Chapter 307 - Going in Blind

The clock on the command deck wall read 0400.

Luca walked into the tactical room with his coffee, the rest of the team already assembled, wired, and ready to go.

"Alright, you guys, we're dropping in 30," Luca said, and caught himself a beat too late. So much for breaking the habit.

"Em, you're still good with running the operation?" he asked.

She confirmed with a nod. "Eleanor and Polina will stay with me at the Strategos, we'll be running comms between all the fire teams."

"She still won't wear the prosthetic," Ryan muttered from his side of the table.

Luca rubbed his forehead. "We'll deal with it after this operation," Luca replied. They'd gotten her a good one, fully mobile, and she'd turned it down without a second thought. "Let's focus. Zoe and I will head in first on the Specter, scope out the terrain while the teams deploy at the landing zone."

Emily pulled up the topographical map of the Vault region in an active blizzard situation and a two-way tug-of-war between five overflow sites.

"We're landing here," Luca pointed. "South and equidistant to sites 4 and 5. We will be disrupting their stalemate in favor of the Vexillari. The only way to do so is to weaken the Varnathi position enough that the Vexillari can get in close enough to pull their units out of their base. We don't have as much distance to play with as we did at the Tower site; these are grouped much closer together, but we can do enough."

"We don't expect them to pivot toward us," Eleanor said. "Iron Timber tested it last night. They set down 20 miles from site 5, the Vexillari site, and we didn't get any response from them. Their next wave started straight for the Varnathi. Unless we have a permanent structure, I don't believe they will switch direction—"

"So that," Emily cut in. "Gives us the opportunity. We disrupt site 4 and let the Vexillari from Site 5 reach them, creating enough of a gap between that wave and their site for us to get in."

"Ryan, you are leading the attack from the Titan, it's finally TL9, which means it can push straight into their base. Sabrina will be with you. Chris will run the scout mech around the periphery, south and east of the site, watching for incoming or the return of their forces. If we do this well, they will commit once they hit the Varnathi site and won't be able to pull back, giving us the time we need."

"So who's hitting the Varnathi site?" Ryan asked.

"We will," Zoe replied. "Luca and me. We're pulling Larissa and Avi to join us on the Specter."

Chris straightened up by the wall, where he was leaning. "And you think that's enough to disrupt their defenses?"

"It will be," Luca replied. "They've been in an equal stalemate for months. It shouldn't take much to disrupt the balance."

"But we don't even know what sort of bases they have out there, could be an observatory or it could be a bunker," Chris replied.

The EM signatures were still tearing up the region, loud enough that nothing punched through them clean, and between the heavy forest and the cloud cover, Luca had already written off anything useful from above.

Chris wasn't wrong, and that was the part Luca didn't love. They were dropping onto a target they couldn't see, in weather that ate every instrument they owned, and calling it a plan. He'd done worse on less.

"Right, it could be anything, so first we're going to scout them out, both the Varnathi and Vexillari, while we get everyone off the Triumph."

"We're grouping the teams by dropship," Emily continued the briefing. "Alpha team will be Furia Andina and Frozen Fangs, Encarna will lead. Bravo will be on the second dropship, made up of the Sunwalkers and the Israel Vanguard, Alvaro will take charge here. Charlie will be the Soñadores and Argonauts—"

"Will they be able to perform?" asked Chris. "They just got out of a four-day portal."

"They'll be fine," Luca replied. "Ryan will spearhead the attack on the Vexillari site, Alpha and Bravo will break through into the site with Charlie and Delta providing cover. Delta will be Mochi, Iron Timber, and Windward. If the site is anything like the ones around the tower, defensive forces will be minimal, but due to the distance between the sites, we need to move fast. Hit 'em with a hammer and complete the objective."

"For mobility, we have Heavy-1 and Heavy-2, both dropships will drop the mechanized armor. Guerrerios do Sol and Die Sturmer will shadow the Titan. Ryan, try not to lose it this time," Emily added as an aside. "Supporting Charlie and Delta will be the two IFVs we own, the Gorgons. Both have recently been upgraded to TL9. They carry plasma beam turrets and can transport and evac if needed. Desert Sparks and the Rising Sun will be running those with Joey. But we can't carry everyone out. So once we're committed, we need to do what we set out to do."

"And the Rifters?" asked Ryan, looking through his tablet.

"Zayaan will be making us lunch—" Luca started before Emily elbowed him.

"The Rifters are with us at the Strategos, securing the landing site. They'll be supporting the Gorgons and bringing our Valkyries behind for emergency extraction," she finished.

"You've all gotten the plan; we just need to execute," Luca said, already hungry. "This won't be finished today. There are five overflows, and we can't see shit in this weather. Best we can do is tip the balance, empty a site out, and take over it before they turn around and bite us in the ass."

Danny, who hadn't said a word, asked: "And the Triumph…"

"We're not bringing the Triumph down," Luca said. "Not at first, anyway. The air cover and air defenses are too thick below, and while we do have frigate-sized armor and defenses, it doesn't help at all with our strategy."

"Can't we just pummel the sites with plasma from orbit?"

Of course, Danny wanted to flatten it from orbit. And an hour later, he'd be the first one down in the crater, on his knees in the dust, sifting it for whatever the blast had left over. That was the split that ran right down the middle of Danny, the most barbaric guy in any room and the most curious one in the same breath, and Luca had stopped expecting him to pick a side years ago.

"Our objective isn't to blow up the mountain, Danny. The Vault lies beneath those mountains. For all we know, there are kilometers of installations beneath those mountains. There could be observatories, manufacturing plants, who knows what else in there. There's no way in fuck we're glassing the surface just to make today easier."

Danny shrugged and Ryan made to stand up.

"Any other questions?"

The hangar was already loud when Luca stepped off the lift, the noise of a hundred people getting ready for a fight rolling up the corridor to meet him. He cut left toward the armory, where his Phantom Scout suit was waiting in its locker with the Tomahawk and the sniper rifle. He peeled out of his bodysuit and stepped out of it, down to his boxers, because there was no graceful way to put on a Phantom suit. The thing fit like a coat of paint and forgave nothing, which meant every scout in the room was standing around in their underwear, gearing up shoulder to shoulder, and had stopped being shy about it somewhere around the second month of the arrival of the System.

"Eyes front, Rossi," Zoe said, not looking up from where she was securing her boots.

"I was reading the room," Luca said. "Morale check."

"Morale's fine." She stood, rolling a shoulder. "Yours is showing."

Larissa snorted from the next bench, already half into her Phantom armor, the dark material extending out to her gloves. Avi sat beside her, adjusting his vest.

"Hey, Luca." Ryan leaned around his locker, grinning. "You sneaking chocolate up here at night? Suit's showing you a little soft around the middle."

Luca looked down at his stomach and frowned. "That's muscle, you jealous bastard."

"Sure it is."

"It's all muscle. Some of us peaked."

"Peaked at twenty," Larissa said, dragging her hair back into a knot. "Que tragédia."

"I've still got a couple good years."

"Sure you do." She hauled the charge handle on her rifle, let it snap forward, checked the chamber, then did it again a breath later for no reason Luca could see except that she needed to keep them busy.

Avi had his helmet off, talking fast, the nerves coming out of him as words. "So the plan," he said, to nobody in particular, "is we land in a blizzard we can't see through, on a base nobody's laid eyes on, between two armies that both want us dead, and we're the distraction."

"That's the plan," Zoe said.

"Just confirming." He snapped the helmet back on and gave it a knock with his knuckle. "No notes. Beautiful work."

Emily came through the armory hatch with her utility belt over one shoulder, took one look at the room, and stopped. "It's like a locker room exploded in here."

"It is a locker room," Ryan said, stepping into his trousers. "That's the whole concept of a locker room, Em."

"Put on your pants, Ryan."

"I'm working on the pants. The pants are happening."

She pointed a finger at him without slowing down, grabbed a spare power cell off the wall rack, and the finger said everything the words didn't. Ryan held up both hands in surrender, then immediately ruined it by getting his foot caught in the trouser leg and hopping sideways into the lockers with a bang that made the whole room laugh.

Luca cinched his rifle strap and didn't argue with it. He sealed the suit up his chest, the plates tightening, the passive camo shimmering across his forearms once and going still.

"Hope we actually pull some XP today," Ryan said, finally upright. "We haven't gotten shit since we got here. I'm starting to take it personal."

"Ryan," Luca said, "we can still lose our actual lives down there. You get that."

"I know." Ryan looked at him, and the joke was gone out of his face. "I know. Still. Would be nice."

And the thing was, Luca agreed with him. Wholeheartedly, no qualifier on it. He clipped the sniper rifle to his back and said nothing, because there was nothing worth adding.

Out on the hangar floor, the suit had crept up his ass, and Luca reached back, grabbed a fistful, and hauled the seam loose, pretending the whole time that he wasn't. Zoe, three steps ahead, did not turn around. He could hear the smile in the back of her head from here.

The hangar bay stretched out under the work lights, and along it the dropships sat with their ramps down and their bellies open, teams boarding two and three at a time. The Titan hovered in next, low and mean.

Somewhere in the noise, a team captain was yelling a head count, and somewhere else, two of the recruits were arguing about whose turn it was to take the gun seat, and over all of it the engines were already spinning up into that low building hum that Luca felt in his teeth before he heard it.

He stopped and watched his teams, loading the ships and strapping in. He took a breath as the sound of the engines climbed another note.

He jogged for his own dropship, where Zoe had already dropped into the seat beside his and was running the pre-flight without him.

The drop went as well as could have been imagined, and some part of Luca compared it to Midnight Veil before the rest of him caught up.

It was almost that bad. Almost. The turbulence grabbed the dropship and shook it the same way Midnight Veil had shaken the old Percival, that full-body violence that came up through the stick and the seat and his back teeth all at once, but unlike Midnight Veil, the hull wasn't coming apart around him. The view outside the windscreen had gone completely white. Not having anything to watch was probably a mercy, though he wasn't sure he trusted it.

One second, he'd had the curve of the planet under him, white and clean and a long way down. The next, the wind shoved the nose ten degrees off where he wanted it, and he hauled it back on feel, because the instruments had quit pretending to be useful somewhere above the cloud line. The dropship bucked hard enough to lift him against the harness, then dropped out from under him just as fast, and his stomach went with it.

"Altimeter's garbage," Zoe's voice came through his helmet, both of her hands light on her console, calm as a woman waiting for a bus. "EM's eating everything. You've got maybe four hundred meters of floor before terrain, going off the orbital scan."

"The orbital scan from before the storm."

"That's the one."

"Love it. Real confidence builder."

He activated [Atmo Sense] with a thought, because with the instruments dead, he had no choice. The ability overlaid the detail he was missing over his senses like a second set of nerves, feeding him the information he needed, every shear and pressure front and lift arriving in his hands a half-second before the bird actually moved on it.

[Steady Hand] sat right beside it in the interface, one flick away, and he wanted it badly. It would have ironed the buffeting hard and turned this whole white-knuckle plunge into something close to clean. He left it dark. The ability wasn't free, and it would burn a few degrees of neural heat into a skull he needed clear and cool for everything waiting under the cloud, hours of fighting, reading the field, and keeping the teams alive. That was a long day to run on a head he'd already lit up on the very first landing. So he flew it on his own two hands instead, four years of flight time doing the work the System would have done for him.

Snow came at the glass sideways in long white streaks. Somewhere behind him in the cabin, Larissa swore in Portuguese, and Avi laughed, the slightly unhinged laugh of a man who had decided the alternative was worse. The dropship groaned through its whole frame. Luca eased the descent on the floor [Atmo Sense] gave him, terrain pressure building under the hull as the ground came up, every muscle in his back loose, because he could feel exactly where it was.

The cloud broke at ninety meters.

The world snapped into being all at once, a dark red forest under a hard slant of snow, the red sun nothing but a smear behind the storm, and a flat white shelf of clearing dead ahead exactly where the scan had promised it. Luca flared the nose, killed his forward speed, and planted the dropship on its struts hard.

He popped the harness and was up and moving before the ramp finished dropping, sealing his visor as he went, the HUD blooming to life across the inside of it. The storm took him the moment he cleared the hull, a full nor'easter blowing sideways, snow driving flat and hard enough to hear it hiss against the plates. The suit shrugged off the cold like it wasn't there, sealed and thermal and indifferent. The wind was the part that didn't care about any of that, and it leaned into him hard enough that he had to set his boots and brace. He'd grown up shoveling out of weather exactly like this. None of it had ever tried to kill him before. The Specter sat clamped to the deck, sleek and black and patient, and Zoe was already at the release while Luca took the driver's side. Two clamps, a hiss of pressure, and the hovercraft floated free on its repulsors, rocking once before it steadied.

Larissa swung into the back, rifle slung, dark Phantom armor already going pale as her passive camouflage blended her into the snow. Avi came up the other side. A black shape detonated out of the dropship's shadow and landed square in the rear seat, and Pixel shook the snow off her coat with an air of personal offense, having clearly decided the backseat was hers and the discussion was over.

Avi looked at Luca across the roll cage, eyebrows up, asking without asking.

Luca tipped his head toward the plasma minigun mounted over the cage. "Get up top."

Avi grinned and climbed for the gun.

Luca brought the Specter around toward the tree line, the storm closing over the dropship behind them, and opened the channel to the rest of the column still up in the dark. "Command, this is Ghost-1. Specter's down and rolling. Let's go find out what we're fighting."