Free Battle Station by B. V. Larson Page A

of the floor and jumped out.
    A new planetary surface met my eyes for the first time. It wasn’t anything to write home about. There was a flat, gray-white expanse of ice that seemed infinite, only to be broken up by looming black crags on the western horizon. The surface of the ice blew with a fine mist about two feet deep. I looked down, and realized I couldn’t see my legs. My heavy armor had broken through the crust and I was left wading in snow that came up to my waist.
    “Sir,” Miklos said in my helmet. I could hear his breath blowing over the microphone. He was stressing.
    “What’s wrong, Captain?”
    “Incoming barrage, sir. The Macros must have spotted us.”
    “How much time do we have?”
    “About forty minutes.”
    I cursed and moved to the landing pod. So much for sneaking down out of orbit. The Macros knew we were here, and they’d fired their equivalent of a flock of ICBMs to keep us company. This training exercise wasn’t going exactly as I’d planned.
    I reached out and touched the surface of the landing pod, causing it to open. That’s when I found out just how far from “planned” this mission had gone.
    A Centaur bolted out into the open. He charged past me, his horn blades clacking against my chest plate as he passed. One of his short arms was broken and bleeding, dangling and flopping against his forelegs as he run.
    “What the—” I began, leaning into the opening.
    Smoke poured out of it. Black, rolling fumes swirled up into the clear blue sky behind me. I couldn’t smell them, but they looked thick and unpleasant—like an oil fire. I had to dip my helmet down below the smoke to see anything. I’d been about to demand my team tell me what the hell was going on, but I didn’t bother. The scene inside the pod explained it all. I flipped on my suit’s floods and examined the details.
    About half the Centaur troops were dead. A number of their corpses were charred black and smoldering. A few live ones stood against the walls, shivering. A few more flopped and twisted on the floor, grotesquely injured. One kicked his hooves at his own discarded generator pack, goring it with his horn blades as if it were a mortal enemy. Perhaps, from his point of view, it was. His eyes rolled in his head and one of his horns had been torn loose. Blood welled and ran down his face and into his foaming mouth, where it outlined his teeth in red. I thought I recognized him: he was large with darker fur than most. Then I had it. He was the Captain.
    “Disaster,” said Kwon, leaning his big head into the landing pod beside me. “Total freaking disaster.”
    “Thanks for the newsflash, Sergeant. Any more pearls of wisdom for me?”
    “Well sir,” he said, taking the question seriously. “I don’t think this is going to work out. I don’t think the Centaurs can be used as drop-ship troops. We have to come up with something else.”
    I sucked in a breath, cursed and slammed my gauntleted fist into the wall of the landing pod. The blow crushed in the metal. When I removed my hand, it slowly popped itself back into its previous shape.
    When we’d gotten the Centaurs under some kind of control, I let the ship’s big hand lift me back to the bridge. I investigated what had happened, using the vid systems that I’d left recording on their suits.
    We watched as they stayed calm for the first minute or so. After that, they become uneasy. A few opened their eyes and turned off the black-out mode on their goggles. These individuals were the first to go nuts. They scrabbled at the walls, trying to get out of what seemed to them to be a deathtrap.
    Things had gone from bad to worse when we’d hit a sudden patch of turbulence. At that point, the ones that had remained calm were outnumbered by the panicked Centaurs. Some shed their systems and gored one another, or the smooth walls. A few lasered down the lunatics. Many were blinded by these emissions, released in close quarters without the protection of