Your support makes Blue Moon possible (Patreon)Hey, all. Just stumbled in, bored, naked, confused, and covered in baked beans. Have some randomness. 
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"Two minutes out! SUIT UP!"
Coarse, abrasive, load enough to be heard even over the screaming engine noise - ah, that would be the loadmaster, dragging me back to the here-and-now. The floor beneath me tilts wildly, nauseatingly, from moment to moment; these dropships are stealthed up to the gills, and this strikeforce includes enough gundrones, dedicated ECM units and other assorted flying crap more obvious than us that the odds of being blown out of the sky should be infinitesimal - but nobody feels like taking that chance, these days. There have been too many nasty surprises, and far too many needless casualties.
Discarding that train of thought - painful, and unproductive, as it is - I turn to my suit. Technology honed to an unimaginable degree of perfection; my armor, weapons and delivery system in one. With a bit of luck, it might even be enough to keep me alive; I slip into it, densely-armored joints shifting around me as it tightens like a second skin. I revel in my amplified strength for a moment before activating the onboard computer, feeling an array of distressingly dangerous components self-checking around me.
"Embedded systems . . . Online. Autodiagnostic green. Powerplant active . . ."
The voice is atonal, androgynous, yet somehow comforting:
"Synchro in three . . . Two . . . One . . ."
Information, raw and discordant, rushes through me, plays across my HUD in a blaze of colour; enemy ECM, the electronic howls of a dying recon 'bot, ionospheric backscatter, a thousand attempts at misdirection, deception, even outright subversion/
/- I reel, momentarily dizzy with imagined vertigo, throwing a dozen pseudointelligent software counteragents and pattern-recognician engines against the myriad infeeding streams, and the haze drops away -/
/For the first time in weeks, I feel complete. The entire battlespace unfolds before me - I no longer heed the dropship's wild gyrations. I no longer care, for I see the fire-support and close recon drones tracing endless, delicate Gordian knots around the heart of the storm, columns of hunched armoured vehicled inching ponderously towards their objectives. Radio chatter, the desperate, the complacent, and everything between. The IFF beacons' continual shriek of perfect, unique randomness, all splayed before me in three dimensions and real time.
I see everything.
"Dropping in thirty. You ready to die?"
Ah. The loadmaster, again. I turn to him, drawing up to my full height (a shade over eight feet, armoured up) and respond.
"SIR! NO, SIR!"
He grins back.
"Damn right. Now get going."
He retreats to the cockpit as the bay decompresses, a ramp barely wide enough to accommodate me opening in the dropship's tail. I walk steadily back towards it, then balance precipitously on the edge, counting backwards in my head
... six, five ...
The wind tears at me, air rushing past at three times the speed of sound.
... four, three ...
Across six vertical kilometers of utter darkness, I see explosions flare, blossom and die against a landscape of perfect black.
... two, one ...
Wings beginning to unfurl behind me, I step forwards, freefalling into the maelstrom.
________
Might continue it, but probably won't, due to terminal laziness. I don't write much, any and all comments appreciated. :]
________
"Two minutes out! SUIT UP!"
Coarse, abrasive, load enough to be heard even over the screaming engine noise - ah, that would be the loadmaster, dragging me back to the here-and-now. The floor beneath me tilts wildly, nauseatingly, from moment to moment; these dropships are stealthed up to the gills, and this strikeforce includes enough gundrones, dedicated ECM units and other assorted flying crap more obvious than us that the odds of being blown out of the sky should be infinitesimal - but nobody feels like taking that chance, these days. There have been too many nasty surprises, and far too many needless casualties.
Discarding that train of thought - painful, and unproductive, as it is - I turn to my suit. Technology honed to an unimaginable degree of perfection; my armor, weapons and delivery system in one. With a bit of luck, it might even be enough to keep me alive; I slip into it, densely-armored joints shifting around me as it tightens like a second skin. I revel in my amplified strength for a moment before activating the onboard computer, feeling an array of distressingly dangerous components self-checking around me.
"Embedded systems . . . Online. Autodiagnostic green. Powerplant active . . ."
The voice is atonal, androgynous, yet somehow comforting:
"Synchro in three . . . Two . . . One . . ."
Information, raw and discordant, rushes through me, plays across my HUD in a blaze of colour; enemy ECM, the electronic howls of a dying recon 'bot, ionospheric backscatter, a thousand attempts at misdirection, deception, even outright subversion/
/- I reel, momentarily dizzy with imagined vertigo, throwing a dozen pseudointelligent software counteragents and pattern-recognician engines against the myriad infeeding streams, and the haze drops away -/
/For the first time in weeks, I feel complete. The entire battlespace unfolds before me - I no longer heed the dropship's wild gyrations. I no longer care, for I see the fire-support and close recon drones tracing endless, delicate Gordian knots around the heart of the storm, columns of hunched armoured vehicled inching ponderously towards their objectives. Radio chatter, the desperate, the complacent, and everything between. The IFF beacons' continual shriek of perfect, unique randomness, all splayed before me in three dimensions and real time.
I see everything.
"Dropping in thirty. You ready to die?"
Ah. The loadmaster, again. I turn to him, drawing up to my full height (a shade over eight feet, armoured up) and respond.
"SIR! NO, SIR!"
He grins back.
"Damn right. Now get going."
He retreats to the cockpit as the bay decompresses, a ramp barely wide enough to accommodate me opening in the dropship's tail. I walk steadily back towards it, then balance precipitously on the edge, counting backwards in my head
... six, five ...
The wind tears at me, air rushing past at three times the speed of sound.
... four, three ...
Across six vertical kilometers of utter darkness, I see explosions flare, blossom and die against a landscape of perfect black.
... two, one ...
Wings beginning to unfurl behind me, I step forwards, freefalling into the maelstrom.
________
Might continue it, but probably won't, due to terminal laziness. I don't write much, any and all comments appreciated. :]