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They exit at 60,000 ft.
It doesn’t even feel like falling.
Back-first, Teo watches the Lockheed get smaller and smaller as it drifts into the distance.
With nothing else to gauge perspective, it looks like the one falling away.
“Alright, make space.”
At Litsch’s command, the 12 spread out. When his mates are mere specks, Teo rolls his shoulders forward and spreads his knees, thin air dragging legs overhead.
And then he’s diving.
In 12 seconds he’s hit 330mph.
Terminal velocity will drop by a third as the atmosphere thickens.
At this rate they’ll hit the ground in 3 minutes.
If everything goes to plan they’ll only barely not.
“Tighten up at 8,000 feet, enjoy the view, commence comms blackout” The radios click off.
Teo has 2 and a half minutes to enjoy the silence. Nothing but the sound of his own breathing as he watches the earth hurtle towards him, or rather vice versa.
It’s a treat really, usually such ops happen at night. But apparently last minute intel put the bug in Command’s ass to get a team on the ground asap. So instead of staring into inky blackness, Teo gets a Bird’s Eye View of the jungle in sunset.
He can just make out individual trees—rather than a uniform sheet of green—when they regroup, aiming for the small clearing reviewed in the handful of VR runs that time had allowed before sardining themselves into a cramped cargo hold 3 hours ago.
Seconds to impact, he flattens out and pulls.
The drogue comes out first, nearly halving his speed before breaking away. His canopy extracts an instant later, fully inflating a mere body length from the ground.
For a brief moment, Teo has pulled nearly 10 Gs. It’s hardly noteworthy to him. Mildly uncomfortable, but he can take worse. Much worse. They all can.
A second later, as their feet touch the ground—some just before—they cut away, the dozen simultaneous gunshots of deploying chutes already swallowed by dense foliage.
Teo is the last of the fallen to touch down.
In one fluid motion, flaring toggles, feet skimming grass as he pendulums forward.
Cutting away just as he reaches amplitude some mere inches off the ground, momentum tossing him forward out of his rig, front rolling through mud and vegetation, weapon shouldered even before he’s risen to his feet, chute wafting into the trees.
Then Litsch.
“Everyone good?”
11 aye sirs, and they are off.
A full sprint through the jungle—one of Earth’s last—holding effortless conversation as they do.
“Alright, contact in 10. S’naps on when we hit perimeter, they’ll be talking on radio for as long as they can. If we’re lucky jumping around the bandwidth, that’ll be the whole time, but if there’s RF jamming on site—which there probably is—then we’ll be limited to line of sight once we trip the alarm. In that case the ‘Squitos overhead will tightbeam relay. The feed won’t be as synchronized, but we’ve trained for that too, so I don’t expect any problem either way.”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Scheppe chimes in, voice steady despite the blistering pace.
“Lieutenant, don’t you ever get tired of being used as the Guinea pig for all this X-tech? Don’t you think we could do just as well without these sockets plugged into our skulls?”
“I don’t get paid to be tired, Sergeant. Nor to think. Command has deemed it an adequately vetted force multiplier, so we’re gonna use it.”
Aggin checks the Sergeant on the shoulder as they vault over the downed kapok.
“C’mon, Jakob, don’t act like this is the first time anyone’s ever used SyNAPS. This isn’t a field test, the bugs were worked out ages ago.”
Scheppe rolls his eyes at her.
“Yeah, still don’t like it. Too much to go wrong. We don’t need shiny and fancy, simpler’s better. I’d rather flip this thing off and go in oldschool.”
“Yeah right, Oldschool. So you prob’ly don’t want those NODs either then, huh? Or your ballistic weave for that matter.“
“I just don’t like relying on feelings, Saara. Making life or death decisions based off of vague notions of danger just doesn’t feel right.”
“But that’s what we do all the time anyways. We’re always making decisions based off feelings no matter what we do. Whether in combat or deciding which fucking side to get with your lunch. It’s always feelings. It’s just that when we’re networked, those feelings are way more reliable and accurate than if they were only coming from your own head. You’re only calling it vague because you’re so used to it. You know that your ‘vague’ is still orders of magnitude clearer and better informed than what any mere Baseline gets. The panoply of viewpoints paints a rich—“
“Picture of what lies ahead, yes yes I remember Dr. Kube’s lectures too. I bet you don’t even know what half the things he said mean anyways.”
“Whatever, he’s right. To any Unagged, even our vaguest most subtle inklings would feel like divine insight. Like a fucking lightning bolt of omniscience.”
Teo, hot on their heels, joins in.
“We already get a stream from the drones, I don’t see why we need all the subliminal stuff. Why not leave it at a shared feed? Just show me a video of what everyone is seeing. Have Command bark instructions in my ear and have the algo flag everything on our glass.”
“C’mon Teo you know the answer to that. You couldn’t possibly process all the relevant info quick enough, no conscious mind could. Sure, a half dozen thumbnails on your HUD and a couple simultaneous commands you might be able to process and act on, but you would be completely overwhelmed if even, like, 2% of the real-time data was made available to you. Conscious awareness just can’t handle that much, but the subconscious can.
The subconscious can deal with far more, and it can do it faster, because that’s what it’s optimized to do: take in a bunch of sensory input, come up with a plan, and then give you that plan in the form of easily actionable items, a.k.a. reflexes—“
Teo’s foot catches a vine and nearly sends him over. An effortless front flip rightens him without any fuss at all.
“—It’s like when you touch a hot stove. Do you think ‘oh golly that’s hot I better move my hand’? No. You reflexively pull your hand off. Your subconscious doesn’t waste time waiting for you to figure out if you should take your fucking hand off the burner, it does it, before you are even aware of it. It chooses before you even know anything’s been chosen. Same idea with SyNAPS: it routes as much tactically relevant information as possible to your subconscious, so your quicker half can make decisions unencumbered by conscious-you getting in the way with all your lumbering thinking. And sure, in hindsight you might feel you made some choices, but that’s because your brain is a bullshitter. All ours are, that’s what they do. But really, you’re just along for the ride.”
“Oh god, you’ve done it now, Teo.”
Scheppe laughs.
“Cue the Free Will lecture. She ain’t gonna be finished til we’re back in—“
“Enough.” Litsch growls. “Scheppe, Colton, take your teams, start flanking.”
“Yes sir.” Come twin replies as the group forks from spear to trident.
VO2 maxes augged to 350 ml/kg/min, they can maintain this pace for 90 minutes fully laiden. It only takes 15 to reach the clearcut: nearly a kilometer square of razed earth, ring of guard towers overlooking the cluttered plain beyond razorwire capped walls.
They all know the layout by heart of course.
So enhanced are their faculties of memory and planning that with just a passing glance over the satellite imagery, each of them could have recited any number of relevant details on a whim:
Floor plans of personnel quarters, manufacturing floor, armory, shipping hangers.
Low-traffic junctions and primary choke points.
The number of sentries at north and northeast entrances, likely armament and response time.
Probable locations of non-combatant emergency egress.
Exact distance from western wall to central processing complex, the 17 routes—ranked in order of tactical advantage—between them.
But, as it is, with 2 hours of pre-mission combat sim under their belts, memorized doesn’t even begin convey the extent to which they know this place.
This place—3 thousand miles away in a jungle they’ve never been too—this place is as familiar to them as their own homes.
They know it as intimately as any beloved childhood hiding place or imagined world of fantasy.
Every nook, every cranny, every blind spot and kill alley, they feel, as surely as they feel the teeth in their jaws or the fingers on their hands.
Assorted garages and hangars intermingled with craft in varying states of disrepair. Modular office trailers stacked and conjoined into vast assembly line floors and warehouses; some, dormitories of a sort. Sprawling greenhouses. Various equipment and materiel scattered about, vague tarped shapes. Windowless buildings spewing caustic yellow fumes. An expansive loading area, pallets of product loaded by automated forklift onto flatbead and quad-rotor alike, day in day out.
A typical refinery operation. Just one of hundreds in the cartel states, the majority not even hidden, the plata to be had by turning a blind eye incentive enough for most, plomo sufficient for the rest.
Only the low slung building at the compound’s east end, with its too-massive ventilation ducts and conspicuous over-abundance of heat exchangers, gives any indication of the more substantial facility beneath.
Before they even step into the clearing, tactical glass has flagged countless plots of imperceptibly disturbed earth past jungle’s edge: landmines, an archaic deterrent, frowned upon but nevertheless effective, at least against those without the latest predictive AI and extraporential algorithms piping real-time updates.
As far as security measures go, the auto-turrets are the newer-tech option. Anyone without serious cloaking might as well be wearing a big red bullseye.
Sensors picking up heat signatures thousands of meters away through the dense foliage. Internal system tirelessly cross-referencing movement pattern, shape, speed, and myriad other variables. Constantly updating firing solutions and neutralizing anything falling within rather expansive threat parameters.
Unless of course its and its brother’s all-seeing-eyes are currently blinded by the IR lasers of a recon drone swarm that ID’d them 10 minutes ago.
If not for their airborne vanguard, Teo and the rest of the team would’ve been picked off long ago.
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