Chapter 301 - The Kid Who Stayed

The dropship hit the top of the Martian atmosphere like it had a personal grudge against it, and Matteo grinned, visor still up, with nobody looking his way to catch it.

The whole bay shook. An IFC transport would have padded the ride smoothly, its inertial dampers tuned down by some committee until you forgot you were moving. This one let the shake come straight up through the deck and into his teeth, so he felt every meter of how fast they were falling. Rust-colored light bled through the forward viewport and washed the troop bay the color of an old penny. Below them, filling the glass, was a planet nobody owned. No flag over it, no fence around the good portals. Just Mars, going from a dot to a world in the time it took him to breathe twice, and a corvette somewhere above them that he could call his ship now if he wanted to stretch the word a little. Out of the side ports, the rest of the formation fell with them, six other dropships strung across the sky, all of them aimed at the same dead patch of ground.

Two weeks ago, he had stood on a Genesis observation deck and watched the Triumph pull off the platform and burn for another star without him. He had thought, at the time, that the feeling would last longer than it did, the hollow thing, the kid left behind while his brother's story continued. It had lasted about four days, and then Izumi had walked into the cafeteria with a tablet and a job, and that grin she used when she already knew the answer, and the hollow thing had quietly gone and found someone else to bother.

He wasn't watching ships leave anymore. He was on one, going down, with his own people strapped in on both sides of him, and it felt exactly right.

"Hope you know what you're doing, Matty," Evan said over the squad channel, which was Evan's way of saying he was happy.

"I never know what I'm doing," Matteo said. "That's the whole appeal."

"He admits it." Jules, dry, checking the seals on her med kit one strap at a time the way she always did. "Write that down. He admits it."

"Logged," Sarah Chen said, not looking up from the slate flickering against her forearm. "Time-stamped. I'll send it to your mother."

"My mother's dead, Chen."

"Then she'll be proud and unreachable, which is the dream."

Somebody laughed, and the laugh ran around the bay and came back, and Matteo let it. Six weeks ago, a joke like that would have landed the wrong way, would have made the new ones flinch, and the old ones go quiet. Now it just sounded like Echo Team, because that was what Echo Team sounded like, and the only thing that had changed was the patch on their shoulders.

"You miss it yet?" Jules asked, mock-serious. "The badge scans? The pre-op briefings?"

"The lines..." Sarah Chen said. "Six weeks on a waitlist for a portal somebody already owned, behind two hundred people with cleaner files."

"To be fair, Karen worked us plenty," Evan said. "Tokyo, the undercover stuff, all of it was real jobs." He thumped the hull with the heel of his hand. "Just always somewhere with a rope line and a slot you had to book. Venus had a queue. Europa had a queue. Everything good had a queue."

"Mars doesn't," Matteo said.

"Mars doesn't." Evan was grinning; Matteo could hear it.

Mars had no rope line, not anymore. Orion used to run the whole Level Sixty circuit up here, every slot, every dig, until the company went bankrupt and pulled its crews off the planet four months ago. What was left rolled to Titan, and Titan was busy going broke of its own. So a world that used to cost a permit and a six-week wait sat wide open now, underbuilt and a long way from any backup, and that was exactly why it was theirs to take. Hyeon went where the rope ran out, and Matteo had spent four years wishing somebody would.

Izumi owned a Corvette she had probably talked someone out of, sixteen dropships, a command vehicle the size of a house, and the firm belief that the answer to most questions was go. She was a bit of a wildcat, and everyone in the bay knew it, and every one of them had signed on anyway, because a wildcat who pointed you at a frontier beat a clean charter that pointed you at a waiting room.

"Karen's still building her thing, you know," Samira said from the scout's perch by the ramp, half-cloaked already, her passive camo making the suit around her blend into the dropship. "The academy. Heard it's actually going up now."

"Good," Matteo said, and meant it. Karen standing up a training academy meant the whole machine was getting bigger. It meant Echo walking out the side door into Hyeon wasn't a wound to anyone. Karen had not fought him on it. She had looked at him for a long second across her desk, the look she'd been giving the Rossi boys since before any of them could spell their own names, and she had said the only thing she ever really wanted, which was go, and come back, and then she had let them go. There was room now for everybody to do their own thing. He was doing his.

"Two minutes," called Izumi.

She was not on the channel. She was in the bay.

She came down the line from the bridge to the LCV Strategos tied down by the aft bulkhead, the big command vehicle squatting there on its locks, painted white and pale gray in snow camo nobody had bothered to repaint for Mars, its turret folded down and its shield emitters dark for the drop, rigged to roll the instant the ramp dropped. She had a hand on every grab bar she passed, her weight already shifting with the ship, comfortable in a falling box, the way most people were comfortable in a chair.

She was doing it in the heeled platform boots she always had on, a good three inches of black leather that had no business within a mile of a combat drop, and she crossed the pitching deck in them without once looking down at her feet. The Hyeon logo rode her shoulder next to the little stamp of her name in characters he couldn't read. She had the grin on, the one that always came right before something stupid and dangerous, and she aimed it at the whole bay at once, and it landed on Matteo anyway.

"Listen up, since half of you are new and the other half don't listen." Izumi planted herself in the middle of the bay and rode the turbulence without a handhold, just to prove she could. "Outpost on the site below us used to belong to Titan. Then Titan went broke, and a portal opened up underneath the place and ate the staff, and now it's a Level Sixty overflow with a very nice set of ruins under it that nobody has a legal claim to, because nobody has a legal claim to anything on this planet. Mars is the frontier, kids. We hold it, it's ours."

"Level Sixty," Bai Hongyu said, somewhere down the formation. The youngest of the Kunlun girls, the one who looked like she was about to laugh at all times, including this one. "The fun number."

"The fun number," Izumi agreed. "Hardest things that exist. Nothing meaner than what's waiting down there, so you don't have to worry about a surprise. There are people on that outpost. A salvage crew came for the same dig we did, got caught when the overflow blew, and they've been holed up for nine days waiting to die. We are going to go get them."

The floor fell out from under them, a sheer drop through a pocket of thin air that drove Matteo's gut up into the harness, and then the engines caught and the deck came slamming back up to meet them. Somewhere aft the Strategos hit the end of its tie-downs and came back against its locks with a clank, a loud one, the kind he felt in the floor as much as heard. Izumi rode all of it without moving her feet.

"And then," she said, "we are going to keep the outpost. Both things. Same trip." The grin widened. "I like capable people, and anybody who survives nine days inside a Level Sixty overflow is somebody I want to talk to before they sign with anyone else. So we save them, and we plant the Hyeon flag on the ruins, and everybody goes home richer. Questions?"

"Is this sanctioned?" Sarah Chen asked, mildly, already knowing.

"Sanctioned by who, Chen? There's nobody here." Izumi spread her arms at the whole unowned planet outside the hull. "That's the beautiful part."

"So it's a training op," Evan said over the channel. "You found us the meanest sandbox in the system and you're going to drop sixty people on it."

"I'm going to drop my entire company through every overflow between here and the level cap," Izumi said, "because the day Genesis fabricates those drives, the lane to Alpha Centauri opens, and I'm not running four light-years of supply with anybody who tops out at fifty-eight. You want to ride that lane, Evan? Get to Sixty. This is how."

"Could've just said yes."

"It's a training op," Izumi said. "With a rescue in it, and a payday, and a flag at the end." The grin came back. "Everybody thinks logistics is what shows up after the frontier's safe. It's what makes the frontier safe. By the time anybody else figures that out, Hyeon's going to own the whole road to Alpha Centauri. Try to keep up."

Matteo pulled his rifle in against his chest, thumbed the power cell loose, read the charge, and seated it again. Out here, there was no supply line and no one coming if it went bad, none of what the IFC had brought in before it let a team near a high-level overflow. Whatever they carried down the ramp was whatever they had. He ran a hand down the front of his medium armor and wished, not for the first time, that he'd asked Luca for a TL9 set before the Triumph left. His brother would have handed one over without blinking. He just hadn't wanted to ask.

It was going to work. He could feel it going to work.

He reached up and pulled his visor down, and it sealed with a soft click that dropped the bay noise to the hiss of his own breathing. When he looked up, Izumi was already looking at him.

He'd spent two weeks not noticing it, and it picked right now to make itself impossible to miss. Her visor was still up, and the grin had gone small, and she had her eyes on him across the shaking bay, steady and a little amused, picking him out of thirteen people and not bothering to hide that she'd done it on purpose, that she'd been doing it a while now and wanted to see how long he'd take.

He knew that look now. That was the whole difference. A year ago, he would have shrugged it off. He'd have built a whole story out of it and believed every word, the way he had with Anastasia, eyes wide open and seeing exactly what he wanted to see and nothing that was actually there. He'd been an idiot. He'd said so, out loud, once, and never again. But he'd learned something getting out of it. He could tell the real thing from a performance now. He could see what was in front of him.

And the thing he hadn't been seeing was Izumi, who had burned a small fortune in fuel once to pull him out of a bad spot and never brought it up, and who was looking at him right now like she'd been waiting on him to catch up.

Heat climbed his neck and went straight up into his face, and for the first time all day he was grateful for the helmet, because behind the visor nobody could see him go red as the planet outside.

Izumi smiled. She'd caught it anyway. Of course, she had. She caught everything.

The dropship screamed down through the thin air, and the bay shook around them, and still the look held, and Matteo knew, dead sure, that the two of them were going to get to everything that look was about, just not now, not here, not with however many teams and a Level Sixty overflow between them and the ground.

The ramp light went orange.

"Saved by the war," Izumi said, just for him, and turned, her own visor dropping and sealing as she moved, and was Director of Hyeon Logistics again before her boots finished the pivot.

"Echo, on me." Matteo's voice came out steady, which he was proud of. "Kunlun, you're our left as we clear the lip. Let's find the survivors first, and we'll secure the dig second. Everybody comes home."

"Everybody comes home," Echo said back, all of them at once, the old call, the thing they always said and never once said lightly.

The ship banked hard and slammed onto Martian soil, and the locks on the Strategos blew with a bang he felt in his sternum.

The ramp light went green.

It dropped, and red light and red dust came roaring up the open mouth of the bay, and past it Matteo saw the dead outpost hunched on the plain and something huge moving in the dark beyond it.

The LCV-Strategos roared off its cradle and down the ramp onto the dirt, turret swinging up toward the thing in the dark, Izumi lit up behind the armored glass by the glow of a dozen command screens. Echo came out behind it on foot, and Kunlun behind them, and the rest of the teams off the other dropships behind them, boots and dust and engines all hitting the ground at once. Matteo ran out into the middle of it and went to work on the first thing in his life that had ever been completely his.