Free Steel World by B. V. Larson

throw around, unlike Earth with her handful of mercenary legions.
    After reading several technical articles, I deactivated my tapper and told myself it didn’t matter anymore why I was here. The important thing was that I was about to drop onto a burning rock circling a binary star. The drop itself was going to be a terror. We’d practiced drops and null-grav operations many times, but I knew the real thing was bound to feel different.
    It was my first drop, my first battle, and my first war. I wanted to crap myself.
    “Systems check, legionnaires!” shouted Veteran Harris, marching down my aisle.
    I felt the love when his eyes fell on mine. Then he was gone, marching down the row, checking force-buckles and magnetic locks.
    We were already packed into the lifter. The plan was simple: the lifters would wallow down from Corvus , entering the world’s atmosphere. When we were at a sub-orbital altitude, we would be dropped in our pods.
    All around me, men and women began tapping at their interfaces and moving their armored limbs. The guy in the jump-seat next to me whacked me with his rotating shoulder joint. It didn’t hurt too much, but I was wearing only smart cloth, not an inch of steel. The jarring contact was enough to cause me to flinch away.
    “Sorry splat,” he said to me in a rough voice. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
    I glanced at the nametag and rank insignia on his shoulder, which identified him as Sargon, a specialist. Sargon had a cannon emblem over his stripes, indicating he was a weaponeer. I could have figured that out just by looking at his gear. He got up and hauled down a huge collapsed cylinder from the upper racks. It was a weapon nicknamed the “belcher”—a heavy plasma weapon that resembled a rocket tube that needed to go on a diet.
    As he retrieved his weapon, he made a point of putting his armored ass into my face. I punched him hard enough to put a bright silver mark on his burnished armor. My knuckles were armored with steel gauntlets, not just smart cloth.
    “Sorry,” I said.
    Sargon sat down again with the belcher in his arms, and he laughed while I ignored him. I’d been called ‘splat’ countless times by everyone since leaving Earth. It was something a new recruit had to get used to. The only way to prove them wrong was not to panic on the way down and splatter yourself all over the ground of your first alien world. Apparently, this happened quite often.
    I went back to my check-out routines. I tapped at the back of my left wrist with mesh-covered fingers. Lights glimmered green one after another in sequence. Oxygen, power, rifle—they were all good.
    Out of nowhere, Veteran Harris appeared again and loomed over me. Like all his kind, he was big, loud and hell-bent on stomping the newest men flat on our first drop.
    “Show me your lights, McGill!”
    I dutifully rotated my wrist in his direction. He strained to peer down through his faceplate. In full jump-gear it was a difficult trick to read another man’s vitals, but he managed it.
    My suit wasn’t armored, but it wasn’t white and papery like the vac equipment of last century’s astronauts, either. Instead, it was like wearing thick, stiff cloth covered with aluminum foil. It made me think of a parka made of tough canvas.
    The heavy troops around me wore metal shells with spherical rotating joints at the shoulders and elbows. I envied their expensive gear.
    “Huh,” Veteran Harris grunted after reading my numbers. “You’re good to go, splat.”
    “Thank you for looking after me, Veteran!”
    Harris shook his head and chuckled. He clanked away. Both of us knew he hadn’t forgotten about taking a half-dozen rounds in the chest from my snap-rifle, and I had a weapon in my hands right now that probably served as an excellent reminder.
    The moment he was out of sight around the end of the row of seats, the ship began to shake violently. I saw the weaponeer next to me look around worriedly.
    “It’s only