Alone in the Dark

It hasn’t ever been the claustrophobia that’s inherent in our species. It’s never the fact that I could accelerate into the surface of whichever planet I’m taking part in an assault on at as much as fourteen meters per second per second. It’s always been the darkness, the heat, the system initiation during the freefall. It’s the being popped out of the ship like an egg from a hen, only to be dropped some hundred kilometers – depending entirely on the volume of the target system – onto what is preferably a solid surface. Then you’re expected to engage on contact. And contact normally comes very swiftly when you’re waltzing around the surface of a hostile planet in a thirty-kiloton, ten-meter-tall war machine.

But when you breach, you breach. There’s no going back. The little egg will have to grow up, and fast. It’s really an amazing experience until the panic sets in: you feel the thump of the deployment charge, the rush into microgravity, and then your hair stands on end, you bob against the restraints. Yet you can’t see anything, and your navigation and targeting systems haven’t even started loading yet. They taught you about this, that a premature system startup would draw electronic attention to a sitting duck, but – God damn it – you’re falling at a planet. They tell you that the human race is among the most adaptive races in the known universe, but the human brain cannot adapt to blackness, silence, and knowledge of a painful doom. So we have faith. All of us pilots. We tape crucifixes, snippets from the Book or Qur’an, and other sigils that would be considered religious gobbledygook back flatland onto the insides of our locker doors. It’s those three or four minutes of complete isolation before – God willing – your computer kicks into action and the pod starts to get hot. And then your heads-up comes online; glorious green against the glass you know is in front of you. Program startups run by as the shell behind the ghostly green text changes from black to a dull red, and then, just before the shell is stripped away and you’re hit with the light of the world below you, a message of encouragement flashes. In training it always says “Warriors feast in Valhalla”. The message is meant to be taken that, assuming you buy a nice farm on your target system, your courage is to be commended and you will be honored by flatlanders and your fellow pilots throughout human space. My executive officer had had our motivational notice hedged back to one simple, deeply facetious word: “Armistice.”

“Okay, ladies,” I heard crackle over the ship-to- Æsir; the stay, as we called it, an epithet for the acronym STÆ. “You can expect to find hostile activity at approximately seventy-three percent this morning. Local atmosphere is in the neighborhood of thirteen-percent-lethality for carbon monoxide, so we don’t need to remind you again not to leave any ejection sites until help arrives. May your actions bring glory to the Federation, and do your best not to make today the day you get sent home to your family in a box.”

In other words, I thought, watching entry flames lick past my calibrating systems module, watching my altimeter flash from green to red and back to green as I dropped, there was some prime rural real estate for sale on this system, and those in charge didn’t want any pilots seriously considering a purchase. Voices talked to me again through the platform-to-platform comm channels. Other pilots chided the drop officer above, hassled each other about gambling debts. This was who we were.

“Rook,” I heard. “Listen up, I know this is your first drop, but this is all going to go real smooth like, ‘kay?”

A couple seconds later, a response came back: “Oh, oh, okay.”

“Whassamatter, rook? Shit yourself in the void?” A third voice. Laughter followed.

I clicked my comm over to a private band to the rookie, and spoke calmly. I told him that he was with me, and to find the Fenris before we took off. He nervously replied with a thank you. “We’re gonna be fine, okay?”

“Okay.”

My fingers itched around the triggers on the joystick in my right hand, and my wrist flexed involuntarily on the throttle in my left. My Æsir flatlanded hard and I punched the throttle forward. I could feel the machine purring beneath and behind me, a glorious god of war and thunder striding across what appeared to be soldiers’ quarters around a military-based metropolis. My Thor-class combat platform didn’t tower over the homes and convenience stores it walked past, but it must have been a terrifying sight to the locals: a bipedal machine, standing maybe a story higher than their domicile, walking down the street, crushing cars beneath large steel feet attached to inverted legs. I was headed due north, waiting for contact, when the ping came from the Fenris, several clicks away and only two or three degrees off of due west. I readjusted my course, unintentionally ripping several windows off the second story of some poor business. Collateral damage happens, and no locals were thrown from the building.

My Æsir walked on like an old man hunched over, his arms propped out to the sides to help him balance. Unlike a frail octogenarian, however, the balancing arms on the combat platform contained high intensity photon weapons and mass drivers: lasers and shotguns, we called them. The hump of the back of the platform included short range missiles and missile defense capabilities. To continue on with the metaphor, my Thor was an old, rich man out for blood.

I turned another corner, commenting on the lack of comm chatter about combat. Other pilots responded that they had not encountered resistance, either. This was unnerving. Somewhere in the area of a dozen three-story machines were travelling through a human city on a colony with a larger-than-average population, with known resistance forces, only to be allowed a heinously wide berth. Finally the Fenris was in view, the enormous quadruped stood a dull gray mountain against the brick of nearby buildings. Explosions birthed like mushrooms on its side, scorching the armored plating and blowing away the huge latches of cargo compartments. Not a single shot was returned from the Fenris.

The thought suddenly dawned: the bastards had finally wised up to how we operated. It wasn’t efficient in any manner, dropping with minimal payload only to hit up the Fenris for mission-essential equipment, because a scenario just like this one was far too simple to create. Judging that the support platform wasn’t responding to its assailants meant only one thing. They had fried her electronics somehow, probably mid-drop. It didn’t really matter how. I called in for support, and geared my right hand for business.

A beam of light the emitter of which is intelligent enough to calculate proper convergence for is not an extremely dangerous weapon unless put in the right hands. Aiming down at a local tank, one must estimate the position of its fuel source, and the lightrifle will theoretically do the rest of the work beyond the trigger pull. This is theoretical because accidents happen, algorithms corrupt, the locals like to mix and match parts because they have them rather than because they necessarily work; the lightrifle, however, has yet to fail me in actual combat to within two shots, and I have watched countless machines of war – which had apparently not advanced much since we left the Homeworld -- explode from within. The mass drivers are no less friendly: a cylinder of metal is accelerated by magnetic force down the forearm of the Thor and is divided atomically at critical points, blowing forward from the arm with hundreds of kilometers per second of intertia. These shards can rip through an armored tank, bounce off the asphalt behind it, and hammer halfway through a second if the angle is right. And as for the poor saps running around in impact armor below, they stood as good a chance of being crushed beneath the combat platform as they did catching a piece of shrapnel from either my shotgun or their own destructing vehicles.

A command platform, a four-meter Odin, leapt over a nearby building and joined the fray. The smaller Æsir were equipped with jumpjets, for precision strikes and moving into and out of melee combat with enemy Vanir combat platforms. This particular Odin was equipped with a smaller mass driver and an assault saw, and leapt into the maelstrom like child leaps upon candy. The saw hewed through an enemy tank, and the shotgun turned upon retreating infantry, blasting huge portions of them down to the pavement with each shot. Other Æsir appeared and also joined combat. I saw the rook destroy a tank with his Tyr’s lightrifle, then turn to stomp down on an embanked machine laser station. It was carnage, and I smiled. We stayed flatlanded for two days while Federation inquisitors scoured the city for further resistance sympathizers, keeping away from residential centers and keeping mostly to ourselves.

Some might call me despicable for taking joy in the slaughter of insurgent forces. After all they were only protesting the “oppressive force” the Federation holds on their colonies. However, these particular “freedom-fighters” had chosen to protest by storming a Federation embassy and butchered its staff, broadcasting vidfeeds of their own leaders torturing Federation personnel for information that likely didn’t exist. We were sent in as a police force, to keep what peace we could – contact, for an Æsir pilot, involves being fired upon. Had these idiots not assaulted the Fenris, they might have had some glimmer of hope to diplomatic ends.

Then again, it was this procedure which forever changed the way we fought.