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By the time you hit land, if you don't burn up on entry or even worse bounce off the atmosphere all together and suffocate in the abyss, you want to get down and thank whatever gods you worship for delivering you safely to the ground. Then, of course, you raise a fist to heaven and curse those same gods for ever allowing you to go through the ordeal in the first place. The clamps that hold the ship in place begin to blow off in a series of three small thumps.

Thump! goes the starboard side.

Thump! goes the port side.

Thump! goes the aft section and we'd be weightless right now if not for the harnesses that crush us down.

"Time minus one minute," and if I make it back I swear I'll find that synthetic harpy and whoever programmed her and purge them both through the nearest airlock! When you're a young man, fresh from training and new to the drop ship, too stupid to understand how the universe is really working, she's an angel in the last moments before you free fall. You don't realize that the only thing waiting for you when you come dragging home is a warm meal and a bunk on E-Deck. To the older vets she's a fraud, a broken promise of love and a reminder of the ones we've left back home. I'm sweating now; I can feel it on my palms and as it condenses on my face. Now comes the uncertainty, the place where once I welcomed this darkness now I fear it. To drift hearing nothing, seeing nothing, smelling only the stale, recycled air in your helmet and feeling nothing but the pulse beating faster in your heart is maddening. You want to die. You want to live. Torn, you just beg to feel something, anything that will let you know in what reality you still exist.

An eternity passes and then, from someplace in the darkness she screams in your ear.

"Launch!" and the last nail comes with a body crushing force as the blast door catapults backwards on it's rails and out we go into the great black beyond. Blood rushes my head; no one can see, no one can hear and I'm sure that it's all for the better. Inside the ship you're warm, as warm as your body can make you and then the void of space and absolute zero grip the thin hull and leave you racing in a flying ice box. The cold vanishes as we hit the atmosphere and begin to bake alive in our suits. They insulate us but never enough.

BANG! goes the shovel as the drag chute opens and the ship jerks us up before dropping us back down. You drift in and out of consciousness for a few minutes as the vessel comes within a few thousand feet of the surface. As salvation seems imminent, when you hope for a soft, peaceful landing you hear the snap and the drag chute breaks away allowing you to gain speed and fall once more like the led balloon you are. Time to bury the casket. Everything goes black, silent on impact. No one stays awake for it and no one can tell you how it feels when it happens; though we can all describe in great detail what it’s like on waking.

I wake up every time with the same complaints; my chest hurts from the restraints and my head's been thrown around in my helmet. I look around, stray sunlight coming from a gash in the ceiling. Sarge didn't make it this time, I see his legs dancing like crazy on the floor but there's a rock through the face of his helmet. Where the hell did they drop us this time? Galloway bought it too, but I didn't expect him come through this one anyway. I blow the bolt that holds my harness rigging together and fall to the floor. My rifle's stuck in the side of the hull. I grab Galloway's and start stripping tags and gear from the men closest to me. From the looks of it, only five or six of us made it through and not too many in good shape. Guess this is what they call a "success?"

"Take what you need and let's move out!" the corporal barks as we assemble near the door. I give one last look to the guys, our brothers-in-arms still harnessed and ready for the fight ahead. They're here for the long haul, buried in the dark alien soil millions upon millions of miles from home. No one will ever be back for their bodies, just isn't cost effective or worth the man power. This is where they'll be, waiting, watching silently through dead eyes as time erodes this world into dust. I open the hatch and let the sunlight fill the sepulcher. Callous as it may sound, you do what you have to and you move on.

No emotion.

No fear.

And when you die, they bury you ten feet deep in an iron casket. That's the only thing that’s certain.