Undercurrents by Robert Buettner Read Free Book Online

heights, Lieutenant.”
    I wrinkled my forehead. “Huh?”

Eight
    Twenty minutes later, Howard and the other briefing spooks adjourned for coffee and probably a game of chess.
    Weddle and I stood in the empty, echoing bay with our respective trainers, arms outstretched like scarecrows.
    The redhead, who turned out to be an Airborne School jumpmaster, knelt alongside me. He was fitting an Eternad armor suit he had unpacked from one of the plasteel crates. As he worked he tapped suit features and lectured. “Thigh scabbard. One each twenty-four-inch synthetic koto-steel bush knife—”
    I sighed and tapped my opposite thigh pocket. “One each search-and-rescue pyrotechnic canister.”
    He stood, slipped the helmet down over my head like a coronation. “I gather you’ve worn Eternads before, Lieutenant?”
    I nodded.
    “When last, sir? The latest evolution’s had a couple tweaks.”
    Successive evolutions of the Eternad fighting suit had been saving Trueborn GI lives, including mine, since clear back at the start of the Slug War.
    “Couple years.” I sniffed the prior occupant’s sweat in the helmet pads. “I think somebody’s been wearing this suit ever since.”
    He smiled. “We’re fitting each of you to a suit that’s broken in. Seventy percent of new suits experience out-of-the-box glitches. Can’t tolerate that when we’re already pushing the equipment’s limit.”
    I frowned out through my open faceplate. Pushing my equipment’s limit? Eternads store a GI’s body-movement energy, then use it to run their computers and sensors, and to heat and warm the GI. They synthesize or purify air, and water if necessary. They keep out any water that isn’t necessary, such as the kind one might fall into. They also keep out vacuum, bullets, shrapnel, chemical and biological agents, and the occasional mosquito. But they’re light enough and supple enough to let the GI double-time a marathon. Eternad armor’s limit is hard to push.
    He snapped my visor shut to pressure test the seals, so I was talking to myself when I asked, “What the hell does that mean?”
    Ten minutes later, my suit was fitted and cooling me. Meanwhile, the spook had unpacked another plasteel. The jigsaw he had laid out on the floor was sleek and radar-absorbent black. He held a cylindrical section alongside my suit’s thigh, cocked his head, then replaced it with a different one.
    I popped my visor as he said, “The fairing pieces look different outside the wind tunnel.”
    “Wind tunnel?”
    He stared into my helmet. “General Hibble didn’t tell you?”
    I sighed. “Why don’t you?”
    He glanced at the closed hatch, then back at me, and lowered his voice. “Sir, Weddle’s a master parachutist. But they did say you’re Airborne qualified?”
    I nodded. “Made it through jump school.”
    He smiled and raised a fist. “Air- borne !”
    I bumped his fist with mine while avoiding a visible eye roll. “All the way.” I left the military for many good and sufficient reasons. Somewhere on my reason list was gung-ho phobia.
    The jumpmaster ratcheted the suit’s right forearm until it matched the length of my own. “Basically, sir, this jump will be just like a static-line school jump. Only from a little higher altitude.”
    My heart skipped. “Jump?” I had graduated jump school because my military operational specialty required it, but it scared me green. Now it was clear that Weddle and I weren’t going to step out onto Tressel’s surface from a Scorpion, like exiting a taxi. We were going to parachute to the surface.
    I frowned. “A little higher” meant something different to someone wearing paratroop jump boots than to sane people. “Not a HALO jump?”
    Super spooks like Kit Born, and special-operations troops since long before the Slug War, often jumped High Altitude-Low Opening. HALO jumpers exited an aircraft in the frozen stratosphere, breathing bottled oxygen and bundled against the cold, then fell arms and legs