Suicide Squad: Dreams of Venus

Issue 2

Disclaimer: Issue 1 is missing. Flickr is a dastardly website and they wiped it off the face of the fucking Earth. So you lose valuable setup and team-building. Until I rewrite it and it's inevitably worse. Sorry.

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The wind's a cruel mistress.

She can reach out one formless, shapeless finger, and push a high-caliber rifle round a millimeter off course.

Or whip a cape into the air with a slight exhale just as you're about to take a kill shot.

Or just send you careening all over the place as you're skydiving through a blizzard.

Like a blind cyclist in a blender.

The first thing that happened to Floyd was the air got punched out of him. He didn't think it was cause of any physical entity, be it the wind, or one of the others, or anything else that might have happened to be 30,000 feet in the air. The sheer shift in pressure from the sealed capsule into the brutalizing winds was enough to effectively stun him, and the first thirty seconds of free fall were spent limp and gasping.

Once Floyd's faculties had sort of returned, he focused on forcing breaths, with the rapid efficiency of a sniper's practiced control. After three quick breaths, he was practically back to normal, and flung his limbs out, splaying himself wide. He looked down at his belt. His landing harness was intact. He looked over his shoulder at his parachute. Tattered white cloth was flapping wildly out of his backpack. Not great.

"FLAG!" He yelled into his helmet comm. "My chute's out!"

"Gimme your coordinates," Digger's voice crackled in. "I'll try to work my way over to you and-"

"Not enough time," Flag said, voice strained. "Computer says you're too far apart. You'll have to-"

"Is your harness working?" Shiva asked.

"Why the hell is everyone interrupting everyone?" Floyd shouted. "Yes, it's work-"

"Good," Shiva said calmly. "You can land with just the cable."

Floyd immediately saw what she was saying and nearly kicked himself for not thinking of it first.

"OK. OK. That'll be a tough shot."

"Tough shots are why you're here, Lawton," Flag sighed, significantly more relaxed. "Fifteen thousand feet."

"Easy money for you, cunt," Digger drawled.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Floyd said through clenched teeth.

He struggled against the punishing winds and forced his hand down to his belt. He touched the metal plate on his harness and the plate opened, the grapnel barrel sliding out and locking into place. The ground was coming up nice and slowly, but he knew he only had about a minute and change of free-fall left, so Floyd got to work.

When he deployed the grapple wire, it would fire straight out of the muzzle and keep going until it hit something, then retract fast. Normally it would be fired straight down into the ground, with a drag chute to slow the rapid descent, for a quicker landing. But Floyd had no chute. And he was in a blizzard. If the grapple hit a particularly large chunk of sleet, it would start retracting into nothing and the hook would simply return to his harness, and then he'd get painted across the nice pristine snow. Which would be sub-optimal.

So Floyd simply let go of his harness, and the jet engine roar snapped his hand back into position, bent out near his head.

"Seven thousand. Deploy at two hundred," Flag said mechanically.