By fireteams. Let’s go.
The remainder of the platoon started out the doors. Powell stayed back with me, yelling at stragglers. The pilot kept the shuttle steady as possible. Powell and I got out of the door just before some sort of kinetic round tore the shuttle apart. I did a quick ping on the pilot’s uniform’s system feed. There was nothing there.
Lieutenant, Powell sent. She was falling about one hundred meters away from me and sent to me via tightbeam. Look down.
I looked down and saw flickering beams shooting up into the evening sky. They weren’t going all the way up into the atmosphere; they were terminating on points below me.
They were hitting my soldiers. Killing them.
Full camo chaos dive, I sent over the platoon channel, to everyone still alive. Then I ordered my suit to seal me in, went dark on communication, and made myself as close to a hole in the atmosphere as I could. The suit’s camo function would hide me visually and would do what it could to scatter any electromagnetic waves that would be sweeping over me, trying to bounce back to a receiver set on targeting me. My suit was also making subtle movements and sending out extensions to move me around randomly, changing my speed and direction of descent, almost making it harder to target me. Every platoon member who heard my order was now doing the same.
Chaos diving could kill an unmodified human with the jerks and turns. My suit stiffened up at the neck and other joints to minimize the potential injury. It didn’t mean I didn’t feel my insides strain. But it wasn’t meant to be comfortable. It was meant to keep you alive.
One other thing: The electromagnetic-scattering camouflage effectively makes you blind. You fall, relying on the data your suit polled before you turned it on to allow it to track where you were and how far you had fallen, factoring in all the shifts in direction and descent speed and feeding that into your BrainPal. The camo was designed to give me a visual feed again one klick up—just enough time to assess and plan a final descent path.
Unless there was an error, in which case I would see the ground just before I smacked straight into it. Or I might never see the ground at all. There would just be a sudden thump.
Also: I wouldn’t know if one of those beams had found me until it started frying me.
The point is that you don’t do a full camo chaos dive unless you absolutely have to. But that’s where we were at the moment. Me and every other soldier in the platoon.
It also meant that when we landed, we would be scattered all across the countryside, coms quiet to avoid detection. In our briefing I had given the platoon an alternative extraction point in case something went wrong, but having the shuttle shot out from under us so far up and then performing a chaos dive meant that the remainder of the platoon was likely to be scattered over an area a hundred klicks to a side. When we landed, we were going to be alone, and hunted.
I had several minutes to contemplate all of this as I fell.
I also had several minutes to think about what had happened. Simply put, there should have been no way for the shuttle to have been shot out of Khartoum’s upper atmosphere. Khartoum had defenses like any Colonial Union planet would, to prevent alien species from attempting an attack. But as they had been on Franklin and every other planet we’d visited recently, these defenses were built and run by the Colonial Union itself. Even if these installations had been overrun by Khartoum’s citizens and abandoned by their CU operators, anyone trying to operate them would have been locked out by a nested set of security measures. Unless the CU operators had gone over to the other side—possible but not likely—those were someone else’s beams.
Another wrinkle: The Tubingen should have been tracking the shuttle’s descent and alerting us to, and defending us from, any ground-based attacks. If it hadn’t, it would have been because it was otherwise occupied. Which is to say, that it was being attacked, either from the surface of the planet or above it. In either case, also not from the Colonial Union.
If this was correct, then it meant a couple of things. It meant that whatever was happening on Khartoum, it wasn’t just about the planet’s independence—the planet had aligned itself with enemies of the Colonial Union. And then it laid a trap for us. Not for the Tubingen itself—whoever was doing this didn’t know which among the Colonial Dense Forces ships were going to respond. The Tubingen, its shuttle, and my platoon were all incidental in this. No, the trap was for the Colonial Union itself.