This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Anonymous_D-boi on 2024-11-01 22:34:34+00:00.
“Hold tight gentlemen, it’s gonna be one hell of a ride!”
A wave of unease and fuzziness spilled over me, a common and much maligned side effect of faster-than-light jumps. As the aerospace assault ship I was aboard came into orbit around our “dream holiday destination,” as Platoon Sergeant Reyes put in a briefing the day before, I once again took in my immediate surroundings. Me, seven other dismounts in two rows, seated across each other, plus a three person crew crammed in an armored personnel carrier that was itself stuck to the bottom of a landing craft designed to fly as fast as possible to the surface of a planet, drop off the merry men in a tin can and then haul ass back to orbit. At least that’s the theory. We’ve all seen the casualty rates.
I was the second man on the left, counting from the rear hatch. To my left was Johann, our platoon’s corpsman, eyeing all of us for signs of motion sickness. Sitting across me was Nigel, the section’s machine gunner, grasping the 15 kilo beast of a gun in his giant hands. To my right, right next to the hatch, was Sergeant Castelli, our battle-hardened section leader, who was monitoring the overall situation on a screen on the inside of the hatch: “30 seconds to launch!”
The landing craft's engines started to whirr as the pilot went through the preflight procedures. At 15 seconds, the atmosphere in the ship’s space dock was vented, and the blast doors to the outside void were opened. Our mothership's jump drives have also started spooling up by now, eager to get out of range of orbital defenses. Our landing craft would simply land on the ship delivering the second wave after it unloaded its cargo of fighting men.
At 30 seconds, many clamps went undone and a battalion of drop troopers came loose, making their way to the planet below. At drop school, they taught us that it takes a modern aerospace defense network about 60 seconds from us leaving our assault ship and them picking us up on sensors to missiles exploding around us. Deep reconnaissance groups, special forces and long range orbital strikes should have taken out at least a part of the network, but you can never really rely on “should have”. I started counting; one, two, three…
After counting to fifty-eight, just when we started to enter the atmosphere above our landing area, I felt a sudden jerk in addition to the shakes of atmospheric entry as the pilot started maneuvering the landing craft and popping chaff and flares in a hope to evade incoming missiles. By now, the air was thick enough to hear explosions outside. We all hoped that it was the missiles getting caught on decoys, and not our friends. Sergeant Castelli overcame the deafening noises using his radio: “1 minute to landing!”
I looked over the Sergeants shoulder at the computer screen. There were reports of landing craft closer to the ground taking fire from anti-aircraft guns. This was confirmed as a stray round, way beyond effective range, left a large inward facing dent in the floor of the personnel carrier. Not much longer, I said to myself.
Imagine a car suddenly hitting a concrete wall. That's how it feels to hit the dirt in the APC after being cut loose from the landing craft. Even before the driver managed to start the engine, sporadic small arms fire started to pepper the vehicle’s armor, with the gunner responding in kind with the turreted heavy machine gun a moment after. After the company, or what was left of it, landed, we proceeded to our objective, a group of silos hosting anti-voidship missiles, a major threat to any friendly vessels in orbit, however so well protected that a ground assault was needed to destroy them, short of using nukes. We landed about thirty kilometers from the silos, a bit closer than usual, but speed was of the essence. It just so happened that we landed about 1200 meters away from and in sight of a mobile AAA battery protecting the silos.
Our platoon was ordered to assault the battery. The commanding officer decided to ride in and overwhelm the relatively poorly armed soldiers manning it. The climate where we landed was dry, but the ground was solid. That meant a good ride, or so we thought. My vehicle was in the lead, and we were just hammered with rifle and machine gun fire. The gunner was shooting back of course, but it was unrelenting. We got to about 300 meters of the battery when we all heard an incredibly loud bang and the vehicle suddenly stopped. We could all hear the vehicle commander screaming over the intercom: “DISMOUNT!”
Sergeant Castelli and the man across from him opened the rear hatch. With the skill that only a thousand repetitions can give you, they went through the hatch and fanned out to the left and right of the vehicle, respectively. My left foot went up. As it was passing through the hatch, I was thinking of why I enlisted. I wanted to be a soldier, a warrior. I wanted to put on armor and slay dragons.
As my left foot took its first step on an alien world and the safety of the APC’s armor gave way to the cold morning air, those thoughts left my mind and I focused on the moment. It was machines that brought me to this world and that protected me from a bullet's bite, but it was now my turn to fight.