The Risen Empire Read Online Free Page A

on the back of the neck held hyper-oxygenated plasmanalog that was injected directly into the brain in case a marine's heart stopped. The exoskeletal servomotors could immobilize the wearer if the suit detected a spinal injury. There were local anesthesia IVs every hundred square centimeters or so. And the armor could maintain a terminated marine's brain almost as well as a Lazurus symbiant. Vecher had seen soldiers twenty hours dead reanimate as cleanly as if they'd died in a hospice.
    But he hadn't remembered how uncomfortable the damn suits were.
    And the discomfort was nothing compared to the horror of this green stuff. The planned jump was a high-speed orbital insertion. The marines would be going down supersonic, encased in single-soldier entry vehicles packed with gee-gel. The forces on impact would collapse your lungs and crush your bones to powder if you weren't adequately reinforced.
    Vecher understood the concept all too well. The idea was to make the entire body equal in density, so that nothing could puncture anything else, an undifferentiated bubble of fluid, at one with the gel inside the entry vehicle. That was the theory, anyway. Bones were always the tricky part. Vecher hadn't saved a high percentage of marines whose insertions had failed. Most never even became risen. Exotic injuries such as skeletal disintegration, hearts splattered against ribcages like dye bombs, and cranial collapse foiled even the afterlife.
    Vecher hadn't minded the skeletal reinforcement injections, actually. Standard procedure. He'd had his marrow replaced before, after a viral infection. The lung-filling, however, you had to do yourself; you had to breathe this shit.
    It was inhuman.
    But there had to be a doctor with the first wave of this mission. The Child Empress was hostage. To refuse this jump wouldn't mean mere dishonorable discharge. It would clearly be an Error of Blood.
    That thought steeled Dr. Vecher's will. If breathing a quasi-intelligent, oxygenated goo was unpleasant, plunging a dull blade of error into one's own abdomen would certainly be worse. And at his rank, Vecher was assured elevation sooner or later, even if he didn't die in battle. From immortality to ignominious suicide was a long plummet.
    Vecher put the tube to his lips and took a deep, unbearably slow breath. Heaviness spread through his chest; the stuff had the exothermic cool of wet clay against the skin. It felt like a cold hand clenching Vecher's heart, a sense of foreboding made solid.
    He moved his tongue around in his mouth before taking another horrible breath. Bits of the goo were caught between his teeth, salty and vaguely alive like a sliver of oyster. They had even flavored the stuff; it tasted of artificial strawberries.
    The cheery taste just made the experience more horrible. Were they trying to make this awful?

    PILOT

    The squadron looked down into the council chamber from the high vantage of an air vent. There were three craft left.
    Pilot Ramones had lost her Intelligencer to automatic defenses. The Rix had installed randomly firing lasers in the hallways surrounding the council chamber, and one had gotten extremely lucky. Strong enough to kill a man, it had vaporized Ramones's craft.
    Below the squadron, the forms of humans, both hostages and Rix commandos, were vague. The Intelligencers' cameras were too small to resolve large objects at this range. The squadron would have to move closer.
    The air in the room was full of interceptors. They hung like a mist, pushed back from the vent by the outflow of air.
    "I've got reflections all the way through the room, sir," Hendrik reported. "More than one interceptor per cubic centimeter."
    Marx whistled. The Rix certainly had numbers. And these interceptors were larger than the ones his squadron had faced in the hallway. They had seven grasping arms apiece, each suspended from its own rotary wing. The relatively large brain and sensory sack hung below the outstretched arms, so that the craft