Khepera at the Dawn

The Drop

Al-Mutawwali stood rapping the fingers of his right hand on the back of the datapusher's chair, earning himself an irritated glance from Ms. Pascal. Ibrahim wondered if there was more to his agitation than Amjed's lecture. If this really was the drop sphere's first deployment, he'd have observers other than Setna Amjed looking over his shoulder during the operation.

Any smugness Ibrahim felt vaporized when he realized those same observers would be watching him as well.

"We can't delay any longer." The Lieutenant spoke softly, as if to himself. When he gave his orders, however, his voice snapped with all of its accustomed volume.

"Proceed with the drop."

The datapusher in the cubicle across the aisle from Mushkilah shot her a skeptical glance as she again turned to her mirror to fiddle with her hijab. She supposed she was overdoing it - nothing short of a hurricane could have blown it awry that many times in the last hour.

But Amjed had stomped down the aisle twice during that time, once nearly getting a look at her dataport before she could switch it back to her progress report.

She poked invisible strands of hair back under her scarf as she scanned the length of the aisle in the mirror. At the far side of the control platform, Amjed's door stood closed. A mailbot scurried from cubicle to cubicle, and Mac Nguyen was leaning against the divider that separated Karen Taggert's workspace from his own. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Mushkilah had to be careful. The scene now playing out on her dataport was damning indeed. With the help of friends in low places, she'd managed to patch into the Booth's observation grid. At a touch she could switch from node to node, but she hadn't touched the control pad for quite some time now, since she'd found the perfect view of the Lahab-u-Din and the massive mirror ball growing out of its side. Only the top third or so of the drop sphere bulged up from the blacker-than-black shadow of the carrier, the light reflected up at it from the blue-green vastness of Murkworld glinting off the golden curve of the verses that covered its surface. From the Booth node they appeared delicate and minute - she thought she could make out Ayat al-Kursi, the Verse of the Throne, but couldn't be sure, so tiny did the script appear on her dataport. In reality, each letter towered taller than a tall man, and the entire verse of the Holy Qur'an would have stretched over at least half of the warehouse-like Misr datapool in which she worked.

Ayat al-Kursi. Had to be. No military vessel expected to enter atmosphere did so without its protection against the Jinn who might inhabit its upper reaches. No self-respecting ghazi would have stepped foot aboard such a vessel. A marine could expect dangers enough after planetfall.

Light flared suddenly up from the glow nodes around the drop sphere. The launch sequence had begun.

Mushkilah adjusted herself in the mirror one last time. The coast was clear.

On the dataport, the sphere flashed brilliantly in the Lahab-u-Din's strobes, its data and weapons arrays seemingly alight with Saint Elmo's Fire, as it rolled away from the carrier and began its drop down to Murkworld.

On the viewscreen, the elegantly scrolling verses of the Qur'an seemed to fade away as a dull, oily muck oozed out like sweat from unseen pores in the sphere's surface -- another toy of the ghazi engineers. Based on one of the many failed attempts to emulate the substance with which the Bedouin coated their ships, the drop-sphere's liquid skin served as both heat shield and camouflage. Well, camouflage if the drop was being made on the night-side of the planet: the substance had some of the strength of the Bedu material, but none of its kaleidoscopic color. It came in one hue: primer gray. That gray, however, was almost impossible to detect from ground-based observation nodes, at least at night.