Chapter 217: (Foxtrot Niner Two) (1/2)

The multi-role strike hovercraft slipped through the air, dropping altitude quickly. The intact ships of the squadron were smoking, over half of them the battle-screens were down and the particle screens were so overloaded they were flickering and snarling.

Mukstet, pilot of Foxtrot-Niner-Two, lead striker of the squadron due to their unorthodox launch, looked around, the window shields covering the smart-armaglass retracted. The trees were whipping by and so far there hadn't been any Precursors popping up on the sensors.

That could be because our sensors are hashed, he thought to himself. He saw a faint glimmer of sparkling blue and did a slow bank toward it.

The controls were mushy, slow to respond. The two fifty-gallon reactor mass tanks were empty, used to power the afterburners, which meant his fusion reactor was offline. He was running on the auxilary zero-point reactors now and they barely had the power to keep the ship in the air. They were at over 80% heat, which left the alarms pinging in his ear. The hotter they got the higher the impedance and the less power the reactors produced due to the power being converted to heat.

It was a vicious self-sustaining cycle.

Terrans have been able to beat everything but heat, Mukstet thought, dropping his altitude even further. He was barely skimming above the tree-tops now. He glanced around him, doing a visual on the other striker craft. Four of them were streaming smoke, one white, one bluish, the other two black smoke pouring from where the weapon covers had torn free. A glance at the squadron icons showed him that of the twenty strikers besides his all of them were yellow or amber.

”973, can you do field repairs?” he asked over the link.

--need time and mass nano-forges too hot too slushy slushy-- the green mantid sent back along with a picture of a half-dozen green mantids standing on the lid of a top loading clothes washing machine with bubbles pouring out from the edges of the lid. The caption read ”C17H35COONa/H2O!!!!!” Mukstet didn't get it completely but he got the gist.

The blue glimmer came out to be a large lake surrounded by manicured lawns, decorative tree groves, shrubs, and estates for Lanaktallan. There were wrecking equipment near the manors and over half of them were in the middle of being demolished.

”All Foxtrot-Niner elements, all strikers on me, we're going land near the lake and do field repairs,” Mukstet said. ”All dismount strike team leaderss give me a status report on your dismount teams once we're on the ground. Have your green buddies reconfigure your suits for intra-atmospheric combat. My appreciation to your green buddies for keeping everyone alive during our insertion.”

Blinks came back from the squad leaders.

”Foxtrot-Niner-Two, this is Foxtrot-Niner-Twelve, my center-line gravitons are out and my zero-point heat is at 92% and rising. Tell me we're setting down soon,” came Dulketit's voice.

”Five mikes, that's it, just five mikes, Foxtrot-Niner-Twelve,” Mukstet said. ”All squadron strikers, drop speed to two-hundred kay.”

The icons blinked and Mukstet went back to keeping his battered striker in the air.

He managed to get his landing gear deployed and set down on what was obviously a manor's ornate back lawn. The striker hovercraft settled down slowly, bumping, and Mukstet killed the power. The vehicle made a whining sound that slowly went silent. The other twenty striker craft settled down on the lawn, not quite dress right dress but close enough.

Foxtrot-Nine-Seven and Foxtrot-Nine-Eighteen both had fires erupt. Black armored troops jumped out with fire extinquishers, hosing down the fires with white powder.

”How's she look?” Mukstet asked his mantids.

--couple hours need mass good to stop at water you run hoses-- 973 sent back with an image of armored Telkan wrestling umbilicals from the lake to the strikers.

”All right. How's the engineers? You all make it?” Mukstet asked.

--some injured two lost legs three lost bladearms be okie okie-- 973 transmitted back with a sweating smiley face.

”All right. Make sure they get first aid,” Mukstet said. He reached down and popped the umbilical connecting him to Jekib. He turned on the system, feeling cool air flood in. He hadn't realized how overheated he'd gotten during the insertion. He undid his five-point harness and hit the release stud for his neural jack connector.

It felt weird being disconnected from the striker. Light he was lighter somehow. Aches and pains vanished for a second to be replaced by other aches and pains. His shoulders, elbows, wrists, and fingers hurt from the vibration through the stick and how tightly he'd gripped everything.

He closed his eyes, just like he'd been trained to, and took several deep breaths, giving his brain time to synch back up to his body. A count of five, opening and closing his hands each count, and then he opened his eyes again. He reached out and hit the stud on the side to open up the cock-pit side door.

Air rolled over him, smelling of water and alien green things. He could see the dismount strikers spreading out at the pointed directions of Sergeant Kuplo. Some of the scouts were running for the construction equipment, others were opening up panels on the striker craft and pulling out hoses, still others were kneeling down while a handful of troops with the red cross, red crescent, and red square of medical personnel were checking their armor's statistics.

The next two hours passed with a blur. Pulling the hoses out to refill the reactor mass with filtered water, the debris caught by the filters passed to the nano-forges, the greenies making repairs as rapidly as possible. Telkan Marines helped put mass into the hoppers for the nano-forges to tear apart once the creation engines had cooled down and deslushed.

”You get anyone yet?” Mukstet asked Kanpuk, his Technical Specialist operating the com-system.

”No. Tegket's working with the other EW guys to try to cut through the interference, but these Precusors are a lot better at jamming than the other ones,” Kanpuk said. ”So far we've heard some chatter, including a Telkan Marine Heavy Assault Battalion that got dropped into the wrong zone and are protecting a refugee center or ammo dump or something, as well as a couple of Terran Pacific Rim Class warmechs just jumping from the Boop and making landfall via impact.”

Mukstet shook his head. They'd barely made it, he couldn't imagine dropping free fall to planet-side in a three hundred foot tall ten thousand ton mech. But then, those mech guys were a whole different breed of crazy. Mukstet's brother had tried out for the war-mech program and now was the pilot of a heavy assault class mech.

But then, he'd always been a little weird, even before the Terrans came.

”Keep me posted. Let me know if we find anyone that needs close air support once we get the strikers reconfigured for intra-atmosphere work and as much of the field repairs as we can do are done,” Mukstet said. He'd opened the faceplate on his armored vac-rated flight suit and was enjoying the cool fresh air after all the hours sharing Jekib's air.

The Marine Scout armor used a laser to stimulate a small fungus to produce oxygen from CO2 and CO with enough efficency they could operate in total vacuum for months.

That was something that Mukstet had noticed. During comparisons to Lanaktallan equipment, he'd noticed that the Overseers had created all of their equipment under the assumption that everything would run perfectly. Terrans on the other hand, designed all their equipment as if the world was coming to end and whoever was using the equipment was in the worst possible conditions in the worst possible situation.

Which Mukstet was glad for now.

--refabbing ordnance-- 973 reported. --airframe repairs during wing repairs done--

Mukstet looked over and could see the green mantid engineers, in their hard-shell extreme environment armor moving off the wings of the strikers. They'd been forced to weld the wings in the open position to prevent an actuator failure from allowing the wings to slide into the retracted position. Now that they were ground-side the mantids had to cut the welds and smooth the armor again to allow the wings to deploy and shift properly.

”Everyone get something to eat. Sergeant Kuplo, make sure your men take shifts, eat, and get some water into them, that was a rough landing,” Mukstet ordered.

”Yes, sir,” the Scout Sergeant said. ”You heard him, men. Squad leaders, take charge of your squads. Get with me in half an hour and I'll have guard rotations.”

There was a click as Sergeant Kuplo switched to the leadership channel. ”What's the ETA on the strikers being ready?”

Mukstet checked the chron display on his retinal link. ”Eight hours for full repairs, two more to combat capable. We had to strip the ordnance to run the afterburners in vacuum.”

”I'll assign shifts as if its eight hours then, sir,” Sergeant Kuplo said.

”You know I'm just a Private First Class, right?” Mukstet said.

”You're striker a pilot and you're in charge of the squadron, that makes you 'sir', sir,” Sergeant Kuplo said and then shut off the link to stop any more discussion.

Mukstet sighed and went back to overseeing the striker hovercraft being worked on. The weapons were all deployable, able to be rotated back up into the airframe to increase stealth then deployed when live fire time came.

One thing that Mukstet had noticed is that Terrans really liked kinetic weaponry. His striker had two six barrel rotating autocannons, two door guns, and an underbelly deployable cannon. Missile pods, sure, but he noted there wasn't any laser, plasma, or maser systems. All kinetic.

He wondered why that was as he moved around Striker Foxtrot-Niner-Fifteen, noting that the mantids were repairing the pilot side smartglass and had the armor off the nose to expose where they were working on the airframe.

He took a moment to admit to himself that he really really really wished the Terran pilots and dismount leaders had made it off the Boop. He didn't have any orders loaded up, the only scans of the planet were the ones he'd managed to get from orbit and on the way down, and he had no idea of who had even made it groundside and who hadn't.

He was glad to hear at least some of his fellow Telkans had made it groundside. Second Telkan was largely unblooded with the exception of the power armor guys and most of those were in the infantry units.

Mukstet had joined the Marines after fighting on the wall of Log Base Gamma on Telkan-2 for nearly a month, dressed in an armored vac-suit and running a massive rotary laser cannon. He'd never felt so helpless in his life as when he'd been on that wall. He'd swore he'd never feel that way again and signed up when the Telkan Marine recruiter had come through.

It was slowly getting dark, the pale sparks of the mantid engineers becoming brighter and brighter as time went on and the night got darker. He could see holograms springing up where the mantids clustered together and went to work.

--airframe repaired armor repaired ordnance almost done-- 973 reported. --software checks done combat capable but fragile fragile need two more hours--

”You've got it,” Mukstet sighed. My first combat command and the entire squadron is grounded. At least I got them onto the ground.

Mukstet kept walking back and forth on the grass, his palm turned up so he could look at what little ground-side data they had. A BOLO almost four hundred miles out but Mukstet's trainers had all stressed that unless it was coming to your rescue or had requested you a trooper never had a reason to go into the hellfire of a BOLO's combat zone. Off to the east, roughly a hundred and fifty miles, the sensors had picked up heavy Precursor movement almost three hours ago but Mukstet had no idea where they were now. To the west there was heavy groundfire that they'd managed to avoid during their orbits.