You can always tell the efficient officers by the way they hold their briefings. The Fleet Arm’s cap-ship guys and console jockeys tend to blather on and go through the briefing protocol by the book, and everyone in the briefing room usually zones out after being told the same information six different ways. The recon officers cut right down to the chase, and by the time their briefings are finished, the mid-rat sandwiches in the briefing room aren’t even halfway gone yet.
“Today’s mission will be a drop-and-shop run,” Major Gomez says once we’re all in our seats. As the sole combat controller assigned to this mission, I am the only Fleet Arm guy in the room. The rest of the troops are Spaceborne Infantry Force Recon, a team I’ve dropped with a few times before.
“New Wales has been Lanky real estate for right around a year now,” the major continues. “Chances are good you’ll find some major settlement clusters down there. They’ve had plenty of time to dig in and make themselves at home.”
Behind the major, the wall-mounted holographic briefing screen cycles through a series of three-dimensional renderings of our target planet. As always, we have a rough idea where the Lanky population centers are located, but as always, our rough idea isn’t good enough for orbital strike coordinates. The Lanky minefield around the planet won’t let any fleet recon unit close enough for good targeting data. This, in turn, creates job opportunities for the Force Recon teams.
“We have the usual shit soup down there, which fucks with the sensors as always, but the recon drone got a decent IR fix on the northern hemisphere before they blew it out of space. They set up shop not too far from the old colony capital.”
The map behind the major zooms in to magnify the target area, projecting the tactical symbol for “unconfirmed settlement” over the topographical data. New Wales had been colonized for over fifteen years before the Lankies showed up and seized the place, so there was quite a bit of decent vegetation and agriculture on the ground before the ratio of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere got flipped around in the span of just a month and a half. Now it’s the usual Lanky neighborhood—hot, humid, and certain death for any human not in a vacsuit.
“Primary target area is designated ‘Normandy.’ If the cannon cockers launch our pods reasonably straight, you’ll be on the ground between twenty and fifty klicks from the edge of our suspected main settlement. Hoof it in, mark the atmo exchangers and whatever other high-value gear you see on your way in, and let the fleet guy do his job once you have eyeballs on Lanky City down there.”
Since we started taking the fight to the Lankies, 80 percent of my missions have been what we coined drop-and-shop runs. Because the aliens secure their new colonies with super-dense orbital minefields, none of our fleet units can get close enough to a Lanky-occupied world for accurate targeting data or reliable controlling of remote drones. The Linebacker space-defense cruisers can clear a section of the minefield big enough for a strike package or a salvo of nuclear space-to-ground missiles, but the recon teams need to go in ahead of time to get a definite fix, so the Linebackers won’t waste their limited loads of very expensive missiles. We drop, tag everything worth bombing in the target zone, and upload the information to the ships waiting out of reach. The Linebackers blow open a window, the carrier sends in a strike package or ten, and then the retrieval boats come to pick us up.
The tricky part of a drop-and-shop mission is always the ingress. The Lanky proximity mines nail everything man-made beyond a certain size threshold, and drop ships are too big and too man-made to make it through. That’s why recon teams get onto alien-controlled worlds by express delivery—ballistic drop pods, fired from the big missile tubes of capital ships. It’s one hell of an exciting way to commute to work.
“Suiting up at 0700 Zulu. Launch is at 0830 Zulu,” the major says, concluding the briefing. “You’ve all done this a few dozen times, so you know the drill top to bottom. Report any suit issues to the armorer, so we can plug in someone from the standby crew if needed. Good hunting, people. Dismissed.”
“How many drops is this for you, Grayson?” the recon team leader, Lieutenant Graff, asks me as we file out of the briefing room.
“Oh, hell, I sort of lost count,” I tell him, even though I know exactly how many times I’ve been fired into space in a bio-pod. Drop counts are a main measure of prowess among the Spaceborne Infantry grunts, and being blasé about one’s drop count marks one as a hardened SI trooper. “I think it’s close to two hundred now.”
“Damn. They really oughta come up with some new level for the drop badge. Platinum or titanium or something. You got gold four times over by now.”
“What about you, LT?”
“This’ll be number sixty-nine.”
“You counting the training drops, too?” I tease.
“Well, we can’t all be in demand like you, Grayson.”