"And so," said Barret, "we hit the landing zone, literally....and pretty hard. All of us were shaken up, but no time to lick our wounds... speed was of the essence if the Chinese had already landed, and it did seem that someone was around, deep in the canyons of this forest world, if the EM scans were to be believed. We hoped that they'd only have a forward base or something with a few terraforming workers and drones, lightly guarded... and if not, too late now. You don't fly 40 years across space to just go back if things get rough... it was time to do or die.
The capacious ship's hold opened wide and we glided into the light. We opened our own cargo doors and our mech lurched out, its job to keep an eye on the landing zone while we made for the canyons. The 4 metre semi-sentient walker trudged a few steps and then bent down to the ground. "Look, buttercups!" it reported. It was right - we had landed in a field of buttercups, though only a minority had survived being flattened by repulsors and scorched by jet blast."
"That's the reason why we'd come here, of course. Habitable world were rare, and we had to have it. We couldn't let it fall into Chinese hands. So we were there in force, armed to the teeth, with our mechs and transports and bombers and stuff..."
"What's a Mech?" asked Melancthe, just looking for a way to break into Barret's monologue.
"Uh, what? Oh, it's like a primitive drone, with legs and stuff. Looks like a man covered in metal. They were used in combat against the Chinese, who also had their own mechs of course, and also for police work on prison worlds, construction duties and so on. Our mech was armed with twin Vulcan cannon, anti-armour missiles and a swarm of vicious scissor drones."
"Scissor drones?"
"Yeah, they were nasty. On one of my first combat flights the Chinese managed to infect one with a virus and it went mad in the back of the transport while we were in flight. Lost half the men before someone managed to EMP grenade it. Our mech had a microwave weapon of course, used mainly for crowd control."
"Those sure were cruel times," said Melancthe "You said those were used to fry prisoners....How can you justify microwaving people?"
"I can't. Today it just seems unbelievable. Things have changed so much. Some of the things I witnessed... horrible. But you just get on and do your job, you know? I kept out of the most evil stuff that went on. So much so that, like I said, the political officer on board our spacecraft on the way here from Aerth had wanted to kill me for not being nasty enough. I was a disgrace to the military and our whole society, he'd written in his report. Why he had suddenly ended his life after that decision was weighing heavily on my mind as I closed the cargo bay, started the engines and slowly spooled them up to launch speed.
Other craft were also taking to the air. For example, we had Junglecats, which were just right for the terrain - fast, manoverable and armed troop carriers. They were one of the only non-VTOL craft serving, but still only needed 100 m or so to get airborne. They flew fast and low into the hills around the canyons, scanning the land and looking for trouble."
"The first into the canyons were the SAWPs - Small Airborne Weapons Platforms. Used as scouts, for checking out new worlds, they were heavily armed and equipped with the most up-to-date repulsor drives - they just zipped from place to place like hoverflies, constantly scanning, cannon and missiles primed and ready to answer any threat..."
"The interceptors we'd released on hitting atmosphere kept watch high overhead for any sign of enemy activity. Again, missiles and extremely rapid-fire cannon were the order of the day. The only concentrated beam weapons we had back then were huge devices used in mining....But those interceptors were fast. They could do Mach 8 but usually were limited to Mach 2 because of people's insistance on manning the darn things - when computers had become semi-sentient people were afraid they would take over everything, and anyway, people wanted to fight. It was this combination of aggression, fear and blind sticking to tradition that lead the military to put people back in machines that used to operate automatically as robots, slowing them down and reducing their effectiveness... Sounds crazy doesn't it?"
"Anyway, we got our engines started and lifted off into a sky full of activity as the whole invasion fleet released their fighters and transports and SAWPs towards that magnetic anomaly deep in the canyons that suggested a foreign structure... possibly our enemy."
"We'd no idea what was there. Maybe just some strange rock or something. But if it was unfriendly we had to hit it hard before it hit us. We hovered over the landing zone and took one last look at our transporter ship - a place that had been our home, a small piece of Aerth in this alien yet familiar land. Then I pushed forward the throttle and we accellerated fast, heading for the canyons and an unknown fate."
to be continued
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