He was on his back in a linkcouch, the overhead softly glowing. Lieutenant Amendes leaned over him, a hand on his shoulder. “Easy does it, Gar. You’re safe.”
“The squadron—”
“It’s okay, Gar,” she told him. “You’re out of there.”
He sat up slowly, head spinning. Amendes reached up and removed the brow circlet that had linked Garwe to the Starwraith battlepod through its on-board AI. It took him a moment to readjust after the sharp transition, to remember where he was.
The carrier, yeah. The Night’s Edge.
The compartment was circular and domed, with a close-spaced semicircle of twelve linkcouches, half of them still occupied by other members of the squadron. At the far side of the compartment was the main console, just beneath the glowing arc of a holofield.
“Won’t be long now,” Lieutenant Cocero said from the console. He was watching over a Marine technician’s shoulder. “The Skipper’s down. So’s Pal.”
Major Lasenbe, the squadron’s Wing Commander, punched his fist into his open palm. “Damn!”
On a linkcouch nearby, Captain Xander sat up abruptly as though coming wide awake out of a bad dream, her fists clenched. “No, no, no! Shit!”
“The gasbags are overrunning the compound now,” the Marine tech reported from the console. “They’re in among the buildings now, killing the off-worlders.”
Garwe slid out of his linkcouch, fighting against the shaking weakness in his legs. Above the console, within the holofield’s glowing depths, Garwe could see a terrified face—the high brow, dark skin, and contrasting golden eyes of a supie. A data block beside the image identified her as Vasek Trolischet, the xenosoph who, unlike the Marines of the 340th, was physically in the gas giant, and unable to escape. The sound was muted, too low for Garwe to hear what she was saying, but from the look on her face, she was terrified.
Abruptly, the holofield filled with static, and Trolischet’s fear-distorted features blinked out.
“We’ve lost contact with the Hassetas base, sir,” the technician reported.
Two more of the Blue Flight Marines emerged from their artificial comas, blinking in the soft lighting. On a viewall on the far side of the compartment, the disk of Dac, vast and striped in hues of brown, salmon, and pale cream flowed in banded serenity, the violence in its depths masked by the giant’s scale.
Major Lasenbe stood behind the technician, hands now at the small of his back. “A cluster fuck, Captain,” he told Xander without looking at her. “A Class-one cluster fuck.”
Xander rolled off the couch and came to attention, though she still looked drawn and pale, and seemed to be having difficulty suppressing a tendency to tremble. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’m … sorry, sir.”
Lasenbe turned. “At ease, Captain. I’m not chewing you out. They should have sent you in with the pick-up ship, not fifteen minutes ahead of it. Maybe those poor devils would’ve had a chance, then.”
“Is the transport still going in, Major?” Xander asked. “We could reinsert—”
“No point. The gas bags are wiping out the compound as we speak.”
It would take an hour or more to get back down to Hassetas. By then it would be too late.
“God damn it,” Xander said, slumping, her fists clenched.
Garwe was trembling as well, part of the after-effect of a particularly close linkride. Starwraith battle pods actually did serve as combat suits for living Marines, but it was also possible to link with them from the safety of a remote location, so long as non-local communications elements eliminated any speed-of-light time lag. The Marine Carrier Night’s Edge was in synchronous orbit for Dac, just over 180,000 kilometers out, an orbit that perfectly matched the planet’s rotational period of eleven hours, or, rather, which matched the period of Hassetas, since the different cloud belts circled the gas giant at different rates. Any closer, and the ship’s orbit would have carried her past the target and over the horizon, blocking the sensory and control feed signals transmitted from ship to pods and back. The time delay at that distance for conventional EM transmissions would have been impossible, six-tenths of a second for remote sensory signals to travel from pod to Marine, and another six-tenths of a second for the Marine’s responses to travel back down to the pod. Both the pods and the carrier, however, were equipped with quantum-coupled comm units, QCC technology that operated instantaneously, with no time lag. Without instantaneous transmission times, the Marines would have been bumping into things—or aiming at targets that had already moved on. Even at that, Garwe’s pod had felt … sluggish, not quite in synch with his mind. The effect hadn’t been much, but he felt that it had affected his combat performance.
“Sir, with respect,” he said.
“Who are you?” Lasenbe demanded.
“Sir! Lieutenant Garwe, Blue Seven. It might’ve been better if we’d gone in physically. I felt slow down there, like there was a time lag.”
“Nonsense. There was no lag. Besides, if you’d deployed physically, Lieutenant, you would now be dead. Your pod crushed and burned …” He paused, checking data pulled down through his implant. “Three minutes ago.”
“But if we’d been able to pull back and engage the enemy in the air, instead of trying to protect those buildings—”
“You did what you were ordered to do, Lieutenant. Hammet!”
“Sir!” the technician snapped.
“How many Marines are still e-deployed?”
“Three, sir. Namura, Rad—”
“Yank ’em out. We can’t do anything more down there.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Lasenbe was pointedly ignoring Garwe now, giving orders for the withdrawal of the rest of the squadron. On the couches at his back, the other Marines were beginning to revive, their links with the battlepods 180,000 kilometers below severed.
“What the hell was that chemical they were hitting us with?” Palin wanted to know. “Some kind of acid. …”
“Fluoroantimonic acid,” Hammet said. “We got a full read-out on the chemical composition up here.”
“Fluoro—what?” Misek Bollan asked.
“A mixture of hydrogen fluoride, HF, and antimony pentafluoride, SbF5,” Xander said, with the air of someone perfectly at ease with ungainly chemical formulae. “Nasty stuff. One of the strongest acids known.”
“Roughly 2?×?1019 times stronger than one hundred percent sulfuric acid,” Hammet added. “No wonder it was eating through your internal circuitry.”
“Since when did you become a chemist, Skipper?” Wahrst asked. She was grinning.
“Since before I became a Marine,” Xander replied. “What I want to know is … how were those gas bags delivering the stuff? It protonates organic compounds, eats right
