This is part 4. Click here for part 3.
The Bad Egg rattles around us while we wait. We shiver and sweat, waiting for a quarter of hour like this. Cooking in our seats. Each of us enduring the hurry up and wait and pre-combat jitter bugs in his own way. I’ve assigned targets and objectives to each of the teams; my first, Johansen’s second, and Kelly’s third herd.
The whole Bad Egg rings like a bell. Her mounted autocannon open-up upon our LZ in retaliation. Deafening even over the roar of a fusion torch in atmo. That’s normal, reassuring even. Less normal is the sickening stomach heaving lurch of the whole damn dropper as we take another hit with a resounding clang.
“Smitty, get your Marchers of my boat yesterday!” The Old Man yells in my ears. The bay lights go from red to green, just like that. The bay ramps are still lowering, but I can I see tracers in the sliver of sky already. I hit my command override push to send to the entire company.
“Hussars! Drop drop drop!” I send.
Without waiting for any response, I hit the master release and hit the drop ramp with Astrid’s shoulder to push it down. The hydraulics scream in protest and black fluid jets out, spraying my ride, but fuck it. Then I’m free-falling and I hit my booster jets and e-gravy. I jink like mad as streams of tracers bend toward Astrid. The ground grows ever larger, and Astrid reminds me of the altitude.
“Low altitude warning. Pull up. Pull up.”
Along with Astrid’s bitching Betty, I can hear the air guard going nuts over the radio. Bandits high, air breathers tally count two-zero and growing. And they’re slinging hypersonics at the Egg. Not my circus not my monkeys. As much as I don’t want to walk home, I can’t do anything about that fight. Besides my threat board just lit up like a Christmas tree; radar track, radar lock, laser warning, thermal bloom, everything.
Astrid is calmly chants in my ears, “Lock on warning. Lock on warning. Evasive maneuvers suggested.”
Threat buzzers ringing in my ears go from the low growling warning tone to the high-pitched buzzer of missile launch alert so fast the sound has Doppler shift. I think this might be an ambush. I cut my boost and the e-gravy and just let Astrid fall out the air. I can see contrails closing in like predatory fish and I lose with my gun pod and missile defense mode. Twenty-three-millimetre tracers stream out to intercept the incoming contrails and I’m rewarded with a fireworks display worthy of Hegeomony Day.
My little rotary twenty-three-millimeter auto-cannon gunpod spits fire. The firecon is slaved to the threat radar in a poor man's goalkeeper MDS. Thanks to on demand smart fusing, my shells can roughly approximate a proper flak burst too. I let the computer fend off the missiles, while I take in the whole cluster fuck at once. My hud is alive with threat markers. Missiles in the air, air breathing jets up high, and what looks like a battalion’s worth of ground contacts. I do not have warm and fuzzies.
I plummet to the ground amidst a ripple of firecrackers that trace a line in the air towards me and Astrid. I hit my maneuver jets and jink past the worst of fragmentation and still active seekers, which fly on by before self-detonating. Thank God for the small mercy of fighting cheapskates who haven’t splurged on smart missiles.
"Critical altitude warning. Impact immanent. Pull up. Pull up," warns Astrid.
I slap the e-gravy back on, and not coincidentally the inertial buffer, and then juice the boosters just in time. Now I'm skimming the deck, crashing through tree limbs, all without pulling enough gees to hurt, too much.
“Hussars! Sound off! Who's still alive out there?" I send.
A technical mounting an anti-aircraft AC takes a crack at me. Tracers stream past my cockpit, butt puckering close but no cigar. I flush my thigh mounted six- packs at the general area. FASCAM submunition bomblets set on to whom it may concern. That ridgeline ripples with explosions that shake the trees, and then there’s a nice bright orange explosion from ICE vehicle brewing up. Then I swing behind another ridgeline and settle down to let the tubes re-cycle and start organising this cluster fuck of a turkey shoot. It remains to be seen, who are the Turkeys? Us or them.
Drop pod scenes never get old and this one is particularly well done. Hoewver... Substack could benefit greatly by allowing the <abbr> HTML tag. C'mon man, even I don't know what MDS is supposed to stand for!