2951-06-28 – Tales from the Service: The Prime August Fiasco

As I hinted last week, the attack on Prime August was a bit of a minor disaster, despite its success. In addition to stronger than expected defenses and a large-scale comms breakdown that was at least partially caused by innovative enemy signals equipment, the attacking force encountered sophisticated enemy deception tactics that split the Marine landing force and isolated each split component of it from the others for many hours after the landing. 

Fortunately, the defenders of Prime August were too few in number to exploit this success. The attack took far longer than planned, but it was concluded successfully, with the Incarnation listening post on the world destroyed.  

My understanding is that the trick used by the enemy at Prime August to degrade Confederated communications technology would not work again, but the precise details were not provided to me either in this account or in any official report I have access to. 

As the last Marines tromped off after their lieutenant toward the perimeter, Kanako Dunai unbuckled his restraints, grabbed the sidearm strapped below his chair, and headed aft to follow them outside. The normal diagnostic routines hadn’t been able to restore the comms system to normal operation, but that was fine; he had been a damage control tech before he’d certified as a pilot, and there was nothing on a strike-rig comms array he didn’t know how to fix. 

The cool night air wafting up through the dropship brought Kanako an eye-watering smell of burnt metal and sweet spices while he rummaged around in one of the lockers for a toolkit. Prime August was a world well suited to human life, but he could tell that whatever vegetation surrounded the landing site would be unbearable as a neighbor, at least for him. Alien pollens and other airborne biomass usually didn’t cause too much trouble for human settlers for the first few generations, but clearly this was one place where first-generation colonists would suffer from hay fever. 

Wiping away tears and slinging the tool-kit over one shoulder, Kanako finally disembarked. Not a single Marine remained in sight, though he couldn’t see very far owing to the near-complete darkness split only by the roving spotlight beams on three dropships. Overhead, a fourth dropship, its lower hull still glowing from re-entry, circled downward toward the field. 

He was halfway up the ladder on the side of his ship when the shooting started. At first, only a few Marine railguns buzzed in the darkness, but soon, almost everyone seemed to be shooting, in almost every direction. Streams of glowing slugs sprayed across the sky, and a few volleys passed dangerously close overhead. 

Cursing, Kanako hugged as close to the hull of his ship as he could. The briefing had not suggested any significant danger at the Alpha landing site. He still had no comms, no way of knowing what was going on; his earpiece was slaved to the ship’s malfunctioning system. Overhead, the circling dropship kicked its engine into overdrive and climbed back for the safety of the open sky. 

After a tense few seconds, the shooting began to tail off, and orange streams no longer stitched the darkness. Kanako wondered what they’d all been shooting at. Prime August was supposed to be a milk-run, at least as far as the landing went; now that panicky voice on his comms on the way down was sounding more and more prescient. Maybe Alpha really was a trap; maybe the Marines would come running back at any moment, a horde of Nate infantry on their tails. 

“Dunai!” 

Kanako turned and looked behind him at a tall, wiry figure waving a hand-lamp. “Sorry Commander. My comms-” 

“Yeah, mine too.” Commander Mesut pointed his lamp back toward one of the other landed dropships. “It’s not the hardware. Some sort of jamming, I think.” 

“That’s impossible.” Kanako started climbing down. “The signal modulator-”  

“Should cycle between frequencies too fast to be totally jammed. I know.” Mesut sighed. “But that woman on the comms-” 

“You heard her too, Commander?” Kanako dropped the last few feet to the ground and adjusted the strap of his toolkit. “I thought-” 

“I heard her. Jensley heard her, and you heard her.” Mesut pointed upward at the fourth dropship once again cautiously spiraling downward. “I think that means he heard her, and everyone who for some damned fool reason went to Beta or Gamma heard her.” 

Kanako frowned. Had every pilot thought the comms outage was their own? That would explain the hodgepodge scattering of the formation just before they’d hit the atmosphere; everyone was either making their best guess as to what was expected of them, or following someone else in hopes that they knew what was going on. “Quite the mess, sir.” 

“Indeed. And now-” Mesut was interrupted by another short volley of railgun fire, this time mostly sprayed into a copse of tree-analogues near the landing zone. “Now the Marines are landed in at least three places, they can’t talk to us, and we can’t talk to them. Which is even worse since we’re supposed to be their long-range relay.” 

Kanako pointed skyward. “The Pumas can relay them. Their circuits are totally different than ours.” 

“Yeah, but the moment they’re clear to come down here, they’re going to be busy blasting whoever the Marines are shooting at.” Mesut waved a hand. "No, I think we’re on our own. We can’t dust off and leave the grunts here, and we can’t just let them wander off in the direction of the objective with no comms, can we?" 

Kanako shook his head. “Not sure we’ve got much of an alternative.” A handful of pilots with sidearms and no comms could hardly expect to make much of a difference in this mess, after all. Even if they dusted off and hovered over the Marines while they pushed forward dropping messages- 

Kanako held up a hand. “Commander, can Michaelis see our spotlights from orbit? 

“On a night like this? Sure. Does that help us?” Somewhere beyond Mesut’s dropship, the fourth ship finally touched down and began to disgorge its  

“Can’t jam visible light.” Kanako shrugged. “If we get all those lamps pointing skyward, I’ll bet there’s a morse-code translator program in the standard software.” 

“And Michaelis would be able to read the signal with their scopes. That only fixes things one way.” 

“Sure.” Kanako hefted his toolbag. “But it’s a clear night. Once I pull my rig’s forward ‘scope and get it aligned, Michaelis or another ship can do the same trick to talk to us. It’ll work until dawn, at least. Hopefully we'll find something better by then.” 

Mesut clapped his hands. “I like it, Dunai. Get started with the scope. Jensley and I will fill in number four over there and work on the lights.”