern Martian hemisphere takes up most of my forward field of view, red and orange and white, swirling clouds over an ochre landscape. Even from the vantage point of the pod’s crummy fixed-magnification camera lens, the panorama is breathtaking and terrifying at the same time. There’s nothing like a pod launch, your body hurtling through space in a shell barely big enough to keep the vacuum out, to make you understand just how insignificantly small a single person really is.