Hot Drop

# Chapter 1: Count Three Chirps

## 1. Suit Locker Bay 14B (Lance, Deck 14)

Walsh's calibrator goes orange on the first pass and he thinks about not running a second one.

Bay 14B is built for eight Marines and holds twelve. It smells of hot polymer and gun oil and the sour aluminium tang the recyclers push out when Deck 14 runs the drop-window air cycle. Twelve lockers down the port side. Twelve down the starboard. Names stencilled white on grey, and some of those names belong to Marines who have not come back. Nobody reissues the numbers. Walsh's is 47-3. He has stood in front of it nineteen times and been scared nineteen times and has never once said so out loud.

He runs the wand across the sensor strip again. Orange again.

Six metres down at 47-1, Mendez sits with her helmet between her knees and her own calibrator hooked into the HUD. She does not look up. "What is it, Walsh?"

"Calibration, Sergeant."

"Talk."

"Strip reads orange. Twice."

"Show me."

He carries the helmet down the bay past four lockers and two Marines who do not move out of his way. Mendez takes it without looking at him. She sets it on her thigh, hooks her own calibrator, and drags the wand across his sensor strip slowly enough that he can hear the contact tone drop half a pitch over the bad section. Orange. She goes again. Orange. Third pass, and the strip comes up green and holds green.

"You would have run it once," she says. "You would have got orange. You would have shrugged. You would have got in."

"Yes, Sergeant."

"You are not agreeing with me. You are waiting for me to finish."

She turns the helmet in her hands. Her forearms are scarred pale from wrist to elbow where a suit seal failed on her over Halcyon-Two, and she still runs her own calibration wand with the same three-pass patience she has just used on his. Walsh has watched her do it every drop. He has never once copied her.

"Three chirps," she says.

"Three chirps, Sergeant."

"Three. The pod pings three times before the door cycles. Transponder handshake with the Lance, with the orbital strike platform, and with the bunker-side intercept. Three handshakes. You count. If you do not get three, you do not get in."

"And if I do not get three and the door cycles anyway?"

"Then you get out of the chair."

"The chair is the pod."

"Then you get out of the pod, Walsh."

She gives the helmet back. The weight of it comes off her palm and onto his and he feels the difference, because she has been holding it like a thing she cares about and he has been holding it like a hat.

"You count out loud," she says.

"There is nobody in the pod with me, Sergeant."

"There is when I am training you to count."

"Yes, Sergeant."

"This is the part where you stop saying yes Sergeant."

He opens his mouth. He shuts it again. Down the bay Tunney laughs, short and dry, the Irish in it audible across all twelve lockers.

Mendez puts her hand flat on his shoulder pad. Her hand. Never her finger. She leaves it there long enough that the plate warms under it, and then she takes it away and goes back to her locker, and Walsh stands in the middle of the bay with a green sensor strip and a cold feeling behind his ribs that he does not have a name for yet.

Tunney does not laugh in the bay. That is the rule. She laughs on the mess deck and in the ready room and in the gun bay when a rifle jams for somebody who deserves it, and she does not laugh in here, because in here everyone is putting on the thing that will either work or not work. Walsh looks anyway.

She is at her own locker with her helmet hooked under one arm and her medical kit flopped open on the bench, sorting pressure seals by size with two fingers. Boone is two lockers down, suited, sealed, running her calibrator across her sensor strip with the flat over-careful concentration of a Marine on her first hot drop. Boone has run it four times. Walsh has counted.

"Right so, Boone," Tunney says. "You are the only one in this bay who has actually read the procedure. You may be the only one in the regiment. Aldana does not read the procedure. Mendez does not read the procedure, Mendez writes on it. Walsh has not read the procedure since Halcyon-Two. The procedure is between you and your conscience now."

"I read it twice, Corporal."

"Twice." Tunney closes the med kit with her hip. "Calibration?"

"Green, Corporal."

"Copy," Tunney says, and goes back to her seals.

Two lockers on the starboard side stay shut. Nobody has been near them this morning and nobody walks in front of them, which takes effort in a bay this size. Walsh knows both names on the doors. He knew one of them well enough to owe him forty credits. The regiment has not reissued the numbers and the regiment is not going to, and every Marine in Bay 14B moves around that stretch of wall the way you move around a hole in a deck plate.

Walsh gets into his suit.

It goes on in an order that has not changed since basic and that his hands do without him. Underlayer. Shin plates, left then right, the left one seating half a centimetre proud the way it always does because he dropped it on a ramp at Halcyon-Two and never turned it in. Thigh, hip, the lower back plate that bites if you rush the buckle. He rushes the buckle. It bites. He works his thumb under it and reseats it and does not swear out loud.

The chest plate is the heavy one. He lifts it off the hook with both hands and drops it against his sternum and the weight goes down through him into the deck and he feels his own knees take it, and that is the moment on every drop when his body understands what the rest of him has been pretending about all morning. Twenty-two kilos of ablative composite against his chest, and under that his heart going at a rate he would not report to a medic.

He checks the shin pocket. Half a pack of UEF cigarettes, soft, six left. He has carried them since the Lance took him aboard and he has never smoked one on the ground. He has never carried a lighter either. Mendez has the chrome one and Mendez does the lighting, his cigarette first and hers second, and that arrangement is two years old and neither of them has ever put a word on it. He seals the pocket.

The rifle comes off the rack last. He clears it, cycles the action twice, checks the cell seat with his thumb, and slings it muzzle-down across the chest plate. Four spare cells on the left hip, seated back to front so the contacts face away from his ribs. That one is Mendez as well. She made him reseat them on a hangar deck in front of the whole squad the second week he was aboard and he has never got them wrong since.

Gloves. Collar ring. He seats the helmet and turns it a quarter and the visor seals against the collar with the small wet sound of a pressure-grade O-ring taking temperature, and the bay noise drops away into suit noise, which is his own breathing and the fan and nothing else.

The HUD wakes. Sensor strip green. Squad net open, twelve fingerprint banners along the bottom in twelve small green diamonds. He looks at the sixth one, which is his, and he thinks about the bad section on the strip that took three passes to clear, and about the fact that he would have got in.

He is counting. He has been counting since the air cycle changed. Not chirps. Just numbers, in the back of his head, under everything else, the way he has counted since he was eleven years old in a room he does not think about. It keeps his hands steady. It is the only trick he has and he has never told anyone he has it.

Down the bay Mendez seats her own helmet and the bay goes quiet without her asking it to.

"Forty-Seventh." Her voice comes through the squad net flat and close, as though she is standing inside his helmet with him. "Suit-up complete. Briefing on Deployment Deck Fourteen in three minutes."

Lockers click open and shut. Harnesses settle. Twelve helmets come up off twelve benches and twelve pairs of boots make the small composite clatter of Marines going from where they were standing to where they need to be. Boone goes past him at a half-jog with her rifle already slung, which is wrong, and Tunney reaches out without breaking stride and unslings it and hands it back to her muzzle-down, which is right.

Walsh is last out. He always is. He shuts 47-3 and puts his glove flat on the stencilled door, which is not superstition, because he does not have superstitions, and then he goes after them.

Mendez is waiting in the hatchway with her hand on the frame.

"Sergeant," he says.

"Move, Walsh."

"You have never drilled me in the bay before." He hears his own voice come out thinner than he wants it. "Nineteen drops. You have never once run my strip."

Mendez looks at him through two visors and a metre of Deck 14 air, and for the first time this morning she is not fast with the answer.

"Have you ever counted two, Sergeant?" he says.

Her hand comes off the hatch frame.

"Once," she says, and the drop klaxon cuts her off.