Mission Orion: The Travel through Time

Chapter 49

"This is getting worse." I muttered, staring outside the windows. More and more enemy ships were pounding us as we made our way to the other side of planet. We may have been successful in jamming the signals, making sure the base didn't know about our plans yet, but it was just a matter of time before they figured it out. I saw with my own eyes, as Charlie Five went down right behind us, killing everyone on board. We had expected this, but the Kenjah's air force was better equipped than we had anticipated.  "I can hardly keep up with this." Holder said, as he veered left dodging a laser beam. "How many minutes till drop?" I yelled. "Five minutes more!" He yelled back. Everyone, including me, had their suits on, and I brushed my hand across the lower part of my leg just to make sure that I still had the secret weapon Montwik had given me. I looked at Profus again, who was looking out of the window, from where we had a direct view of the photrox. The were a lot of jets surrounding us, each of them engaged with some or other of our ships. "Everyone, hold on!" Holder said, as he prepped the ship for the drop. "We are almost near the drop point, make sure your helmets are on and your comms are switched on." he said. I put on my helmet and turned on the comm system, just like he had ordered. 

"We are here." Holder's voice said over the suit comms. "Prepare for drop in three..two..one..drop initiated." I've gone through the drop once, but that just couldn't prepare me for this. One minute I was looking out towards Charlie Four, and the next second, we were dropping down at several thousand miles per hour. I could feel the thrust from the engines pushing us downwards, causing the ship to go faster with each passing second. I gripped my seat as my heart crawled into my throat, just like the previous time I experienced a drop. I could see Emanta looking at me, suppressing her smile, like she found it amusing I was terrified of this. I looked at Reneesh, who did not seem like he was comfortable with the drop either. In fact, he seemed more terrified than I was. He had his eyes squeezed shut and I could actually see him sweating. By now we were entering the outer layers of the photrox's atmosphere. The exteriors of the jet were rattling to due the resistance of the photrox's atmosphere. "Alright. we're in the planet's inner boundaries. We expect their second line of air defense to start pounding us soon. We just got an update from Charlie One that the second line could not be taken offline. get ready to face the heat boys." Holder announced. The jet slowly started slowing down, it's thrusters in full reverse action. "All right, here they come!" Holder yelled, as the ship banked leftwards. One of the soldier, who had removed his safety straps from his seat soon after entry to the atmosphere, tumbled down onto then floor. Just as he was helped by two soldiers, I saw two red laser beams missing the jet by just a few metres. The jet violently banked leftwards again, before we had another near miss by another one of the laser beams. "Alright guys, this ain't going to work. We cannot take out these laser beams, and it won't be long before our luck runs out. The base now knows there is a jet in their airspace but we are justified in assuming that they are  not aware of why we are here and what our goal is. Even their most sophisticated radars cannot track anything below one thousand feet. If we can fool the system into believing that our jet has crashed, it would stop firing the laser beams and we could fly to our location below one thousand feet and hope we get to the place and land before patrol jets come along to check for wreckage." Holder said. "I'm sorry." I interrupted, identifying myself with my identification number. "What happens when they don't find the wreckage?" I asked. "All the radar and defense mechanisms are fully automated and do not have any manual intervention. When they find no wreckage, they would have to manually go through the logs and only then would they figure out what we had done. And then they would need to launch a search operation and by the time they triangulate our position, we should be done with the whole thing." Holder replied. "Alright guys. Our computer tracks another laser coming right at us. And we are going to fool the computer into believing that it hit us, and we went down. Don't worry guys, I've done this a thousand times. Strap yourselves in, it's going to be a tough time. Comso, get ready. When I say ready, point the trusters backward and I want fifty percent thrust. Soon after simulated impact, I am going to point the nose downwards, just like it happens in a real crash. There will be a lot of turns are spins too. Get ready." He said, adjusting his headgear.