“Very well, then. To the hull,” Astrid said.
We crawled on our bellies to keep the two-meter rise between us and any ambitious gunners, two moving, one guarding as we crossed the empty landing to the hull. A few brave demons tried to rush us, but we burned them down before they could draw a bead on us. When we reached the wall and stood, I thought we were saved. The Imperial dissidents milled, lancers pointed floorward as they recognized the danger. Several guards dropped their lancers to pull out zeroblades, and officers coordinated their soldiers into waves, preparing to charge us, but I wasn’t worried. They would suffer horribly on the way over. We could hold out here until rescue arrived. To underscore my point, I took careful aim and blew the torso out of a warrior who was glaring at me with particular malice, sending the rest scattering into cover.Just because they couldn’t shoot didn’t mean we would allow them to stand in the open within range.
I heard a beep in my radio, followed by a whistle. It could only come from Tilly. I looked up, and saw her streaking high overhead, rolling over to reach the hull wall and follow it to us. Good old Tilly. Clever girl.
A motion by the lancer-blasted, half-collapsed corridor we’d come down drew my attention. An Imp had mounted a heavy repeating lancer on a tripod, and was swiveling it around to point to us.Surely, he won’t shoot at us so close to the outer hull, I thought, but then I saw the demon’s eyes, and I knew that intelligence and common sense were not ruling his actions. He was driven by bloodlust.
I grabbed Astrid by the collar and dropped, pulling her on top of me as the idiot demon fired, blowing a two-meter hole in the station’s side between Pavlov and me.
The air rushed outwards, gale-force winds picking me and Astrid bodily from the floor and drawing us towards the breach. There were no handholds, no way to prevent our egress. I just had time to semi-instinctually scream, “Tilly!” before we were sucked into the ever-black sky of the stratosphere.
THE FALL
THERE WAS Ahorrid rush of wind as we passed through the hole in the hull, then silence. Astrid’s collar was torn from my grasp. She snatched at me, flailed uselessly against the lack of air to reach me, then gasped, failing to breathe. As she drifted away from me, I watched helplessly as her face puffed up, her eyes rolled back into her head, and her body went limp. I reached for her, but I didn’t know what to do. My equipment harness had an emergency oxygen supply, but up here, the lack of pressure held worse dangers than suffocation. I tried to flip into the skydiving posture we’d learned back at the Academy, tried to direct my fall over to her, but it was useless. The air was so thin, it offered no resistance, no lift, no control. Despite my struggles, Astrid floated into the eternal night until the starless dark swallowed her.
Silence filled my ears as I gently rotated, seeing the distant ground and black sky in sequence, separated by a blue band of horizon.
I considered my options. I was breathing well, so myhelmet’s bottled oxygen had not been compromised. I could see that the pressure lines along my suit had inflated, which should prevent an embolism or other pressure-related problems. I was high up in the stratosphere, but had fallen from a stationary platform, not orbital speeds, so I didn’t need to worry about burning up on re-entry without a drop pod. At this altitude, I had a few minutes of falling time to figure out how to survive and rescue Astrid.
That was the good news. The bad news was everything else.
I had no way to control my descent. There were devices that could have helped me, energy gliders and microthrusters which would have let me maneuver in this rarified air. Drop troopers carried them in case they needed to bail out of their pods mid-descent. However, I was dressed as a shuttle-borne space marine, not an elite dropper.
Even if I could direct my fall, I had lost sight of Astrid and had no way to find her again. I did not know how far away she was – she could be concealed a few hundred meters off by the dark sky, or she could be over a kilometer away, and drifting further with each passing second. I didn’t know if she was still alive. People had survived extreme situations before, even getting ejected into space without a suit. The conditions were not immediately lethal, but rescue was required within seconds to ensure survival. We were going to spend several minutes up here. Most likely, Astrid was dead.
I pushed the thought from my mind. Astrid was a demon and cybered to the eyeballs. Surely, she had some augmentation which would help her survive: a biogenetic platelet factory, or blood oxygen injector, or something like that. Unconscious she might be, but still alive. I couldn’t accept the alternative.
However, even if I could solve my maneuverability malady,locate Astrid, and find her still breathing (or at least alive), I had no method of landing safely. My suit had no parachute, no retrorockets, no antigravity device, not even a long strip of cloth to throw out behind me. There was no way to slow my descent before I slammed into the ground at terminal velocity. Even my personal shield wouldn’t save me from that.
I cursed myself for not taking a drop trooper’s battle suit. That would have solved my problems, but in the safety of Darius’s battlecruiser, the extra bulk had seemed like an unnecessary encumbrance. We could not have foreseen that Astrid and I would be tumbling through the upper atmosphere.
I remembered Pavlov. Had he been sucked into the sky with us? I didn’t know, and a quick look around failed to spot his falling form. Even if he had been ejected from the Imperial command center, his safety was secondary. I couldn’t save him at the expense of Astrid’s life.
A shower of bright streaks burned past me on their way to the surface. Darius’s drop troopers. Good. It looked like they’d made it off the suborbital station all right. Better than I had anyways.
I was about to accept my death when I heard a beep in my helmet, a simple ping from a short-range radio I knew well.
“Tilly?” I asked, disbelieving.
The assenting warble nearly brought me to tears.
“Tilly, it’s good to hear you. Where are you? Can you show me?”
A negative blat. I frowned, considering.
“Can you see me? Do you know where I am in relation to you?”
Tilly chirped positively.
“Are you above me?”
Another blat.
“Below me?”
A chirp.
“How far away? Beep for every hundred meters.”
