Descent into Mayhem (Capicua Chronicles Book 1) by Bruno Goncalves Page B

her, and she realized suddenly that the advantage the plantation afforded them could not be overlooked. She had unconsciously known that such extreme measures might be necessary, now that she thought about it.
    Duly re-Suited, both officers returned to the meeting point to find that the sergeants were well into clearing operations. Having apparently given up on using the tactical knife as an improvised axe, the pilots were setting their Suits’ weight against the trees, uprooting them easily before dragging them out to the plantation and emplacing them amidst a rapidly growing abatis wall. As Lippard went to assist her comrades, Kaiser approached the beacon and repositioned it carefully at coordinates previously extrapolated from orbital images. Having done that, he joined his teammates in the freshly booming business of knocking down trees.
    A full twenty minutes before crunch time, the reconnaissance team had effectively cleared a circular area with a radius of forty meters around the radar beacon. As the minutes ticked away, the mobile Suits took up guard positions at the four cardinal points of the circle, facing outwards from behind the abattis as they awaited Ground Command’s descent to the planet’s surface.
    Peering silently over the tortured roots of an uprooted tree she had personally emplaced, Lippard found herself hating the delay. It left her too much time to think.
    For the first time she wondered at the kind of people who lived there. Were they the sort to fight, or did they have the wisdom to know a lost cause when they saw one? If they fought, would they fight honorably, or would they fall into the vicious coward routine? Lippard knew herself very well; Mars had taught her a lot about what she could expect from herself in a fight. Her gauntlets tightened around her laser platform as she thought of that planet. Her conclusions over the conflict’s origins had been about the only subject she’d ever disagreed with Kaiser over, but then again he could be strange about such things. Lippard knew that if the last was to prove true for those people, she would kill them all if she was given the chance.
    An enormous sonic boom suddenly shook the forest’s limbs free of its avian inhabitants, announcing the imminent arrival of a behemoth. Moments later her OS motion alert warned her of a significant airborne signature above and behind her. She did not bother to look; a countdown had appeared in a foreground overlay and read thirty seconds to touchdown. She did not require instructions for what was to happen next. The mounting roar of retrorockets firing tore at her ears and she put her Suit’s kneepad against the tree’s root, lowering her profile as she began to key up for a potential assault. This was the most critical part of the mission; if they failed several hundred deaths would be on their heads, and the four would then find themselves stranded in a hostile environment. The roar began to intensify until it was screaming into her skull. A yellow alert appeared before her display, warning her that, due to the outside sound presently being above the tolerance of human ears, it was unsafe to exit her Suit. Still the roar intensified, since despite her OS having capped any increase in volume to her earphones, the vibrations were still somehow penetrating the armor. A powerful wind began to blow vegetation and all manner of wildlife beyond her, and entire clouds of flying creatures took to the sky in even greater numbers than before. Despite the protection her armor conferred, Lippard instinctively began to squint as great clouds of dust rushed past her, obscuring her surroundings as it scattered an intensifying blue light.
    The roar suddenly died away, leaving her surroundings hidden in a dark haze, and a fluttering relief passed through her as she realized that the descent had been completed. Hazarding a look over her pauldron, she could barely make out a massive silhouette rising above the dust cloud like a