“Sir, with respect,” he said.
“Who are you?” Lasenbe demanded.
“Sir! Lieutenant Garwe, Blue Seven. It might’ve been better if we’d gone in physically. I felt slow down there, like there was a time lag.”
“Nonsense. There was no lag. Besides, if you’d deployed physically, Lieutenant, you would now be dead. Your pod crushed and burned …” He paused, checking data pulled down through his implant. “Three minutes ago.”
“But if we’d been able to pull back and engage the enemy in the air, instead of trying to protect those buildings—”
“You did what you were ordered to do, Lieutenant. Hammet!”
“Sir!” the technician snapped.
“How many Marines are still e-deployed?”
“Three, sir. Namura, Rad—”
“Yank ’em out. We can’t do anything more down there.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Lasenbe was pointedly ignoring Garwe now, giving orders for the withdrawal of the rest of the squadron. On the couches at his back, the other Marines were beginning to revive, their links with the battlepods 180,000 kilometers below severed.
“What the hell was that chemical they were hitting us with?” Palin wanted to know. “Some kind of acid. …”
“Fluoroantimonic acid,” Hammet said. “We got a full read-out on the chemical composition up here.”
“Fluoro—what?” Misek Bollan asked.
“A mixture of hydrogen fluoride, HF, and antimony pentafluoride, SbF5,” Xander said, with the air of someone perfectly at ease with ungainly chemical formulae. “Nasty stuff. One of the strongest acids known.”
“Roughly 2?×?1019 times stronger than one hundred percent sulfuric acid,” Hammet added. “No wonder it was eating through your internal circuitry.”
“Since when did you become a chemist, Skipper?” Wahrst asked. She was grinning.
“Since before I became a Marine,” Xander replied. “What I want to know is … how were those gas bags delivering the stuff? It protonates organic compounds, eats right through them. Why didn’t it dissolve the gas bags?”
“They’re supposed to have some kind of natural delivery system, aren’t they?” Mortin said.
“Right. A natural delivery system, which means made out of the local equivalent of organics, proteins, bone, cartilage, that sort of thing. When we handled HSbF6 in the lab, we needed either Teflon or field-shielded containers. It even eats through glass.”
“They must’ve had help,” Garwe said. “Some source of technology from the outside. But then, they were using electron beam weapons, too, weren’t they?”
“Yes, they were,” Xander said. “Someone has been running relatively high-tech weaponry to the locals. I wonder who?”
“Or why?” Palin put in. “What do the gas bags have that they could trade off-world for weapons?”
“There’s a lot here that doesn’t make sense,” Major Lasenbe said. “We’re not here to sort it out, however. Xander, you and your people go grab some down-time. But I’ll want an after-action uploaded to my essistant tomorrow by thirteen hundred.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Lasenbe strode from the room. Xander appeared to relax a fraction.
“Asshole,” Mortin said, his voice low.
“Belay that, Marine,” Xander said. “Are all of you all right?”
There was a mutter of response, “Yes, Skipper,” and “Okay” and “Ooh-rah” predominating. The Marines sounded subdued, however
“Kind of a rough trip, Captain,” Garwe told her. “I think we’re still all in one piece, though.”
“Garwe,” Xander said, turning to face him, “what did you mean when you told the major about feeling a time lag?”
Garwe shrugged. “I’m not sure. It might have been psychodilation, I suppose.”
“Or you were speeding?”
“No, Skipper,” Garwe said. “I was linked with the rest of the squadron.”
Psychodilation was a natural effect of human perception, the apparent slowing of the passage of time during moments of great danger, stress, or, paradoxically, boredom. “How time flies when we’re having fun” was the opposite extreme of the effect. Both perceptions occurred when the brain entered an alpha altered state under different circumstances, and had to do with how much in the way of fine detail the person was actually perceiving.
“Speeding,” on the other hand, more formally known as PV, or psychovelocitas, was the artificial boosting of overall brain function to speed up reaction times, perception, and thought. There were times when this was appropriate, and carried out through the use of drugs or neural enhancement software, but while linked in with a combat formation was definitely not one of those times. Battle pod operations demanded precise coordination between squadron elements. If Garwe had been speeding, linked communications with him would have been garbled, fire coordination would have become chaotic, and unit cohesion might easily have broken down completely.
Xander nodded. “I’ll check the telemetry records up here. It might have been a fault in your neural circuitry.”
“My pod checked out okay, Skipper.” Not that it could be checked now. What was left of his pod was by now still drifting slowly into the depths of the gas giant Dac, flattened by atmospheric pressure and subjected to the searing heat of the planet’s depths. “I was probably just hyped on adrenaline.”
“Gar’s right,” Palin said. “I was pretty keyed up, too. I think we all were.”
Xander nodded. “Still, all of you will report to sickbay for a full neural series. I felt like I wasn’t quite in synch, either. And I don’t like not being in control.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” several of the Marines chorused.
“Garwe.”
“Yes, sir?”
“You stay for a moment. I want to talk with you.”
“Sure, Skipper.”
She sounded angry, and that was never good.
He wondered where the hell this was going.