Hurtling through the near-vacuum of the thermosphere, the giant "bullet" encasing the Basilisk turned and tumbled freely, with no care at all for the stomach, or the brain sac, within. Gan braced every muscle he could, even down to the curl of his toes; held his breath, except in tightly controlled, tightly rhythmic bursts, ignoring the instinct which burned in his lungs. His vision swam and splattered as he focused dead-ahead on a seam in the cockpit window. Biomechanically speaking the blood deprivation was no worse than piloting a vector-jet back on Daedalus-1. But encapsulated in iron and isolation, with the radio waves crackling on a dead channel as he tumbled toward the moon like a meteor, or a living bomb, wreathed in burning plasma ... Gan was thankful for protocol, else he'd start to think. And thinking led too easily to mistakes. Any and all of which flirted with disaster at 200,000 feet.

Focus. Calm. He'd just entered B-flight; as the atmosphere thickened around the falling shell, it riveted through the rifling along the sides, slowly stabilizing the butt up and the point down. Now Gan was truly like a bullet, spinning only along a single axis. He was falling faster, too; hotter. As the air inside the cabin approached equilibrium with the outside superoxygens and fluoroblankets, a barometric needle in his instrumentation array ticked down. Focus. Calm. Through the torrent of blood rushing into his skull, and the spray of black colors in his capillaries, he had to eject when the air outside was thick enough to create the drag he needed, but not so thick that the Basilisk's legs would burn up in all the friction. He reached up for the handle. He had to eject soon ... soon ...

Now!

The trigger ignited pockets of plastic explosive stuffed into the seams of the anti-atmo shell, bursting it into two halves which now free-fell into burning oblivion. And with the help of a few engineering miracles, the jump-rockets and mech-sized parachute also kicked into action; while a great fiery plume wreathed about the Basilisk's feet, and kevlar cloth unfurled over its head, the deceleration shoved Gan into his seat, and the blood back down into his legs. The radio similarly burst; the shell, something of a Faraday cage when cocooning a mech, now glowed and shrank as it streaked toward Triton-5. All of it reached Gan now: Druid taking the mission way too seriously, like usual. The idle crackle of the Commander's channel, not speaking until she absolutely had to. Grizzly's laconicism. Everything as it was meant to be. Except for the seventh voice on the radio; one unfamiliar in its singsong, sarcastic cadence.

Gan stayed quiet and nodded along while the Commander assigned him to babysitting duty. But on the inside, roiling like the very soot-storm into which he now faded from view, he wasn't so sure. Maybe she trusted him more than the others to get the rookie all caught up and tested. Or maybe the plan had merely turned out this way. Either way, if the rookie cracked under the pressures of her first mission, both of them would need bailing-out. And Gan's PPC and twin railguns, despite their power, couldn't fight for the both of them.

The mist and the ash-like detritus now swept over the mech; past the cockpit, almost like gentle mists rolling down a mountainside. Gan switched off the radio, again struggling to break through a wall of prickly static; and for a time he was alone in the grey. Though the parachute strained and labored, the Basilisk herself weathered the hostile winds of this place almost gracefully, well-anchored and well-weighted. With every sweep of the storm she swayed a little more, almost—almost—like a hammock. Certainly, compared to the chaos of a free-fall through low orbit, then the tossing and reeling from a parachute and a set of jump-jets (now empty), and the orange-hot glowing in the Basilisk's feet which, according to the automated systems overseer, was within "nominal" temperatures, Gan could almost take a nap out here. But an untold number of minutes later, drifting aimlessly through the grey silence, the cockpit suddenly rumbled, and outside there was a great burst of unsettled debris and dust. He had landed. Pressing a few buttons to jettison both the parachute from his anchor on his withers and the rockets from his back, leaving these to be buried under the dregs, Gan stepped forward a pace and swept his hip joint 360 degrees, both to test it and to check whether he had landed nearby anyone else. No. Manually he couldn't see even two hundred feet ahead, and in these two hundred feet, quietly and suffocatingly, only the storm greeted him. And with the radio picking up nothing beyond these powdery, dry walls ... there may just as well have been no one else on the moon at all. Maybe the besiegers and the besieged had already killed each other off, and the rest of the fireteam had vaporized during the drop. The darkness, the silence from the radio, and the eerie howls of the wind battering against the cockpit only enforced this illusion.