Ex Tenebris
The Peregrine jolted, and the smartplas slab punched Firenze in the throat.
He grabbed the safety webbing above his sling chair and pulled himself upright, even as the vertol shuddered. Beside and across the red-bathed hold, the ASOC team bounced in their jump seats. Some leaned back, eyes on the ceiling as the aircraft shook and jolted. Others hunched forward, taking the beating from the armor and riding out the storm.Sergeant Clausen stood in the center of the hold, his hands thrust up into the safety webbing, rocking in counterpoint to every shake and shimmy.
Aaron Hill snored, and his head landed onto Firenze’s right shoulder. His eyes flickered open, he muttered, “My bad,” and straightened to resume his slumber.
At the rear, the landing ramp was sealed high and tight, while a line of wrapped pallets sat in the trough that ran through the center of the airframe, each cushioned in mesh and bound to the ceiling with a static line. The soldiers were pressed against the walls on both sides, split by the cargo. Clausen waited at the head, calm and collected.
Firenze wished for half that composure.
Near the cockpit, Herren and Gerdoux manned the crew chief stations, one each at the port and starboard door. The Peregrine was running ‘slick’, so the weapon mounts were empty, which had been expected, but still a bit of a disappointment.
Between those two, the cockpit hatch hung open, and Jennings and Peters manned the controls. From here, Firenze could just make out the bulbous frames of their helmets, cut against the dim greens of their flight controls and the lightning ballet beyond the windscreen.
The Peregrine soared along the top of the storm, pinned between the starlight and the shadowy tendrils reaching from below. Jennings kept them just above the grasping darkness, skirting along the edges of the thunder. Another surge buffeted up, the sandblast scouring the deck beneath their feet, and the vertol rocked again. This time, Firenze was ready, pulling his head back when the lightning silhouetted the pilots against the twilight, and he was spared the beating.
Peters called back through the hatchway, “Five minutes! It’s going to get rough!”
Clausen repeated the warning, “Eyes up! Descent in five!”
From across the cargo mountain, washed in red twilight, Rutman added, “Tray tables up. Seats back and upright.”
As if on cue, Hill opened his eyes.
Lauren sat on the skid before them, cast silver-white against the crimson. She demanded, “How can you sleep in this?”
“I’m not sleeping.” Hill protested. “This is my favorite part!”
She turned to Firenze and said, “This means it’s going to be miserable.”
By request, Firenze had patched Lauren’s avatar into the TACNET interface. Ostensibly, he’d done it to aid coordination, but so far, it had mainly been used for her and Hill to antagonize each other.
Firenze answered, “I’m trying to keep my lunch down.”
Monterra, seated to his left, offered, “Just don’t think about it. Brace up and try to put your brain somewhere else.”
“We’re in a steel coffin, surfing an irradiated hellstorm, and we’re about to corkscrew onto unknown levels of fuckery. There’s plenty of data keeping me rooted in the here and now, thanks!” Firenze half-joked.
“How about nicknames?” Lauren asked.
That got Monterra’s attention, but Hill only grinned.
Lauren expounded, “Think about it. How come everyone here has insulting ones - names like Princess, Scooch, or Bugtuck, but this jackass gets to be ‘Reaper’?” She pointed at Hill.
“It’s cause I’m awesome,” Hill answered.
From across the hold, Rutman burst out laughing.
“Quiet, Scooch!” Hill demanded.
Monterra snorted. “You actually think that’s because...” She cackled, almost as hard as Rutman. Even Clausen worked to suppress a grin.
Rutman explained, “Okay, so there’s this pepper-”
“Leave a man his dignity!” Hill cried, sending the others deeper into laughter.
From the opposite and nearest the ramp, Berenson turned towards them. In the dark, his too-smooth features blended into the shadows, the only clarity on gleaming teeth and shining eyes. Firenze’s head swam with images of a tiger ,slinking at the edge of camp. He’d never seen a tiger. This was another alien sense-memory, wedged in his wetware as a parting gift from the old machine.
“Hill is correct,” the genejob observed. “Although I confess some surprise that he appreciates such mystery over a tawdry set of facts.” Berenson paused, and his predatory grin shifted towards something almost congenial. “I find satisfaction in such unexpected places.”
“I will set aside that obvious insult, sir!” Hill replied. “And I will accept the recognition as a fellow man of mysteries.”
“The only mystery you-” Monterra was cut off by the chime of the intercom and a flicker of the lights.
Peters called back, once more, “Descending!”
Clausen bellowed, “BRACE!”
The vertol rolled, tilted, and plunged. Through the cockpit, the lightning swung to fill the view, blue-white cannonades across the black-whipped cloudwall. That wall expanded, thinned, and then thickened once more, no longer as a shadow but as a band of grit and solid darkness.
They slammed into it like hitting concrete, and the roar of the storm pounded over the walls, now feeling thin as paper. The engines roared.
The cockpit glass blackened, as if smothered under a blanket. Green instruments flickered. Yellow now. Orange. Red. Orange.
An alarm rang.
Firenze slammed against his harness, and the smartplas hammered his jaw into his skull.
He was falling.
Another alarm sounded.
The engines screamed, the airframe howled, and the deck pushed up to meet him.
The cockpit windscreen cleared. The raging shadows parted, the scouring grip broke free, and they tumbled towards MacPhereson.
Seven crooked spokes burst from the sands and clawed down the mountain. Hangar mouths glowed in the darkness as great earthmovers wormed around open maws to push clear the ever-shifting tides.
Firenze categorized the critical junctions, each slamming into place against the map he’d burned into his wetware. One image hung, of the base as it should be, compared to what it was. The southeast spoke had been rebuilt. It didn’t match the plans. Firenze’s analysis cut short as the vertol arrested its fall.
MacPhereson pitched out of view, and the hull groaned as sand-jammed servos strained against the onslaught.
Firenze slammed into his seat, and he tasted blood.
A squeal of hydraulics came from his left, but then vanished into the roar of wind as the ramp swung open. The air became a vortex, the wind hammering over him as it yanked bits of strap and cable towards the yawning abyss.
Devallo and Rutman sprang from their seats in a preplanned ballet, each secured only by a single wire against the storm. Devallo knelt down at the crate nearest the ramp and ripped open the latch. Inside, pressed into black foam padding, a single disc sat, barely larger than a frisbee and twice as thick. Devallo’s fingers danced over its rubberized buttons, tapping out a series of commands more muscle than memory.
Behind him, Rutman descended the ramp. He clung to the side, his right hand clutching around the strut, and he pivoted over the void, shoving his goggled face into the onslaught. Still hanging from the wire and strut, he held out his left hand, as if gauging MacPhereson and the vertol beam against his thumb. Satisfied, he pulled himself back from the torrent, his face now chapped and goggles pushed in near bleeding, and he screamed final corrections down to Devallo.
Firenze couldn’t hear their words in the tumult, but he saw Devallo confirm 2KT before arming the charge.
The engineer slammed the lid shut, twisted the latch into place, and kicked the box down the ramp.
It tumbled into the black, and its guidewire snapped tight.
Clausen bellowed orders towards the cockpit, and the vertol slewed about, peeling upwards into the storm. The ramp lurched upward, whining towards closed.
Searchlights now pierced the thunderheads.
The alarms in the cockpit grew, insistent rhythmic bleats now joining the chorus. Beyond the windscreen, tracers split the skies in golden, hungry streams.
The hull shuddered, twelve times, like a roman candle thumping away in the bulkhead, and engines roared once more, hurling Firenze back into his sling.
Lauren stood still, watching the box fall - not where it was, but where it must be, through steel and storm alike. She tracked it in silence, her ghostly hand resting on Firenze’s shoulder. Then she closed her eyes.
Light carved past the V30, cutting their shadow upon the storm. For a moment, they ascended from a sunrise.
The shockwave took them from behind, and the world turned to madness.
Firenze hurled against his harness. Forward. Back. Up. Down. Left. Every angle and combination tumbled around him. He closed his eyes and held his breath and clutched to the webbing as the universe pummeled him to jelly.
Then it was over, as suddenly as it had come.
They were alive.
The ramp descended, once more. Below, the blast crater was already turning over, sands tumbling down the slope to roll across MacPhereson’s perimeter. The guns were silent, and the searchlights blind.
Devallo yanked a retaining pin, and the cargo pallets ripped backwards, vanishing into the abyss like a train over a cliff. The guidewire snapped in succession, and parachutes bloomed. Rutman followed, hurling himself into the darkness. Trevinger jumped after, and Diaz right behind. Berenson stopped at the threshold, gave Firenze one last look, and then vanished into the void.
They descended, again, racing down like a falcon from spiretop. Firenze pressed into Monterra, and he was vaguely aware he should apologize for the intrusion, but all he could do was clutch desperately to his webbing.
Again, the servos screamed, the engines howled, and the deck swung up with vomitous speed.
Firenze toppled back into his sling. His fingers were cold. His breath came short. Lauren reached down, placed her hand beneath his chin, and made him look up.
The sands hung, just below the back hatch, mere feet below the drop, and hammered into interleaving waves by the downblast. Clausen was calling out, “Move! Move! Move!”
Devallo went. Then Chen. Herren. Cole. Monterra vanished from his side. Garrett.
Hill yanked Firenze from his seat, ripped the crash-webbing clear, and shoved him towards the gap.
Three steps down the ramp, his wits caught him, and Firenze took the leap by choice. He crashed into the crystalline dust, felt it crunch under his kneepads and gloves. Enginewash pounded over him as more figures landed.
His breath caught in his rebreather, and the storm hammered against his goggles. When had he put that on?
Hill’s hand landed on his shoulder, pushing him forward and down, away from the downblast and towards the complex looming ahead.
A tremendous howl filled the air, the sand ripped up around them, and the vertol raced for the sky once more.
Thirty meters up, a hyvel caught it between the thrusters, and it spun away on a jet of flame, vanishing into the maelstrom. Tracers followed, strings of golden beads hurled through the sky with the rattle-roar of thunder rising from all sides.
Firenze didn’t permit himself to wonder who hadn’t gotten out. This was not the airship. His place was ahead. ASOC would cut a path, and then he could get to work.
This time, he would not fail.
He grabbed the safety webbing above his sling chair and pulled himself upright, even as the vertol shuddered. Beside and across the red-bathed hold, the ASOC team bounced in their jump seats. Some leaned back, eyes on the ceiling as the aircraft shook and jolted. Others hunched forward, taking the beating from the armor and riding out the storm.Sergeant Clausen stood in the center of the hold, his hands thrust up into the safety webbing, rocking in counterpoint to every shake and shimmy.
Aaron Hill snored, and his head landed onto Firenze’s right shoulder. His eyes flickered open, he muttered, “My bad,” and straightened to resume his slumber.
At the rear, the landing ramp was sealed high and tight, while a line of wrapped pallets sat in the trough that ran through the center of the airframe, each cushioned in mesh and bound to the ceiling with a static line. The soldiers were pressed against the walls on both sides, split by the cargo. Clausen waited at the head, calm and collected.
Firenze wished for half that composure.
Near the cockpit, Herren and Gerdoux manned the crew chief stations, one each at the port and starboard door. The Peregrine was running ‘slick’, so the weapon mounts were empty, which had been expected, but still a bit of a disappointment.
Between those two, the cockpit hatch hung open, and Jennings and Peters manned the controls. From here, Firenze could just make out the bulbous frames of their helmets, cut against the dim greens of their flight controls and the lightning ballet beyond the windscreen.
The Peregrine soared along the top of the storm, pinned between the starlight and the shadowy tendrils reaching from below. Jennings kept them just above the grasping darkness, skirting along the edges of the thunder. Another surge buffeted up, the sandblast scouring the deck beneath their feet, and the vertol rocked again. This time, Firenze was ready, pulling his head back when the lightning silhouetted the pilots against the twilight, and he was spared the beating.
Peters called back through the hatchway, “Five minutes! It’s going to get rough!”
Clausen repeated the warning, “Eyes up! Descent in five!”
From across the cargo mountain, washed in red twilight, Rutman added, “Tray tables up. Seats back and upright.”
As if on cue, Hill opened his eyes.
Lauren sat on the skid before them, cast silver-white against the crimson. She demanded, “How can you sleep in this?”
“I’m not sleeping.” Hill protested. “This is my favorite part!”
She turned to Firenze and said, “This means it’s going to be miserable.”
By request, Firenze had patched Lauren’s avatar into the TACNET interface. Ostensibly, he’d done it to aid coordination, but so far, it had mainly been used for her and Hill to antagonize each other.
Firenze answered, “I’m trying to keep my lunch down.”
Monterra, seated to his left, offered, “Just don’t think about it. Brace up and try to put your brain somewhere else.”
“We’re in a steel coffin, surfing an irradiated hellstorm, and we’re about to corkscrew onto unknown levels of fuckery. There’s plenty of data keeping me rooted in the here and now, thanks!” Firenze half-joked.
“How about nicknames?” Lauren asked.
That got Monterra’s attention, but Hill only grinned.
Lauren expounded, “Think about it. How come everyone here has insulting ones - names like Princess, Scooch, or Bugtuck, but this jackass gets to be ‘Reaper’?” She pointed at Hill.
“It’s cause I’m awesome,” Hill answered.
From across the hold, Rutman burst out laughing.
“Quiet, Scooch!” Hill demanded.
Monterra snorted. “You actually think that’s because...” She cackled, almost as hard as Rutman. Even Clausen worked to suppress a grin.
Rutman explained, “Okay, so there’s this pepper-”
“Leave a man his dignity!” Hill cried, sending the others deeper into laughter.
From the opposite and nearest the ramp, Berenson turned towards them. In the dark, his too-smooth features blended into the shadows, the only clarity on gleaming teeth and shining eyes. Firenze’s head swam with images of a tiger ,slinking at the edge of camp. He’d never seen a tiger. This was another alien sense-memory, wedged in his wetware as a parting gift from the old machine.
“Hill is correct,” the genejob observed. “Although I confess some surprise that he appreciates such mystery over a tawdry set of facts.” Berenson paused, and his predatory grin shifted towards something almost congenial. “I find satisfaction in such unexpected places.”
“I will set aside that obvious insult, sir!” Hill replied. “And I will accept the recognition as a fellow man of mysteries.”
“The only mystery you-” Monterra was cut off by the chime of the intercom and a flicker of the lights.
Peters called back, once more, “Descending!”
Clausen bellowed, “BRACE!”
The vertol rolled, tilted, and plunged. Through the cockpit, the lightning swung to fill the view, blue-white cannonades across the black-whipped cloudwall. That wall expanded, thinned, and then thickened once more, no longer as a shadow but as a band of grit and solid darkness.
They slammed into it like hitting concrete, and the roar of the storm pounded over the walls, now feeling thin as paper. The engines roared.
The cockpit glass blackened, as if smothered under a blanket. Green instruments flickered. Yellow now. Orange. Red. Orange.
An alarm rang.
Firenze slammed against his harness, and the smartplas hammered his jaw into his skull.
He was falling.
Another alarm sounded.
The engines screamed, the airframe howled, and the deck pushed up to meet him.
The cockpit windscreen cleared. The raging shadows parted, the scouring grip broke free, and they tumbled towards MacPhereson.
Seven crooked spokes burst from the sands and clawed down the mountain. Hangar mouths glowed in the darkness as great earthmovers wormed around open maws to push clear the ever-shifting tides.
Firenze categorized the critical junctions, each slamming into place against the map he’d burned into his wetware. One image hung, of the base as it should be, compared to what it was. The southeast spoke had been rebuilt. It didn’t match the plans. Firenze’s analysis cut short as the vertol arrested its fall.
MacPhereson pitched out of view, and the hull groaned as sand-jammed servos strained against the onslaught.
Firenze slammed into his seat, and he tasted blood.
A squeal of hydraulics came from his left, but then vanished into the roar of wind as the ramp swung open. The air became a vortex, the wind hammering over him as it yanked bits of strap and cable towards the yawning abyss.
Devallo and Rutman sprang from their seats in a preplanned ballet, each secured only by a single wire against the storm. Devallo knelt down at the crate nearest the ramp and ripped open the latch. Inside, pressed into black foam padding, a single disc sat, barely larger than a frisbee and twice as thick. Devallo’s fingers danced over its rubberized buttons, tapping out a series of commands more muscle than memory.
Behind him, Rutman descended the ramp. He clung to the side, his right hand clutching around the strut, and he pivoted over the void, shoving his goggled face into the onslaught. Still hanging from the wire and strut, he held out his left hand, as if gauging MacPhereson and the vertol beam against his thumb. Satisfied, he pulled himself back from the torrent, his face now chapped and goggles pushed in near bleeding, and he screamed final corrections down to Devallo.
Firenze couldn’t hear their words in the tumult, but he saw Devallo confirm 2KT before arming the charge.
The engineer slammed the lid shut, twisted the latch into place, and kicked the box down the ramp.
It tumbled into the black, and its guidewire snapped tight.
Clausen bellowed orders towards the cockpit, and the vertol slewed about, peeling upwards into the storm. The ramp lurched upward, whining towards closed.
Searchlights now pierced the thunderheads.
The alarms in the cockpit grew, insistent rhythmic bleats now joining the chorus. Beyond the windscreen, tracers split the skies in golden, hungry streams.
The hull shuddered, twelve times, like a roman candle thumping away in the bulkhead, and engines roared once more, hurling Firenze back into his sling.
Lauren stood still, watching the box fall - not where it was, but where it must be, through steel and storm alike. She tracked it in silence, her ghostly hand resting on Firenze’s shoulder. Then she closed her eyes.
Light carved past the V30, cutting their shadow upon the storm. For a moment, they ascended from a sunrise.
The shockwave took them from behind, and the world turned to madness.
Firenze hurled against his harness. Forward. Back. Up. Down. Left. Every angle and combination tumbled around him. He closed his eyes and held his breath and clutched to the webbing as the universe pummeled him to jelly.
Then it was over, as suddenly as it had come.
They were alive.
The ramp descended, once more. Below, the blast crater was already turning over, sands tumbling down the slope to roll across MacPhereson’s perimeter. The guns were silent, and the searchlights blind.
Devallo yanked a retaining pin, and the cargo pallets ripped backwards, vanishing into the abyss like a train over a cliff. The guidewire snapped in succession, and parachutes bloomed. Rutman followed, hurling himself into the darkness. Trevinger jumped after, and Diaz right behind. Berenson stopped at the threshold, gave Firenze one last look, and then vanished into the void.
They descended, again, racing down like a falcon from spiretop. Firenze pressed into Monterra, and he was vaguely aware he should apologize for the intrusion, but all he could do was clutch desperately to his webbing.
Again, the servos screamed, the engines howled, and the deck swung up with vomitous speed.
Firenze toppled back into his sling. His fingers were cold. His breath came short. Lauren reached down, placed her hand beneath his chin, and made him look up.
The sands hung, just below the back hatch, mere feet below the drop, and hammered into interleaving waves by the downblast. Clausen was calling out, “Move! Move! Move!”
Devallo went. Then Chen. Herren. Cole. Monterra vanished from his side. Garrett.
Hill yanked Firenze from his seat, ripped the crash-webbing clear, and shoved him towards the gap.
Three steps down the ramp, his wits caught him, and Firenze took the leap by choice. He crashed into the crystalline dust, felt it crunch under his kneepads and gloves. Enginewash pounded over him as more figures landed.
His breath caught in his rebreather, and the storm hammered against his goggles. When had he put that on?
Hill’s hand landed on his shoulder, pushing him forward and down, away from the downblast and towards the complex looming ahead.
A tremendous howl filled the air, the sand ripped up around them, and the vertol raced for the sky once more.
Thirty meters up, a hyvel caught it between the thrusters, and it spun away on a jet of flame, vanishing into the maelstrom. Tracers followed, strings of golden beads hurled through the sky with the rattle-roar of thunder rising from all sides.
Firenze didn’t permit himself to wonder who hadn’t gotten out. This was not the airship. His place was ahead. ASOC would cut a path, and then he could get to work.
This time, he would not fail.