Earth Afire (The First Formic War)

chest were extended to maximum length, but even so the fit was tight.
    “You try to get beauty sleep, Fatani?” Reinhardt asked with mock surprise. “You must suffer from some serious insomnia.”
    “Keep it up, Reinhardt,” said Fatani. “We’ll see how long you laugh when I drop your skinny butt from this bucket at three hundred and twenty kilometers per hour.”
    “You’d only kill yourself,” said Reinhardt. “Birds tend to crash without a pilot.”
    “I can pilot as well as you can.”
    “Yeah, and by the time you crawled up here into the seat, you’d be crashing into the ground.”
    “Then I’d die with a smile on my face, knowing I had just dropped you.”
    “Enough with the testosterone,” Patu said. “Can we go now, please?”
    “Blue River, Blue River,” Mazer said into his helmet. “This is Jackrabbit. We are clear and flight-ready, over.”
    “Roger that, Jackrabbit,” came the voice over the radio. “You are clear to go. Mission sequence code: lima tango four zero seven foxtrot, over.”
    Mazer entered the code into his HUD and repeated the sequence back to the controller. Windows of data popped up as the computer accepted the code and opened the mission file. Mazer blinked the command to forward the files to everyone else. A timer in the upper right corner of his HUD began ticking up the seconds from zero. It was a timed mission, apparently.
    Reinhardt initiated the gravlens, and the HERC lifted a few meters into the air. Even after all these months, the silence of the whole operation unnerved Mazer. He had done hundreds of hours in traditional helicopters, and his mind had become accustomed to the roar of the engines and the thump thump thump of rotor blades. To hear nothing but the almost imperceptible purr of the computers felt completely unnatural.
    Then Reinhardt initiated the rear engine, and Mazer got that all-too-familiar sick feeling in his stomach as the HERC shot forward over the tarmac and headed north. Mazer pushed the sensation aside and focused on the intel. “Target is latitude negative thirty-seven degrees, zero minutes, twenty-one point seven seven two two seconds. Longitude one hundred seventy-five degrees, ten minutes, thirty-seven point five one six two seconds.”
    “Coordinates confirmed,” said Patu.
    “Identify target,” said Fatani.
    The HERC shot up another fifteen meters as they approached the tree line, heading up into the hills of the Hunua Ranges and leaving the airfield behind them. Mazer instinctively put a hand on the instrument panel to steady himself. “Target is an AT-90 Copperhead. Crew of two. Both seriously wounded.”
    Copperheads were squat assault tanks loaded with enough firepower to level a small city. They were also ridiculously heavy and hard to carry because of their wide, shallow design.
    “Whose turn is it to play medic?” asked Fatani.
    “Yours,” said Patu. “And don’t ask me to cover for you. I bandaged up the last two rounds of guys.”
    “They better not be bleeders,” said Fatani. “I hate the bleeders.”
    For field tests and war exercises like this one, the NZSAS used rubberized dummies for their casualties. Mazer and his unit were to treat the dummies like real soldiers and administer lifesaving first aid as part of the exercise. The bleeders were the worst. Loaded with red syrupy paint, they added a good two to three hours to cleanup time and put everyone in a bad mood.
    The Copperhead tank would be a dummy as well. Probably a burned-out bus or ATV pulled from the scrap heap and loaded with enough weight to resemble a Copperhead. The Colonel wouldn’t use a real one and risk damaging it.
    “So what’s the deal, Lieutenant?” asked Reinhardt. “Is this operation a final exam or something? Why all the secrecy?”
    “No idea,” said Mazer. “Colonel said to be ready to fly at 0300, and we’d get our orders then.”
    “Seems strange to me,” said Fatani. “Normally we’re the ones designing the field tests. Now all of a sudden the colonel’s doing it for us. No briefing. No prep. Just strap in and wait for orders.”
    “Combat’s no different,” said Patu. “Makes perfect sense to me. Brass wants to see how the HERC manages when we’re not controlling all the variables. Think about it. Before we run a test, we determine everything. Where it flies, what the weather’s like, where the enemy is located, what their capabilities are. But what team in real combat is going to have all that