“This is insane!” she tried reasoning with him, or so it seemed to her mind. Objectively, she sounded very much like she was panicking, but Savoy was polite enough not to say so.

Savoy shrugged. “Welcome to the military. You think any organization with a quarter ounce of sanity would use the motto ‘It’s not a job! It’s an adventure!’?”

“But…but…” Milla stammered.

“Look,” Brinks began as reassuringly as possible, “I’ll be with you all the way down. You’re going to be perfectly safe—at least until we hit dirt.”

Milla’s armored form shifted back from Savoy, and Brinks could read shock in her stance. “Until?”

He shrugged again, an awkward motion in armor. “War is a funny thing. It doesn’t allow any guarantees.”

Milla finally acquiesced. “Very well…What do I have to do?”

“Whatever you’re going to do, you’d better do it quick!” Samuels snarled over the intercom. “We’ve got three more bogeys joining this here party, and they look mighty pissed!”

Savoy pulled Milla around, standing her in front of Brinks so he could clip her armor to the major’s with the built-in security clips. Then he floated the two of them toward the back of the shuttle, actually bouncing off the wall as Jennifer Samuels slammed the stick hard to avoid a burst of fire.

“Green light!” Samuels shouted over the intercom. “We’re lined up! You’ve got a thirty-second window! Go, go, go!”

“I am not ready!” Milla screamed as she was pushed toward the open airlock.

“Too late.” Savoy grinned and threw them both out of the orbiting shuttle craft.

He watched for ten seconds as the boss and the space lady floated clear. How many troops could say that they had just tossed their commanding officer out of an airlock and expected to get away with it?

Some days, I love my job. Savoy grinned, checking the shuttle’s approach velocity and the telltale green light. All the numbers checked and he had another five seconds on his window, so he grabbed the bulkhead and threw himself after his boss.

Jumping from orbit bears few similarities to skydiving in the classic sense. The first few moments are more akin to swimming or the types of dreams where you try and try to move but can never seem to budge. After that, however, the sudden acceleration as your orbit decays is, without a doubt, frightening. Your stomach feels like it’s being driven into your spine, and you pity the poor person who made the mistake of eating before his first jump.

Milla, fortunately, hadn’t been hungry during the preparations for entry into the system and only had to worry about the spinning planet that loomed ever closer beneath her. Tossing her cookies into a sealed helmet was asking for trouble, particularly when the next time you’d be able to remove said helmet was sixty vertical miles straight down.

Brinks’s tight grip kept her from struggling much as the planet’s gravity pulled them down, but it left him little time to properly guide their descent.