Tempus Fugit

Drop

Grimly nodding, General Nivim Barkada took in a long breath through his mouth and let it slowly go out his nose.  Then he was turning to his waiting commanders.

“The word is given.”  He rasped, his demeanor once again resolutely professional.  “Time to begin our landing!

Aggregate carriers, holding heavy equipment and soldiers, were large vessels themselves, like the cruisers.  But, where the cruisers were slender and fast, the carriers were broad and slow, forced to use a flotilla of smaller destroyers and fighters as protection as they lumbered into position.  From massive bays in their bellies, the carriers would deploy the battle shuttles that ferried heavy equipment and supplies to the surface in rapid drop fashion.

And from their sides, each had long rows of four metre in diameter ports where the waves of drop shock troops would be deployed in individual armored suits.  Each suit was designed as a self-contained, four legged assault platform.  While serving as primary modes of mobility, those four legs also used powered hydraulics to flatten out and form the suit’s egg-shaped drop pod, complete with ablative armor.

Once on the surface, the legs would crack open like a giant egg, compressing and lifting the platform off the ground.  There the pilot sat in the cockpit, with a large, mounted recoil-less energy cannon as a primary weapon.  They also could access a series of cutting blades and concussive pneumatic battering rams set in the leading edge as siege equipment.  A quad of auxiliary rotors and thrusters set into the rear edge provided short range flight and maneuvering.

Checking over his suit, Nivim made sure it was ready for drop with the rest of his command.  His officers would be well distributed amongst all the drop clusters, to avoid too many of them being lost to ground batteries, hopefully largely inoperative, thanks to the quantum cannons.

“General, carrier wing is in position to drop.”  The carrier’s navigator abruptly announced over the pod bay’s communication array, loud enough to carry over the sound of suits being prepped.

“Acknowledged.”  Nivim replied, pitching his voice so the array could pick it up and relay it up to the carrier’s command deck.  He took hold of a pair of handles set into the roof above his pod’s carriage to insert himself through the top, the pod laying on its back.  Once inside, he pulled on his tactical helmet, which would feed him data and enhance his senses in battle and proceeded to lock himself into the suit’s cockpit.

That done, he thumbed his suit’s communication link to active.

“Navigation, begin your run.  Drop heavies first, then pods three minutes after.”

“Acknowledged, general.  Beginning drop run.”  And Nivim felt the carrier’s engines change tone as it picked up speed in preparation to skip through the planet’s upper atmosphere.

There, the shiver that announced they had hit the atmosphere at speed, the increased particle density slamming into the carrier’s shielding and slowing her down.  Then the twitch of the first load of heavy drop ships leaving the carrier’s belly bays, each wave shifting her slightly in her path.   That was followed by the rapid fire sound of the pod carriages snapping into position before each pod was vaulted out into space.

Hearing that, Nivim unconsciously braced.  And, a heartbeat later, was punched down into his cockpit seat as the carriage locked onto his pod then used a combination of coherent energy pulses against the top and a sling shot action by the carriage to hurl the pod into space.

Clear of the carrier, Nivim felt gravity momentarily depart, leaving him hanging in his suit’s harness.  In that instant his suit’s drop display flickered to life, a coherent slab of light displaying his immediate surroundings.  Just in time to roll and look back at the carrier that had just discharged his pod as a massive ground to space missile blew through its shields and hammered into its starboard thruster assembly with a flare of light and a ripple of concussion.

That concussive wave flipped him back over as it washed by him.  Then his pod hit the atmosphere with a jerk and a downward twist and Nivim was dropping towards the surface at hypersonic speed.

Like a meteorite shower, they lit up the sky, the drop pods quickly biting into the atmosphere thanks to stubby air brakes that deployed as soon as they made their first skip into the thickening gas envelope surrounding the planet.  Pulled out of space by those breaks, they then screamed downward, the friction from the atmosphere burning away the ablative armor.  Braking thrusters then burned hard just before the pod struck the ground, slowing it barely enough to survive impact.  Still, it hit hard, each one digging itself into the ground with the force of its relentless fall from orbit.

The thrusters fired again to clear space around the pod’s base then, with soft whines of moving machinery, the legs retracted to their primary size and extended to lift the pod off the ground and expose its pilot, which then began to work to mount their cannon on the swivel installed for that purpose.  That done, the suit began to advance like a giant mechanical crab, jump rotors humming and energy cannon swinging back and forth, looking for targets.  They weren’t long in coming.

While the orbital bombardment by the quantum cannons had effectively knocked out most surface defenses, missiles like the one that had hit the carrier’s thrusters few and far in between, it hadn’t destroyed the planet’s ground forces.  Which, in a surge of deadly intent, they appeared out of underground bunkers, fired steadily at the advancing armor suits.

“Commanders, form suit units up on the rams.”  Nivim ordered, unconsciously ducking as a spray of coherent plasma blasts went streaking by just overhead.

“And have your mortars focus on those bunkers.  I want them dust now.”

Multiple legs working like a giant armored centipede, one of the heavy pieces of mobile armor Nivim had called a ram, rumbled by, a brace of energy cannons on top firing steadily at the thinning line of defenders it advanced towards.  It was already surrounded by a halo of armor suits, the individual soldiers adding their weapon fire to that of the larger tank.  A heart beat later the air was screaming as mortar rounds began punching through space to drop in on reinforced underground emplacements.

Seeing that with both his eyes and watching the data stream over his HUD, Nivim nodded in grim satisfaction as reports of successful landings all across the planet’s surface began filtering in.  They had a toe hold.  Now, to extend.

“All forward units, advance.”  He growled, taking hold of his suit’s swivel cannon to trigger off a quick burst at a cluster of enemy troops that were trying to make a stand outside of a blown out bunker.

“I want all forces within designated target city perimeters in five minutes!”