The Drop II

Continuing on with my little excursion into military scifi.  I just spent almost an hour researching orbital reentry speeds, terminal velocity, g-force, and a couple of other things to make sure that the deceleration was actually proper.  Hope it seems as such.  Oh, random question:  What do you think of the colours for the blog?  Does it make it hard to read?

The pod glided smoothly through the vacuum, having exited the ship.  Avitus could feel the weightlessness, but remained unable to move.  However, it no longer bothered him.  In fact, soon he’d be glad for those straps.  The pod began to vibrate gentry as it entered into the atmosphere, and did so more and more as the gasses thickened, soon violently shuddering him.  So too could he feel the pod begin to rotate.  There were three spines along the pod which burned away as it burned through the atmosphere, rotating it and releasing chaff designed to interfere with targeting computers.

Fully into the atmosphere and the chaff expended, the ride got smoother, and soon Avitus felt the force of three decoys fly off, each with a weak radar signature, and they composed the entire outer shell of the pod, taking away its heat signature as well.  Soon he would be at his target landing zone.

Avitus and the pod he was entombed within jolted violently and started spinning.  Something had managed to hit him and sent him spiraling.It righted itself, no longer turning, just in time to open and eject him.  It broke into pieces, instantly decelerating whilst he continued to rocket towards the ground, still two and a half kilometer in the air.  In the blink of an eye he had fallen a kilometer, and then another, decelerating from approximately 1800km/h in just a four seconds.  His vision began to blur a bit, everything turning grey and his peripherals closing in briefly before returning to normal.

If that much force was put on him much longer, and had he not been trained for such again and again, he would have blacked out, failing to properly land and striking the ground.  His armour automatically charged the Talaria on the back of his suit, which when charged with sufficient energy effectively had negative weight.  The computer did all the math; it slowed him down just enough that he would not break himself into pieces.

Hitting the ground itself was lessened by special attachments onto the bottoms of his boots which collapsed and crunched, absorbing the energy from hitting the ground, relieving hosts stress on the joints of both Avitus and his armour.  Even still he bent his legs at the knees and dropped backwards, rolling onto the ground.  He had observed the site as he descended, but had only few precious seconds to do so, landing in the courtyard of some large building, perhaps apartments.  This is not where he was supposed to land.