Deathstalker 02 - Deathstalker Rebellion

making command decisions when people's lives might be on the line. But that was why, in the end, he had to go. If he didn't, he might as well resign his Captaincy, and he wasn't ready to do that just yet.
    So he led the away team. And prayed he was up to it. Frost accompanied him, of course, as the ship's Investigator. More surprisingly, Security Officer Stelmach insisted on coming along, too. Probably because he didn't trust the other two out of his sight. The rest of the team consisted of six marines chosen by lot, and Communications Officer Eden Cross. He'd worked at Gehenna Base briefly, two years ago. He didn't seem at all happy to be paying the place a return visit.
    Cross was average height, average weight, dark-skinned and tight-lipped. He hadn't been one of those who conspicuously ostracized the Captain, but he rarely had much to say outside his duties anyway. Though he'd become almost eloquent when it came to trying to find reasons he couldn't or shouldn't be part of the away team. Silence approved of that. He didn't want mindlessly loyal people with him in dangerous situations. He wanted people who were scared, on their toes.

    Survivors. Interestingly enough, Cross hadn't been a Communications Officer all that long. He'd been passed from one position to another, usually at his own request, apparently because he just got bored after a while, no matter what he was doing. He was an overachiever, in a Service where uniformity was prized above all. He'd either make Captain before he was thirty, or burn out early. As it was, Silence made him pilot of the pinnace that would take them down to Gehenna's surface. Cross would get them down safely or die trying. It wasn't in his nature to do any less.
    Silence gripped the arms of his seat tightly as the pinnace dropped like a stone toward the planet below. He accessed the pinnace's sensors through his comm implant, and temperature readings sprang into life before his eyes. He watched blankly as the figures rose in sudden spurts, starting high and moving rapidly from incredible to unbelievable. Silence cut off the figures. They made him nervous. The long slender ship slammed through the overheated atmosphere, rocking and bucking as it plunged into the roaring flames that leapt miles above the endlessly burning surface. Silence made himself let go of the seat's arms.
    The pinnace's outer hull would protect them against any temperature to be found on a solid world, and there was always the force Screen. The pinnace could handle anything Gehenna could throw at it.
    Theoretically.
    Silence wasn't convinced. There were already too many unanswered questions about Gehenna, of which the emergency beacon was only the latest. He tried to stir uncomfortably in his seat, but the hard suit wouldn't let him. He'd put on the protective suit before he got into the pinnace, like everyone else. He wouldn't need it till the pinnace landed, but getting into a hard suit was difficult
    enough at the best of times, when you had plenty of room to move around in. It would have been impossible for a crew of ten to manage in the cramped confines of a pinnace.
    A hard suit was part space suit, part armor, and part weapons. It was designed to keep the bearer alive, no matter how inimical conditions got. Once all the systems were connected, the suit guaranteed to keep the wearer cool and calm, no matter what was happening outside it. They tended to be slow and awkward and about as subtle as a flying half brick, but they got the job done. They'd been pretty much superseded by portable force shields and Screens, but they still had no equal for where someone needed to make hands-on investigations.
    Radiation-proof, environmentally secure, harder than steel, and able to withstand practically anything except a point-blank energy beam, they'd originally been intended as combat armor for extreme field conditions. However, they were too clumsy and slow for that, so the fleet inherited them as go anywhere, do anything suits. Everyone else on the pinnace seemed to be moving easily and confidently within the suits' limits. Silence felt as though he'd been dripped in congealing tar.
    Sweat was beading on his face, but he couldn't lift his armored arm high enough to wipe at it. He shouldn't be feeling so hot. The pinnace's life-support systems automatically maintained a comfortable interior temperature. But you couldn't think about the impossible heat outside and not feel something, even if it was only in the