36 The Fall
THE FALL
THERE WAS A horrid 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 my helmet’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.”
Tilly beeped eleven times.
“That’s not too far. Come get me, and we’ll figure out what to do.”
Tilly blatted at me.
“What? Why not?” I grimaced, realizing Tilly couldn’t answer easily. I considered, and realized she might be suffering the same problems as I.
“Tilly, do you have maneuverability?” I asked.
Tilly blatted again, then added a timorous warble.
“Too high, huh? What about your thrusters?” I asked, then considered the ramifications of her blat.
I’d heard of this sort of thing from cavalrymen who flew too high chasing ascending shuttles.
Tilly would probably regain flight control as we entered the lower, denser atmosphere.
Her thrusters likely had little effect in this thin atmosphere, as they wouldn’t have enough air to serve as a working fluid.
Likewise, her aerovanes had no air to push on.
That would change as we entered the troposphere.
“Tilly, can you see Astrid?”
There was a brief pause in which my adrenaline spiked, then Tilly chirped.
Relief flooded my body. “Keep trying to maneuver. The moment you can fly, get Astrid on your back. Then come back for me.”
Tilly blatted loudly. “Tilly, don’t—” She blatted again, louder. “We don’t have time to debate—” Tilly’s negative blat was so loud it hurt my ears.
“Fine. As soon as you regain control, grab me, then we’ll save Astrid. Deal?”
Tilly chirped her assent. I scowled. We were not going to have much time once we reached the lower atmosphere.
Less than a minute later, the air started to buffet me around.
I assumed the belly-down position taught in my skydiving classes.
The ground was much closer now. Tilly whistled her approach as she pulled into formation with me from below and to my right.
She sidled sideways, rolling to give me an angle at her handlebars, but the turbulence jerked me away.
Tilly advanced more aggressively, lightly colliding with me.
I scrabbled for a handhold. My legs bounced off Tilly’s aft chassis, but I caught onto her front cowling.
With a herculean effort, I pulled myself forwards, grabbed her handlebars, and set myself into the saddle.
Tilly’s magnetic clamps closed around my legs, and I yelled, “Get us to Astrid!”
Tilly took control, kicked her thrust coil into high gear, and sent us screaming through the atmosphere.
Astrid came into view, falling on her back, her skirts and wide sleeve cuffs billowing upwards. They must have acted like a drogue, slowing and stabilizing her fall. I couldn’t tell if she was alive or not, but at least she wasn’t bleeding from the eyes.
We were moments from impact. I didn’t have time to try and gently grab Astrid and ease her onto Tilly’s back. “Tilly, grab her the way you grabbed me.”
I heard the whine as Tilly’s docking clamp extended.
Going so fast, we began to shake, hard. The ground grew larger, the sharp, rocky mountainside rushing up at us.
Tilly tried to move forwards, but the turbulence pushed Astrid away.
The Emperor began to flip over and over.
Another five seconds, and she’d be dead.
“Grab her!” I screamed, and Tilly rushed forwards. Her clamp fastened around Astrid’s torso. Something cracked. I pulled back on the handlebars, guiding us towards a dip in the ground, desperately hoping to pull out of the dive before we hit.
We weren’t going to make it. I tried to roll, to shield Astrid from a direct impact.
We bounced. Tilly’s shield flashed. I thought Astrid’s did too, but I couldn’t be certain.
Tilly flared her airbrakes, bleeding off speed. I leaned over, trying to see Astrid beneath me. Her face was hidden by her hair, but I could see both her legs and one arm dangling below her, so she wasn’t completely beaten apart. Was she still alive?
I keyed my commlink into the channel we selected for our little confederation up on the archduke’s cruiser. “Calling any and all loyalist forces, this is Consort Levar Boylan. I have the asset, but we require immediate medical assistance. If anyone can hear me, please respond.”
My commlink immediately replied. “This is Lyudmyla. We’ve seized the armory and have medics with us.”
I keyed in the location on Tilly’s display. “We are on our way. Prepare for landing.”
Minutes later, I came screaming over the treetops.
The Crystal Palace was awash with light, and the grounds fronting the armory flashed with lancer fire.
The loyalists had erected shielded barricades before the main doors and driven the Imps back with disciplined volleys.
I came in high and rolled into a dive, hoping to avoid the worst of the incoming fire.
It seemed most of the combatants had more important things on their minds, for not a single bolt blazed our way.
I landed behind the barricades, ordering Tilly to drop Astrid from a height of less than half a meter before jumping off myself.
One demon reflexively brandished her zeroblade, but lowered it and came running when she saw who we were.
“She’s hurt. We need a medic,” I shouted. I could see Astrid’s left arm was broken, crushed by Tilly’s rough grab.
“We need to get her under cover,” the demon soldier said, lifting the Emperor by the armpits and dragging her into the building. A lancer bolt vaporized a chunk of the doorframe, but we ducked inside as the defenders responded with a crackling fusillade.
Lyudmyla hurried over, two white-collared Imperial medics in tow. The demons brushed me aside. Ordinarily, I would have been terrified or offended, but right now, I was too worried for Astrid’s health to care.
“How is she?” I asked.
“She’s not breathing,” the medic said, pressing a breathing mask over Astrid’s mouth and nose and pumping air into her lungs. They began working on her, chattering in medical Imperial, which I was not well-versed in.
“Will she live?” I asked, more frantically this time.
One of the medics barked at me. “Will you let us save our Emperor!”
I opened my mouth to argue, but had nothing to say. How could I get in the way of them rescuing the woman I loved? So, instead, I rounded on Lyudmyla. “Where are we at?”
To her credit, Lyudmyla straightened and began a military situation report.
“We’ve taken the armory. The Stelsylvanians barricaded most of the Federation delegation in their quarters, but a few of the bastards escaped.
Their locations are unknown. Yezhidian sky troops just landed near the barracks.
Archduke Darius is leading the assault but has encountered resistance.
” The demon shifted uncomfortably. “We would have had them under control, but we needed to seize the arsenal first to arm all our forces, which cost us the element of surprise.”
“I understand,” I said assuredly. “Where are we with the prisoners? With the main hall?”
“We did not have the troops for both thrusts,” Lyudmyla began, but then one of the medics cried triumphantly.
“We have a heartbeat!”
I hurried over as the healers injected fluids into Astrid’s unbroken arm, and the heartbeat on the portable readout started slow, jumped abnormally high, then settled to normal levels.
“Brain activity is normal. She’s unconscious, but healthy.” The healer turned to me. “Consort, you saved the Emperor’s life.”