Recreant

Prologue - The Storm Before the Calm

For the first time ever, Pod was afraid. Oh, he'd thought he'd felt fear before, but that was nothing. At any moment, the life of Pod – everything that he was, every bit of potential of what he could be – was more than likely to be snuffed out. The fact that whatever killed him would more than likely have destroyed every part of him before the information ever reached his brain was insignificant.

It was the simple concept of no more Pod that terrified him.

You're rarely given time to dwell on anything in the military, little opportunity for self-reflection. You're driven to the point of exhaustion all day, so your sleep is deep and mostly dreamless – solely for rejuvenation, never rest for rests' sake. Its only at times like now, when all preparation is done and all you can do is wait for the inevitable, that those doubts creep in – when fear begins to embed its poisoned claws.

The bank of grease and moisture spattered red lights on the ceiling silently click to green, and the time to reflect has gone. As one, Pod and the others are on their feet. The behaviour is well-rehearsed, practiced, wordless.

Helmets unfurled from the thick armour around their necks, like the segmented carapace of the beetles from the dead tree nest he'd once found in the woods outside the training camp. There was a moment of darkness as it surrounded Pods head completely just before the neon glow of a heads-up display bleeped into life, reams of text scrolling past as the armours computer systems booted up. Diagnostic cycles rolled through to completion as the armour slowly and automatically adjusted itself for Pods thin frame. There was the gentle hiss of pneumatics and servo-motors as panels and joints tightened, twisted and shifted into place. The main display of the HUD switched on fully, displaying the interior of the dropship in crystal clear sharper-than-reality detail. Four names appeared to the right of Pods vision, each accompanied by the seismic peaks and troughs of their carefully monitored life-signs. He knew that his own name and details have, in turn, appeared on each of his four colleagues displays.

Pod remembered their orders and, via a series of coordinated blinks, the contents of his heads up display were toggled. First to infra-red, then to ultra-violet, finally settling on a display whereby the entirety of the outside world was reduced to a bright green wireframe, the complexities of reality reduced to little more than basic geometric shapes. He glanced around at his colleagues, each of them now resembling something from an old fashioned videogame. They're little more than stick people now, crude cuboid representations of themselves. The reason for this is something retrieved from recent military intelligence; Rumours that the enemy can disguise and fake visual stimuli – one of their many formidable talents. When facing them, you couldn't even trust what you were seeing with your own eyes – better to let the computer take over and only show you what was real, detail be damned.

Pod lifted one foot off the ground, placed it back down, and lifted the other. The armour had adapted properly to his shape now, and despite the weight of it, the motion was virtually effortless. He stepped forward and slowly advanced towards the weapons rack towards the back of the dropship. According to the view inside Pods helmet he was leaning forward and picking up a hollow yellow rectangle with a tapered funnel towards the front – he knew from experience, however, that this was his primary firearm.

Without the assistance of the motors in the arms and shoulders of the suit, he knew that even with his enhanced strength he'd be barely capable of holding the rifle, let alone wielding it in combat with any level of accuracy.

The Tsunami T12 select-fire rifle is a weapon with almost as lengthy and expensive a development history as Pod and his fellow soldiers. Its closest relative, the Landslide JSCT-4, was a heavy gun developed for battlefield use by large Mechanised Infantry units. It was favoured for both its reliability and flexibility and relative cheapness compared to its competitors. The Tsunami project was an attempt to retain the qualities of the Landslide but compacted into something a third of the size, and was a resounding success.

Upon picking it up, the palm sensors in Pods armour connected with the computer systems within the rifle, and both suit and weapon were in sync. Ammo counts and weapon diagnostics flickered into life on the left hand side of his HUD, a series of nominal values displayed in a reassuring green.

"Drop zone in T-60" barked an electronic voice. Pod looked around as his fellow troops queued behind him, just as they'd rehearsed dozens of times. The soles of his boots locked to the floor with metallic click, mere moments before the hatch in front of him slowly began to slide open.

Within the confines of the suit all senses were dulled. He'd done enough armour-less drops to know that by now the wind would be whistling all around them and the ice cold of the winter landscape below them would be chilling their skin. Inside the vacuum sealed and temperature controlled suit though, there was none of that. The panel was fully open now but through the HUD he couldn't even see the outside world for what it was – the terrain below that rushed by resembled nothing more than wireframe geometric shapes.

Pod performed the last minute checks, although he knew that his actions were mostly redundant. If anything had appeared out of place, automated systems would have aborted the drop by now. Every piece of metadata about Pod, the armour, his suit, was being fed back to centralised systems that monitored every aspect of everything. He was nothing more than a series of statistics to High Command at the moment.

"Drop zone in T-10" came the voice again, louder this time, more urgent. The magnetic locks in Pods boot switched off and he counted down the seconds. He suddenly wished that he knew any of the words for one of Deacon's prayers.

"Go!" sounded a voice from inside his helmet. Pod didn't need to be told twice. He leant into a half-crouch before taking a single deep breath and launching himself forward and out of the drop ship.

He was falling now, the green numbers of the altimeter that now occupied the centre of his heads-up display growing smaller and changing in colour. A four-digit number became three digits, switching to yellow. Moments later, there were just two digits – now in a bright flashing red.

Icons appeared across the display, multiple anti-gravity actuators across the body of the suit firing into life as one. One foot came into contact with snow-covered ground, the other straight after – as gentle a motion as if he'd simply walked down a step. His colleagues landed silently one-by-one beside him, already in formation, rifles readied.

Another value appeared on the display now, a timer. Counting up, this time. A series of bright flashing zeroes advance to 00:00:01. Mission commencement.