Free Steel World by B. V. Larson Page B

his guns and the enemy. He’ll cut you down if he has to. The same goes for me.”
    I shrugged, less than encouraged. My job was to snipe and scout. I was expendable and expected to die. New troops in every legion started off that way. To get good gear, you had to earn it. Only experienced survivors who’d proven themselves in combat became regular light troops, or heavy troops with expensive armor and energy weapons. Good gear wasn’t produced on Earth, and the legion had to use hard-won Galactic credits to buy it. They didn’t like wasting such a precious resource on a loser.
    The buzzer finally sounded, and the big light on the ceiling went green. It was go-time. All thoughts of equipment and Cancri-9 vanished from my mind. I wasn’t even worried about the saurians I was about to meet on the planet’s surface. I was worried about not going splat on my first day out.
    Properly managing a drop-pod wasn’t a trivial task. First off, just loading yourself into one was dangerous. Rather than a calm process where each soldier was strapped into the delivery system by competent techs, the method used was dangerous and tricky.
    You began by rushing to a circular hole at the end of the row of jump seats. When the light flashed green, you had to drop within a second down into the hole, careful to place your arms flat at your sides and keep your face looking straight ahead. It was rather like jumping off a diving board feet-first, forming an arrow with the body to fall in the smallest region possible.
    Waiting for me below was an automated system. It sensed the falling body, and shot two half-shells from both sides at once. If your form and timing was good, and you were mildly lucky, the mechanism caught you and enclosed you in an instant capsule. The capsule was then shunted at a right angle, loaded into the ejection gun and fired like a bullet out of the bottom of the lifter.
    I watched as Veteran Harris went first. He did it like a pro, because he was one. He stepped out over the hole in a smooth hopping motion, pointing his boots downward and keeping his arms stiffly to his sides. He vanished, and the ship shuddered as he was grabbed, encapsulated and fired in about a second. The line then moved forward and the light went green again. A bio specialist took a deep breath and dropped. She did it correctly as well.
    At the back of the line, I felt vaguely sick. When I’d first learned how we were expected to deploy, I was shocked. How could such a dangerous, complex system be the best method?
    The answer was simple: it did the job as fast as possible.
    Ships cost money—a lot more money than any legionnaire was worth. The legion didn’t want their ships low over the planet for one second longer than absolutely necessary. The lower a ship was, the more vulnerable it was to defensive fire. That’s why they usually didn’t land in a hostile environment—they didn’t want to get blown up. They didn’t want to linger in low-orbit and give us ample time for a safe drop. They wanted to fire us out the aft port like machine gun bullets so their lifters could escape as fast as possible back up into far orbit, where they would be safe.
    And if we did screw up, if we did go splat —that was no big deal to the officers in charge. They thought in terms of equipment and missions. There was nothing more expendable than our flesh in their equations. They could always reconstruct us from stored data, or just recruit fresh bodies on Earth if we managed to get ourselves permed somehow.
    My turn came up surprisingly fast. The troops were marching forward, firing out of the ship at a consistent rate. At the last moment, Sargon the weaponeer spoke to me over his shoulder.
    “Just drop straight in the center. Don’t try to hold back or put out your hands to protect yourself. Trust the machine. If it screws up, you’re meat anyway.”
    With those words, he took a final stride out over the opening and disappeared into it. I heard the ship