(It’s time to raaaaaaaage!)

---

Mission planning for their training drop had been fairly standard, with one interesting exception. They had to prep for the possibility of volcanic ash operations. A long-ago quirk in Aurora’s terraforming had resulted in a planet with volatile tectonic activity, and the area they were dropping in was littered with volcanoes, both dormant and very much not dormant.

While the Rhinos were heavily armored, volcanic ash was incredibly abrasive and could cause all sorts of issues for the assault shuttles. Engine damage, pneumatic and hydraulic system problems, windscreen scarring . . . and ash, much like sand, was invasive and got everywhere. The last thing Blue wanted on a drop was a contaminated oxygen system or cascading failures in her instruments.

Volcanic ash ops boiled down to one very simple concept—avoid if at all possible, and if it wasn’t, get the fuck out of the ash cloud like your tail was on fire.

The locker room was packed with everyone gearing up before preflight, and Blue was grateful that her locker was at the front of the room rather than buried in the middle of the chaos like Killi’s. Her fingers flew nimbly over her body armor, checking the connections as her ears rang with the clanging of battered metal doors slamming and the bantering of two dozen pilots. Even if they didn’t all need to drop on Aurora to play babysitter to one little science team, the Bronze Legion wasn’t about to pass up a training opportunity. Everyone in Bravo Company would participate in the day’s exercises, which meant the full wing of Rhinos was needed.

Blue waited just long enough for Killi to join her, and then the women headed for the dropship bay. As copilots, the bulk of the preflighting duties for their respective ships fell on them.

The raucous shouts of maintainers hard at work drifted out into the corridor, and Blue breathed in the familiar pungent scents of fuel, grease, and oil as they strode through the open hatch. The bright lights of the cavernous bay shone down on the swarm of maintainers hurriedly finishing up their tasks, maneuvering with practiced grace around the two rows of six ALS-71 Rhinos lining either side.

Sparks cascaded from the ceiling as a maintainer repaired a panel, the stocky man made tiny by the height and those orange embers dying long before they came close to reaching the deck. On either side of the hatch, the bay stretched into the distance, taking up a considerable portion of the Perseverance.

The massive dropships made the cavernous space look small.

At an impatient grunt from behind them, Blue and Killi quickly cleared the hatch, because they weren’t the only copilots hustling. They absently waved at Lieutenants Tina “Tiny” Tragarz and Heather “Ruby” Ridolfi as they trotted past them for Bronze Raven Three and One respectively. Ruby paused long enough to wave back, her eyes bright with excitement. She was one of their newbies fresh out of training and viewed everything through the lens of enthusiastic inexperience.

Blue stopped at Bronze Raven Four, eyes eagerly drinking in her dropship.

“Missed your baby, did you?” Killi nudged her side. “Girl, you can love your ship, but don’t love your ship. Or do! Whatever keeps you here with us. I won’t judge.”

Killi easily dodged Blue’s lazy swing and trotted off to Bronze Raven Five, laughing under her breath the whole way. Blue shook her head at her incorrigible friend and turned back to her ship.

A possessive smile pulled at Blue’s lips as she started her external walkaround. Measuring twenty-five meters from nose to tail with a thirty-meter wingspan, the ASL-71 Rhino was a beast. A true assault shuttle rather than one of the sleeker fighters the Legion used in aerial combat, the Rhino favored bulky armor and sheer power over maneuverability and speed.

Slightly concave wings stretched out to either side of the armored fuselage. Fully ten meters above the deck, Blue had to crane her head back to inspect the underside of the wings and engines. While the powerful rear thrusters were critical for void operations, it was the rotating atmospheric engines on the wings that turned the bulky Rhino into a VTOL. Considering how often the Bronze was deployed to austere locations, that was a critical function, and Blue climbed up onto the wings and spent long minutes inspecting the system before she moved onto the next item on the checklist.

Auxiliary hatches on the port and starboard, currently sealed for void ops, hid the dual M268 GAU-18 Aries Miniguns. The six-barrel Gatling-style machine guns spat out 30mm depleted uranium rounds, high-explosive incendiary rounds, or anti-personnel rounds at a rapid rate of fire and were the cherished babies of her gunners. She ensured the hatches were secured and turned her attention to the recoil attenuation thrusters, or RATs.

Designed to mitigate recoil, there were four RATs per gun, equally spaced around the hatches in a square pattern. Any two by themselves could handle the recoil of the gun on the opposite side of the ship, but the Rhino’s engineers were a fan of redundancy. If any one RAT failed, the diagonal thruster would automatically shut down for balance purposes. Even if the entire system failed, there was a manual backup and crew coordination that would keep those Aries Miniguns firing as long as their ammo lasted.

And the massive Rhino could carry a lot of ammo, along with twenty personnel including aircrew and a full-loadout of gear and supplies.

Blue left the actual inspection of those guns to her diminutive gunners and moved on to the chin-mounted railgun.

This was her gun, controlled from the cockpit by the pilots, and she carefully checked the six-foot barrel. It fired 20mm tungsten sabot rounds, but the smaller caliber didn’t matter when those rounds were sent downrange at a blistering 7,000 feet per second. They usually practiced with dummy rounds, but in combat conditions she’d have access to the standard tungsten penetrator armor rounds, as well as frangible anti-personnel rounds designed to shatter on contact.

Blue was really happy she’d never had to use those on live targets.

In short order, she’d finished her external checks and affectionately patted the scuffed gray hull. The Rhino definitely wasn’t the prettiest or the quickest, but she was fun as hell to fly, and Blue had missed hers. She might not be obsessed like some of her fellow pilots, but she really did love flying, especially in atmo.

Blue strode around the side of her Rhino and found Killi waiting for her. The other woman stood with one hand on her hip and her helmet in the other. Only Killi could manage to look adorable in their Legion-issued body armor.

Black with bronze accents, the dropship pilot armor lacked the adaptive camouflage and hamatic capabilities of the legionnaires’ armor, but it would stop small-caliber rounds and was void-rated with a rebreather unit built into the suit. Though if a pilot had the misfortune to end up in the black, it wouldn’t be enough to keep them alive for much longer than a quick farewell and a quicker prayer to whatever deity they worshiped.

“You ready?” Killi asked with a grin as dropship commanders and aircrew poured into the bay.

Blue winked and bumped her fist against Killi’s.

“Let’s rage.”

---

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Missed the previous snippets? No worries, I got you covered.

• Snippet 19
• Snippet 18
• Snippet 17
• Snippet 16
• Snippet 15
• Snippet 14
• Snippet 13
• Snippet 12
• Snippet 11
• Snippet 10
• Snippet 9
• Snippet 8
• Snippet 7
• Snippet 6
• Snippet 5
• Snippet 4
• Snippet 3
• Snippet 2
• Snippet 1