Frozen Fire Read online

  Were they nice to me when I was in her shoes?” Xi retorted.

  “No,” Podsy allowed, “but you get to make the world you live in. You don’t need to keep it the mess that you were raised in.”

  “This isn’t a slumber party or a sorority hazing,” Xi scoffed. “Military life isn’t for the soft of ass. If she can’t handle me getting in her face over some ration bars, what good will she be when we’re knee deep in the shit and taking fire?”

  “I know.” Podsy sighed. “I just think there’s more than one way to skin the proverbial cat. Bear that in mind when you’re having all the fun down there, will ya?”

  “I still wish you were coming, Podsy,” Xi said seriously. “Koch’s repair unit was absolutely gutted when we transferred over from Fleet to Armor. We need every qualified Wrench we can find—legs or no,” she added with a pointed look at his amputated lower limbs.

  Podsy grimaced. “You know I’d rather be down there with you, too.” He shook his head in bitter resignation. “But I’ll do more good scrounging up care packages and delivering them to you on schedule. Unlike Durgan’s Folly, it would be nice to have a steady supply line.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially as he cast a look around the Bonhoeffer’s “veteran” crew. “And between you and me, I don’t trust these geezers to be on time for anything but the Tuesday all-you-can-eat buffet line.”

  Xi laughed before turning serious again. “I’m going to miss you down there, Podsy.”

  “Well, at least you’re in good hands,” he said with a bemused smile as Xi’s new crewmates appeared.

  Xi grumbled at the sight of them. “Don’t rub it in.”

  “Elvira’s can is loaded and secured, Captain,” Private Miles “Blinky” Staubach, her new Monkey, reported.

  The man beside him, Chief Warrant Officer Fourth Class Lu Kai, nodded in agreement. “I double-checked the reactor and ammo stores, Captain. We’re five-by-five.”

  “Good,” Xi said flatly before gesturing to the nearest drop-cans. “Now how about you help the rest of the headless chickens straighten themselves out so that ours isn’t the only can that makes the drop?”

  “Yes ma’am,” Staubach replied.

  Lu, on the other hand, made a distasteful look before acknowledging, “Aye, Captain.”

  “Hop to it,” she said with an urgent look, and her mech’s new crewmates did precisely that.

  “You’ve gotten them into shape,” Podsy said approvingly. “It’s almost like you know what you’re doing…almost.”

  “I know, right?” she deadpanned.

  “Excuse me?” came the feminine voice of the one person Xi did not want to hear from. She schooled her features into a neutral mask while Podsy made little effort to hide his delight in Xi’s discomfort. “Captain Xi,” the woman said as she approached, proudly displaying her press credentials between her obnoxiously-perfect breasts. “I was just wondering if there’s a better place where I could store my backup data storage equipment?”

  Xi bit back a dozen angry retorts she would have loved to deliver, but with great effort, she calmly replied, “The small arms locker is the only compartment in my mech where you haven’t already stowed at least one piece of your gear, Ms. Samuels. And as I already made clear, that particular compartment is off-limits to civilians.”

  The blue-eyed, blonde-haired reporter wasn’t deterred. “This equipment is more valuable than half of the mechs in the battalion. I was assured by General Akinouye himself that I would receive full cooperation, Miss Xi...”

  “Captain Xi,” she interrupted tersely. “When I’m on-duty, that is the proper form of address. Or was that not also made clear during your meeting with my superiors, Ms. Samuels?”

  Sarah Samuels’ eyes flashed with something between amusement and satisfaction. “Perfectly, Captain.”

  Xi did, however, eventually relent by gesturing to Elvira’s drop-can. “See those two, green, impact-rated munitions crates just inside our can’s ramp?”

  Samuels flipped her hair as she turned to look at the indicated crates before nodding. “Yes, I do.”

  “If you can neatly stack the ration bars I’ve got stowed in there under the port hot-bunk,” Xi said in a slightly patronizing tone, “you can use one of those for the last of your gear. But that’s the best we’ve got to offer. Take it or leave it.”

  “I’ll take it,” Samuels agreed, turning toward Elvira’s drop-can. Her hips swayed exaggeratedly as she walked, and more than a few heads turned to watch her as the reporter bent down to do as Xi had instructed.

  “Now I really wish I was going with you.” Podsy sighed wistfully.

  “She’s not your type,” Xi quipped. “Still has a pulse, remember?”

  Podsy snapped his fingers in mock disappointment. “You’re right, you’re right…but still…” He cocked his head while admiring the view as the reporter bent over yet again. “Without exceptions, what good are rules?”

  “You’re sick, Podsy,” Xi said, summoning as much scorn as she could before breaking out into a grin.

  “I’m going to miss you, Captain,” he said seriously. “Good hunting down there.”

  “I’m going to miss you too,” she said with feeling. He blinked quickly before turning his wheelchair around and rolling toward the drop-deck’s main entry.

  Stumbling out of a nearby drop-can, Private Quinn once again spilled an armload of supplies, this time, chemical heat packs.

  Xi groaned before stomping over toward the harried woman. “Making out with my deck on company time again, Quinn?”

  “No, ma’am,” Quinn replied, her voice tremulous as she gathered up the scattered heat packs.

  “The next time I see you hurl yourself at this deck,” Xi snapped, “there had better be a ring on your finger demonstrating your undying affection. Is that clear?”

  “As a Solarian’s conscien...” Quinn began before halting mid-word and giving Xi a wide-eyed look.

  Xi smirked. “The first smart thing you’ve said all day, and you couldn’t even do that right. Move your ass!” she barked, spurring the woman into action as she collected the last of the scattered supplies. After Quinn had once again disappeared within one of the thirty-nine prepped drop-cans, Xi muttered, “What the hell have you gotten yourself into, Bao?”

  1

  Insertion

  Xi verified her neural linkage to Elvira with a brief diagnostic cycle. It caused her body to flush with alternating waves of tingling and emptiness, as the implants buried in her brain prepared to re-route her motor cortex and tactile senses. Everything was green, which meant all that remained was to wait for the drop timer.

  Hurry up and wait. I live for that shit.

  She drew a cleansing breath, nervously checking her mech’s various data streams and triple-checking the manual controls. What had once been a mere pre-deployment ritual, learned after hundreds of hours of practice in simulators, was now seared into her brain after the deployment on Durgan’s Folly when she didn’t have a functioning neural link to her mech.

  She looked down at her fingertips, seeing the traces of scars from the abuse she had put them through on that hellhole of a world. Doc Fellows had assured her that another couple rounds of nerve regeneration therapy would restore the last of her fingers’ sensation, except that therapy would have to wait.

  Her comm board lit up with the launch countdown timer, showing three minutes to drop. The corners of her mouth twitched upward. The wait was over.

  It was time to link up with her mech.

  Activating the link required less thought than it took to blink an eye, and once active, the link washed her body with a familiar string of sensations. Just one in eighty humans had brain structures which permitted long-term linkage of the type used for directly controlling an external vehicle. Xi happened to be exceptionally suited to neural linkage, which combined with her extraordinary reflexes and focus made her a one-in-ten-million candidate. That was the reason they pulled her from prison and put her in a mech
.

  She went through the ritual of checking her direct neural inputs, seeing the correct indicators light up across her board as she completed a hundred and thirty-two distinct inputs in less than three seconds. Once satisfied her link was up, she raised the rest of the company on their dedicated channel.

  “2nd Company,” Xi called, “link up and relay drop status.”

  Her command board flared to life as each of the Jocks under her command verified their links and drop-readiness.

  “All right.” She nodded approvingly. “2nd Company, sound off.”

  Lieutenant Eugene Ford, her Company XO and 5th Platoon’s CO, was first to reply, “Forktail here, drippin’ venom.”

  Next came Lieutenant Nakamura, 6th Platoon’s CO and Xi’s third-in-command. “Wolverine, snikt snikt.”

  “Masamune, razor sharp.”

  “Sam Kolt, makin’ us equal.”

  “Eclipse here. The blacker, the better.”

  “Cave Troll. Big and filthy.”

  “Widowmaker, breaking hearts.”

  “Gym-Cricket, wishing on a star.”

  “White Zombie, more human than human.”

  “Heavy Metal Jesus, thunder-strikin.’”

  “Holy Diver, riding midnight seas.”

  Xi nodded in satisfaction before finishing, “Elvira, clicking my heels.” She switched to Elvira’s closed-circuit intercom, “All crew report ready for drop.”

  “Ready, Captain,” Chief Lu, her new Wrench, acknowledged. His voice was tight and anxious. Perfect.

  “Ready, ma’am,” Private Staubach replied more confidently.

  “Don’t ‘ma’am’ me, Blinky,” she quipped. “My twentieth birthday’s coming up in three months, which makes me the youngest person aboard this bug. Captain, Cap, or Elvira will do just fine on the closed-circuit.”

  “Yes, m…I mean, yes, Captain,” Blinky replied nervously, causing Xi to grin with satisfaction. They were all on their toes, which was precisely where they needed to be.

  The drop timer reached thirty-seconds-to-go, and the Bonhoeffer’s deployment clamps clanged loudly against Elvira’s drop-can.

  “This is it, kids,” Xi called over the company-wide. “Watch your altimeters, velocity, and initial approach angle to adjust trajectory as needed to avoid burnup, but no maneuvering thrusters after drop-plus-twenty-seconds. Pop your chutes at the deck but don’t burn the brakes until you hit the red-zone. Let’s get wheels-down ASAP.”

  A rapid sequence of acknowledging flickers appeared on the display before her. She could just as easily have piped the company reports directly into her neural linkage, but unlike most, she had little difficulty switching back and forth between her real eyes and Elvira’s myriad of cameras. In her mind, the less clutter she put in her combat-feeds, the better.

  As the counter reached the last few seconds, she felt her own nerves begin to fray and she called out, “Drop in five…four…three…two…one… Drop!”

  The drop-can released from the Bonhoeffer’s clamps, and the external video feeds sprang to life to show the white orb of Shiva’s Wrath below. Looming beyond the relatively tiny planetoid was the blue-green gas giant that served as its parent. Xi focused on her initial approach trajectory and, after a few seconds’ calculation, she fired her drop-can’s thrusters to re-orient the flat, rectangular container that held her mech.

  The thrusters roared to life, pitching her bow up and rolling the can to an upside-down orientation per drop protocols. The pure-white horizon of Shiva’s Wrath loomed below as Xi worked to fine-tune her approach vector.

  Suddenly, one of the can’s four thrusters died, causing it to briefly pitch as the other three continued burning for a quarter-second before she could cut their fuel supply.

  “Get my thruster back, Lu,” she snapped before isolating control for that thruster and carefully re-igniting the other three. If she didn’t trim more off their angle, she would risk a fatal approach velocity that her parachutes and braking jets might not be able to overcome.

  “On it, Captain,” Lu replied tersely, but the seconds ticked by and nothing happened. Her thruster-fire window was closing. Fast. She needed that last thruster angle.

  “I need that thruster, Chief,” she growled, performing a quick calculation and finding there was nothing else she could do until he gave her back the fourth thruster. They were barely on the survivable end of the approach angle spectrum and had only another five seconds she could fire her thrusters before they would be unable to adequately compensate.

  The thruster sprang back to life. “Three Thruster back online, Captain.”

  He hadn’t spoken the second word before she was already burning all four at maximum. The can’s approach vector slowly climbed until it was just over one percent above the minimum-survivable angle for her drop can’s profile.

  Going against her own pre-drop instructions, she let the thrusters burn for another two seconds before their fuel supplies were fully exhausted. “Yeah, yeah,” she muttered, imagining the razzing her company would give her when they found out about the breach of protocol, “sue me.”

  The topside of the drop-can began to glow yellow-orange as it kissed the thin atmosphere of the frigid world below. The planetoid’s embrace intensified with each passing second, but thankfully, the icy worldlet’s atmosphere was thin enough that the display was rather less spectacular than drops into dense-atmospheres like those on nearly all of the Terran colonies.

  The unfortunate side of the thin atmosphere was that it would provide significantly less braking effect as the drop-cans skipped through and accelerated toward the surface, which made drop-chutes and braking thrusters even more important.

  To compensate, the cans had been put into extremely narrow and precise approach vectors, which kept them in the atmosphere for as long as possible.

  But even Shiva’s Wrath had enough gas in its atmosphere to make the drop-can, and everything in it, begin to vibrate with worrisome intensity.

  She performed a quick damage check of the can’s topside and found nothing remarkable. But the simulations had suggested this level of vibration would not take place for several more minutes.

  “Diagnostics,” she barked over the intercom.

  “It looks like Three Engine’s housing took some damage,” Private Staubach promptly replied, and Xi re-oriented one of the drop-can’s external cameras onto Three Engine to find that there was damage to its external housing.

  “Manually isolate all feeds to Three Engine,” she commanded while doing so remotely. She didn’t like the idea of making her people get out of their drop-couches during approach, but they simply couldn’t afford to have Three Engine’s pending destruction impact the rest of their systems.

  Lu hesitated for a trio of seconds before acknowledging, “Yes, Captain.”

  She gritted her teeth, knowing that Podsy would have jumped out of his drop-couch before she had ordered him to. Thankfully, Lu was technically competent and completed the task in twelve seconds, evidenced by a thrill of sensory feedback sent through her neural link showing that a handful of fuel and coolant lines had been manually closed off.

  “Three Engine isolated,” Lu reported as he clicked back into his “crash-couch,” as they had come to be known.

  “Good work,” she replied, and a few minutes later, the glowing, damaged engine was torn completely off its mount. With it gone, the vibrations temporarily abated, and the drop-can continued its parabolic trajectory toward the surface of Shiva’s Wrath. Xi hoped no one was coming in behind them to get clocked by the engine. Most of the times, the drop-cans maintained separation, but sometimes, atmospherics funneled them together.

  The drop-can’s approach vector arced gently toward the surface of the planet, and eventually resumed its vibration, but this time, it did so in accordance with what the simulations predicted. Xi had no way of checking on the rest of her company until they touched down and freed their mechs, which would happen in another eight minutes if all went according to
plan.

  Consciously, she knew it was all a matter of physics that gave the vehicles no choice in how they manifested. Mass, velocity, gravity, air drag—these variables had been pre-calculated and were now playing out like some kind of unholy Rube Goldberg machine, which held her people’s fate in its convoluted machinations. She rationally knew that nothing could be done to change their date with the surface, but that didn’t banish her mounting anxiety during what was only her second combat drop.

  The minutes thankfully ticked by as the company’s drop proceeded according to plan, and soon the surface of the world below dominated her fields of view. The “deck,” which was slightly different for each drop-can due to their physical profiles and drop characteristics, was less than thirty seconds away. It was time to flip the can topside-up.

  “Flipping the coin,” she declared, using the same terminology she had employed during the myriad simulations.

  She test-ignited the orienting rockets, found them all in working order, and waited for the ideal moment to flip the can with a controlled, asymmetrical burn of chemical drivers.

  The drop-can slowly rotated, just like in the simulations. Once it had achieved landing orientation, it remained there by the force of a hundred micro-rockets automatically regulating the can’s orientation.

  “Prepare for chute deployment,” she intoned over the intercom.

  The “deck” approached, and when Elvira’s can hit that precise altitude, Xi deployed the drop-chute. Her deployment input was logged so precisely that she only missed the bulls-eye by one two-hundredth of a second, a personal best after three hundred simulated runs.

  A swarm of parachutes, each connected to the drop-can via carbon-fiber lines, blasted up from the still-glowing topside and deployed in perfectly-coordinated succession. Twenty-one distinct chutes blossomed, filling the sky and causing everyone inside Elvira’s cabin to snap down into their crash-couches. If they hadn’t correctly braced for the lurch, someone might have lost a tooth. Or worse.