by CH Gideon
How the hell did Kong get his intel?
3
Drill, Baby, Drill
“Bonhoeffer Control, this is Dragon Actual,” came Xi Bao’s voice over the control room’s speakers. “LZ is clear and ready to receive the package.”
“Roger, Dragon Actual,” Chief Rimmer said, giving 2nd Lieutenant Andy “Podsy” Podsednik the thumbs-up to commence deployment of the package.
Podsy raised the CAC as soon as Rimmer gave the go-ahead. “CAC, this is Drop Control,” Podsy said urgently. “LZ is clear, and we are requesting fighter escort for Operation Red Rock.”
“Copy that, Drop Control,” came the reply from Lieutenant Colonel Moon, the Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Commander of the Interceptor Group, or CIG. The IG was comprised of both void fighters and aerospace fighters attached to the Terran Armor Corps Assault Carrier, giving the Bonhoeffer another versatile layer of defense. “Escort launch in six minutes.”
“Acknowledged,” Podsy said as a sudden flurry of activity arose at the other end of the drop-deck’s control room. “Six minutes,” he confirmed before muting his mic and moving toward the anxious crews at the heart of the commotion.
“Report,” Chief Rimmer demanded before Podsy felt compelled to do likewise.
“The Zero’s drop-wing is having trouble with the new load profile, Chief,” replied one of the petty officers in frustration.
“I thought we flash-loaded the profile directly into the flight control system,” Rimmer growled as he pulled up the relevant data streams on a nearby workstation.
Looking over Rimmer’s shoulder, Podsy quickly realized what had gone wrong. “You need to deactivate the diagnostics,” he explained, leaning forward to point out a small cluster of numbers. “Those are the wing’s presets, which haven’t been changed since the Zero underwent its most recent refit eighteen years ago.”
“He’s right,” Rimmer said through clenched teeth. “Ever since they bulked up the Zero’s forward armor, the wing’s been set to the modified front-heavy profile. The only way these figures could have gotten in there is if an auto-reset process started returning profile variables to the hard-coded defaults. Here…” Rimmer grunted, tapping out a series of commands on the virtual interface before declaring, “It should be good to go now. Re-flash the new profile and we won’t miss our drop window. Do not make me look like an asshole right now,” he barked.
“Yes, Chief,” acknowledged the petty officer.
Podsy made his way back to his original station, where he double-checked the drop-wing’s flight profiles. The wing was designed to be plugged directly into the Bahamut Zero’s systems, which would control it during deployment. But the only way to deploy their sensitive, mission-critical package to the surface was to use the Zero’s deployment wing as a modified descent-control system.
Podsy had helped Styles and Rimmer develop the new program, but as the moment of truth drew closer, his confidence in their preparations began to wane.
“Approach trajectory achieved,” reported Chief Rimmer in a raised voice. “We drop in two minutes.”
The seconds ticked down as the steady stream of status reports came back green, until the Bonhoeffer was in position to deploy the package.
“Red Rock drop in five…four…” Chief Rimmer called, “…one…drop!”
Podsy watched as the Bahamut Zero’s purpose-built deployment wing detached from its bay. Instead of the Zero nestling between its collapsed wings, the deployment platform carried a custom drop-pod kludged together from parts of six damaged drop-cans deemed unfit for combat duty.
It had taken teams of fifteen fabricators twelve days of round-the-clock effort to prep this special drop-can with the equipment necessary to protect its precious cargo during transit. The entire mission hinged on this drop going by the numbers, and for the first fifteen seconds of the wing’s flight, that was exactly how the op went.
With ten of the Bonhoeffer’s aerospace fighters moving into a diamond formation and racing ahead of the drop-wing just as they had done during the Bahamut Zero’s deployment back on Shiva’s Wrath, the package was finally in the pocket and en route to the surface.
Suddenly an alarm began to sound. “Attitude is creeping out of alignment,” declared the same PO who had discovered the drop-profile error. “Our drop trajectory was zero-point-zero-four degrees out of alignment.”
“Compensate with the wing’s auxiliaries,” Rimmer ordered, his voice taut as he worked his own remote console. “Light engines five through eight and burn until we’re back in the bullseye.”
“Firing engines five through eight,” acknowledged the PO, and the drop-wing’s attitude stabilized as it descended toward the LZ. It took several seconds of continuous burn before—thankfully—the correct approach vector was reestablished, and the package was back on course for a clear landing.
“I’ve got a pressure drop in the main cabin,” reported a second PO.
“How fast?” Rimmer demanded, his eyes fixed to his own display.
“Half a millibar per second,” replied the PO.
“We blew a few welds,” Rimmer said dismissively. “We were planning to vent that pressure on approach anyway. Adjust the primary burn profile to compensate.”
“Compensating,” the flight control PO acknowledged, while Podsy surreptitiously shadowed his efforts and double-checked his work, albeit far slower than he would have liked due to the computer access restrictions he was still saddled with.
True to his word after Shiva’s Wrath, Colonel Li had restricted Podsy’s computer core access to the sub-net DI systems only, which made most virtual tasks borderline impossible to complete in a timely manner. But Podsy had made peace with the punishment, especially after Colonel Jenkins’ ingenious ploy to trick the Bonhoeffer’s CO into pinning lieutenant’s bars onto Podsy’s collar.
“Approach is green,” Rimmer called as the package fell through the nearly-nonexistent atmosphere toward the reddish planet.
Deploying the collapsible wings in the thin atmosphere would barely slow the can’s descent, but every last micro-gee of deceleration had been accounted for. Precisely on schedule, the wings unfurled and the package’s descent fractionally slowed.
“Prepare to fire primaries on my mark,” Rimmer commanded, waiting several seconds before declaring, “Mark!”
The drop-vehicle’s braking engines burned with enough force to kill any human inside the vehicle. There was no gentle way to deliver this cumbersome package, so only machinery had been loaded.
The main engines burned for so long their manifolds turned bright orange and warning alarms began to flicker across the various control monitors.
“Steady on,” Rimmer intoned as beads of sweat ran down the face of virtually every person present, including Podsy. “Six more seconds,” Rimmer declared. “Four…three…two…one. Cut it!”
The primary engines ceased firing, and the package cleared the yellow zone. At this point during a Zero drop, the wing would level off and give the battle mech a constant altitude from which to fall the rest of the way to the surface. This drop package was considerably less maneuverable than the Bahamut Zero, though, which meant they needed to bring the wing as close to the ground as possible before detaching.
The package fell steadily through the yellow zone at a speed of just over two hundred kph, and when it kissed the red zone, Chief Rimmer declared, “Detaching package!”
The custom drop-can detached from the wing, which burned its drive rockets at maximum. The expansive wing missed a brush with the surface by less than three hundred meters before it pulled up and began to climb back to its retrieval altitude.
Meanwhile, the drop-can’s braking motors erupted in a hellish blaze, sending billowing clouds of vapor and exhaust skyward as it finally touched down less than a hundred meters from the bullseye. The touchdown’s deceleration was rated at eighty-three gees, which was well below the 120-gee limit for the most sensitive equipment aboard the can.
“Touchdown!�
�� Rimmer declared, igniting a chorus of whoops and cheers from the control room. Podsy wiped the sweat from his brow and even managed to join in the jubilation for a moment before raising the CAC.
“CAC, this is Drop Control,” Podsy declared. “The package has arrived, and deployment platform is on rendezvous course.”
“Copy that, Drop Control,” acknowledged the CAC comm officer. “Good work.”
“All right,” Xi called over the battalion-wide, “let’s unpack this can and get moving. All Red Rock team members, proceed to the drop-can. How’s my highway coming, Thrasher?”
“The road’s clear for thirty-two kilometers, Captain,” replied the battalion’s dedicated minesweeper. “I think I see a few palm trees in the distance,” he added jokingly.
“You’re not getting a psych exemption that easily, Thresher,” Xi chided with a grin.
“It was worth a try, Elvira.” Thrasher chuckled.
“Wise man once said ‘do or do not, there is no try,’” Xi scolded.
“What is that, some fortune cookie wisdom?” Lieutenant Winters wondered.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Ford groaned. “Does nobody know the classics anymore?”
“Just you and me, Forktail.” Xi snickered.
“You know you give me nightmares when you talk like that, Cap,” Ford said with mock fear as Trapper’s infantry moved to secure the drop-can.
“That makes two of us, Lieutenant,” she replied half-seriously.
“Wait, wait,” Winters said as though receiving an epiphany. “I remember. Little green puppet guy, yeah? Kind of a weird voice?” he ventured while the first of the industrial-scale vehicles disembarked the drop-can.
“Thank God,” Ford said in relief. “I was afraid you were beyond hope.”
“Part of the Disney empire. Name was Kermit, right?” Winters deadpanned, causing a riot of laughter to erupt across the channel.
“Jesus Christ!” Ford exclaimed. “I can’t believe I fell for that.”
“Chin up, Lieutenant,” Xi said in a tone of patently false conciliation. “One of these days we’re bound to find someone to replace you as the butt of every joke.”
“Don’t count on it.” Winters snickered. “He’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
“Glad I can be the entertainment center for the battalion,” Ford grumbled.
“All right, enough chatter,” Xi said after the last of the three industrial haulers had emerged from the drop-can. “Red Rock One, are you in position?”
“In position, Elvira,” acknowledged the first team of excavation specialists.
“Red Rock Two, sound off,” Xi continued.
“Red Rock Two is ready to roll,” replied the second team’s leader.
“Red Rock Three, acknowledge.”
“Team Three ready to go,” said the third team leader after several seconds’ delay.
Xi rolled her eyes, muting the mic as she annoyedly muttered, “Civvies…” Unmuting the mic, she said, “All right, people, let’s roll out. 1st Company, we take point. 2nd Company, double-column escort formation centered on the package. Last Company, bring up the rear…as always.”
The battalion began to move out in a column, with the trio of heavy equipment movers at the center of the elongated formation. On the backs of those three transport vehicles were the various components needed to assemble one of the most powerful tunnel-boring-machines ever designed by humanity. It could cut an inclined four-meter-diameter tunnel through a kilometer of soft stone in two hours and had all the necessary equipment to excavate that much waste to a depth of twenty kilometers before the pace would slow significantly.
Now that the TBM was on the ground, Xi’s first job was to escort it to the dig site a full day’s ride from the LZ.
But she still had a rogue Terran colony to address, and she doubted they would be happy about her destroying one of their fortresses earlier in the day.
4
Counterattack
“There it is, ladies,” Xi declared when the most notable feature on the Brick came into view. “The Gash.”
Stretching in a nearly straight line five hundred kilometers long, the Gash was a canyon formed by an asteroid strike tens of millions of years ago. The crust of the Brick was so brittle and dry that the impact’s shockwave, centered nearly four thousand kilometers away, had caused such a violent upheaval of the world’s crust that it had torn this twenty-kilometer-deep, hundred-kilometer-wide wound in the planet’s surface.
The north rim of the Gash was as sheer as any rockface on Earth, while the southern rim was rubble-strewn and pitched between twenty and fifty degrees. Climbing down that grade, even at its least treacherous points, would take balls of steel.
Fortunately, the Terran Armor Corps was all metal.
“We’ll reach the South Channel in six hours,” Xi declared. “Keep your eyes peeled for any upstart colonists. The first habitats they set up on this rock eighty years ago were high in the Gash’s south side. While those facilities looked abandoned on the latest aerials, I don’t want to take any chances.”
The Brick’s atmosphere was so incredibly thin that many of the Legion’s support vehicles were incapable of navigating it. Combined with gravity that was eighty-five percent of Earth-norm, it was impossible to deploy most aerial support vehicles from the ground. Missiles functioned perfectly well, and artillery was even more potent here than in environments with thicker atmospheres due to diminished drag on the shells in flight, but drones of any stripe were completely useless. That left the Bonhoeffer’s eighty-four mixed fighter craft as the only potential aerial support available to the Legion during its deployment on this particularly desolate world.
Xi hoped she would not have to call on those fighters, and had painstakingly crafted her battalion’s battle plans in order to minimize their reliance on air support. But in her brief career, she had learned that while battle plans were nice, they tended to disintegrate shortly after the first shots were exchanged.
“Captain,” Chief Gordon called, “the ambient radiation is causing some trouble with the onboard data relays.”
“What kind of trouble?” Xi asked in alarm.
“Primarily, we’re getting brief delays in targeting solution plots due to interrupts in the cross-talk between parallel systems,” Gordon explained. “Recommend we request two cans of isolating gel for each mech, and when we receive them, we coat every unhardened vehicle-critical data system in the battalion.”
“I thought the extra anti-rad coating we applied to the hulls pre-drop was supposed to counteract the Brick’s ambient radiation?” Xi scowled.
“Theoretically, it should have,” Gordon agreed, “but I’m still getting enough leakage to cause our systems trouble. Have everyone run radiation sweeps in their cabins, but Elvira’s looks tight enough for us to stay locked down for months before we accumulate enough to give our bodies trouble. It’s the targeting systems that have me concerned.”
“I’ve just added the requisition to the latest form,” Xi assured him, having done so via her neural link with a few seconds’ thought. “Good work, Gordon.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
Another hour passed, during which time the convoy rolled steadily nearer to the Gash. Thrasher led the way, sweeping a path clear of any potential IEDs and thankfully encountering none, while the rest of the column moved at a relative snail’s pace. In another hour, Xi would take First Company to secure the South Channel, their best approach to the Gash’s floor, where the TBM would be deployed.
Then the enemy announced their defiance.
“Incoming!” Xi snapped, her board lighting up with mixed missiles and artillery. “All mechs, Intercept Package Gray. I say again: Intercept Package Gray.”
Acknowledgments streamed in, and the battalion never missed a beat as railguns and anti-missile rockets launched a stream of countermeasures at the inbound ordnance. Explosive shells burst hundreds of meters in the air, intercepted by precision railgun fire.
Missiles were expertly torn down by the battalion’s rockets, and for a moment it seemed like the enemy had just foolishly revealed the locations of over two dozen heavy weapon emplacements.
Then the salvo’s purpose became clear.
“Multiple contacts at knife range!” Styles called over the battalion-wide as a hundred different vehicle signatures sprang to life—some less than ninety meters from the column.
“Engage targets,” Xi barked, spraying her chain guns at anything that moved out to five hundred meters. Two rebel surface drones were torn apart in the opening seconds, while the rest of the column spewed out a terrifying display of close-in firepower. In four seconds, thirty thousand rounds were spat by the battalion’s anti-personnel weaponry, and a hundred SRMs were loosed from their moorings. Fifty surface drones were reduced to scrap metal in those seconds, while the rest unleashed their relatively meager arsenals against the column.
Fortunately, the enemy failed to prioritize the TBM haulers. Unfortunately, a hundred micro-rockets could pierce even the most robust armor fielded by the Terran Republic.
“Blackjack is down,” reported Lieutenant Ford grimly as the light humanoid recon mech was scrapped by a hail of surprisingly effective micro-rockets. Unlike those Xi’s people had received at the plateau fortress, these tiny missiles carried warheads capable of penetrating all but the heaviest armor. Blackjack fell, but the battalion’s guns shredded the remaining drones in knife range before they could add to the butcher’s bill.
Then the second enemy salvo took flight.
“Incoming,” Styles reported, thankfully taking control of battalion communications from his temporary post aboard Cyclops, one of the recent additions to the battalion.
“Intercept Package Gray,” Xi called, but this time the amount of inbound ordnance was triple that of the first flight. Some of this new ordnance originated from points nearly two hundred kilometers from the column’s current spot. “Clear the board,” she snarled, loosing Elvira’s full complement of anti-missile rockets while the battalion’s railguns spat tungsten bolts at the incoming artillery shells. After unloading her rockets, Xi assigned two dozen targets within range of the column’s SRMs. “All crews, engage targets. Fire! Fire! Fire!” she barked as the first inbound enemy ordnance struck the Legion.
