During the battle Phoenix had deployed a scattering of countermeasures. It wouldn’t take long for military-grade sensor array to sort through it, but they didn’t need long.
The battle served two purposes. Get past the picket ships and mask the insertion team.
Hammerhead accelerated hard for the surface, burning a streak across the black and breaching the upper atmosphere. Just below the stratosphere two drop pods launched. A dummy and one with the team and their equipment.
Even if the ORA penetrated the sensor jamming, the Intelligence Bureau designed the pod with stealth as their primary objective for the recon marines.
In the chaos of two attacking ships and noise from the excessive radiation, it would be a miracle to detect an indiscreet object with no emissions, which used old school tech to slow its descent.
***
Yuri sat upright. Finally it was show time. The Commander gave the signal.
“—the barn is open. Launch!”
With that, Yuri flipped the throttle and surged out of the hangar bay on a steep orbital insertion angle towards the planet.
He keyed open the comms to the others on the cargo deck. “Hang on! This will get fun when we hit the outer atmosphere.”
The auxiliary craft shook, streaming through the first two stages of entry and into the stratosphere. The tactical board quickly populated with targets of opportunity.
First, the pathetic ground defenses surrounding the target structure, then whatever detection systems on the surface the computer could identify.
The ORA bastards couldn’t have been operating here long. Similar to the wormhole, other than the large amount of ships, they didn’t have much of a physical presence. Which could only mean their expedition near the wormhole was very recent.
“Good luck gentlemen. I’ll see you when I see you.”
Yuri flipped the switch and the drop craft deployed.
He then headed for the first missile emplacements. They hadn’t yet overcome the emission noise Phoenix put out. Good.
He strafed them with railguns and pulled away for another pass.
Nothing like flying in an atmosphere!
Warning alarms blared.
Damn. He had counted . . . what was it the Commander would say when you . . . oh yeah chickens. He’d counted his chickens before they hatched. Missiles rocketed towards Hammerhead.
The point defense would handle those no problem.
The first explosion boosted his confidence. One of twelve missiles down. He banked hard to port and several seconds later the missiles blew by and began their turn.
More alarms—another launch from the surface.
Soon the missiles would have enough and would communicate amongst themselves to foil his evasive maneuvers. Banking hard from a pursuing cloud of missiles would only reveal another cluster which had maneuvered ahead to intercept.
He released as much electronic noise towards the flanking missiles as he could. They passed harmlessly by but he wouldn’t be able to do that again. While he dodged, weaved and confused, it gave the point defense more time to shoot them down.
This place had to have a power source. No mobile planet-side base could power military grade weapons systems without an equivalent power source nearby.
Finally, the computer located it through the enemy’s own efforts to hide it. It’s what he’d been hoping to neutralize before he was forced to disengage.
Several plasma cannons opened up. Not easy to avoid those. The ionized plasma blasts slammed into Hammerhead. Several nearby missiles decided they weren’t going to get any closer and detonated. The shaped charges exploded only a few dozens of meters away.
He turned into the power source. It’s so close. The missiles had corralled him now. He wasn’t getting out of this. He would make sure the team on the ground had a fighting chance in case they encountered a hardened structure they couldn’t enter without heavy weapons.
He held his course.
His final railgun burst emptied the magazines and destroyed the power source. Several explosions bobbed the craft in several directions at once. He didn’t have any tungsten slugs left. Not a lot of room on the small craft for munitions. Phoenix wouldn’t even have enough to spare him any reloads.
The hostile missiles closed for the final intercept, soon they would fire a final burn to max out their speed and mitigate any sudden evasive on his part.
They never reached.
The approaching missiles from all around vanished in fireballs, the concussive blasts rocking the small craft.
The comm blared.
“Flaps.” It was the Commander. “We won’t be able to cover you any longer. We’re jumping to engage the other two vessels, disengage and return to the ship. No more crazy stunts.”
“One damn minute, Commander. I was busy. Disengaging and returning to Phoenix.”
A glance at his board told him the impending missiles of his doom were gone. Phoenix obliterated them from orbit with a precise barrage. He’d done all he could for the team.
He accelerated into the stratosphere and into orbit.
***
Lee gripped his harness. His fingers felt numb.
He did another quick test and adjust of his armor’s command functions. He could control the HUD and the activation of auxiliary suit functions using eye movement and blinks.
His hand rested on his new projectile sidearm. He’d based the new design on rail-fired weapons. It was powerful enough to penetrate armor. The only issue was the barrel overheated after eight shots.
On his left hip, he carried the same gas powered grappler he’d “borrowed” from a rescue worker on Atlas. He never went anywhere without it.
“Good luck gentlemen. I’ll see you when I see you!” Flaps said.
With that their insertion pod launched from the access bay of Hammerhead and plummeted towards the ground at unsafe speeds.
The kind of unsafe for anyone who desired to live long and prosper.
Sergeant Dawes clearly wasn’t bothered. The marine looked around with wild eyes. “Oh yeah! Faster!”
The vibration was unbearable. Lee could dampen the sound to his ears all he wanted, but he couldn’t dampen the vibrations transmitted through the craft into his armor.
“Sergeant! We can’t go faster, there’s no propulsion. We’re free falling!”
The marine grinned. “I know! Isn’t it great?!”
Lee twisted his mouth into a frown. Both corporals on either side of Dawes were grinning the same way. Lee leaned his head back and squeezed his eyes shut. This atmosphere diving thing isn’t for me. He’d prefer to face an army of soldiers in a duel to the death.
“We’re coming up on the drop zone,” Corporal Chen said, monitoring his handheld device.
“Hold until the last threshold,” Sergeant Dawes said.
Lee’s eyes shot open. “Sergeant, I don’t want to be a puddle of mush on some forsaken tundra planet.”
“No worries, Lieutenant.”
Lee shook his head. No worries? You should be worried!
The altitude to the drop-zone plummeted. Three parachutes would arrest their descent. Lee wasn’t sure all the drama was necessary. There’s no way anyone could detect this obscure pod through the mayhem in orbit. Not judging by what they’d learned so far of the infrastructure deployed on the planet below. That and Flaps’ theatrics above. Still the marine was intent on pushing this drop to the limit.
The pod was tearing itself apart! Lee swallowed. “Sergeant…”
“Stand by.”
The readout on Lee’s heads up display showed thirty thousand. Twenty five thousand—the numbers like seconds ticking to his death. After everything he’d been through, all that might be left of him is mush.