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Chapter Six

Riordan surveyed the group gathered at the intersection of the corridors outside the air lock. Within, they could hear Bannor and Miles preparing the special materials for Yaargraukh’s descent frame. He nodded at Newton. “Doctor, administer the stimulants, please.” The autoinjector hissed three times; Peter, Katie, and Liebman seemed to have shaken off the cryodaze, but better safe than sorry.

Caine raised and sharpened his voice. “Once you’re dirtside, where do you head?

The response was a loud chorus. “Toward the city at the river fork.”

“And if you can’t view the landing map?”

The rote-learned reply was a flat, syncopated singsong: “Head north to the tributary, then east to the fork.”

Riordan nodded and spoke normally. “If your equipment fails, that’s where you go. If there are locals, observe but avoid if possible. I have the Dornaani translator, but if that’s lost”—which is to say, if I crash and burn—“you’ll need to introduce yourself the old-fashioned way: at arm’s—or spear’s—length. If you have to hole up, keep your helmet powered so we can locate you. But so long as you can, keep moving toward the rendezvous.”

Girten swallowed before asking, “And what if heading toward the rendezvous requires shedding some weight—like the musette bag?”

Riordan smiled at the term: once Craig had described the musette bag strapped to his leg when he dropped into Normandy, the term stuck. “Do what you have to, but just remember: the gear in those sacks is crucial group equipment. So hang on to them however you can.”

Girten nodded but was also frowning. “Yeah, but why not put all the additional payload on a single frame and drop it separately? We’d move faster, rendezvous quicker, and then double back to get the load.”

Liebman shook his head. “Ya think that’s really such a good idea?”

“Why not?”

“I seem to remember reading about how some of your gear was dropped that way at Normandy. And was lost.”

Girten sighed. “Yeah. The heavy weapons and the radios.”

“Right. So this way, even if we lose some of the extra gear, we won’t lose it all.”

Caine nodded at Liebman’s conclusion, noticed Eku wiping at a smear on the leg of his vacc suit. “Try not to lean against the musette bag.”

Eku looked up. “Why is it coated with grease?”

“To make sure it comes off the frame with you when your ’chute opens.” Caine waved off Eku’s puzzled frown. “Chief O’Garran will explain it in a minute. Final systems check. If your HUD indicates your radio has received the coded freekset, raise your hand.” Everyone did, although Girten lagged a moment behind the others.

Riordan leaned toward the air lock. “Chief: you ready?”

“Been waiting on you, sir.” O’Garran emerged, face flushed and shiny with sweat. He pointed behind him, beyond the hull. “The emergency descent frames are strung outside the air lock. After you slip into the cargo harness, activate the frame as we’ve practiced. The harness will tighten and pull you a few centimeters into the foam that has started expanding behind you. When it’s hardened, you’ll see a blue—well, aqua—ready light on the facing side of the thrust unit.”

Miles took a sharp step toward them. “Eyes and ears! This is the last review of the descent profile, so listen to every word as if your life depends on it”—his grin was evil—“because it does.

“Our mass-to-surface ratio is low, so the foam aerobrake may try to skip off the atmosphere. If it does, the automated descent package will change your attitude, make your entry angle more steep. The aerobrake will experience greater atmospheric resistance. That will increase heat and ablation. But once the sensors confirm that the frame is back in the optimal reentry corridor, it will adjust you back to normal attitude.”

Ayana crossed her arms. “I examined the frames as you were inspecting them. I did not see any sensors.”

O’Garran grinned. “More Dornaani magic. The sensors are nanites, embedded in the foam of the aerobrake. Individually, they monitor thermal levels and structural integrity. Collectively, they work like a gyroscope, only better. And if there is a problem with the shell, they’ll show you how to fix it.”

Duncan smiled broadly. “Problems? Surely there won’t be any problems.”

O’Garran matched Solsohn’s facetious smile with one of his own. “Well, of course . . . because nothing ever goes wrong on our ops! But”—the banter bled out of his tone—“if the rate or pattern of ablation becomes uneven, the nanites will show you where you need to compensate and how much.”

Ayana frowned. “How long do we have to effect correction?”

“Not long,” O’Garran admitted. “Uneven ablation burns away one part of the aerobrake much faster than the others; it can go from a slight wobble to an ass-over-ears tumble in less than ten seconds. Normally, only a shipside operator would see and correct that, but Dora found a way to jack our suits directly into the automated descent package and project the operator interface onto HUDs.”

Dora surveyed the faces that had turned toward her. “It’s just like all the other Dornaani controls. Stare at the problem, fold your pinky, and blink twice. The system will do the rest.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Liebman sounded like he regretted having to be the one to ask.

Little Guy shrugged. “Then you break out of the shell early. But all that mass will accelerate your fall. So the higher you are when the final ’chute deploys, the further you’ll drift away from our target point. Frankly, given our angle and rate of descent, some of us may miss the drop zone by a hundred klicks.”

“Or by hundreds of klicks,” Newton amended grimly.

Miles continued with a brittle smile. “But since everything is going to go perfectly, the aerobrake’s ablation will slow you and carry away the reentry heat until you’re just above the stratosphere. At that point, the smart foam will release you. That’s what triggers the first drogue ’chute, which will pull you away as the shell evaporates into dust.

“Now, remember how the frame wasn’t designed for a live operator? Well, neither were its parachutes. Even experienced jumpers will have very limited control over the final phase of descent. Those with no prior experience—Eku and the commodore—will have none. That’s why two of us old hands will be paralleling them closely, all the way down.”

Caine nodded in approval as he thought, Yes, I’m such an outstanding asset to the mission.

O’Garran waved toward the air lock. “Group one: with me.”

As the chief closed the hatch behind the first six jumpers, Riordan discovered that Eku was once again wiping absent-mindedly at another oily stain on his vacc suit. “Eku?”

“Oh, yes: the grease.”

Riordan nodded, then pointed at what he was clutching tightly in his other hand. “I think I need my helmet, now.”

Eku handed it over hastily. “I am sorry, Caine. I am . . . distracted.”

Couldn’t tell. “We’re all anxious, Eku. By the way, did you get all the data stored on the crystal?”

He nodded tightly. “I also made a copy for my own helmet.” He glanced at Riordan. “If something happens to this ship, those will be the only remaining records regarding Elena. Or of Hsontlosh’s treason.” The hatch’s red-orange warning light flashed; the air lock was open to vacuum. “How long will we have to wait, do you think?”

Riordan shrugged, put a hand on Eku’s shoulder, could feel it quivering through the suit. “Not long now.”

***

Despite being no stranger to EVAs, Eku’s fist was tight on the lead line as Bannor finished the final inspection and gestured toward the slowly rolling starfield on the other side of the iris valve. But instead of exiting immediately, the factotum rubbed at yet another stripe of grease as he held the musette bag awkwardly away from him with his splinted arm.

Riordan frowned, pointed, toggled the command channel. “Colonel Rulaine, that concerns me.”

Bannor, who’d already started inspecting Caine’s rig, turned. “Damn, how could I have missed that? Eku, you’re going to have to keep hold of the bag with your good arm when the frame dissembles.”

“Why?”

“Because if the musette works free of its bindings during separation, it could yank that arm something fierce.”

“But if I need my good hand to—?”

“Then loop your arm through the strap before you use it. Just don’t re-break that arm. The pain—and possibly, unconsciousness—could make your landing, eh, more hazardous.” Riordan knew an understatement when he heard one.

Eku nodded and, bag still held feebly, he used the other hand to tow himself to his frame. Bannor had half-completed inspecting Riordan by the time the factotum reached its basketlike cargo harness. “Quite a job he did with those,” Rulaine commented.

Caine watched as Eku slid into it and adjusted the straps; it was entirely too reminiscent of an open-work iron maiden. “I thought it was you who’d performed the necessary miracles.”

His friend shook his head. “There wasn’t enough time for me to learn about Dornaani smart materials.” He jerked his chin at the grey framework. “Just as well. At the start, that thing looked pretty much like every other pallet I’ve pushed, dropped, or loaded. Thirty minutes later, and Eku had it in a human-friendly configuration.”

Riordan nodded. The descent frames had been given the same string of commands and transmogrified themselves within a few minutes. All but one of the dozen were moored at ten-meter intervals along a rigidized tether: the one that had been fried during Caine’s EVA. Three baskets remained empty: his, Bannor’s, and Miles’. “Where’s O’Garran?”

Bannor gestured toward the tumbling cosmos. “C’mon: I’ll show you.”

Even before Riordan was through the opening, he detected movement to his right, turned—and was so surprised by what he saw that he almost lost hold of the tether.

Miles O’Garran was glide-crawling all over an irregular, lozenge-shaped object that Riordan couldn’t identify until he recognized the side that was mostly turned away from him: a fully deployed and hardened foam aerobrake. But the other side of that teardrop shape was an irregular, partly nacreous mass that seemed to have accreted atop a rough cocoon at its center . . . 

“Yaargraukh?” Caine breathed.

“Yes,” came the Hkh’Rkh’s decided morose reply. “It is I.”

Riordan turned to Bannor, who was smiling broadly. “It looks like hell, but it does the job.”

“That remains to be seen,” Yaargraukh grumbled sourly.

“Ah, don’t be a big, leathery baby,” O’Garran muttered as he liberally applied Dornaani smart paint to an exposed flap of equally magic Dornaani tape.

Riordan resisted the urge to shake his head; partly because it would be disorienting, partly because every fraction of a second was increasing his whole-body REM dose. “I saw the parts list for this contraption, but . . . what am I looking at?”

“A marvel of ingenuity,” Bannor chuckled, but there was pride behind the ironic self-deprecation. “The biggest challenge was to create a pressure-tight whole-body capsule around him.”

“Yeah,” Miles added as he checked whether the paint had set. “Hkh’Rkh duty suits—sorry, but it’s the truth, Yaargraukh—have piss-poor EVA duration, pressure integrity, and radiation protection. Nothing we could do about the rads.”

“But,” Bannor resumed, “we solved the other two by encysting him under three pressure-rated tarps.”

“Okay, but won’t the airflow tear them off long before his frame reaches the stratosphere?”

Bannor pointed at the base of the third and outermost of the tarps. “Might have, if we hadn’t sunk all of them into the foam. They’re cemented into it just like everything else.”

“But that foam sets in less than a minute.”

“Don’t remind us,” groused Little Guy. “That was the hardest part of the job: getting our lovable snork fixed in the foam in a few seconds, along with a pony tank of air and his escape tools. Only then could we layer the tarps over him and get their edges down into the foam before it set. Oh, and did I mention we had to evacuate the air from the space between each of them? If we hadn’t, the pressure changes would have popped them like balloons, or made them sag and shred.” He floated back from Yaargraukh’s surreal reentry capsule, inspecting his handiwork. “Tell you what, though: if Ayana hadn’t lent a hand, we’d never have finished in sixty seconds.”

But Caine’s focus had snagged on a different detail. “You said something about ‘escape tools’?”

“Actually,” Yaargraukh grunted, “that is my favorite part of the design.”

Bannor rolled his eyes. “It also happens to be the most dangerous part.” His gaze went sideways toward Caine. “You may have noticed that he is completely encapsulated?”

“You mean, he . . . he can’t see outside?”

Rulaine shook his head. “No way to achieve that without compromising pressure integrity. Now, if everything goes according to plan—”

—Little Guy emitted a single incredulous guffaw—

“—his descent profile will be almost identical to ours.”

Caine frowned. “And if something goes wrong with his automated descent package?”

“Then he has to go to manual control. Which means cutting himself out of the cocoon.”

“Yeah,” Miles added, “which is why we had to keep his arms out of the foam but with just enough room to use the escape tools in his hands. To hack his way out.”

“Thanks, Chief; I kind of foresaw that part. But why does he have to go to manual control?”

“Sir, you remember what I said about the Hkh’Rkh duty suit? Well, the helmet is the worst part: no HUD. So we had to rig a manual control stick.”

Riordan shook his head. “But how will he know when and where he needs to steer? Or change thrust?”

Bannor pointed at the mummified mass that was Yaargraukh. “The helmet does have a small panel for video feed. The descent package can superimpose navigational guidons on that image.”

“Except, just like the rest of us, he’s facing away from his direction of travel.”

Miles shrugged. “Between some hot-wiring and a few mystic passes, Eku rigged it so that if Yaargraukh keeps the frame within the limit of the guidons, the software will translate his steering choices into matching maneuvers for the descent. Like I said, Eku’s a wizard—even if he is a frog-pet.”

“Chief,” Riordan snapped, “jettison that last term. Right now.”

O’Garran sounded injured. “But, sir—”

“Right now. We need everyone in the group to feel like a full member of the team. ‘Frog-pet’ is a nonstarter nickname.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Any other questions?”

“Yes. While no one has more confidence”—or personal experience—“regarding the physical prowess of Hkh’Rkh, I’m worried if Yaargraukh hits a snag, he might not be able to clear the tarps fast enough.”

“Already solved, sir.” The chief pointed to a protrusion at the approximate top of the swaddled cyst. “Drogue ’chute. Yaargraukh can pull it from inside the cocoon. When it deploys, it will either pull the cocoon off entirely, or at least stretch it out away from him. He’ll have plenty of room to hack at it.”

Bannor nodded down at the awkward agglomeration. “Well, Yaargraukh, to borrow the idiom of the Lost Soldiers, you are definitely the biggest badass of all badasses.”

“You exaggerate the risk,” came the basso-profundo reply. “You and Chief O’Garran have ensured my safety. The only unfortunate aspect is that the process has been . . . most undignified.”

“How?”

“I have been fretted over like a whelp.”

“Well,” Miles sneered, “if you’d brought a real space suit, we wouldn’t have to do any of this.”

“As you may recall, Chief O’Garran, I did not leave Turkh’saar with anything other than my life and the assured enmity of the Patrijuridicate’s Old Families.”

Riordan could hear Bannor’s grin: “Well, yes, there’s that.”

The Hkh’Rkh let air wheeze out his three equilaterally arranged nostrils: sardonic amusement. “I am ready.”

“Time to deploy,” Bannor agreed. “Commodore, whenever you give the word.”

Riordan nodded and moved toward his own descent frame, third out along the tether. “The word is given.”


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