to ranks of backboards … and waiting. They hadn’t opened the can yet, so we were in near total darkness. A maddeningly calm voice inside my head, an extremely sexy woman’s voice, said, “Five mikes.”
“Ah, copy that,” another voice said. “Crack ’er open and let’s see what we got.”
In front of me, beyond the lined-up helmet backs of nine Marines, the end cap of the Katy split in two and began to swing open. If we’d been riding in the throat of an alligator, that’s what we would have seen when he yawned. Light blasted in from a slender horizon to my right, silhouetting the closely packed Marines and illuminating the utilitarian interior of the can.
“Four minutes. Brace for course correction in three … two … one … fire.”
I felt a short, sharp kick along my back. The Katy’s AI pilot had just fired the engines, giving us a slight bump up in velocity and making a micro correction to our course. I wondered if the bad guys at Capricorn Zeta had noted the course change, and were getting ready to welcome us.
“Okay, platoon.” That was our platoon CO, Second Lieutenant Paul Singer. “Unship your harnesses.”
I used a thoughtclick to unsnap the harness holding me against the rigid backboard. God knows we didn’t have room in there to fumble with snaps and fasteners with our gauntleted hands. I glanced up and felt claustrophobic. The Marines of 2nd Platoon were lined up on the canister’s bulkheads in four ranks of ten each, plus two extras—Singer and Staff Sergeant Thomason. The helmets of three of them were less than a meter from my own, coming in from either side and one seemingly suspended head-down directly above me.
There is no “up” or “down” in zero-G, of course. From Corporal Gobel’s vantage point, I was the one hanging upside down.
“Three minutes.” Damn, but that AI’s voice sounded sexy. “Two hundred kilometers.”
The seconds trickled away as we continued waiting in ranks. Two hundred kilometers to the target was a long way, too far for us to see the objective yet. But it was out there, probably well above the gleaming curve of the Earth. Then I noticed a bright star directly ahead, and queried my in-head. Was that the objective? The platoon AI responded by putting a red box around the star, together with a fast dwindling set of numerals just to one side. Approaching in a lower, higher-speed orbit, we were closing with the target at just over two kilometers per second. According to the opplan, the shotgun would fire when we were ten kilometers from our objective.
“Okay, Marines,” Lieutenant Singer said, “Listen up. We do this by the book, and we’ll come through this alive.”
Well, most of us, I thought. Maybe …
If we were very, very lucky… .
“Remember to steer for the rock end of the facility,” Singer went on. “The doughnut will navigate itself to the main control hab, and that’s where we’ll make the breach. We don’t know what kind of defenses the tangos might have in there, so stay sharp, and keep an eye on your CT2 displays. Got it?”
“Ooh-rah!” a number of the Marines chorused back, their centuries-old battle cry.
I wondered how the CT2W could sort new fear from what was there already.
Oh, I knew how it worked in theory. The Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System has been around in one form or another since the early twenty-first century. It picks up P300 brainwaves, which are linked to stimulus evaluation and categorization. Back in the 2020s, this was handled by a smart helmet equipped with scalp sensors. For the last century or so, though, it’s been a program running within a soldier’s cerebral implants. The idea is that we can detect a threat subconsciously, well before it actually manifests as a bad guy with a weapon. It sounds wild, using brainwaves to detect subconsciously perceived threats, but tests show Marines pick up about 47 percent of hidden threats with just their eyes or standard optics … compared with 90-plus percent when they’re running a CT2WS.
“Two minutes.”
“Weapons check,” Staff Sergeant Thomason called. “Lock and load!”
I looked at my own weapon, a Mk. 30 Sunbeam-Sony carbine packing a half-megajoule-pulse in a mass of just four kilos. My sidearm was the usual Browning Five, a stubby, mag-accelerator handgun that could hurl a five-millimeter bit of steel-jacketed depleted uranium at a thousand meters per second. Both weapons were charged, hot-linked to my in-head, and safed.
There’s an old myth that says Navy Hospital Corpsmen don’t go into combat armed. That might have been true once, back when the Geneva Convention dictated the rules for civilized warfare. Unfortunately, any nonhuman bad guys we happened to run into weren’t going to be signatories of those documents … and that was definitely true of the human hijackers we were facing now.
“Hey, Gunny,” Sergeant Woznowiec called. “Any intel yet on how many tangos are waiting for us in there?”
“Negative on that, Woz,” Hancock replied. “When I know, you’ll know.”
“Comm silence,” Singer warned. “Stay the hell off the TC.”
Shit. The tactical channel was shielded and short-ranged. There was no way the bad guys could be listening in. Singer was an asshole … worse, a wannabe asshole fresh out of the Naval Academy.
“One minute.”
“We’re getting a warn-off from Zeta station,” Thomason said. “They’ve seen us.”
There was a lot of traffic in low-Earth orbit. The idea had been to slip in close like an innocent cargo tug. Unfortunately, that deception couldn’t provide us with cover indefinitely. The station’s radar would have been tracking us for long minutes already, and collision avoidance alarms might be going off over there already.
“Twenty seconds,” Thomason added. “Dropping the backrests.”
Those rigid boards behind our backs, shaped to fit our armor backpacks and meta tanks with snug precision, were grown from the canister’s internal nanomatrix, just like made-to-order chairs and tables grown from the floor. At an electronic command from our AI, they dissolved back into the deck, leaving each of us moving with the Katy. I felt my boots leaving the deck, just by a few millimeters, as the sexy AI voice sounded off the final countdown.
“Cargo launch in five … four … three … two … one … initiate.”
The Katy fired its forward maneuvering thrusters. From our point of view, the walls of the cargo canister abruptly slid backward, and the entire platoon emerged suddenly into open, empty space. The vast, eye-watering blue and mottled white of Earth filled half of the sky with aching beauty. The sun was squarely at our backs; the sunset terminator stretched along the curve of the horizon ahead.
The Marine version of a KT-54 was called a shotgun Katy for a reason. By decelerating sharply, the vessel’s armored human cargo hurtled from the wide-open bow, moving at the same speed as the tug until it slowed. Now it was dropping away behind us, empty, and 2nd Platoon kept moving at a constant velocity toward our objective. For all intents and purposes, it was as though we’d just been fired into space like a cloud of pellets from an enormous shotgun.
“Platoon, shift to Formation One,” Singer ordered. “Deploy!”
Our
