The Drop

The insertion pod hit the upper atmosphere of Titan doing eleven kilometers per second, and Sergeant Mace Alvarado decided, not for the first time, that the designers of the Mark IV drop system had never been inside one.

There were five of them in a space designed to hold four, with gear, seated in harnesses that Mace had always thought of as the military's way of saying we care about your spine but only briefly. The thermal shielding was doing its job — doing it loudly, a sound like a continuous explosion filtered through a metal coffin — and the vibration was the kind that loosened fillings and made you think too hard about tolerances.

Corporal Aldus Wire was asleep. Mace had checked twice, because sleeping during atmospheric insertion was the kind of thing you did if you were either supremely confident or had lost the part of your brain responsible for self-preservation. Wire had both eyes closed, arms folded across his chest, rifle held between his knees like a man who'd found a comfortable position on a bus. He hadn't spoken since the transport ship, which wasn't unusual. Wire communicated when he had something worth saying, and in eleven months working with him Mace could count the conversations on both hands.

"Eighteen seconds of deceleration burn and then we're subsonic." PFC Danny Okafor's voice came through the helmet comm, slightly too loud, slightly too cheerful, the way it always was. "Assuming the retros fire, which they will, they basically always fire, except that one time on Callisto but that was a manufacturing defect that has since been corrected, I read the report—"

"Okafor," Mace said.

"Sergeant."

"Stop."

"Stopping."

Staff Sergeant Rosa Mena was checking her demo pack for what Mace estimated was the fourth time since boarding. She had a way of counting inventory under her breath, lips moving, eyes focused on the middle distance — a ritual more than an inspection, because she already knew exactly what was in the pack. She'd been doing this since Mace's first deployment under her, three years ago on the Jovian stations. She'd been announcing that each deployment was her last since the second one. This one she'd said it with finality, which meant either she meant it this time or she'd stopped saying it ironically.

Private Cael Frost was staring at the hatch in front of him with the expression of someone who had recently made a decision they were reconsidering. He was nineteen on his personnel file and looked seventeen in person, with the kind of face that would require twenty years to catch up to the competence behind it. He'd scored second in his cohort on tactical assessment. He had, according to his record, listed his age as nineteen when he was eighteen because seventeen-year-olds couldn't enlist without parental consent and his parents hadn't consented. Mace knew this. He'd decided knowing it wasn't useful.

The retros fired.

The deceleration hit like something swinging a very large object into Mace's chest, held there for six seconds that felt like a longer number, and then released, and the sound dropped from catastrophic to severe, and through the vibration Mace could feel the attitude adjustment as the pod oriented itself for ground impact.

"Forty seconds," he said. "Wire."

"Awake," Wire said, without opening his eyes.

"You were asleep."

"Resting."

"That distinction matters to you."

"Some distinctions matter."

The pod impacted with a force that would have folded an unarmored person in half and which, in armor, was merely brutal. The hatch blew outward two seconds later on its pyros, and then the ramp was down and the methane-nitrogen wind of Titan's surface was coming through the opening — filtered by their helmet systems into breathable mix, but the cold was something no filter addressed. Even through the armor you felt it as a concept, the particular hostility of a moon that had not invited you.

Mace was first out.

The Titan lowlands spread in every direction — flat orange-gray rock, methane ice in the craters, the soup of low cloud that never entirely broke. Three klicks southeast, barely visible through the atmospheric haze, the dome of New Carthage rose against the sky. It had been the largest human settlement on Titan, two hundred thousand people, eight years of terraforming infrastructure, the best atmospheric processing station in the outer system. The dome was still intact. That was the Keth way — they didn't destroy what was useful.

"Clear," Wire said, already at the pod's edge with his long-barrel scope assembled, scanning the terrain in a slow arc. "Patrol grid is twelve hundred meters northeast. Moving south. Four units — I count eight contacts." He paused. "Briefing said six."

Mace filed that away.

"Mena."

"Pod's buried." She'd already triggered the self-burial system; the Mark IV sank into the soft methane ice on a hydraulic screw, covering their insertion point. It left a scar in the surface but nothing that would survive the next thermal cycle. "Demo pack accounted for. Timer's synced to mission clock."

"Okafor."

"Medical kit, comms array, three days of compression rations, two of which I would not technically describe as food." He paused. "Medically we are good. Cael, you're favoring your left side."

"I'm not," Frost said.

"You are. The impact harness caught you at the wrong angle. It's not an injury, it's bruising, but if you don't rotate the shoulder in the next twenty minutes it will seize and that will become a problem." He was already moving toward the rookie, field-dressing protocol activated before anyone acknowledged it. "This will take thirty seconds."

"We don't have thirty seconds," Frost said.

"We don't have a fireteam member who can't lift his rifle either. Hold still." Okafor rotated the shoulder manually, which produced a sound and an expression from Frost that he didn't comment on. "There. Done. You're welcome. You can buy me a drink when this is over, which we will survive because I am not dying on Titan, I have very specific plans for after my enlistment that involve a beach and no one shooting at me."

Wire had moved thirty meters from the pod and gone prone in a depression in the rock, scope tracking.

"Patrol's changed course," he said. "They know we're here."

Mace looked south toward the dome of New Carthage, then northeast toward the movement Wire was tracking.

The briefing had said six patrols, rotating, with a response time of four minutes for reinforcement. Eight contacts on an altered vector meant either the briefing intel was bad or the Keth had been waiting for them specifically.

Neither option was good.

"Move," Mace said. "Standard dispersion. Wire takes point. New Carthage in forty minutes. If those patrols close faster than that, Wire, you know what to do."

"I know what to do," Wire said. He didn't elaborate. He never did.

They moved out across the orange-gray flats, five people spread wide enough that one engagement wouldn't catch them all, close enough that they could collapse into contact formation in ten seconds. The dome of New Carthage grew ahead of them as they walked. From this distance, Mace could see the structures inside it — the city, still standing, lit in the bioluminescent blue-green of Keth inhabitation. They used their own biology for light, the Keth, which meant an occupied Keth space glowed from the inside in shifting patterns that you had to stop yourself from reading as language.

Everything about the Keth looked like it was communicating something.

Eleven years of war and they still didn't know what.

"Sergeant," Wire said, from point position, tone unchanged. "North quadrant. Two o'clock. They're not the patrol."

Mace stopped. Checked his own visor display. Two signatures, large, moving fast on an intercept vector. Not patrol weight — these were heavier, the ground-unit signatures his overlay labeled as Keth Warforms, the organic combat bodies the Keth deployed when they were done with reconnaissance.

They were three kilometers from the dome and the mission had been running for eleven minutes.

"Okafor," Mace said.

"I see them," Okafor said, and for once said nothing else.

"Frost. You're with me. Mena, find us cover. Wire—"

"Already on it," Wire said.

He fired once.

One of the signatures on Mace's display went still.

"Cover," Wire said. "Two minutes. Move."

They moved.