Snowball Down

"Snowball Down!"

“Raider Team: Snowball down!”

The cry kicks your nine man rapid deployment force into activity. The arms room door slams open and those you’ve chosen to deploy for this mission stride by to grab their chosen—or assigned—weapon. Some are quiet, their visages grim. Others, depending on their personality and feeling about the certain fire fights the next couple hours will bring, are loose, alert, even jocular. Heavy weapons specialists shrug into their flex armor, adding its weight to their already awkward loads before lumbering out the door. The drop ship shuttle is already rolling to the launch pad. You follow the last of your team aboard.

Baxter, your raider team Second, quiets the men while he issues basic loads of pyro--smoke and grenades--to everyone. He passes det cord, caps and plastique to your two demo specialists. Hopkins passes back boxes of 7.62mm for your ancient but reliable M60 machine guns and 25mm grenades for the grenade launchers. No one complains about having to carry the additional weight. Everyone already has the ammunition for their personal weapons.

The chatter dies as you stand. There’s never enough time for a decent brief and your men know that just as well as they know the battle drills and SOPs that can spell the difference between success and a small survivor's pension going to your next of kin for a short two years. When a meteorite—a “snowball”—falls, a previously deserted area rapidly becomes a battleground where events explode tracer quick.

You give your troops what you can: the quick METT-T analysis you’ve extracted from the last-second down link for your operations guys, and your own experience. Mission. Enemy Situation. Terrain & Weather. Troops & Teams (special assignments). Time available. You barely finish as the shuttle roars up to the launch pad, then you’re up the lift and into your lift couch--Lazy Daddy, the troops call it. The time for shouted instructions is over. No one pay will be able to focus on a damned thing until you reach orbit, and then they’ll be too busy performing final equipment checks to listen to anything you have to say this late in the game.

G forces smash the thoughts from your head, turning existence into a fight to breathe. Eternal moments later it’s over and you’re fighting the damned zero-G dizziness that almost has you puking along with the newbies, Jones and Grayson, whose misery lets them ignore the catcalls from vets no longer tortured by their inner ears. Half an orbit gives you barely enough time to verify your gear, run a last comm check with the team, slip into your jump harness, then pull yourself through the tunnel and down into your "coffin"--the drop tube that you and your men need for re-entry.

This part of the drop always sucks the worst. The drop tubes are disposable, so you know the bean counters didn’t spend too much doing reliability testing. They fit you tighter than a girdle, so even if you aren’t too scared to breathe, you can’t catch your breath. As always, you fail to keep from thinking that you’ll be re-entering the atmosphere in nothing more than an alloy tube on top of a solid fuel deccel rocket, which was built by the lowest bidder to just get you into the atmosphere without burning up before it's discarded forever. The tube is anything but a marvel. Four inch fins ostensibly give a flight computer the ability to guide your little dart down to 25,000 feet, at which point your shell blows clear, leaving you in free fall. The rest is up to you; you packed your own ‘chute, just like everyone else.

Eight klicks of free fall will land you in the middle of the deadliest game available--the race for triton crystals. Unsynthesizable, miraculous as a biological catalyst, and found thus far only in the crystallized remains of meteorites, triton is glassine wealth. And umpteen other corporate mercenary teams, all locked, loaded, and ready for bear, are after the same thing you are. And willing to shoot you to doll rags in order to get it.

You put the understanding that any foul-up that ensnares you or your team in the host countri's legal system might leave you dangling on your own, while the no-load bean-counters and the pencil-pushing legal beagles at corporate run for the shelter of reinforced concrete deniability. If your team is captured by the indigent government or if you’re shot to doll rags by someone who came to the party dressed a little bit more snappily than you, they won’t care, unless they can get you back for less than the cost of replacing you. Because you don’t really exist anyway.