Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

I laugh in response, but the thought of being marooned on a far-off world with Halley is almost indecently exciting for a moment.

“The Navy would come looking for us,” I say. “They’d want their drop ship back, and I doubt they’d be willing to forgive us the rest of our contract.”

“The hell they would. The Versailles is going to break up in atmo. Far as the Navy would know, we burned up in that hull, and the second drop ship never made it out of the flight deck.”

For a moment, I can’t tell whether she’s kidding, and the possibility hangs in the air between us almost like a physical thing. Then there’s another garbled transmission on the emergency channel, and the ear-grating sound of the mutilated broadcast serves to snap us both back into reality.

“I guess we shouldn’t have advertised that we’re up here with a working Wasp,” she says. “Makes it kind of hard to skip town unnoticed.”

“Stinger Six-Two, do you read, over?”

The voice on the emergency channel is suddenly perfectly clear, as if the broadcast is coming from our own cargo hold.

“Affirmative,” Halley replies. “Stinger Six-Two copies five by five. Broadcasting party, please identify.”

“Stinger Six-Two, this is the XO. What’s your status and location?”

“Stinger Six-Two is in orbit. We’re clear of the ship, and heading for the deck, sir.”

“Six-Two, do you have any ordnance loaded?”

Halley exchanges a glance with me.

“Uh, that’s a negative, sir. This is the spare drop ship. We just have gas in the tank, but the racks are bare.”

“Copy that, Six-Two. That’s too bad.”

Halley taps a few buttons on the tactical console before toggling back a reply.

“Sir, my TacLink node shows your pod four hundred klicks north of my position. I can be on top of you in twenty minutes.”

“Sooner would be better. Six-Two, do you have any weapons on board at all?”

“That’s affirmative, sir. We have a full weapons locker with standard tactical loadout.”

“Outstanding,” the XO says, and the relief in his voice is unsettling. “Expedite your descent as much as safely possible. Don’t break your ship, because you’re the only hardware we have in the system right now.”

“What the hell is he talking about?” Halley asks me. “What about the other drop ship? That one’s fully armed with air-to-ground ordnance.”

I can only shrug in response.

“Sir, didn’t Six-One make it down to the surface with you?”

“If they did, they’re not talking to us. You can try to raise them on the way down. Now hurry up, we need you down here yesterday.”

“Affirmative, sir. We’re on our way.”

Halley cuts the comms and starts tapping buttons on her tactical console again.

“Flight profile for descent says we’ll be down on the deck in twenty-two minutes,” she says. “I’ll be goosing it all the way, so make sure you’re buckled in tight. It’s gonna be a bit bumpy.”

“What the hell is going on down there? He sounded like he’s scared shitless. You think the SRA’s trying to take the place?”

“I have no idea,” Halley replies as she adjusts our trajectory and points the nose of the Wasp below the far-off horizon.

“I guess we’ll find out in twenty minutes,” she says. “Now hold on, and shut up, will you?”

If the combat landings in the TA were a high-speed descent in an express elevator, the ride into Willoughby’s atmosphere from high orbit is like a rocket-assisted free fall down the elevator shaft. As we enter the upper layers of the planet’s atmosphere, Halley pulls up the nose to expose the ceramic belly armor of the Wasp to the friction heat generated by our high-speed entry. For a good ten minutes, I can’t see anything on the other side of the cockpit window but superheated gases streaming past in bright flares. Halley makes control inputs on her stick and throttle to keep the ship on the right angle and trajectory, but the results of her corrections are too subtle for be to feel. To me, it feels like we’re just falling into the atmosphere belly-first, and only Halley’s calm and focused demeanor keeps me from full-blown panic. When the fireworks outside the cockpit finally subside, the blackness of space has given way to the bright, pale blue of a clear sky.

“Altitude one hundred thousand,” Halley announces, more to herself than for my benefit.

“Ever done this all by yourself?” I ask.

“Not without Lieutenant Rickman riding shotgun in the left seat. Relax, Andrew. I know what I’m doing here.”

“Never doubted it,” I say, and claw the molded armrests of my seat as she increases thrust and pulls the Wasp into a banking turn.

“They got some shitty weather down there,” Halley says when we pass through twenty thousand feet. “All I see is storms. I thought this place was terraformed.”

I look outside at the top of the cloud cover, a roiling mass of gray and black that extends from one end of the horizon to the other.

“Just because it’s terraformed doesn’t mean it’s like Earth in springtime,” I say, remembering Sergeant Fallon’s words back at the Medical Center.

“Well, if this is what it looks like after they had the atmo exchangers running for a decade, I don’t want to know what it looked like when the survey ship got here. Hang on, this is going to be a bit bumpy.”

Halley has a gift for understatement. As we enter the cloud cover above Willoughby’s surface, the ship gets whipped around like a plastic bag on a wind-swept sidewalk. We’re in the clouds just a few moments before rain starts hammering the thick glass of the cockpit, fat drops that sound like heavy-caliber small arms fire hitting the window panels. I shoot Halley a worried glance, but she’s focused on her instruments and flight controls. There’s nothing I can do to help get us down on the ground in one piece, so I do my best to merge with the thin padding on my armored seat.

“This weather is fucked up,” Halley says after a while. “We’re at five thousand, and it’s twenty-five degrees celsius out there. It’s like fucking Florida in late spring.”

“Too warm?”

“For this rock? Hell, yes. Weather briefing yesterday said they’re just above freezing this time of year.”

We finally break out of the cloud cover over muddy brown terrain that looks entirely too close for comfort. Halley levels out the ship and banks slightly to the right to get a good look at the planet surface below.

“Wow, that mess went almost all the way down,” she says. “We’re fifteen hundred feet above the deck.”

“Versailles personnel, this is Stinger Six-Two,” Halley broadcasts. “I’m a hundred and ten klicks out from your position. ETA five minutes. Can you find me a nice flat spot and pop some IR smokers?”

“Copy, Six-Two,” a voice replies on the emergency channel. “Uh, negative on the smokers. We have hostiles in the neighborhood. Just home in on the pod and set down as close as you can. And have that ramp down, ‘cause we need to evac in a hurry.”

“Six-Two, copy,” Halley replies, and then gives me a bewildered look.

“Hostiles? What the hell is he talking about? My threat board is blank.”

“Native wildlife?” I offer, and Halley shakes her head.

“Ain’t nothing living down there except what came in on the colony ship, except for some algae.”

“Chinese or Russians? Think they have troops on the ground?”

“I don’t fucking know, Andrew,” Halley replies. “All I know is that I wish we actually had some ordnance on those pylons, ‘cause if we bump into someone who needs shooting, all we can do is flip ‘em the bird.”

The escape pod looks like a projectile from a giant cannon. It’s lying on its side on a gently sloping hillside, lines from the retardation parachute draped all over it like bright orange vines. Halley makes a low pass over the site, and I can see several people down by the pod, waving at us with urgent gestures.