Free The Siege of Earth (The Ember War Saga Book 7) by Richard Fox

Drones swarmed over the unfinished edges, transmuting omnium into the basalt-like material that made up the spikes, bringing the two ends closer and closer together.
    Construction was nearly complete, and Valdar didn’t have long to stop them.
     
    ****
     
    The drop pod bucked beneath Hale hard enough to slam the back of his helmet against his seat. His visor display and gauntlet screen erupted with warning icons and dozens of panicked voices talking over each other through the IR.
    “Bridge, this is Roughneck 6, status report?” Hale asked.
    “—are clear. They’re going for the drop pods. Release! Release!” Durand’s shout carried through his helmet. “They are sitting ducks!”
    “Egan! Why are we still attached to the Breit ?”
    “Not sure, sir.” Egan sat near the apex of the drop pod in a pilot’s chair, the only one with access to a window. Egan did a double take and leaned against the view port. “Bandits coming right for us!”
    “Bridge! Why are—” The dorsal rail cannon battery thundered, shaking Hale and his team against their restraints like peas in a can. Hale tried to get his senses back and felt his body weight shift against different parts of his restraints.
    “Egan?”
    “We’re released,” Egan said, struggling with the controls as red flashes of light came through the windows, “but the engines are off-line.”
    “Egan! I am too young and beautiful to die!” Standish yelled.
    “Shut up!” Egan roared back. The drop pod lurched to the side and Hale felt a strong vibration through his acceleration seat as the engines came online.
    “All teams, this is Roughneck 6. We are on the way to the drop zone. Report status in sequence,” Hale said through the IR.
    “Crimson has release!”
    “Gold has release!”
    “Slate…damage…dead stick. I repeat dead—” The lieutenant’s words ended in a wash of static.
    “Damn it. Egan, do you have vis on Slate’s pod?”
    A scarlet beam stabbed through the hull and gouged a line through the deck just inches from Hale’s feet. The drop pod’s electricity cut out, plunging the team into near darkness. Light from Egan’s cockpit wobbled across the pod as it lost control.
    “I’ve lost engines,” Egan said. “I blow the ejection seats or we’re all dead.”
    “Do it!” Hale shouted.
    “Brace!” Egan opened a yellow and black panel and grabbed the neon-green handle within.
    Hale pressed his head against the back of his seat and grabbed his chest restraints. There was a flash as explosive charges blew his seat out of the drop pod. Hale tumbled over and over, catching alternating glimpses of the icy plains of Pluto and the Breitenfeld and her task force locked in a knife fight with Xaros ships.
    He grabbed release pins on each of his shoulder restraints and pulled. One came free, but the other slipped out of his grasp. The left half of his body sprang away from the seat, jamming his right arm against the harness. Centrifugal force pulled his free arm away. He strained to reach the other pin, but even his pseudo-muscles in his power armor couldn’t overcome the force of his mad spin through Pluto’s thin atmosphere.
    Hale jerked his right shoulder and found some wiggle room. He jerked again and came free of the chair. He kept rolling end over end, the thin layer of nitrogen and methane over the dwarf planet’s surface doing nothing to buffer his fall. He keyed the thrusters in his boots every time he saw Pluto’s surface and twisted his body to plunge headfirst once his tumble eased.
    Hale looked around. Gauss point defense batteries across the Breitenfeld and her task force ripped through the void. Rounds flashed as they hit drones or raked across the sides of Xaros construct ships.
    Burning streaks descended across Pluto’s brief horizon. Hale didn’t know if they were disintegrating drones or dying fighter craft. He looked to the surface and saw a puff of ice and snow as something impacted against a glacier.
    “Here