Chapter Eight
The open channel was utterly silent—except for labored breathing. Losing Liebman was bad enough; the abruptness was terrifying, almost paralyzing.
Which Riordan could not allow to take hold. “Who was alongside Liebman?” he asked, keeping his voice low and steady.
“I was,” Katie replied thickly.
“What did you see leading up to his . . . to the frame failure?”
“I saw—not much, sir. By the time I looked over, his aerobrake was already trailing vapor, leading edge white-hot. Then it rolled, tumbled like a mad thing, and was gone.”
Riordan clenched his teeth. Of course Katie hadn’t seen anything; her faint slurring meant she was still fighting the cryodaze. She had to sacrifice some situational awareness to stay focused on her own actions. But if I’d warned him, just a second sooner—
“He never had a chance to jettison the frame,” Bannor explained, as if reading Caine’s mind. “In that kind of rapid onset, almost everyone blacks out. But what the hell did Liebman mean by saying he ‘did it backward’?”
Girten’s voice was mournful. “It means he was too smart for his own good.”
“What?”
“The chief explained how, when the heat burns too much off one side of the aerobrake, the machine turns it to the opposite side to even it out. When Liebman heard that, he snapped his fingers and said, ‘hey, like the tiller on a boat; always turn away from where you want to go!’ And he couldn’t get that image out of his head. He was like that.”
“And how did that kill him?” Dora almost shouted.
“Because,” Miles answered as he sucked in a sharp breath of realization, “Dornaani controls work by aiming your eyes at the problem. But during our one drill, Liebman stared at the opposite side.”
“But red means danger!” Eku gasped through chattering teeth. “And green means safety. Surely he knew to correct the red?”
Girten may have choked back a sob. “Maybe . . . except he was color-blind.”
For a moment, Riordan saw the disaster through Liebman’s eyes. He had to fix one of two illuminated areas, but couldn’t tell them apart. But he could sense the pitch of the frame, so he reacted—before remembering that he had to stare toward, not away from, the failing side. In an instant, the ablation redoubled, aerodynamic stability was lost, the frame rolled . . . and he was gone in two seconds.
Riordan exhaled silently, then realized Eku’s teeth were still chattering. Damn it. “Mr. Eku, we’re coming up on the stratosphere. Talk us through what happens next.” Not only was repetition prudent, but it might help focus any shock-blanked minds in the group. And having a task to perform might calm the factotum.
Eku’s voice started faint but gathered strength. “The frame will provide controlled descent to the lower half of the stratosphere unless it detects an imminent catastrophic failure or the operator elects to jettison it. No matter how the frame is jettisoned—as part of regular operations or in an emergency—the process is the same. The nanites in the foam dissolve it as the first drogue ’chute deploys and pulls you clear. Subsequent drogue ’chutes will reduce your speed of descent. When the last detaches, it deploys the main parachute. Remember to scan for other canopies and take bearings on them, if possible. If you pass through fifteen kilometers altitude and the frame has still not self-jettisoned, you must do so manually.”
As Eku finished, Riordan watched his own frame’s vapor trail thicken into a smoky, spark-flecked plume. An orange-yellow glow rose up around the edges of the aerobrake. Just as well that he couldn’t see it from the same perspective that he was now viewing the others: inverted teardrops of fire falling at increasingly steep and divergent angles. “Chief O’Garran, we seem to be drifting apart. How’s our formation?”
“About what we expected, but that doesn’t predict much about our actual landing pattern. That will be determined by where individual frames start losing stability or integrity, because that’s when they’ll cut us loose. The higher that begins to happen, and the greater the variation among the altitudes at which it does, the more scattered we’ll be.”
O’Garran’s voice changed. “Heads up, Eku. Three frames are not increasing their angle of attack: Wu, Somers, and you. Why?”
“I am not certain. But I suspect—”
“Lower mass,” O’Garran interrupted. “Damn it. Those were the three loads we lightened.”
Caine frowned, as much at the angry orange halo rising around the rim of his aerobrake as Miles’ assertion. Hard to believe ten kilograms more or less could cause such a difference, but—“I need alternate guesses—and solutions—now. Or we go with the chief’s.”
Bannor replied instantly. “It’s the frames’ software, CO.”
“Explain.”
“All of us are under the frame’s minimum-rated drop mass. Every kilogram is just confusing the descent package that much more.”
Caine bit his lip. “Eku: comment. Quickly.”
“Yes, that’s possible,” agreed Eku, “or it could be that the frames’ current actions may only make sense later.”
“Or never,” Miles amended, “if they’re trying to chew on numbers they can’t digest. CO, we need a fast decision, or all three will overshoot the target.”
Caine’s frown returned. “How far?”
“Unknown, sir, but they are still going downrange a lot faster than they’re going downward.”
Caine switched to the command channel. “Recommendations?”
“They’ve got to jettison the frames,” Bannor shot back. “There’s no other fix.”
“How soon?”
Miles’ diction was clipped. “Estimating now, sir. Trying to make sure they come down on the west side of the big river.”
Riordan unmuted the open channel. “Peter, Katie, and Eku: prepare to jettison your frames.”
“But, sir—!”
“That’s an order, Mr. Eku. Chief O’Garran’s first priority is to keep you on the same side of the big river. But punching out early means you’ll spend more time in the stratosphere’s higher, stronger winds.”
“Jumpmaster,” Peter began, tactfully putting his question to Bannor, “how steerable is the main ’chute?”
“Not much: it’s a round cargo canopy. And the smart fabrics are designed to be controlled from the ship. However, look for a yellow stud on the front of your harness: that’s an emergency motion sensor. Push it sharply in the direction you want to go; that might work.”
“Might work?” Girten gasped.
Bannor spoke over the Lost Soldier’s dismay. “No way to change rate of descent, though.”
O’Garran paged in on the command channel. “I have a number, Commodore.”
“Do the honors, Mr. O’Garran.”
The little SEAL returned to the main channel with a big voice. “Wu, Somers, Eku: you will punch out in thirty seconds. I will begin counting you down in five-second intervals. I will start at twenty and finish with five-to-zero. Understood?”
Katie’s and Peter’s confirmations of “Aye, chief” came a moment before Eku’s breathless, “Yes.”
Riordan spent the next twenty seconds craning his neck to visually locate the three frames. Peter’s was relatively close, Eku’s was at the edge of his vision, and Katie’s was nowhere to be seen.
As O’Garran passed “five,” his voice became successively louder with each step of the countdown: “four, three, two, one!”
Caine watched as Peter’s frame dissolved like sugar in boiling water—in the same instant that he was yanked backward, away from what was now only a flame-flecked puff of dust. But Wu’s rearward direction was illusionary; he had simply been pulled away by the drogue ’chute billowing out behind him. But the envelope did not become swollen with air.
Riordan glanced toward Eku, saw the factotum’s own drogue struggling to find enough air in the same moment that Miles shouted, “Eku, what’s—are you spinning?”
“I . . . I am! The bag was stuck and I—”
“Eku, do you still have the bag?”
“Y-yes.”
“Is it still attached to you?”
“Only by the, the D-clip.”
Riordan felt his scalp pull back. Once the musette bag came off Eku’s leg, it had swung out to the end of its strap, pulling the factotum into a spin. Which meant—
O’Garran’s order was sharp and loud. “Cut it away, Eku! Now!”
Riordan held his breath as the first drogue ’chute detached lazily but still with enough force to deploy the second one. Eku emitted a sharp grunt of pain: the jerk had probably ground his broken bones together. “I have my knife out . . . but I can’t hold the strap.”
O’Garran was shouting. “Then just slice at it, damn it! Right at the D-clip!” Even as he was howling instructions, the chief’s frame banked in Eku’s direction, its nose rising slightly. As its angle of descent decreased, its fuming aerobrake brightened.
What the hell—? “Chief—!”
“Sir, I can talk him out of that, but I need to see what’s happening,” Miles interrupted sharply.
For what felt like the tenth time in as many minutes, Caine suppressed another sigh. “Your discretion, Chief.”
“Aye, aye; back soon.”
Riordan hoped that would be the case.
O’Garran was already coaching Eku again. “You need to cut that strap!”
“I’m trying, but—”
The chief’s frame straightened, paralleling Eku’s. “What the—? Eku, cut the strap from the bottom! And hold it against you with your bad arm. That will—”
“Yes! It’s working! I can—ohh!”
Eku audibly vomited as the second drogue ’chute was tugged sideways by an invisible force: the suddenly decreased drag as the musette bag flew free. The envelope appeared to be on the verge of collapsing instead of filling, but was then pulled out straight by the airflow. A moment later, it detached, releasing a third drogue that deployed clean and firm.
“Okay, Eku,” the chief said calmly, “now we’re going to correct what’s left of that spin . . . ”
Riordan didn’t hear what followed. He had a new worry: Peter’s and Katie’s drogues also looked weak. And for the first time, he had the presence of mind to notice how frequently his own thruster was spinning and firing in different directions. Beyond it, looking over the rear of the frame, Caine saw that his and the other descent plumes were diffusing rapidly: more wind than they’d bargained for, even in the stratosphere. Not surprisingly, the few frames he could still see—less than half—were now widely scattered at different altitudes.
Caine shifted his attention to the HUD and increased the display size of the tracking grid. Peter’s and Katie’s frames had slowed, but as the first drogues pulled away, the second ones emerged sluggishly. Frowning, he opened the command channel. “Bannor, what’s going on with our ’chutes?”
“Not sure, CO. It almost looks as if—”
“I’ll tell you what’s going on,” Miles interrupted, voice tight with suppressed anger. “We’re not just under the automated descent package’s lowest programmed load; we’re under the ’chutes’ minimum suspended mass requirement.”
It took Riordan a moment to remember that term: that was the load a ’chute needed to ensure it was being pulled down firmly enough to fill the canopy. “What’s the minimum?”
“Damned if I know . . . sir,” the chief snapped. “When I asked Eku back on the ship, he’d never heard that they had any minimum limit. Stupid me: I thought that meant ‘no limit.’”
Bannor made a tsking sound. “Made worse by the thin air. It could also give us problems when the main ’chute deploys. I’ll ask Eku about that on a private channel.”
“Be my guest. Sir.” As Bannor’s carrier wave dropped out of the command channel, the chief took a deep breath. “Commodore, Eku’s dangerous: not just to himself, but all of us.”
Riordan didn’t disagree, but—“You have a specific failure in mind, Chief O’Garran?”
“Sir, I do. Soon as I got him straightened out, he says, ‘maybe I rubbed too much grease off the musette bag?’”
Riordan fought against the urge to groan, or perhaps laugh, or possibly both. “I’m betting you told him to stop, just like I did.”
“Yes, sir. And told him why. Three or four times.” O’Garran’s tone grew careful. “Sir, I . . . well, I don’t think he sees how all the moving pieces of a mission fit together.”
Riordan, surprised that Miles would pursue such a topic during an operation, checked the frame tracker. “He’s drifting north.”
“Yes, sir. Winds are pretty changeable. The three that punched out early are pretty much going to go wherever those gusts take them.”
“Do you think Eku will land north of the tributary?”
“Too early to say, sir. But I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Riordan saw a comm icon illuminate: Dora. Paging on a private channel. “Chief, check in on everyone. See how they’re doing.”
“Aye, sir.”
As that channel closed, Riordan opened Dora’s. “Eku is fine, Ms. Veriden.”
“Like hell . . . sir! He’s going to land far away from any of us. Maybe north of the tributary, if someone doesn’t guide him down.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
“I’d override the descent package. Use glide and attitude control to keep up with him. Make sure he uses the emergency motion detector the way he should.”
“Once you disable the descent package, the frame can’t steer you back to the landing point, Dora. Worse, you’ll be flying on makeshift controls while facing the wrong way.”
Veriden’s response was every bit as flippant as Riordan expected. “Ai! This mission is so boring, I’m going to sleep. Need a challenge to wake me up!” But before Caine could object, her tone became serious. “Boss, you said it flat out; we need Frog-pet alive. And well.” A beat, then: “You think he’ll stay that way on his own?”
Riordan wanted to object . . . but grumbled, “Damnit, Dora—go ahead. But be careful.”
“I always am.”
Bravado and a lie, all in one. “Ms. Veriden, if you die . . . I’m going to kill you.”
She barked a laugh. “See? You are funny. I’ll catch up with you dirtside, boss.”
As Dora’s private channel closed, the command channel paged. “Riordan.”
“CO,” Bannor said calmly, “we’ve got a major decision to make.”
I live for those words. “Go.”
“The chief and I have gathered data from across the drop. It shows we’re facing variables we didn’t expect, mostly because we followed a terrestrial wind model. We expected strong tailwinds in the stratosphere, but not at a constant of one hundred kph or more. That’s put us downrange too fast, so the automated descent packages are going to jettison the frames sooner: to get us to slow down and fall faster.
“One little problem; judging from cloud movement, the winds in the troposphere are also higher—a lot higher—than those on Earth. And they’re westbound.”
Just like us. Riordan gritted his teeth. “So when the frames see that, they’ll either keep the aerobrake too long in order to pitch down and bore through those winds, or they’ll decide that maneuver is too dangerous and will jettison early.”
“Yes, sir,” O’Garran muttered. “And either way, that leaves us with a hard choice: stay together or stay on target.”
“Explain.”
Bannor almost sounded apologetic. “At a guess, anyone still in a frame now will overshoot the target point by fifty to two hundred kilometers, minimum. The three who’ve already punched out will be pushed twice as far. Maybe more.”
Riordan closed his eyes. “So the choice is between keeping the present drop point or shifting it further west in the hope that we’ll all land in a tighter footprint.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We keep the established drop target.”
O’Garran was clearly surprised. “Sir—!”
“Chief, I hate the idea even more than you do. But if we clear our target settings and then lose comms before we get new ones plugged in, we will have zero control over where we land. Our best chance is to keep the target so that most of us can quickly regroup and rescue the more distant ones who should be heading our way. Comments, XO?”
Bannor’s tone was heavy with regret. “That would be my call, too, sir.”
O’Garran’s tone was formal. “Roger all that, sirs. Commodore, request permission to assist Corporal Somers.”
“Chief, you’ve already—”
“My drop, my responsibility, sir. And Katie’s response time is—well, she’s still cryodazed.”
Riordan clenched his teeth. Newton had worried that given her elfin build and low body mass, Somers would have the longest recovery period. And if there’s aggressive local wildlife—“How’s she doing using the motion sensor to steer?”
“She’s not, sir. Her arms aren’t long enough to reach it reliably, and to listen to her, she’s being bounced around like a cat in a clothes dryer.”
Riordan swallowed back yet another sigh. “Request granted, Chief. No heroics. Find a safe place and hunker down.”
“Will if I find one. Safe landings, sirs.” His circuit closed.
Riordan scanned the frame tracker. “Peter, you’re about to overtake Craig.”
“I see it, sir. Orders?”
“Just that you two should try to keep each other in sight.”
“You want I should punch out now, sir?” Girten asked.
“No.” Then, replaying Girten’s voice in his head, Caine realized that Girten had put unusual emphasis on “now.” “Sergeant, what is your altitude?”
“Uh—just under nine kilometers, sir.”
Nine kilometers? “Girten, your frame’s descent package is corrupt. Minimum jettison altitude was fifteen kilometers. Execute and confirm manual jettison on my mark . . . and—mark!”
“Confi—urgh!—rm, sir. Jettisoned and good drogue release. I have Lieutenant Wu’s frame in sight above m—” A momentary wash of static forced a reinitialization of comms links.
And here comes the CME. Riordan continued down the status list. “Yaargraukh?”
“Yes, Commodore?”
“You seem to be doing better than any of us.”
“The irony of that is not lost on me, given the irregular composition of my frame. A further irony may reside in why my descent is more nominal.”
Bannor understood first. “Both he and his load are twice as heavy. Add in all the tarps and smart paint and he’s probably within the frame’s rated mass.”
More of the universe’s black humor, Riordan reflected with a shake of his head—which showed him a flash far to the left. A fast glance at the tracker indicated the frame had dissolved and that its passenger’s comm channel was still active. “Newton, are you—?”
“Quite well, Commodore. Automated jettison was nominal. Winds are quite strong. And”—a thump and a grunt—“and there goes the first drogue.”
Riordan would have replied, but a hiss was rising behind the comms. “Eku, weather report?”
The factotum still sounded shaken, or in pain, or both. “As you surmise, Commodore: the CME is likely striking the upper atmosphere now. I would—”
“Thank you, Riordan out.” No time for chitchat. He reverse-paged Dora as he checked her position on the tracker, which was now refreshing irregularly.
“What’s up, boss?” Her esses trailed sibilant static.
“New orders. You will—”
“Boss. Please. I can get to Frog-pet. In a few more minutes, I’ll—”
“Dora: listen. You. Will. Abort. Immediately.”
“But, boss, he—”
“You are more likely to die than survive. We’re more likely to rescue him if we gather quickly. That means staying on the same side of the tributary. So, unless you’ve seen a bridge that I missed—”
“Damn you, boss. That isn’t funny.”
“Probably because I was trying.”
“Probably,” she muttered, punctuated by what could have been either static or a sniffle. “Aborting,” she acknowledged through a tight throat.
Caine nodded to no one: so he’d saved one person, probably at the cost of another. Just like I did almost every day in Indonesia. Shit: what a lousy job this is.
Two more frames jettisoned their passengers: Ayana and Duncan. Blinking dots indicated they, too, were still alive, but then stopped blinking. After a moment of dread, Caine realized the reason: the screen had frozen. He tried to refresh it, but after two tries, the system reported that the other signals were too erratic.
Riordan studied the positions on the tracker: probably the last reliable data he’d have for the foreseeable future.
Newton, Bannor, and Duncan were all on track to be in roughly the right position: just south-east of the city at the river juncture. Yaargraukh had been part of their cluster, but was moving further downrange: odd, since he had reported the most normative descent. Miles was now pulling even further downrange than Katie. It was probably due to the wind, but it was equally likely that he’d decided to use it to make sure he overshot, rather than undershot her landing point. Peter and Girten weren’t as far west as those two but were farther south. Eku had been caught in a northwest air current; Riordan’s revised worry was that instead of coming down north of the river, he might come down in it. Dora had cheated back south, away from the river, but now, any wind that pushed Eku safely north of the river might push her into it. Ayana was about fifty kilometers south of her, but in terms of being able to provide assistance, she might as well have been halfway around the world.
Riordan looked around. None of his crew were in sight: no still-glowing aeroshells or canopies. The carefully planned drop formation wasn’t merely compromised; it was nonexistent.
A blow—as if in punishment for his failure—jarred his torso and spine. The aeroshell beneath him was gone; his drogue ’chute snapped out full. He swung on the harness, feet angling down toward the ground. When he got air back in his lungs, he was mildly surprised to discover that, even from fifteen kilometers, the curve of the planet had become a flat, if distant, horizon. There was only one problem: he was still falling. And accelerating rapidly.
As if to punish him again, the first drogue tore away and yanked out the second. The sudden jerk was akin to being in a low-speed car crash. He had the presence of mind to confirm that all his gear was firmly secured—just in time to be hammered by the third drogue’s release.
As he began accelerating yet again, a comm icon flickered: a weak connection to Bannor. He toggled the channel. “Glad to see you’re still alive, Bannor.” He gasped as the next drogue popped out.
Bannor’s voice was dubious. “Likewise, but . . . are you all right?”
“Yeah; that’s just the drogues proving that I should never doubt them. Can you see anyone?”
“No. You?”
“Nothing.” Riordan waited for another drogue to deploy, but this time it was not so much a brutal impact as a longer, slower crush. Caine looked up. The main ’chute had deployed. He looked around again: still no ’chutes. “Not exactly what we planned.”
“Not exactly.”
“Hey: what’s that Lost Soldier acronym you like so much?”
“You mean SNAFU?”
“Yes. That one. What’s it mean, again?”
“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.”
Caine exhaled, studied the barren flatlands beneath him. “Yeah. That. See you dirtside.”
Bannor started to respond, but his voice was swallowed by a sound like crackling bacon: the coronal mass ejection had finally caught up to them.
Riordan’s radio went out, then reinitialized, but there was no carrier signal. No one was talking to each other because no one could.
But there was no time to care as the ground came rushing up.