POD DROP

By Calamity Jane

9th Sep 2005

The tungsten alloy pellet stood no chance of penetrating the 'Tear Drop' to reach the soft flesh and brittle bone of Guild Trooper Michaels, it was not designed to, after passing through the outer ablative layer of the 'TD', its momentum was spent and it came to rest lodged against the hardened inner casing. The small hole it had created in the ablative layer was less than a centimetre across. With the overwhelming violence of the extreme descent entry, and enveloped in his gel cocoon, Michaels never even felt the impact of the pellet. The first indication that he had that something was wrong was when the flesh on his feet seared away from the bone as the gel in cocoon boiled off as a result of the super heated ionised gasses that were funnelled into the hole in the ablative layer by the 'TD's' own velocity, penetrating the hardened outer layer of the 'TD's' protective shell. Immediately following the searing of his flesh came the incineration of of his harder tissues as the alloy of the 'TD' became liquid and then gas, moving up his body and following his almost instant boiling, killing him in less than 2 seconds, but leaving him just enough time for the pain and realisation to register so that by the time his face melted it had assumed a screaming rictus of indescribable agony.

To the gound based defenders of Antares IV, Michaels was merely a shooting star that like hundreds of others like it had blinked out earlier than those that were still pelting down through the upper layers of the planet's atmosphere.