Post-Human Series Books 1-4 by David Simpson Read Free Book Online Page A

found himself marveling that he could live without air.
    The green timer display dropped below thirty seconds.
    “You holdin’ up okay, Doc?” Wilson asked over his shoulder.
    “Hell yeah,” Craig replied. He turned to Robbie. “Robbie, you stay on my six until we reach the surface, understand?”
    “I understand, Captain Emilson,” Robbie replied.
    Craig turned back and faced the same direction as the rest of the team. In only ten seconds, the bottom of the ship would open up in trap-door fashion, and they would begin their descent.
    “Remember, Doc,” Wilson barked, “when the door opens, you won’t even feel like you’re falling for the first thirty seconds, but keep an eye on your time gauge. If you aren’t in the delta position by then, you’re a goner.”
    The count reached zero.
    “Away!” announced the crackling, radio voice of the pilot.
    The doors swung open and the small pressure vacuum sucked the six figures out into space in their triangle formation. Craig was the far man on the left.
    The silence was perfect—not even the familiar sound of his own breathing accompanied him. Wilson had been right: As the seconds ticked by on his HUD, Craig didn’t feel as though he were falling at all. The formation seemed to be a tableau, hanging in the blackness of space, the azure blue of the Earth mixed with the warm brown of the Asian continent below. The other members of the SOLO team expertly adjusted their trajectories, each man putting himself into the critical twenty-five-degree angle to control his speed and drag when they hit the atmosphere. Craig awkwardly performed the maneuvers needed to match their delta positions—movements much more difficult to perform in a supersonic spacesuit that felt like a sleeping bag with arms than they were in his familiar HALO suit.
    The seconds continued to tick by as the telemetry, communications, and pressure readouts flashed on the OLED of his HUD. The thirty-second mark was reached, and the aneroids in his suit reacted to the atmospheric pressure as they began to hit the outer rim of the atmosphere, the psi remaining at 3.5 to keep him comfortable and conscious.
    “Good work, Doc. You’re doing fine,” said the reassuring voice of Commander Wilson over the radio. Craig looked down at the commander, just a couple of meters below him, still the point of their formation. “Keep those arms tucked. The pressure won’t feel like much at first, but when we hit Mach 1, the turbulence will be powerful. Even a little twitch can send you into a fatal tailspin.”
    “Noted,” Craig replied. He wanted to gulp a nervous breath of air but resisted the urge. The HUD read just over four minutes remaining on their descent. Their altitude was dropping dramatically as their speed approached Mach 1.
    “Sonic boom is imminent, boys! Steady!” Wilson shouted.
    The SOLO suits were equipped with sound dampeners in the helmets to dull the thunderous clap of the sonic boom, but they couldn’t do much to curtail the turbulence. Craig braced every muscle in his body as the speedometer continued to climb. He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw.
    The sonic boom percussion felt like the explosion of a nearby landmine. The members of the team were seemingly all able to ride it out, and Craig’s eyes flew back open when the turbulence seemed to settle. The position of the four others in the triangle formation remained perfect, but the green dot signifying Robbie’s position on Craig’s HUD was suddenly dropping away behind him, moving further and further from the team.
    “Doc, did you just lose your robot friend?” Wilson shouted.
    “Looks like it,” Craig confirmed. There was no way to turn his head to get a visual confirmation, but it appeared the boom had sent Robbie into a tailspin behind them. “It’s okay. If he recovers from the spin and lands all right, he’ll double-time it to our target and meet us.”
    “All right,” Wilson replied.
    A second later, Craig’s