He keyed into the Albert comms system himself. The connection to Rashid was a lifeline, a quantum-entangled filament running clean through a storm of hostile data. On his HUD, the secure channel appeared as a thin blue line across a shifting sea of jamming waves. He outlined his insane plan to hit the logistics base. To his surprise, Rashid didn't call him a lunatic. He agreed—sending back a fully annotated intelligence package, overlaid on Jack's display in pulsing orange polygons marking armor thickness, patrol arcs, and power grid layouts.
Go for the west wall, Rashid's message read, flashing in stark red text. Armor is thinnest here. Minefield on the southern approach—avoid.
Jack's fingers flew across the haptic keys, each tap triggering a muted chime in his headset. One more thing, he sent. This intel, my sim… it doesn't go through regular channels. It goes directly to General Carrick. No one else. If he doesn't read it, the blood of thirty-one divisions is on his hands.
It was a gamble, an obscene overstep of his authority, but the only play left. He knew Rashid would follow through. After the fabricated mission that had almost annihilated his unit, Rashid trusted High Command about as much as he trusted Imperial mercy.
The reply from HQ hit like an artillery shell. The POW camp intel, backed by Jack's uncorrupted battle recorder feed, detonated a political crisis. In the President's Office, faces turned white. In the Council, voices rose. The rescue of the prisoners—especially the two female combat officers—was now not just a military goal, but a political imperative.
Orders came down from the apex of the Commonwealth chain: this unit was to be rescued at any cost. All intelligence related to their position was now beyond top secret. Only Carrick's biometric code could greenlight any operational movement. Any officer obstructing would be arrested for treason.
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Jack's grin spread slowly and wide inside the dim glow of his cockpit. Carrick—the bastard who sent me to Green Hell to die—is now personally chained to my survival. Oh, that's beautiful.
By 0300 hours, a new plan—meaner, cleaner, and audacious enough to terrify an admiral—was finalized. Jack's supply raid was scrapped. This would be a full-scale lightning rescue.
The logistics base still made sense. Its landing pad could accommodate mid-size transports, and the open ground allowed for rapid in-and-out operations. The op was a three-act hammer blow:
- Act I: At 1000 hours, two Commonwealth Air Wings would carve a corridor of burning sky, their missile signatures blooming like a storm on Jack's sensor map.
- Act II: Artillery would saturate every known Imperial position within fifty klicks, the ground quake visible in his mech's vibration readouts.
- Act III: Three battalions of special forces would drop directly into the base, set a perimeter, and hold off an entire Imperial armored division for thirty minutes.
Jack's part? Ghost work. Slip in early, cut the jammers, silence the AA grid, and open the way for the storm.
At 0320, his strike team moved out. Five captured Wraiths—now slaved to Commonwealth control codes—went to Roric's best. Five Paladins were assigned to the most experienced mech pilots in the survivor group.
Fifteen klicks east, the canyon walls gave way to rolling hills. Jack pulsed Thor's holographic radar—an aurora of blue-green light washing across the cockpit. The base's jammers lit up his feed like fireflies, masking heat blooms and EM traces. The easy route was gone.
He switched to stealth protocols. Servo whine dropped to a whisper. Sensor gain narrowed to 12%, muting background noise to a glassy silence. His needle gun whispered once, twice—two sentries down without a sound. The Paladins fanned into a wooded rearguard, their thermal signatures reduced to near-ambient by coolant bleed.
From here, only the six Wraiths advanced. In the pale light of twin moons, they looked like black predators on a hunt—Jack's own Thor among them, its hull plating painted with ghost-pixel camouflage.
The watchtower guards, seeing a familiar squadron returning, didn't even raise their rifles.
The gate hissed open on hydraulics that Jack could feel through his mech's haptic feedback pads.
They walked right in.
(HUD: CAST LOT // LONG THROW // SEED A9C // RESULT: PROCEED)