Beachhead (© Biswapriya Purkayastha)
Page 2
Inside
one of the battle-suits in the forefront of the first battalion of the first
wave, a marine laid his head back against the padded headrest and nibbled his
lip absently. A few centimetres away, on the other side of his faceplate, the
atmosphere rushed by, heated till it burned from the friction of his passing,
but his suit kept him completely cool and comfortable. Through the white
flicker of plasma, he could see the curve of the planet below, flattening
swiftly into a line as he fell. He was falling very quickly, in a long arc taking him over
the unseen landscape hidden below the thick yellow clouds, in a trajectory
meant to put him down within visual distance of his primary target; yet only a
little discrepancy, a minor error in height of insertion, and he could easily
overshoot or undershoot the mark by hundreds of kilometres. He knew it, and he
was not disturbed. His faith in the Space Expeditionary Force’s equipment was
total. All around him, above and below, to his left and right, were
hundreds of other suits. They were close enough that he could see them easily, bright
points of flickering light, railing fire across the sky. The nearest ones were
close enough that he could see the outlines of the suits themselves, and knew
that if there was an accidental collision, even the suits’ incredible
technology would not save their occupants from instant annihilation. But he did
not need to look at them to know they were there, because even now his suit’s
communications suite kept him instantly updated of the location of each of
those others. If he wanted, he could have a three-dimensional map of their
location relative to his own suit projected on the inside of his faceplate,
with paths traced out; and his suit would move him out of any possible danger
of collision with its belt rockets. But there would, he knew, be no danger of
collision, because the training ensured that the division’s co-ordination was
perfect. The marine was a master sergeant. He was very good at his
job, completely efficient, without even the slightest trace of the nervousness
most of the other marines took into combat. The Space Expeditionary Force was
his life, and he had given his all to it, and had left his past completely
behind, until he could barely remember a time when he hadn’t been a marine. He
was tall, strong, intelligent, utterly dedicated, and was widely thought of as
on the track to promotion to officer rank. He had, himself, no particular
desire to be an officer; his current rank suited him just fine, with its
perfect blend of power and responsibility. Besides, he made officers
uncomfortable with his absolute calm even in the most trying of circumstances.
But if he was ordered to join the officer’s training academy, he would. He had
never even thought of disobeying an order from the first moment he put on the
uniform of the marines. His name was Venkatachalapathy, and he had made this kind of
drop many times before. Down under those billowing yellow clouds, he knew, was an
endless rocky desert, broken only occasionally by a patch of shallow sea. Down
there the atmosphere was poison, made of gases which could strip the lining out
of the inside of human lungs, and temperatures at which human blood would boil.
Yet he, and the thousands of other marines making this drop, would be perfectly
protected from the environment by their battle-suits, and could get on with the
business of fighting the enemy. Yes, the enemy would be there, crawling through their
underground networks of caverns below the stones of the desert. Down there,
where the division would be landing, was the enemy’s capital, a vast and
diffuse maze of tunnels and chambers. If the division could capture it, the
heart would be ripped out of the enemy’s defences, and the second wave could
easily fan out and overrun the rest of the planet. If the division failed
to capture it, though – Master Sergeant Venkatachalapathy grinned humourlessly. The
division would not fail. The division had never failed, even against opponents
far more capable than the enemy crawling through the holes under the desert
below. The division had ripped apart massed armoured charges, had fought an
entire army to a standstill more than once, and in its previous deployment had
fought its way out of encirclement by a force six times as large. The creatures
under the desert sands didn’t even have weapons a tenth as deadly as those the
division had faced and beaten. It would be no contest. [ Continue to page 3 ] |