We fell toward Ganymede a hundred miles below. The dropship’s acceleration pressed me sideways against Munchkin’s shoulder. At first, we seemed to ride a fast-descending elevator. Then atmospheric friction against the hull behind me soaked heat through my backpack.
The first bump nearly sent me through the ceiling plates, harness or not. The hull creaked as the explosive stress of internal atmospheric pressure against vacuum reversed. Now Ganymede’s artificial atmospheric pressure squeezed the dropship.
Pooh’s voice dripped casual through the speakers. “Skin temp eight-five-zero. Ablation pattern nominal.”
Cookies bake at three-five-zero.
The buffeting pounded all four hundred of us against the hull and against one another.
Munchkin panted like a horny Chihuahua. “They test-dropped these hulls from Earth orbit, didn’t they?”
“Yeah.” But nobody had tested them after they had been hauled across 300 million miles of vacuum at close to absolute zero for two years.
“Skin temp one-zero-zero-zero.”
Pooh’s reports ceased, and there was only the roar of Ganymede’s atmosphere against our hull and the crash of loose equipment as she and her copilot fought the bucking dropship.
Munchkin stared at me, her eyes so wide that the whites looked like hard-boiled eggs against her camo paint
My heart pounded. “We’re okay. We’re okay, Munch.”
Like hell. If she got out her Muslim beads again, I’d pray with them myself.
The troop cabin’s only window was a half-foot-thick porthole in the emergency hatch across from me. Gobbets of flame flashed by it as the ceramic coating on the drop-ship’s leading edges burned away. Ablation was supposed to happen. They said.
I looked across the cabin at Wire, the old SEAL who had usurped Ord’s division sergeant major job. Wire should have been crapping bricks. But he just sat limp, eyes closed, body rolling with the bumps, conserving energy for when it would matter. Experience would carry him through this. Would inexperience kill the rest of us?
Buffeting slammed heads against hull plates.
How much vibration and temperature these dropships would really take nobody knew. We had been up to a thousand degrees on the nose when Pooh stopped her play-by-play reports. Thirteen hundred degrees was predicted. As for vibration, the ship groaned and bucked so violently that I thought I could see it flex. It seemed like the lines where hull plates joined grew wider as I watched. We could only have seconds left.
Ahead of us streaked the mech ship. Strung out behind and above us at six-mile intervals flew thousands more troops in eighteen other dropships.
I squeezed my eyes shut and counted my heartbeats as the pounding compressed my vertebrae together, then stretched them apart.
My count reached eighty, and I realized I was still alive.
Whump!
The jolt was different. Bigger yet smoother.
Pooh’s voice crackled over static. “For you in back, the ECM pods just redeployed. Our skin temp is nine-zero-zero and dropping. Airspeed’s below a thousand knots. Just a slow float from here down.”
I looked at Munchkin and nodded. “Told ya we were okay.”
“Bite me.” She had her prayer beads out.
The flight smoothed out to something equivalent to parachuting through a thunderstorm.
After five minutes Pooh came back on. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have begun our final approach to Ganymede. Local time is oh-dark-thirty, and the ground temperature is a brisk ten below zero.”
Nobody laughed.
Her voice was a tone higher when she spoke again. “We’re twenty-five miles high and two hundred miles off the LZ. ETA seven minutes. Ganymede looks just like the holo sims so far. We’re busy up here, so ‘bye for now. We’re comin’ in a tad hotter than plan, so strap in tight.”
Pooh, queen of understatement, said “a tad” only once before. We’d made love, and she lay gasping, as limp as a beached jellyfish, her bangs sweat-plastered to her forehead. “That was a tad tiring, Jason.” Hair rose on my neck.
The plan was to touch down at two hundred miles per hour. Whispers drifted back along the rows. “Two-fifty!”
I adjusted my web gear and felt for magazines in my ammo pouches. I checked the safety on my rifle and ran my eyes along our machine gun, lashed snug to the floor plates beyond my boots and Munchkin’s. I turned to her, and we repeated the routine on each other. Gear clattered throughout the cabin as other pairs did the same.
“One minute.”
Thump.
A soft one. Landing skids lowered. The engineers said tires were too risky on the crater floor’s lava rock, so our dropships’ skids would be the first man-made objects to touch Ganymede.
Our battle fatigues’ torsos were armored against shrapnel and small-arms rounds and proof against liquid flame, radiation, and chemical-biological agents. We could breathe indefinitely in an oxygen-free atmosphere, live at thirty below, and see in the dark, passively and actively. We each held a rifle with a cyclic-fire rate of eight hundred rounds per minute, and we each carried two thousand rounds in the light gravity. We carried grenades by the dozen and more plasma packets, atropine syringes, and coagulant dressings than a clinic. Each pair of troops was deadlier than a whole Korean War platoon. Our commanders were radio-linked and could pinpoint each soldier’s location on a global positioning system tied into a satellite network sown in orbit earlier today by Hope . We packed laser designators that would allow Hope to rain down from orbit everything from one-ton smart bombs to burrowing bunker-busters, and bull’s-eye targets a yard wide.
We were prepared for everything.
Except what we found.