2951-06-14 – Tales from the Service: The Prime August Drop
Evidently, our account of the last two weeks featuring some new equipment fielded by the Confederated Marines last year coincided with a Marine recruitment drive event taking place in Sol and Centauri, and some in our audience have alleged that we coordinated the delay of this account to coincide with this event. They point to the central role of the new Kodiak machines in this drive and in our reporting as evidence for this point.
Our audience has grown somewhat in the last year, so perhaps many of these people missed my discussion before that of Naval Intelligence embargo rules. I will summarize it here: even if we have a credible account of a new development on the battlefield, we cannot publish it until Intelligence says so. This is part of the terms of our military embed arrangement.
As it turns out, we were given the clearance to begin discussing the Kodiak program several months ago, but we didn’t have any compelling accounts about it to bring to this feed. You can find several images of the machine on our main datasphere hub which were posted last month after a Marine training exercise on Botched Ravi, for example.
Had the Marines asked us to publish an account to coincide with a recruitment drive, we would have done so, but this content would have borne and appropriate label to indicate this arrangement to our audience. This embed team and Cosmic Background corporate both take transparency very seriously.
When the drop-bay doors finally swung open, Kanako Dunai craned his neck up and looked “down” at the world barely five hundred kilometers below. There wasn’t much to see; John H. Michaelis was above the night side of the planet Prime August. A narrow sea that reflected the light of two large moons snaked between two dark continents, hidden here and there by luminous white tangles of cloud. No lights glowed from the surface – at least none Kanako’s eyes could pick out.
According to pre-mission briefings, Prime August had been one of the planets intended for colonization back in 2946, before the Incarnation had smashed nearly every colonial mission on the Sagittarius Frontier. The engineers sent to build a spaceport and prepare the way for colonists had left Maribel just as first reports of hostile attacks on the new frontier had reached that place. Their ship had checked in at the Sagittarius Gate waystation on schedule and, while Confederated Navy forces scrambled to investigate the attacks, it had headed off to complete its mission, never to be heard from again.
Kanako had seen that world once before, of course. As a hangar technician aboard Whitcomb Scourge, he had been present when the Lost Squadrons had visited Prime August, hoping to find those engineers and their equipment, and perhaps to take on supplies and spare parts from the stranded and still unpeopled colony. Those desperate ships and crews had found nothing except an under-construction Incarnation ground-side installation sitting roughly where the engineers had been tasked to set up a spaceport, and Kanako remembered the dejection and despair that seemed to cascade down the ranks all the way to the lowliest technician. That day, it had seemed that the Lost Squadrons were fated to perish.
They hadn’t perished, though. At least, most of them hadn’t. Many good spacers and quite a few good ships had been left behind by the time the survivors rendezvoused with Confederated forces at Sagittarius Gate.
“Two minutes to launch.” Michaelis’s hangar operations officer announced. “All landing craft report ready status.”
Kanako tore his eyes away from the darkly looming world above his head and flicked the switches that would start his final pre-mission checks. Out there with the Lost Squadrons, while cowering at a damage control station while other spacers fought for his life, he’d resolved that if there was to be war, he wasn’t going to fight it as a technician. The day he’d been pulled from the Whitcomb Scourge duty roster, he’d put in a request to be re-certified as a pilot. Now, here he was at the controls of his very own dropship, about to be hurled free of its troopship toward that same Incarnation outpost that had so dismayed him nearly three years ago. Live or die, he would have his fate in his own hands this time.
At least this time, it would probably be live, not die. The briefing had suggested that the base on Prime August was lightly defended and served primarily as a listening post, using a network of gravimetric sensory platforms scattered throughout the system to monitor star drive activity in nearby star systems. Perhaps, if Incarnation sensory technology was sophisticated enough, the installation might be able to gauge activity at Sagittarius Gate itself, barely thirty light-years away. The briefing officer hadn’t said how Seventh Fleet knew it could catch this station by surprise, but apparently that had never been in doubt; not a single Incarnation warship blocked the attack force’s path. The Marines in Kanako’s payload bay were armed for just about anything, but chances were they were up against no more than two hundred Incarnation infantrymen, perhaps with one or two of the dreaded Immortals among them.
The diagnostics completed, and Kanako wordlessly forwarded his slate of green status indicators to the hangar operations center. In front of the ops officer, a huge hologram depicting each of the twenty-four dropships and their six Puma escorts would be going from gray to green. When everything was ready-
“Launch system is armed. Godspeed to you all.”
Ahead of Kanako’s cockpit, the first five launches detached from the deck and fell away toward the world below. A moment later, the next five followed. Unlike the assault transports that most Marine units deployed from, Michaelis was not equipped with a strike-grade launch acceleration system; its hangar could deploy its entire compliment in seconds, but it deployed them at low velocity. It could recover the dropships and escorts almost as quickly, but both of these properties were only any good if space around the ship wasn’t swarming with Incarnation fighters.
The rippling launch finally reached Kanako’s rig. With a thump, the dropship detached from the hangar deck, and the big hangar doors quickly fell out of view. There was almost no need to use thrusters to get on course for the landing site; gravity would pull the assault force down toward the dark surface below of its own accord.
Even before the dropship hit the upper atmosphere, the Marine payload began to grow restless. On the video monitor, Kanako watched them restlessly check and re-check their weapons, moving the huge limbs and fingers of their Rico suits with surprising ease.
The company lieutenant, having comms access to talk to the cockpit, invariably decided to use it. “What’s it look like out there, pilot?” His voice was harsh and gravelly, and Kanako wondered if the man had once suffered some sort of throat injury to get a voice like that.
“Far as I can see it’s quiet. Ops network reports no opposition in orbit or in air.” Kanako tapped a control to wake a display in the bay to show the Marines a sky dominated by blue and green indicators, with not a single red pip in sight. “We’re too far out to know much about ground fire, but I’ll get you down all right.”
“Understood.”
“All drop units be advised.” This was a smooth, quiet woman’s voice – another pilot, as far as Kanako could tell. “Divert to landing zone Gamma. Do not go to Alpha. Repeat, do not go to Alpha.”
Kanako frowned; the woman certainly wasn’t Allison Mesut, his squadron commander. Tiedeman, the escort commander, was a gruff man, and the comms system hadn’t provided an identity for the speaker. “Who is this? On whose authority are we diverting?”
“Alpha is a trap. Heavy ground emplacements on the ridge.” There was no indication the woman heard Kanako’s transmission. “Repeat: go to Gamma.”
Frowning, Kanako queried the comms system for the origin of the transmission on the squadron channel. After a minute of processing, it returned simply “MISMATCH.”
Kanako switched to a direct channel to the squadron lead. “Commander, who’s that on our comms?”
Though he could almost see Mesut’s dropship in formation ahead, he received no answer.