What’s the actual difference between landing on a jetpack versus a parachute?
Everything.
When it comes to a projectile whose trajectory isn’t affected by wind, pressure, humidity, or firing angle, any open canopy drifting through the sky back home would be a gift to pretty much any automated targeting system in this galaxy.
But if they open fire while you’re under one…
The pack itself isn’t especially explosive, but if it takes a hit mid-descent, there’s no time to react, no reserve chute, and basically zero chance of a squadmate catching you at that speed.
Nobody wants to end up as a neat pancake on impact, so sometimes a good old fashioned parachute is genuinely the safer bet.
Still, they came down beautifully.
Genuinely impressive to watch.
A scattered hail of white, oblong shapes skimming the treetops with jetpack exhaust flaring right before touchdown.
Worth mentioning, clones aren’t exactly fragile to begin with, so most of the braking happened in the last three meters above the surface.
Even with a parachute, that hard jolt when the canopy deploys carries a real risk of cracked bones, and the second risk is landing wrong and either impaling yourself on your own legs in the worst case, or just shattering them outright if your form’s off.
Jetpacks smoothed that problem out, but demanded real finesse to control properly.
The assault troopers, unlike the rest of us, kept their packs attached, theirs carried enough fuel reserve for another jump or so, or roughly a minute of flight, so once they landed they simply peeled off along the perimeter of the LZ.
Behind them, at roughly thirty second intervals, everyone else came pouring down.
Cargo dropped last.
A whole supply train, dry rations, tools, medical gear, spare parts, emergency reserves, and equipment for whatever they’ve got planned for us.
We watch, we wait.
We’re down.
Finally!
The sun’s already hot, filtering through a canopy of deciduous trees, shaped a bit like oak back home, just taller.
Ferns everywhere, thick grass filling the clearing we landed in, visible between the trunks, moss underfoot.
Pull your helmet off and the first thing that hits you is the smell of rotting leaves and damp forest air.
Some kind of beetles clicking away somewhere, birds calling.
And sure, the six-legged lizards the size of housecats and centipedes the size of a hand are a little unsettling, but only if you’re not paying attention, and there’s no time for that right now.
Landed like a flock of fat game birds, honestly.
Hooray, sure.
Problem number one showed up the second the last cargo container hit the ground.
Here comes a laugh only I’m apparently going to appreciate.
Actually, calling it a laugh might be generous, since problem number two is: who’s actually in charge here?
Problem number one, meanwhile, was cheerfully working its way out of my datapad.
I opened it, read through it.
“Execute landing.
Within ten local days, reach the following coordinates undetected.
Leave no trace of your presence.” The datapad flashes the terrain map, our position, the destination coordinates, and that’s the whole briefing.
Then the order wipes itself.
Just a map and two points I made sure to memorize while I had the chance.
I jump straight into the map editor, manually re-enter the anchor points from memory, kill the datapad’s password protection, there’s an option for that, disable it, and we sit and wait.
I tell my second to monitor the comms.
Our job is warning the assault troopers if anything hostile approaches, since technically we’re still just landed, but the channel’s already a mess of crosstalk.
Command types got dumped on us, and none of them can settle who’s actually senior, or in which branch.
Alphas.
Ha.
Here comes the democracy experiment.
Look, in principle, the actual call to break down the cargo and dig in near the treeline got made fast, orders went out, even got followed, but…
Problem four, more cargo than we can realistically haul.
Problem five, symbolic timing aside, armor power cells only hold about five days of charge.
No replacements available.
Problem six, not enough chargers to go around.
Problem seven, food for about a week, tops.
Solvable, sure, hunting’s an option, but that adds a stealth complication that’s now sitting squarely on my desk as acting intelligence officer.
Then it hit me, or rather, I remembered, an annoyingly obvious detail.
There’s over five hundred of us.
Staying hidden?
Please.
Compared to that, the rest of the list starts looking like minor inconveniences.
Like, for instance, the bathroom situation.
Sure, you can technically use the armor’s closed loop waste system, except it’s not actually built for that kind of extended use.
Problem eight, we have to cross a river gorge, and there’s exactly one cable line rigged across it.
For all five hundred of us.
No safety line.
Which also means jetpacks can’t get cached along the way anymore.
Problem nine, walking at a standard pace, we make the deadline, technically, if we march around the clock, and the local day runs thirty two hours.
Running instead?
Sure, good luck with that.
Anyone who’s ever run any real distance in full protective gear during summer heat gets exactly why I’m skeptical here.
As long as the armor’s climate control holds up, no real issue.
Except that’s only rated for five days.
And it’s already twenty nine degrees out here, this early in the morning.
Humidity’s brutal too.
We’re tough, sure, but everything’s got a limit.
For me personally, it’s less about making the deadline and more about what state I show up in.
Wondering why I skipped problem three?
Not an accident, I’m just waiting to see how, or if, the command group actually sorts out march order.
Until the cargo’s distributed and an actual formation forms up, pushing suggestions is pointless.
And I don’t have time to just sit around either, so on my own initiative, while the assault troopers hold perimeter watch, I get my people started stripping paint off gear, pull off my own armor, and start hand mixing a rough camo pattern of numbers and disruptive shapes onto the plating, glancing over occasionally at the huddled group still arguing quietly nearby.
Anyway, recon runs both point and rear guard, plus flank coverage, meaning we’re going to be doing more moving than anyone else out here regardless.
I’ll pull cell chargers from command once the convoy’s actually organized, not before.
Splitting into smaller independent groups and spreading the load evenly gets ruled out fast, that gorge crossing’s a three day bottleneck with exactly one usable route across.
After that point, I’ll float the idea myself, they’ll probably think of it on their own by then anyway.
Not idiots, most of them.
The people nearest me watch what I’m doing with visible confusion.
Painting over identification markings on the outer plating apparently borders on sacrilege from their perspective.
I leave a thin yellow stripe on the helmet and right shoulder plate, the standard mark for platoon lead.
Hand out stencils and paint to the rest, let them decorate their own.
Then command finally worked out that hauling that much food weight meant people needed to eat now, urgently.
Brilliant, in a deeply stupid way.
I doubt for a second we’re not being watched by the same instructors who dropped us here, meaning surprises are basically guaranteed.
We’d just landed.
Ideally we’d have pushed a couple kilometers further into the treeline first, direction wouldn’t even matter, but no.
Given the choice, I’d have cut the rations in half right there, ditched the excess, split the remaining weight evenly, broken into small groups, and sent them toward the rally point ahead of the gorge crossing separately.
Not my call though, orders get followed, not debated.
That’s baked into training and genetics both, sometimes literally, with a boot and a few knocked out teeth involved in the lesson.
Nobody actually teaches how to give good orders though, which is the real gap.
So people improvise, leaning on raw intelligence and trying to stretch tactics doctrine written for massive formations centuries ago onto a situation it was never designed for.
And here’s the real core issue, in my opinion, a serious shortage of actual clones out here.
All of them, really.
Our genetic template’s a natural loner.
Brilliant on his own, sure, but a loner regardless.
Which means Alphas, despite excellent individual training, tend to be terrible team players, adapting slowly and clumsily to coordinated group work.
Five man squads, they handle fine.
A dozen, manageable.
A platoon, tolerable, barely.
Beyond that, it starts breaking down exactly like this, either there’s a clear chain of command, or…
Damn it!
Lucky the comm’s still tuned to my platoon’s general channel.
I manage to shout “Stop!
Take cover!
Weapons up!” the second gunfire starts.
About ten seconds of short bursts, maybe seven weapons firing, then silence.
Where in the world are you all even running, what exactly are you looking at?
Squad leads completely useless, where are your eyes?
Everyone’s fixated on figuring out what happened instead of reacting.
We drop the food and go check it out.
My recon’s already spread out, some prone, some ducked behind trees, holding still.
Exactly as trained, good work.
Meanwhile the rest are only just starting to get their act together.
I can hear Fifty-One shouting at his own people over the din.
Most of his group’s assault troopers, and discipline’s clearly not their strong suit.
Rough spot for him.
His people were on guard duty, meaning they opened fire and someone’s going to want answers for that.
He needs backup, and I think I know exactly how to give it.
Priority channel, broadcasting in Basic.
“KS-8851, callsign Scar, this is CT-134.
Assault element, report to reconnaissance.” A second later the whole channel goes dead quiet, even the command staff stops arguing long enough to listen.
“Copy,” comes the reply, sounding thrown and a little embarrassed.
“Scar,” I repeat the callsign, figuring it’s about to stick as his actual name from here on, “what exactly are we fighting?” “Pack of Gnulls hit the perimeter guard.
About a dozen of them.
Handled it.
No casualties.” “Copy, stand down,” I switch over to the general channel.
“Stand down, everyone.
Get back to camouflage detail.” Well, at least now it’s clear where the shooting came from.
Once we hit the objective, I’m telling Fett everything.
All of it.
Let him teach these idiots to actually read a map, or write up an actual field manual, the kind with real, hard-earned lessons written in, because this improvised approach clearly isn’t cutting it.
Before we boarded the corvette, they ran us through a short briefing on local flora and fauna.
Gnulls, aside from the native sapients here, a genuinely intelligent species of tall beaked birds standing close to two meters, are among the most dangerous, aggressive predators on Rishi.
Picture a cross between a jackal and a lion from back home.
Roughly a meter at the shoulder, around three hundred kilos of dense muscle, lightweight hollow bones, and six fingered paws tipped with sharp claws.
Hard to say for certain what set them off, could’ve been curiosity, could’ve just been catching our scent downwind, but either way they came in hard for a meal, since really only the colonists here can compete with them for territory, and colonial settlements already pushed them out of most areas nearby, leaving them with basically no natural predators of their own.
And here we are.
All dressed in white.
Smelling like dinner.
Our temporary camp position is completely blown at this point.
So, commanders.
What’s the plan now.
Yeah.
Nobody’s surprised.
That idiot, again.
com/Hezzario