7-26 YC 114 2248
Venal Region
C2-DDA Planet IV
9km Altitude
Ryven hadn't worn a combat dropsuit in years, but familiarity flooded over him as he prepped for drop. He carried an assault rifle in his right hand and a pistol on a hip holster. His back-mounted pack carried spare magazines of ammunition, demolitions charges, and a variety of grenades, as well as a few canisters of nanites for first aid. He wore a bandolier of ammunition and grenades across his chest as well. His dropsuit was light, but sported decent protective armor against most small arms and blades. His helmet was similarly high tech and the optics and sensors were integrated to his capsuleer implants and neural interface to allow for instantaneous neural input and rapid reaction times. The dropship's location over the temperate planet's surface and the decreasing distance to the drop zone were fed into his neural interface and he knew his drop was less than a minute away.
He moved toward the exit door in the floor of the dropship and prepared himself to jump out into the darkness. The door slid open slowly and the atmosphere of the planet rushed into the dropship at nearly 900 km/h as the ship zoomed through the lower atmosphere. A buzzer sounded and Ryven jumped through the exit door and dropped rapidly through the night, an altimeter display on his helmet's viewscreen. He watched as the digital counter rolled, counting down from the 9km altitude of his drop down to his planned time to activate inertial dampers and retro-thrusters to slow his descent to a safe speed and cushion his impact. The air rushing past him as he fell through the night sky was a cacophany, but there was no sign at the compound below of his being detected. The forest canopy rushed toward him from below and the altimeter registered 400 meters till impact. He fired off his thrusters and activate his dampers. The thrusters slowed his speed to roughly 50km/h and the dampers soaked up the majority of the force of impact as he slammed into the forest floor, a massive cloud of dust and plant matter occluding him as he crouched and immediately rolled to shed excess momentum. He came out of the roll in a crouch position, weapon drawn, his senses tuned to his dropsuit's array of sensors. All was quiet.
He slowly began to make his way toward the compound where his second target was located. The Guristas camp was a quiet one at this hour, the pirates believing they were safe here in their home regions in a system out of the way, isolated from the usual pathways used by capsuleers. Ryven was not interested in the usual pathways, however, and these pirates were in for a reckoning. Their leader was one of Leela's more ruthless clients, and he was not pleased to have her services suddenly rendered unavailable in the past year. He wished her captured, and likely tortured mercilessly. The audacity of these assholes, Ryven thought to himself, to think they could capture and harm a capsuleer, especially one so dear to him.
Ryven silently maneuvered the 2 kilometers to the compound's perimeter, and dropped to the prone position. The dropsuit's optics were automatically feeding his optic nerve images in the infrared spectrum, and in the cool night air, the enemy sentries stood out bright white against the cool bluish gray background. There were two guards he would have to neutralize before he could make his way into the enemy's compound. Both stood on a parapet at the corner of the outer tritanium wall of their base. Ryven crawled to a small ditch roughly twenty meters from the parapet. The guards were lazily chatting to each other, neither paying attention to what was approaching.
Ryven crawled on his belly toward the tower wall. Though neither guard was paying attention, the motion of a man sprinting across an open space of ground would draw their attention. The human eye was attracted to motion, especially at night. So, he took his time and closed the distance before beginning to climb the wall at the base of the tower and ascend toward the guards' parapet. His suit made such a climb possible by engaging a set of tiny, but ultra-strong spikes that gripped the outer layers of tritanium plating. The climb was slow, but, the distance was only around thirty meters and he managed it in just under three minutes. The parapet was wider in diameter than the tower, so Ryven had to leap one meter backward to grab the lip of the parapet's platform and lift himself up over the edge. He did so in one fluid motion and launched himself silently over the parapet rail, driving his armored fist into the nearest guard and flinging a throwing knife at the other. The knife sank deeply into the guard's throat and Ryven drove his elbow onto the windpipe of the first guard. The entire maneuver ended in under two seconds. He smiled to himself.
"I've still got it."
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