Excerpt of an interview with Kara Walden
05 Jun 2020Kara waldeN
Have you ever fallen? How far? Bet I’ve got it beat.
I once fell a long way. Fell out of orbit, fell all the way down. Out of the ship into the cold black and through those hot first kisses of atmosphere into the gravity heavy blue depths of an endless sky and down, down to the hard rock so far below.
I guess fell isn’t quite right. Truth is I jumped.
They called it a Planetary Assault.
And I’m the crazy one?
I remember up there, in the surf of the atmospheric littoral zone where pressure waves of sky broke on the shores of the endless void my breathing was loud in my helmet.
It was hard not to be excited when the heat started to test the Drop Shield and I discovered I was suddenly holding my breath.
As the re-entry plasma flickered to life around me the silence felt meaningful.
The sky fire seemed almost gentle. Finger thick flashes of shy colour which hinted of the promise of a beautiful sunrise. Soon enough those pretty fingers became rabbit punches looking for a way through and then finally a furious assault that enveloped the shield in a teardrop furnace, falling into a perfect blue sky.
I wasn’t alone.
There were thousands of us. An entire Brigade of Monozygote Marines. Twenty different Archetypes, each replicated two hundred times. Raining down on the people below like the fiery tear drops of a mournful God.
Or, more accurately, the identical and illegally cloned rage tears of Tresken Duvall 3#.
The Plasma fire was still crying its tears when the low battery alert flashed up in my helmet and the Drop Shield began counting loudly down to its failure point.
Before we jumped we were told that the atmospheric density had been calculated to be equivalent to less than the charge cycle of the drop shields.
Which was good to know.
While I was watching the failure point approach, I realised we hadn’t been told how close the margin of error was.
Which would have also been good to know.
Luckily my emotions are a bit out of whack and I waited calmly. I did wonder how everyone else was doing. I had a little bet with myself that at least one of my body doubles would break comms silence when we got to imminent incineration time.
Three
Two
The plasma died away and with perfect timing the drop shield powered down. We were alive and free falling towards the target at terminal velocity.
The bad news was that my siblings in arms were such a well-trained and serious lot I lost my bet.
So because I’m anything but serious, I opened a channel and whispered,
“Phew, that was close,”
Then smiled because I’d just won an extra pudding ration from myself.
A few seconds later we started to receive incoming laser fire from the defences below.
After that it got REALLY exciting!
Later, when it was all over and the Feds were all dead they blamed me for the algorithm breaking casualty rate and hauled me off for “assessment”.
I mean, how is it my fault if all those multiplicated MZ’s aren’t creative enough to come up with a new plan when long range beams are putting holes in the old one? What’s the point in using meat model soldiers if you only make them follow orders? Robots would be the smarter choice.
The way I look at it that whole battle was a test and they all failed. Only because I came first I got hauled off to meet the “Creator” and trust me, he was soooo boring.
Worst of all, I never did get that pudding.