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Chapter 34


“Peace is so attractive, yet strength is obtained only through conflict.”


Devlin Sinclair-Maru, Integrity Mirror


The dogwatch cleared the bridge and the hatch shut behind them. Susan Roush settled in and checked through all key systems. She had not yet slept, keeping an eye fixed on Tanager’s instruments even from her cabin, but she felt fine. She felt perfect.

“Sensors, put the Delta Three station and all satellites up on the main,” Roush commanded.

“Yes, c-c…, yes, satellites and station,” Che Ramos stammered, unsure how to address Roush after she had identified herself as “captain” with the Guard lieutenant on the previous watch.

Tanager torched into a far orbit as the Delta Three station fell slowly behind the bright disk of planetside. Only two satellites still held angles to observe Tanager’s motions, and Roush worked the problem to give the Marine drop team a chance at dropping into the well unobserved.

Roush studied the angles carefully before forming another short message in her UI, sending it to Major Mahdi.

“Nav, prepare our roll.”

“Prepare to roll,” Julie Yeager repeated.

Roush studied the satellite positions again. One fell away behind them, down deeper in the well. It would still possess an angle of observation on Tanager no matter what they did, but Roush intended to sink it as close to the horizon as she could, just in case it aimed sensors on Tanager; someone down there as paranoid as Roush was herself.

Roush watched until the angles nearly aligned. “Nav, roll, full rotation speed.”

Tanager flipped, now speeding high above Delta Three planetside, aft end first.

Roush sent a final message back to Major Mahdi before commanding, “Nav, light ’em up. Twenty-gee burn.”

“Twenty-gee burn,” Julie Yeager said, and Tanager’s main thruster torched back into life, a white-hot flare illuminating the dayside of Delta Three planetside, slowing the ship. Incidentally, the satellite upstream received the blinding torch face-on. If any lens aimed at them, they received the dazzling inferno of deceleration, and little else.

“Ops?” Roush snapped.

“Eight reentry spikes away,” Phillipa Baker said.

There was nothing more that she could do for the Marines, so Roush turned her attention to her own approaching trial.

“Sensors, keep a weather eye out-system. We don’t want an enemy cruiser creeping up on us. Weps? Go to manual on your dry-side point-defense turret.”

Pennysmith started at the strange order. “Uh, yes, Commander. I have manual control of the dry-side point-defense hardpoint.”

Commander Roush finished working a calculation as she studied the Delta Three station and their defenses. “Okay, Weps, reset your static aiming point to…zero-two-seven right azimuth, zero-seven-seven positive ecliptic.”

“Zero-two-seven right, zero-seven-seven positive, aye, Commander.”

Roush felt the puzzlement of the bridge overlaying their tension. For the moment she would let them wonder. Soon enough they would see that, despite what the Admiralty thought, she held tricks up her sleeve that they would never imagine.

“Loki, put up optical scans to the main holo, planetside,” Roush said.

“Yes, Commander,” Loki said.

The bright disk of Delta Three planetside overfilled the holo, white smears of clouds patching blue waters far below Tanager. The hazy edge of the terminator swept near, white clouds turning to gray as the Tanager slid from day to night, decelerating deeper into the well. The growing dark below flickered into bursts of blue light, the serpentine clouds glowing, then falling dark.

“Electrical storm?” Lieutenant Pennysmith said.

“Yes,” Roush said, thinking of eight Marines plummeting invisibly down through that hell. Their reentry spikes were little more than tiny stealthed coffins, scattered somewhere through the tumult of cloud and wind.

“Delta Three station is coming around,” Julie Yeager said into the near silence of the bridge.

Any moment now the station would appear over the horizon as Tanager continued to slow, peeking gradually over the globe’s edge as they closed.

Susan Roush took a final glance at the storm-tossed planet below, before focusing all her attention upon her target. Delta Three station began to rise, growing on the distant horizon, and all she could affect lay in the living moment.

Major Mahdi and the drop team were on their own.

* * *

As an Imperial Marine in the modern era, tactical combat operations usually involved days of mission-specific training, more days of planning and VR run-throughs, and hours of equipment preparation…just to have the operation cancelled. Every Marine aboard Tanager knew this, and hoped against hope that, just once, the damned Fleet sods could leave well enough alone.

Major Mahdi’s drop team only endured hours of prep and VR run-throughs, but right up to the point they collected their live ammunition and crammed themselves into the reentry spikes, they each held more fear of a cancelled mission than they did fear of death.

Major Mahdi had supervised the loading of each reentry spike himself. The first two spikes held Wiley and Sparks, his designated marksmen and the only members of the drop team without battledress. The next five spikes each received a battledress-equipped Marine curled into the small void with no room to spare, and Mahdi, clad within the tight embrace of K77, folded himself into his spike last.

Then they had waited, eight Marines alone in constricted isolation, each hearing their own breath and the gentle sighing of the spike life-support systems. At least the six battledress Marines enjoyed the comforts of onboard systems and the enveloping embrace. Wiley and Sparks had only their UI implants and worried thoughts for company.

The message from Roush had pinged into Major Mahdi’s UI, and he in turn pinged the loadmaster. “Twenty seconds, lads.”

Tanager offered just two launch tubes, so by necessity the drop team could only be launched in pairs, with nearly a second between salvoes.

Major Mahdi pictured Tanager’s roll, the aft end coming around, pointing ahead into their path. The main thruster would ignite and…each of the reentry spikes moved. Two at a time they fell into the launcher, Tanager’s gravitation system suppressing the crushing acceleration of the low-signature mag-rail launch.

Then came the long, jarring drop into the well.

With only the most basic optical feeds available, Major Mahdi saw little of Delta Three planetside as they dropped. Dark clouds replaced the void of vacuum, lightning flashed around him, bouncing and shaking as they passed through the soup.

Major Mahdi could not help smiling in exultation, thrilled, fully alive…at least for the moment. His inertial tracker showed his progress through the storm, en route to their target. With a spot of luck, the combination of the reentry spike’s stealth capabilities and the immense electrical storm would allow them to insert unobserved. If not? If some advanced air defense system detected their approach, then any moment now a powerful weapon would lock on, and battledress or not, that would be the end.

They plunged on.

Scanning his optical feeds, Mahdi could not pick out any of the other reentry spikes among the swirling clouds and lightning flashes around him, but this held no surprise; they would be near invisible, just as they were designed.

His inertial tracker chirped as he reached the target coordinates, and he readied himself, his reentry spike plummeting straight down. The altitude ticked off, lower and lower. Major Mahdi checked his optical feeds one last time, seeing nothing but swirling clouds on every side.

The reentry spike chirped a steady warning as he approached separation. Mahdi clenched and counted down the last few seconds. Just moments from impacting the ground, the reentry spike flared open, its carbon wings shooting out, bleeding velocity hard and fast, jerking Mahdi sharply. One more second elapsed and Mahdi shot free, plummeting the final stone’s throw to the craggy rooftop of their target. K77 ate the jarring impact without complaint, collapsing into a low crouch, and the rooftop held the weight without issue.

Mahdi paused, resisting the urge to move. Darkness and windblown rain surrounded his hunched position as K77 learned the environment and implemented its active camouflage. Mahdi cycled through wavelengths of light, scanning three hundred sixty degrees of his surroundings without shifting position. The five lumps of dissipating darkness revealed the presence of his five battledress-clad Marines, their own active camouflage quickly rendering them near invisible. Mahdi’s greatest concern lifted from his chest, and he breathed more easily. If his two marksmen also survived the insertion, he would consider the moment bountiful indeed.

They waited, still, silent, nearly invisible; six hazy forms hunched across a broad rain-swept rooftop.

After a moment Mahdi checked the local signal traffic, found an appropriate carrier wave, and sent a message to Wiley and Sparks. Tortured seconds passed before an encrypted response came back: Both marksmen survived the drop. Mahdi glowed internally for only a moment, thrilled to have all his Marines intact, planetside. This glow fell into ice water a moment later when Sparks’s next message impacted.

PROBLEM. TARGET NOT AVAILABLE.

What? Had the Delta Three defenses detected their insertion and hustled the governor off to some bunker? Had the storm somehow affected the scheduled meeting?

Mahdi sent a standby message to the drop team, and took the chance of accessing the local Nets. The Delta Three capital Nets feed quickly revealed that, indeed, the massive storm altered the schedules of many city services, including the governor’s planned meeting. If the new schedule fell too far outside their operational window, Mahdi knew it could endanger Tanager’s fate upstairs. He needed the governor safely in hand, fast.

Mahdi found the posting and gritted his teeth: sixty-minute delay. Just on the edge of operational disaster.

“Alright, lads,” Mahdi announced on their shielded carrier, “new plan. We’ll scoop him up en route, outside. Here’s his only available path.” He threw up the sat-map image, displaying the route in the UI of each drop team member. “We’ve got a couple klicks to cover fast.”

“No problem for us, sir,” Corporal Hastings said, “but what about the raven element?” The assault element, all in battledress, could traverse a cityscape with ease, but the two marksmen of the raven element?

“They’ll take a cab.”

That clapped a stopper on further comments as the Marines pondered momentarily on the tactical applications of public transportation. None said anything about the risk of abandoning their target’s eventual destination for an unrehearsed interdiction point. What if the target took some unusual form of transport? What if the proposed ambush location held some disqualifying new feature? These were obvious…too obvious to voice. If Major Mahdi chose this web of uncertainty, he had his reasons.

“Let’s jump.”

The wind gusted, sheeting rain obscured the city lights, and six vague figures rose up to their full height and moved. Within the powerful shell of K77, Major Mahdi led the way, his pillar-like legs stretching out, the supple smart-alloy feet greeting and gripping the streaming surfaces with solidity. He accelerated, reaching the roof’s edge and leaping out into the mist, each of his five Marines following directly behind, each leaping just as he had. Mahdi landed on an adjoining rooftop with a lightness that belied the mass of K77, and without a pause he ran on into the night.

* * *

Not far away the marksmen raven team composed of Wiley and Sparks quickly packed up their kit. They occupied the ideal overwatch position, with views down both approaches and a hot power transformer to conceal their thermal signature, but that all became an historical footnote.

They had come down through the soup, just like the assaulters, flared out of their reentry spikes right on target, and landed on an adjoining rooftop.

The moment Wiley and Sparks landed they had exploded into action. Unlike the battledress operators, they utilized no active camouflage systems, clearing the landing zone fast followed standard Marine protocol. Running through the darkness, one eye gazing through the flip-down helmet scope, the other eye sweeping the rain-washed rooftops with unaided vision, they jogged and scrambled into their preselected position behind the hot transformer.

Laying aside their subcompact raid carbines, Wiley had uncased his baby, the R-40 long-barreled mass driver, while Sparks placed their two observation scopes. It was a moment later when they discovered disaster.

Sparks had only began the initial observation sweep when he caught sight of the notice illuminating an old-fashioned marquee scrolling across the entrance to their target structure. Even through the obscuring rain pouring over the intervening street, they could make out the message.

“Shit, Wiley,” Sparks had said, “look.”

A moment later the update had reached Major Mahdi, and a few dejected seconds, sitting in the dark and wet, ended in shock when the major’s plan change reached them.

“A cab? Catch a cab to our ambush site?”

So here they were, loading the R-40 back into its pack, the barrel removed, Sparks collecting the observation scopes while Wiley shouldered his heavy pack. A moment later they clambered their way down from the storm-tossed heights to street level, feeling extremely conspicuous. As Vested Citizens, they could carry any nonfissionable armament that they wished, but two Marines in helmets and shock armor, strolling down a city street with carbines in hand, presented an unfashionable image at best, even on a backwater world like Delta Three.

Still, the few figures moving about the rainy streets walked quickly, with heads down, huddled against the meteorological assault. Wiley and Sparks felt strangely invisible.

When the autocab responded to their hail and pulled to a halt before them, Wiley and Sparks continued to experience a sense of wooden unreality. Streaming water from their helmets and armor, the two marksmen clambered into the cab, gave their destination, and sat down, their tactical scopes folded back from their eyes, their carbines between their knees. Neither could sit properly due to the bulky packs filled with mass-driver rifle components, ammunition, and other lethal goodies, but the cab set off through the streets regardless.

Warm air blew gently in their faces, drying the water, and soft music began to play. Sparks turned and looked at Wiley’s pinched expression in the semi-light. When they planned this operation, up in the bowels of the Tanager, they could never have imagined a moment such as this.

“Tactical cab experts,” Wiley said.

Without turning, Sparks replied, “Stow it, arsehole.”

Wiley started at Sparks for a moment, water dripping down his face, before he began to chuckle. The chuckle built into a laugh, its sheer gusto becoming infectious. Sparks’s wooden expression melted, his lips twitched as Wiley continued to laugh, and after a moment he began laughing despite it all.

The autocab continued through near-deserted streets, its headlamps cutting white beams through the downpour, and inside its warm interior two deadly Imperial Marines roared in laughter.


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Framed