Sefu looked sceptical. ‘For real?’
‘Why do you ask?’ Saul replied, doing his best to maintain eye contact while the sub-orbital bucked and shuddered with profound violence.
‘Just in case we have to evacuate.’ Sefu barely suppressed a grin. ‘I mean, we’re a long way up and, with all those storms scattered around, we could get ripped to shreds before we reach the ground. It happens.’
‘Shit, yes,’ said the man next to Sefu. Saul registered that his name was Charlie Foster. ‘Did you ever see the UP footage from that guy who fell out of a sub-orbital? The one that came apart just fifteen minutes after take-off?’
‘I did,’ Sefu replied, turning to Foster with a snap of his fingers. ‘His ’chute failed, right? And his contacts kept recording, the whole way down.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Saul.
Foster nodded enthusiastically, gazing at Saul with an innocent expression. ‘No lie. Bastard screamed like a banshee right up until the end.’
Sefu noisily sucked air through his teeth.
‘Hit the ground so hard his skull wound up lodged in his ass,’ Foster added, shaking his head sadly.
Saul considered a variety of responses, most of them anatomically impossible.
The sub-orbital hit a fresh patch of turbulence, lurching like a truck dropping one of its wheels into a deep pothole. Saul drew in a sharp breath and wished he had something to cling on to, as the turbojets grumbled and whined in preparation for the last stage of their descent.
‘And there’s a reason you’re sharing this with me?’ Saul managed to say.
‘Well,’ Sefu replied, ‘I got the impression you weren’t enjoying the flight, for some reason.’
‘Me, I love turbulence,’ said Foster, his eyes wide and happy. ‘It’s like being rocked to sleep by Mother Nature.’
Text, rendered in silver, floated on the lower right of Saul’s vision, telling him that the sub-orbital was now only seven kilometres above the ground, having already dropped nearly fifteen kilometres in the last few minutes. The external temperature was minus seventy, and the air still thin enough to qualify as vacuum.
‘Now Mitchell,’ Sefu continued, twisting around in his restraints to catch the attention of the rest of Hanover’s task force, ‘that son of a bitch was in fucking
love
with jumping out of things.’
‘Fuck yeah,’ confirmed a woman further down the two rows of seats facing each other on either side the craft’s interior. Her tag read Helena Bryant. ‘I trained with him this one time, when we had to jump from about twelve kilometres up. He got to within maybe a half-klick of the ground before he even
started
to pull back up. Scared the shit out of me then, but the man was fucking fearless.’
‘Wing-suit, right?’ Saul guessed.
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ she replied. ‘You know what I’m talking about?’
‘Sure,’ Saul replied, assuming an air of false bravado. ‘I even went on a jump with him once, years ago. He’d been daring me for months.’
‘You knew him?’ interrupted another voice over to his right.
‘We worked together way back when,’ Saul replied. ‘Somehow he . . . talked me into it.’
‘Why’d he have to talk you into it?’ asked Sefu. He was still grinning, but there was a shade more respect in his tone. ‘Because you were too chickenshit?’
‘Too sane, I think,’ Saul replied. ‘The dive was made from low orbit.’
That shut them up.
‘Real orbit, or sub-orbital?’ asked Helena.
Saul grinned. ‘Sub-orbital. I’m not
that
crazy.’
‘That’s pretty dangerous shit nonetheless,’ someone else said.
‘Sure.’ Saul made a point of shrugging, as if to say no big deal. ‘Maybe one in a thousand orbital divers wind up dead, but Mitch and me did it together, from more than twenty kilometres up. We used foam and Kevlar heat shields for the first five kilometres down, then wing-suits the rest of the way.’
Saul recalled the wide wings embellishing the one-piece flying suit. Rigid stabilizers built into each suit kept them from going into a deadly spin as they dropped down through the thickening atmosphere. At the time, he’d thought the experience might cure him of what had then been nothing more than a mild fear of flying, but instead it had made it much, much worse. He’d never even have agreed to it if Mitchell hadn’t been having such a hard time back then, coping with the death of his brother Danny.
Sefu waved a hand in mock dismissal, and several of the task force laughed. Saul felt himself grinning back.
‘So why the fuck do you look like you’re about to crap yourself?’ prodded Sefu.
‘When you jump, you’re in control,’ Saul explained. ‘Being on a plane isn’t the same, though, since your life’s in someone else’s hands. And anyway, it’s been a long while since I rode in a sub-orbital.’
‘Told you,’ said Sefu, looking around at the rest of them. ‘Chickenshit.’ They all laughed, but when Sefu gave him a grin, Saul could see it was much more friendly than before.
Confirmation of Saul’s temporary transfer had come through a few days after his interrogation by Donohue and Sanders.
Almost a week after his meeting with Donohue and Sanders, he’d made his way back through the Copernicus–Florida gate, reacquainting himself with the tug of full gravity and working at rebuilding his muscle strength in a government gym close by his apartment in Orlando. He scored himself some Bad Puppy – a milder derivative of loup-garou – and used it to steady his nerves and kill some of the pain still seeping through despite the medication he’d been given for his injuries. After that, he had hitched a ride aboard a military cargo hopper to an ASI facility near Berlin, where he’d then undergone a brief interview with Hanover in his office.
‘I realize that you knew Mitchell,’ Hanover had said, an operations room clearly visible through a glass pane behind him. ‘It’s too bad what happened to him. You should remember, however, that there’s a reason this is just a temporary assignment for you. Men like Stone are not easily replaced.’
‘I appreciate how that would be the case, sir,’ Saul had replied. ‘Can I ask just what happened to him? All I was told was that he’d been under some kind of secondment when he—’
Saul nodded perfunctorily. There was something distinctly glacial about Hanover’s manner.
‘Now, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,’ Hanover continued, ‘but you weren’t actually the first name I had in mind. In fact, why my original request was turned down remains something of a mystery to me.’
‘I can only do my best, sir.’
‘It’s more complicated than that. The members of this task force have a level of clearance that you don’t. They’re often engaged in highly classified work which you don’t need to know the details of.’
Saul guessed Hanover was digging for something. ‘It wasn’t my idea, sir. I was reassigned, and that’s all I can tell you.’
Hanover regarded him in silence for a moment before standing up and pulling open the door leading to the outer office. ‘You should know it’s my intention to file a complaint with your superiors. Not because of anything you’ve done, but because I’m concerned at the lack of explanation.’
‘Sir,’ Saul replied, standing too.
‘You’ll report for a final briefing at 0800 tomorrow morning,’ said Hanover. ‘I believe you’ve already been briefed on the essential details of our mission. We’re to recover ASI cargo hijacked from Florida.’
‘I was briefed, sir. Thank you.’
Hanover nodded, but his eyes glinted with suspicion. ‘Good. For as long as you’re with us, I don’t think you’ll need to worry about a lack of action.’
The sub-orbital started to level out just as an alert sounded. Saul pushed his head back, relying on the padded restraints around his shoulders, neck and waist to keep him from being thrown around the cabin like a rag doll. The back of his mouth felt sticky and hot still, with the memory of the Bad Puppy, and he found himself wondering if anyone else in Hanover’s squad was holding. Before long the engines kicked in, sending powerful vibrations rattling through his bones in the moments just before they made their final approach.
‘Everybody get ready to move out!’ Hanover yelled, pulling himself out of his own restraints before heading for the rear hatch. Saul glanced in the direction of the cockpit and caught sight of jungle silhouetted against star-speckled blackness, as they scrambled to disembark.
They dropped down one by one into humid darkness, milling around the small forest clearing in which the sub-orbital had landed on its powerful VTOL jets. The subtropical heat seeped in through Saul’s suit, enveloping his skin like a warm blanket and carrying with it unidentifiable scents. The black outline of a mountain rose to one side; the gentle rush of a river was audible somewhere se by.
The briefing earlier that morning had involved detailed orbital maps of a region in the central mountains of Taiwan, an island nation south of the coast of mainland China. Dozens of villages lay dotted around the slopes and lowlands, most of them accessible only by narrow, winding roads. Industrial compounds and mining operations, mostly abandoned and half swallowed up by the jungle, stood along the banks of every river. A few had been reclaimed by paramilitary groups left over from the days of the Hong Kong blockades, the majority of which continued to enjoy a profitable business partnership with the Tian Di Hui. Given that they were operating deep inside a Sphere-aligned nation, their mission was by necessity a covert one.
Saul first checked his Cobra’s fire parameters, then adjusted the temperature control of his suit until he felt more comfortable. He wasn’t quite the outright object of suspicion he had been when they set out, but he didn’t let himself forget that whoever had tipped off the hijackers was almost certainly standing just a few feet away.
Hanover called for everyone’s attention. ‘Check your UPs now for an updated overlay of the area with the latest intel.’ Saul watched as a shimmering grid of data positioned itself over the surrounding landscape. He pulled the focus back for a moment, until he could see the surrounding region displayed before him in its entirety, all the peaks and valleys painted in false colours.
‘Our destination,’ Hanover continued, ‘is less than a half kilometre along a footpath running beside the river,’ he told them, pointing beyond the sub-orbital. ‘Make sure you’re all properly networked, or I will be
very
unhappy if anyone gets lost because they didn’t maintain their uplink.’
Computer systems woven into Saul’s suit kept him in constant touch with the rest of the task force, while his mil-grade contacts could switch easily between active IR and thermal-imaging video feeds that were particularly useful in the middle of a darkened jungle.
He took a moment to test his night vision. The jungle flashed green for a second until his contacts again painted the ground and foliage in a variety of false colours. He glanced at the others around him, their eyes showing up as ghostly black dots floating amid pale and featureless faces.
‘I’m having a problem with my A/V uplink,’ said Saul. His contacts were refusing to connect with the task force’s network.
‘Anyone else?’ asked Hanover.
The rest muttered negatives or shook their heads.
‘Then it’s just you,’ Hanover replied. ‘Could be a software issue. Give it a couple minutes to see if it sorts itself out.’
They moved out, following the river downstream and making their way along a narrow path that had once been asphalt but had long degenerated into loose black grit mixed with thick tufts of wide-bladed grass. The failure of his uplink set Saul’s nerves on edge. He couldn’t rule out the possibility someone had saboed the connection deliberately.
Saul caught sight of a snake slipping off towards the river once it scented their approach. Its scales looked as if they had been painted in hallucinatory colours.
Before long they caught sight of a cooling tower and several low buildings constituting part of an abandoned chemical-processing plant. Hanover called a halt and they gathered around him.
‘Tovey, the path splits just before we reach the fence. Take your men around past the first gate, and you’ll find a second gate round on the far side of the compound.’ Bright neon lines appeared on Saul’s map overlay, winding out of sight through the dense jungle. ‘Wait there until we have some idea what we’re up against, then move in the moment you get the signal. The rest of you follow me – we’ll cut through the fence on this side, and enter that way. The main admin building will be closer to our position, and that’s where the sats tell us the trucks and cars are parked.’ He looked slowly around at them all. ‘Remember, we want them alive if possible. Now move out.’
Tovey muttered a quick
yessir
, and Saul watched as he and his assigned half of the task force hurried away, hunkering low through tall grass that rustled with their passage. Hanover led the rest of them up to a two-metre-high wire fence surrounding the compound, where Saul watched as Sefu and another soldier, using the pale-blue flame of a plasma torch, sliced their way through the thick mesh steel in just seconds.
There were no lights visible inside the compound. The roofs of several of the buildings had collapsed, while bushes and saplings pushed their way out of windows gaping under a half-moon. Tall weeds had fought their way through the cracked concrete base on which the chemical-processing plant itself stood.