Tanner growled as he turned back to the threat board. Who are these people?

At twenty thousand feet, Brinks’s visor finally lightened as the unearthly glow of superheated metal and composite material faded to a tolerable dull orange. He could see the spinning horizon and began shifting his weight and Milla’s to guide the airflow around them and shift their fall in the desired direction.

When he hit five thousand feet, he triggered his “chute.”

The chute wasn’t a haphazard mass of rope and silk, nor even a carefully designed airfoil. It was a small block of metal that drew on the suit’s internal power and energized its core with the same anti-mass technology that gave the Archangel fighter craft their VTOL capabilities.

This small pack separated from the armored suit, connected by two superstrong wire cables, leaving Brinks and Milla dangling under the floating pack.

The other soldiers were in an OILO (orbital insertion low opening) operational stance and waited until they slipped under five hundred feet to trigger their own chutes. In teams of three, their aborted falls became great sweeping glides that brought them in low over the population center and the alien orbital pods.

Someone whistled over the intercom as the city below became clear enough for them to get a sense of scale. The towers were huge, dwarfing the largest built on Earth by a significant margin, but it was the three pyramids around which the city was built that really shook them up.

Each was the size of a small city on its own, straddling a series of bays and rivers that intertwined the skyscrapers. As they swept in, the computers in their suits kept updating the size estimates, finally settling on numbers that put the pyramids alone over three kilometers across at the base with potentially millions of people living within.

Amazing as it was, however, the major knew that none of them had time to be gawkers.

“Teams, this is One. Call by the numbers,” Brinks ordered as he observed from his altitude.

“One, Two. No contact.”

“One, Three. No contact.”

“One, Four. Have a visual. Sector G-Ten…firefight in a populated area. Civilians…hostiles…no local soldiers yet…look like a couple cops, though.”

“Four, One,” Brinks interrupted the soldiers. “Cops?”

“Affirm. Two uniforms—cops or local militia. Resistance ineffective.”

“Four, One. Render assistance. Three, provide backup for Four.”

“Affirm.”

“Affirm.”

“Five through Seven, continue reporting.”

“One, Five. Minor contact. Looks like a pod had a rough landing. No motion.”

“One, Six. No contact.”

“One, Seven. Contact. Major battle at I-Nine and J-One. Require assistance.”

“Teams Two and Six, render assistance to Seven. Five, approach with caution. Remain in contact.”

An echoing of “affirm” came back over the net as the soldiers moved to their tasks.

Stephanos cursed into his mouthpiece as he jinked his fighter hard about, barely avoiding some type of compressed energy burst fired from the Drasin fighter dogging him.