Operation Polaris had been partly my idea. We’d come up with it in the final year of the war, an infiltration plan to take the struggle down the well. I fully admit it was something of a desperate measure. Finding a way to transport hostile operatives onto the surface of a planet where every square inch of airspace is covered by a wide variety of military sensors required imaginative thinking and an acceptance of some major risk factors. Our intel people calculated the probability of success at 34 percent. So it came as a relief when Riviera liberated Freak from that experimental hab and we decided on the Langley Raid instead: success rating a whopping 39 percent. But that had been wartime. Now that peace reigned over the skies once more, the risk factors could be adjusted to a lower setting, or at least that’s what I hoped.
“This is fucking crazy,” Lucy told me, reading the mission parameters on her console.
“Basic misdirection, Newtonian physics and a little meteorology,” I said. “It’ll work.”
Riviera had used his influence to procure an aged but serviceable shuttle from the small council of senior veterans that formed the quasi-government for Cerberus. The ship was a small maintenance runabout used by the graffiti crews and its hull was a chaotic echo of Cerberus’ outer skin, all malformed cartoon characters and satanic symbols. The interior was cramped, barely capable of holding a be-suited Mr Mac and myself. Climbing into the escape pods had been an exercise in strained muscles and a reminder that I wasn’t getting any younger. The pods were yet more war surplus, Kruger seemed to have an endless supply of the stuff, and had been installed on an extension to the shuttle’s airlock, giving it the appearance of a wasp carrying a dumb-bell.
“Earth orbit achieved,” Lucy said in my headphones. “Two minutes to curtain up. Just to be clear, you’re absolutely sure you want to do this?”
“Indubitably, my dear,” Mr Mac assured her.
“Wasn’t asking you,” she snapped. “Alex?”
“Compared to Ceres, it’ll be a warm cup of cocoa,” I told her. “Don’t worry.”
“Guess that job with Astravista’s screwed now, huh?”
“I wouldn’t give much for their share price when this is over. Guess you’ll have to find another route to the stars.”
“Yeah, I’ll build my own from spares. Stand-by for eject in sixty seconds.”
There was a pause then a shudder as Lucy detonated the plasma cannister fixed to the upper hull before making a suitably panicked mayday call on the universal emergency channel. “Oh god! This… this is Delta-One-Five in high orbit, polar quadrant three. We have an emergency situation. Repeat emergency!”
A pause before a calmly professional voice came over the comms, male with a South American accent. “Delta-One-Five, this is Emergency Control and Response. State the nature of your distress.”
“Explosion… I mean we have an explosion on board. Something just blew in the crew compartment.”
“Are you injured?”
“Negative. The flight-deck is sealed but I’m reading extensive damage… Shit! Cameras show the compartment is open to vacuum. There’s a gaping hole in the hull. We’re losing atmo.”
“How many crew are on board?”
“Me and two others… I can’t see them on the cams. Oh fuck!”
“Please remain calm, Delta-One-Five. Is your craft responsive to control?”
“Uh, yeah. Trim’s kinda weird, but she’ll shift alright.”
“We have you on scope. You need to kill your primary engines and burn to a stable orbit. Can you do that?”
“Yeah. Burn to stable orbit. Got it.”
“Rescue craft have been scrambled to intercept you. ETA twelve minutes…”
That was our cue. I gripped the pod’s internal hand-holds and braced myself for what came next. A hard jolt and the pod was free of the shuttle, thrusters firing a pre-programmed sequence to angle it for an atmospheric entry.
“No!” Lucy yelled over the comms. “They ejected. Oh shit no!”
“We’re tracking them,” the emergency guy said in a soothing tone. “Rescue crews will be there within an hour of landing…”
“You don’t understand,” she sobbed. “This tub is ancient. Those pods haven’t been serviced in years. They don’t even have suits on. There’s no way…”
The comms crackled and died as the first wave of turbulence hit the pod, indicating I was now skimming the atmosphere. My eyes roamed over the pod interior, searching for any sign of smoke that might indicate a heat shield failure, though at this stage there really wasn’t much I could do about it. After checking them over Kruger had pronounced the pods to be in full working order but Lucy hadn’t been exaggerating their age. The buffeting grew worse by the second, eventually getting so bad that I had to close my eyes against the jumbled confusion.
It stopped abruptly after a full minute, by which time I’d come close to cracking some teeth as my jaw clamped tight against an involuntary shout. The pod took on only a slight tremble as it fell through the mesosphere and I did some mental arithmetic to try and pinpoint the exact second the carefully placed explosives would blow. I was out by a good five seconds.
A rapid series of concussions and the pod split apart, the constituent parts flying away to leave me tumbling through the stratosphere. We had immersion-simmed the crap out of this scenario and it turned out my muscle memory hadn’t deserted me: arms tight against the body, legs together, head pointed at the surface, maintaining a vertical spin as the smoke cannisters and flares Kruger had welded onto the suit left a dirty stain in the sky. I regulated my breathing to a steady rhythm to slow the flow of judgement impairing adrenaline and did my best not to get distracted by the view…
Blue… It’s all so blue. My only previous trip down the well had been a pretty frenzied affair that hadn’t left much room for sightseeing, what with all the explosions and dismemberment. Now I found myself falling through an infinity of blue, the sky, the ocean far below. For someone raised in enclosed environments it made for an experience that was equal parts exhilarating and alarming. There’s so much sky.
The pods had been launched close to the northern hemisphere at a trajectory that would take us above the Arctic Circle. The scanning stations were less numerous at this latitude and the atmospherics made for lousy maintenance, or at least they had back when I came up with this plan. The further I fell the more of the polar ice-cap I could see creeping over the blue of the ocean. A thin vertical smoke-trail half a mile away told me Mr Mac’s pod had also performed as expected. With any luck the surface monitoring stations would read us as just more debris. Lucy would be burning clear by now, all comms deactivated and giving every appearance of an independent haulage contractor who didn’t want to stick around for the official accident enquiry. Orbital Security might chase after her but I had every confidence in her evasion skills.
The next twenty seconds were crucial, the decision-making window for whoever had eyes on us just now. They could decide the falling debris from two unfortunate escape pods didn’t pose a threat this far from populated areas. On the other hand, they might conclude it was better to be safe than sorry and blast us into small pieces with a missile salvo. I guessed the duty officer of the day must have been worried about his budget allocation because twenty very long seconds of free-fall passed without incident.
The ice filled my entire field of vision now, a great white sheet, dotted here and there with the dark nodes of civilisation. An ever-growing population meant people were now looking farther afield for lebensraum, using tech developed for off-world colonisation to establish settlements in places once considered too hostile for human habitation. The Arctic population had officially topped the ten-million mark a year ago, but it was still 97 percent empty and not a place to linger out-of-doors for any length of time.
My headphones issued a loud insistent beep at five thousand feet and I levelled out into the classic skydiver pose, arms and legs spread to maximise atmospheric resistance, the smoke and flares still streaming in my wake. I needed to slow the descent for a chute deployment but not enough to spoil the illusion of a tumbling piece of debris in the event I was still a speck on someone’s scanner. The chute auto-deployed at five hundred feet. The sims had got this part wrong. What should have been a jarring but manageable transition from free-fall to controlled descent felt more like a chest-first collision with a sledgehammer. The force of it left me with greying vision and a deep pain in my chest as I fought to refill suddenly empty lungs. My chute was a warpable, semi-rigid canopy that should have enabled a partly piloted descent, but the stunning effects of the deceleration meant all I could do was hang there gasping, oxygen starved arms like lead and my vision growing ever dimmer as the ice loomed closer.
Fortunately, I blacked out before I hit.