Excerpt: GRIT

It comes with a sound like sliding snow—because in the lower thermosphere, there's not a lot to resound off of. It should come with a sound like thunder. (In a few minutes' time, it will.)
It comes with a smell like plastic, and hot metal—because in the upper mesosphere, there isn't a lot of air to carry ions. It should smell like lightning. It should come with the scent of a burning wind. (Shortly, it is going to.)
The thing is naked and invisible, and it plummets out of the void and into the void with all the grace of an obeliskoid meteorite. It has a jet-black sheen and a long, thin strip of some darkening shimmer, cut through its front like a vein of volcanic glass. It is smooth, and round, and utterly impenetrable. It slips through the armor of the outside of the world, and drops like a black stone in black water.
It is coming.
It is picking up speed.
It is an awful thing: and it is falling to earth.
With a slow rush, with a sudden crash, the air comes, and now the thing is falling with a sound like thunder, and carries with it the scent of a sheer and burning wind. It goes from jet-black to mauve; from deep purple to orange; from fire-storm to friction-bleeding red, and now its tip is glowing, and that vein of volcanic glass looks ready to peel away.
It does. The obelisk splinters and pulls off in strips; they burst with a look like smoke and a sound like crashing hand-claps. They're gone in the space of a second: black dust in black clouds, shortly dashed in the upper-upper wind.
And the obelisk spits out a rod. And the rod keeps right on falling.
It falls straight at first, like an arrow down a well. It catches a cross-wind, it veers off center; it begins to flip, whipping end-to, like a thrown knife, spinning over and over, and faster and faster. Its points cough steam, or smoke, or something else. It pushes against its own momentum, cutting counter-scythes against the spin: bursting, bursting, jet, jet, burst. It stops spinning. The wind whistles around it, straight and narrow by icy files.
The cylinder begins to unravel, and breaks away, and disappears. The chrysalis spits out a man.
And the man keeps right on falling.
There are no clouds tonight, so he is falling without track; there are no lights below, so he is falling without point of reference. The stars above show him where he's come from. The void below yawns hungrily. He points himself, arms gripping pant-legs, gripping legs, gripping hips, locked and loaded around a wire-sprung spine. And he falls.
The sound of sound is, itself, getting louder. He hears the inside of his own ears, his own rushing blood, beneath the rushing wind. He's dropping lower, and louder, and farther, and in the cross-spaces between the plates of his special falling-suit, he can feel the bitter cold of the stratosphere wind—and for the first time, does it occur to him that...he's here? that this is real? that he's twenty miles from impact, and falling at twenty meters a second, and the only thing to stop him is a bag on his back and some cans on his ass?
He flips himself upright, hand at his hip, legs half-cocked like some ninja assassin. He hears the warning tone, and he's counting ten, counting nine... He hears the second tone and he's thinking three, counting two... He feels the notice pulsing down the bones of his ear, and he throws the trigger at his hip, the thing the size of a flashlight, the mine-cart brake-lever that opens the valve on the rear-most can, and disperses its contents throughout the vacuum-pressure ring around his waist.
FIRING!
It farts a pathetic white halo down beneath him, which shoots up around him the next second; it farts another the next, which does the same, and another, and another. It does this thirty times in ten seconds, and then it's done, and he's still falling, and the empty canister comes whipping out like a spent shell—hits him in the back of the head—and the next comes rearing like a chambered bullet.
The beep. The pulse. He throws the switch.
He's falling and the halos are bursting, and for the first time he can start to make out features below. He's throwing the switch and the next can's coming, and he's thinking three, counting two, spotting mountain, throwing the lever, noticing radio tower, throwing the lever, is that an airport?, throwing the lever, throwing the lever, throwing the lever.
He's at thirty-thousand feet and counting, when the pulse sounds, and he throws the lever, and the last can coughs up what it's got, and goes hatchet-cranking off his ass, and into the frantic twilight.
He can hear the wind now; he can hear the hum of the grid below him. He can hear his heart-beat, and the blood rushing.
He can hear himself breathing.
He's at twenty-five-thousand feet and it's nowhere near as high as it sounds, and he's listening for the pulse and wondering why it hasn't come yet; he's at twenty-thousand, fifteen-thousand—if he was in the right city he could see his house from here—and now he's certain it should have come, and he's wondering why it wouldn't; he's at ten-thousand feet and dropping, and his breath is coming ragged, shrieking in his own head.
He's at five-thousand feet and two seconds from screaming when the pulse comes, and he rips the cord, and the two huge cans on his sides give the last great plumes, and two thousand feet and he's falling, and one thousand feet and he's falling, and he's no longer a ninja assassin or a sheer black stone, but a flailing of arms and legs, and he's at five-hundred feet and closing, and he's at four-hundred feet and coming, and the cans are empty, and they whip-crack off his hips, and he's on his own now, and the pulse doesn't come but he knows it should have, and he unplugs the catch on his chest that snaps his bag down off his back, hurtling along on its 200-foot line.
He feels it slam into the ground somewhere below, and start to drag, and he's still falling, and it's 200 ft, and it's 100 ft, and it's 90, and 80 and now he loses track, and he just spots this one rock, and he sees that it's coming closer, and he's going Please God Don't Let Me Hit That Rock, and it's coming, and it's come, and it's gone, and the single can on his back gives one final spit for good measure and then the ground comes up to crush him.
HE HITS and he knows in that first instant that every bone is his body is broken; He realizes two seconds into his roll that he didn't tuck. Where's the bag-line? (and He passed that rock, didn't he?) and the bag-line's wrapped around his thigh; and he's on one shoulder, then the other; and the bag-line's cutting his thigh in half; every bone every bone every bone must be broken;
sees the stars,
WHEELING
sees the horizon
sliding
dirt, sliding, dirt, grinding, dirt all in his mask and clogging his throat; he's choking, and every bone's broken because he had to have hit that rock, because he triggered too early, because the pulse was going to come and he should have waited but he didn't, and now he's dead.
He tastes grass.
He lies dead.
He listens to himself breathe.
He thinks about his life.
He rolls onto his back. He stares at the sky. The sun comes up of a sudden, and it's probably pretty impressive, but all he can do is watch the stars disappear, and take stock of what's here, and what's gone. He's here. He's not gone. No bones are broken, and somehow—impossibly—he is alive.
He breathes in, and out. He lets the cool air rush over his heaving neck, and feels the rising sun on his chest. He breathes in, and he breathes out. He breathes in. He breathes out.
He rolls over again. He tastes Earth. He inhales Firmament.
He pushes himself up on hands and knees—this Neil Armstrong—choking and sobbing (this world-wide hero) staring at the bare dust dirt before him. He's the first man in history to survive an orbital jump, and his first words, without thinking, ingrained forever within the membrane of human history go something like “Fuck.” or “Jesus.” or “Holy shit; there's dirt everywhere.”
He removes his helmet, and lets it roll away.
He takes off his gloves, and puts one finger to the soil.
He scratches out a word, and it goes like this:

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