It was bad. I'd expected a somewhat normal war, bullet holes, wounded, lots of civilians hunkering down in no-fire zones. Chaos.

  What I got was an organized purge.

  The drop to New Millet was bumpy, air currents buffeting the pod, tossing me against the restraints on my drop couch. The couch was fancy, with internal dampening that clamped around me, keeping the shakes to a minimum. It even stabilized my head, two sturdy, padded headrests extruding from the back.

  Still, I wore the spare safety belts. Give me a thick, sturdy piece of woven polymer over fancy gadgets any day. A belt didn't need working power to keep you safe.

  The turbulence slung the pod sideways. Drop pods are small, steel cylinders balanced on a low-power warpstone engine encased in a battery pack. The engines are designed to run on shards, pieces of warpstone too small to power a spaceship. They're unstable, although that isn't a problem for me, or any half-decent warder. Normal people get the comfort of there being half-a-meter of solid-state battery between them and an exploding engine. Not that it happens very often. And there's a backup parachute.

  I didn't need it, jerking through the air while watching the vid from the external cameras. Lots of green, mostly shallow seas. The land was blacker, with a dark-red tint. My 'pedia called New Millet the lumber yard of the sector, whatever that meant. Lumber was starched cellulose, wood grown uncontrollably.

  Trees. Which was a novelty in and of themselves. I hadn't been to a planet with wild trees in years. Mostly, what I'd seen had been cultivated, like the Knife's plantain tree or the gardens on Dromond. Beautiful but ordered.

  The pod started a high-pitched landing warning, weee-woooo, weee-wooo, rising and falling. Crudmucking annoying, I should have disabled it when I boarded. Too late to do anything about it now. I'd have to go into the pod's com settings, and I'd be on the ground before I finished, safely or not.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Why tell someone you were about to land? That's what drop pods are designed to do. It would have made more sense to tell them they weren't about to land. Whoever programmed the pod's com wasn't thinking clearly.

  To my surprise, the pod came down softly, a perfect landing. If the warning beeps hadn't stopped, I wouldn't have noticed the touchdown at all. I rolled my shoulders, creaked my neck, stretched the stiff out of my legs. Deep breath. Clear mind. Ready.

  Still, my legs were a tiny bit shaky when I unbuckled and stood. No matter what I tried, I could never get my mind away from the idea that I was going into battle.

  Munging stupid. I was an envoy. Nobody shot at an envoy. My guns were just for show.

  In my experience, envoys came in two flavors, the thin, thinking types who talk softly, and the big, burly types who carry lots of guns.

  I wasn't big, or burly, but the guns I could do.

  I'd taken three, my new M3 pistol, one of a pair I'd gotten as replacements for the one slagged on Remba. The M3's solid weight felt good in my side holster. I liked heavy pistols, and the M3 was one, a semi-automatic firing a 20-gram bullet from an 11 mm bore. It made a big bang, and that was often enough to get people to cease and desist.

  For backup, I'd taken my Hurmer sand-gun. A small, squat, compact sub-machine gun, it wasn't much for range. I could hit a half-crouch target with the M3 at a hundred meters. With the Hurmer, I'd have to spray and pray.

  On the up-side, each of its power packs held a thousand ionized micro-pellets and weighed in at just over a kilo. I'd debated leaving my load-out at that, two guns being plenty, and heavy, but decided against it. If I was doing gun-toting and dangerous, I needed something a bit more impressive.

  So I'd taken my slimline.

  The slimline was an assault rifle, custom built by a friend. There had been five originally, one for each of us. The first one had been lost in a river on Shaya. I had mine, and one other.

  I stopped myself from flying into that void of thought. Old memories, and bad ones. Focus on the present.

  The slimline was fast-firing, steady, light, and accurate. 60-centimeter barrel in a perforated barrel shroud. Clever bullpup design, the bolt pressing on an elongated action spring, never striking the backplate. Once you fired, it would keep the recoil to a steady force. Correct once, and it would be incredibly accurate, grouping the 5 mm rounds into a tiny pit on the target. Beat talking softly any day.

  Besides, talking softly wasn't my style.