The Lanky minefield surrounding Mars is much more dense than any I’ve ever seen around an occupied colony world. I know that the mathematical probability of my pod hitting a mine is very small considering the precision of the cruiser’s ballistic computer, but like on every other launch I’ve ever done, the stakes bother me much more than the odds. There are thousands of the irregularly shaped proximity mines out here in this pod’s camera field of view, each maybe twenty meters in diameter and loaded with lethal quill-shaped penetrator rods. My pod streaks through the minefield at hundreds of meters per second, and for the first time since my first few pod drops, I am very aware of the fact that I am tickling the surface of a spring-loaded trap with a hair-trigger release.
A few tense minutes later, my pod has cleared the orbital minefield. I take a long breath and unclench my fists. This phase of the entry is the calm between two stretches of white-knuckled terror, because the atmospheric entry that’s about to follow is as unnerving as the minefield in its own way. If there’s a defect in the pod’s surface, some unseen crack or unsealed gap, the hot gases from the atmospheric friction will enter it and start burning through the pod, and then I’ll burn up in the atmosphere. If I make it close to the ground and the mechanism for the descent chute fails, I’ll hit the Martian soil at a few hundred meters per second and get ground into paste. But at the same time, this is the most exhilarating, death-defying ride in the universe, and nothing will make you feel more alive than climbing out of a pod after a successful descent.
When I enter the top layers of the Mars atmosphere, the truly blind portion of the descent begins, helmet screen or not. As I arc down toward the planet’s surface at the precisely calculated angle computed by Phalanx’s artillery hardware, the pod is surrounded by a shroud of superheated plasma. I’ve seen the effect in a drop-ship cockpit a few times, and the incandescent, glowing plasma streaming past the cockpit windows is so bright that it blocks out everything else. In a pod, you don’t see anything at all except for sun-bright flares from the little nose-mounted camera lens.
The blind part of the descent takes another fifteen minutes. When I see the pale-blue Mars horizon and the swirling cloud cover of the planet again, my anxiety should lessen, but it doesn’t. The planet is shrouded in heavy clouds, the hallmark of a world that has been terraformed by the Lankies for a while. They like it warm and humid, and once they set up shop, their terraformers are amazingly efficient. The pod has no active sensors, so I’m slicking through the cloud cover almost blindly, with only the passive thermal vision and the useless view from the forward camera array to see where I am going. If Phalanx’s aim was true, I’ll be somewhere near the middle of Red Beach, on the outskirts of Olympus City. If their aim was off by a few dozen kilometers—something that’s rare, but not out of the question—I may end up coming down right in the middle of a Lanky settlement or somewhere else I definitely don’t want to be right now.
Luckily, Phalanx’s gunnery was on the mark. When my pod breaks through the cloud cover, I am less than five thousand feet above the ground. Behind me, there’s a muffled bang as the explosive charges blow the lid off the compartment for the drogue chute, and the triple parachute deploys behind the pod. Below the nose of the pod, I see the familiar geometry of human settlements—streets and buildings, lots of right angles, the boxy shapes of colonial housing units and power stations. Mars was the closest thing to Earth before the Lankies came and took it over, and Olympus City had more than half a million people living in it.
I bring up the tactical display again and let the computer figure out where I am. The Lankies destroyed every one of our satellites in orbit, so the computer looks at the topography underneath the pod’s camera lens and compares it to the stored map data for Mars instead of getting a satellite fix. Three seconds later, the pod’s CPU concludes that I am right at the edge of the landing zone designated Red Beach, halfway between Olympus City’s center and our objective, the huge spaceport on its outskirts. The cannon cockers on Phalanx only missed their bull’s-eye by two or three kilometers, which isn’t bad considering they took the shot from a fast-moving platform tens of thousands of kilometers away.
The pod is descending through three thousand feet when I spot the first Lankies in the camera’s field of vision. They’re so large that they’re obvious even from this altitude. Two of them are walking together, one behind the other, across the Mars plains, kicking up puffs of orange-red dust with every step. Another solitary Lanky is making its way down a street almost directly below the pod, stepping over piles of rubble and destroyed vehicles. The computer says I am descending into the campus of Sagan University, the main college in Olympus City and home to what used to be a cluster of research laboratories. Now there’s barely a building down there that hasn’t been at least partially destroyed, and the streets are littered with debris and hydrocar wrecks.
The pod descends through two thousand, then one thousand meters. The nearby Lanky is walking away from the projected landing site, but it’s still too close for comfort, just two hundred meters at the most. The pods don’t have radios or radar, so I have no idea where the other pods in my launch group are descending in the area, and I have no way to warn them anyway until I am on the ground and out of my pod.
Just before it hits the ground, my pod clips the corner of a building, and I get jarred so hard that I nearly bite my own tongue. Despite the triple canopy of the drogue chute, the descent speed of the pod is still anything but gentle. The pod hits the pavement of the street in front of the building and slides a good twenty meters before the computer cuts the drogue-chute lines, and I hit something solid and come to a sudden stop. With the nearby Lanky in mind, I waste no time pulling the release lever for the pod’s lid, and the explosive charges blow out the locking bolts and eject the lid, which lifts half a meter off the rest of the pod and tumbles onto the street.
The air outside is typical Lanky atmosphere, warm and humid, gray skies the color of dirty concrete. I hit the quick-release latch on my harness and climb out of the pod, then release the clamp for my weapon and lift it out of its holder. I chamber a round and turn around to get my bearings. The building behind me is six floors high and may have been a sleek and elegant office tower when it was whole, but now most of the huge glass panes on the front of it are shattered, and a quarter of the structure is twisted rubble. My bio-pod came to rest with its nose against the burned-out hulk of a hydrocar with police markings. More car wrecks are littering the road, some turned over, some smashed flat, others charred black from hydrogen fires or explosions.