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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 ]

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Genre:Science Fiction
Type:Short story
Rating:7.23 / 10
Rated By:30 users
Comments: 1 user
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