DT 2022: Brave the Interdictor

Sgt. Aleksandr "Koslovic" Koslokov
Every jump is the same out the gate. But no drop is the same after.
The unsettling rumble from splitting the atmosphere like a bullet, the whistle and grinding of the wind against my titanium shell. The burnt smell of ozone and cooking metal entering my nostrils through the micro-gaps in the drop pod’s faulty atmospheric seal.
This is the sensation of leaving space and falling from orbit. It’s a feeling I know well. A friend once called it a “brave nausea.” He died before he made it to the ground on his seventeenth jump. He and many more didn’t make it to their eighteenth, or lower, or higher.
They all had different names and descriptions for it. The drop killed them all sooner or later.
78 orbital drops in my career. This was number 79.
My little observation windows flashed from the black and deep blue of the thin atmosphere to bright yellow, brown, and cerulean as stabilization jets burned into an angled sunlit descent. Someone on the SQUADCOM radio, maybe a leader from a jump group ahead of me, shouted out relevant flight information to the rest of the flock.
On practiced instinct, I punched in a quick coordinate adjustment and jerked the glide sticks to the recommended flight path. My mind didn’t register the raw information, I did this too many times to think about it. And even in staggered jumps, there’s mere seconds of lead time before obstacles arrived. It could be minor inconveniences like a rainstorm or life-and-death like a hail of anti-aircraft gunfire.
At some point, recommendations become second nature. When someone has the unfortunate role of being a jump leader, you can only try to supply five percent more awareness than your team members and recommend fly adjustments against hazards as you meet them.
If you make a bad call, half or more of your flock dies. You don’t have time to mourn or regret, you still have the rest of your flock to guide to ground. Make a good call, the responsibility of safety is still there and a million possibilities to consider. From one obstacle to the next, and the next. It doesn’t end until you the reach ground.
For the jump followers, they listen well but there’s little they can do but enter and follow a command. They hope and trust their boss or a benevolent creator won’t blow them out of the sky, relying on prediction software and gyroscopic computers don’t fatally malfunction.
A freefall from orbit is hell. But they don’t call Marine Corps special forces, the ODSTs, “Helljumpers” for nothing. Brave, stupid men and women. I can say that – because I’m one of them. We all choose to be here in this suffering. Waiting for death, hoping for a chance to help the war effort. And that’s only if we make it to the ground alive.
Best of the best, but we choose to ride into battle in flying coffins.
Wet splattering sounds crashed against my drop pod’s hull, fatter and stickier than rainfall. The small closet of space seemed to heat up upon contact and the glass outside briefly took on pink and red tints from absorbing plasma fire from a Covenant air defense weapon somewhere miles below.
I dodged the most of it. Green condition indicators on a sliding screen synced to my heads-up display winked red. Twelve shock troopers met their deaths. Poor suckers. In my off time it’s always hard to decide whether I would prefer a quick death in the air, or a bloody one in a gunfight on the ground. In the air, there’s no time to think about it. On the ground, there’s no time either.
“Koslovic!”
Someone shouted my nickname and I became only slightly more aware against the crushing pressures of the universe. No one waited for me to acknowledge them, they continued. “Sync those pods, you’re driving their coffins to the ground now. Make them count!”
My eye-tracking camera followed my pupils and accepted my micro-gestures, synchronizing the dead ODST pods to my own flight path. If there was time, I could individually adjust the flight paths to be of more use – like using them as dumb artillery. Such opportunities are rare though and need to be early in the flight path, like right now.
I shifted uncomfortably against my safety straps to unfurl a keyboard from my pilot seat armrest. Clumsily typing in some query code, I opened my three-dimensional flight map and try intersecting other Helljumper flight paths, satellite reports of enemy force concentrations, and avoid overlap to prevent friendly fire. I began punching in the planar coordinates when another shout echoed over the SQUADCOM.
“Mothership reports a large enemy boogie matched our flight plan mid-atmosphere, its likely an interdictor.”
“Banshee?” I asked back, with some reservations.
“No clue,” I recognized the voice speaking as First Lieutenant Wilhelm Baxter. “But you have eight seconds.”
A Banshee was unlikely as the Covenant’s closest equivalent to a jet plane. Too sluggish to intercept a fast-moving group of drop pods, gravity engine-assisted or otherwise. Their exotic systems only prevent Banshees from being flightless ducks, they don’t protect the pilot from inertia or airframes from the limitations of aerodynamics. Our space cruiser reported a “large” enemy air asset, something with a likely bigger engine. Something with a self-contained gravity field.
I canceled my coordinate adjustments. Five seconds to contact. I didn’t hear anything over the ominous wind. Or rather the wind was all I could hear. I gripped down on my drop pod flight sticks and hoped for everything and nothing of possibilities. I could be dead in a second.
Everything suddenly exploding in vibrations as if I just hit the bottom of a roller coaster or the drop pod hit a sudden high atmospheric gust throwing the pod every which way. I couldn't see out of my pod but the window filled with a large purple wall and the accompanying shadow bloating out the light. The object seemed to shake the air around it, holding speed and keeping with my drop pod.
In that second, I was able to narrow down the possibilities in my fear but it still didn't register until I watched vague gaps split out from the shadowy purple form and the ghost of a scaly-looking dinosaur materialized with a weapon in hand and ready to shoot. I don't know who screamed, or whether they words were coherent.
I heard myself scream. I heard others scream on the SQUADCOM. Someone's voice did break from the incoherent battle choir. "Covvie assault pod--!"
The communications line buzzed with activity as the intersecting voices startled and popped into static; immediately I felt further shocks rumble through my pod and the dinosaur's form lit up with bright lights of plasma weaponry, its gun flashing at a target unseen. Other ODST markers flashed green to red. Death. Death. Death. Death...
My cybernetic mind finally caught up and flashed the external camera VIS/R overlay onto my helmet augmented reality face shield. A giant flying pillar with fusion rockets burning from its top materialized into view, like a horrifying reveal that a iceberg was bigger beneath the waves. Covenant reusable assault pods, rare sights but...
I didn't have time to think. In my shock and hesitation, sweat from my fingers stuck to my armored gloves and stilled them in place on the joysticks. I forced myself off them as if they burned like hot coals, the way my friends burned outside and how my pod seemed to cook. The alien turned his gun on me and pound the titanium outside with carbine fire. Loud, echoing dents pounded against the side and even in the circumstantial darkness I could see the dents forming.
I jerked my head left at just the right moment in some bout of insane luck as two irradiated-green rounds ripped holes in my drop pod and impaled themselves four inches left of my helmet. The rounds kept pounding away, making more dents like unrelenting hail. My body offered a micro-shake at the sudden uptick in adrenaline and stress placed upon my body, my fingers retreated to the keyboard and like the mad man I knew I was in the moment, I typed into the empty query boxes the actions I needed.
Quickly, quickly.
I heard short burst rockets echo from other human drop pods nearby, they sputtered and twisted. One of the pods flashed by my window view before another lucky shot blasted the hinges off my pressured door frame and the atmosphere elements roared in upon me. I felt my lungs hitch in terror.
The wind and smoke spun around me. I could breath, and yet I could not. I could see, but I could not.
I could now see the alien Jackal gain its clear shot of me with its carbine. I snapped my eyes shut and listened to the howling of the wind and the wet splashes of plasma fire outside. Last thing I would hear, I finally punched my timecard on life.
I heard explosions. Crunching and clattering so suddenly in rapid succession. A warble from a failing, exotic material engine. The inhuman screams of the dying. Not human, not my people.
My eyes opened once more to a bright blue light of a planet falling up towards me and a smoking heap of a sinking purple assault craft, spinning as jagged metallic parts from ODST drop pods joined its form in a mashed-together mess. I got a clear sight of the Jackal pinned by a purple door, its arm ripped off in a mushy mess and its gun missing. It stared at me and I stared back. The alien pod rolled onto its side and picked up air resistant, slowly, slowly retreating back into the sky as my own damaged but intact drop pod left it behind.
I breathed.
A distant explosion roared somewhere above me. I didn't take time to register it or think on it. I glanced back at the digital readout on my surviving troopers. First Lieutenant Baxter was gone. So was half my platoon.
I closed my eyes and took another breath, and I spoke hoarsely, giving out the orders the lieutenant would've made.
"This is Koslokov, LT Baxter is gone. Enemy assault vehicle destroyed. Everyone readjust your flight paths to mine. Keep me informed."
The SQUADCOM visor readout flashed all green in acknowledgement from the platoon. Flight codes adjusted to match mine; it seems our tight drop procession was now spread out and marginally off by a fifteen-mile spread. A bad grouping for what the fighting soon to come would look like. Heavy urban terrain. Hopefully none of us hit skyscrapers on the way down.
I allowed myself a silent send off to those that did one more job for us in death. Thank you: Tyrone. Rodger. Kempton. Alice. Green. They, or I, threw their dead bodies and vacant drop pods at the enemy assault craft like a kamikaze swarm. They did their jobs in the end.
There would be no bodies or identification to collect. They were just gone now. But their deaths didn't go to waste. They, and the lieutenant and the others that didn't make it. They died to buy the rest of us a few more seconds, and few more than that. The obstacle was gone. The rest of the drop still remained. The ground was waiting for us.
Onto the next problem.
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories