Journal #2

October 29th, 2989

Today was hell, nearly everything hit the fan. We lost most of our platoon in the drop, and the snipers responsible for taking out the AA crews were wiped out.

At 1500 hours we found out. The wing commander of the transports carrying us got a distress call from one of the sniper teams, heard an explosion over the comm, and then it went dead. Soon after, we were under heavy AA fire. Since there was no chance of a safe drop at one-hundred feet, the formation was ordered down to a fifty foot altitude for a hot drop. This is what I feared the most.

Hard drop. It literally means a hard drop. All our tanks have a parachute on the back; we just have to release it, and it pulls us right out of the transport bay. As soon as we're out of the transport bay, the chute snaps off and we're free fall. Tanks aren't exactly built for freefall. But compared to a hot drop, a hard drop would have been a walk in the park.

We all scrambled to our tanks, and waited for the order. Five minutes? Ten minutes? I lost count. I later found out it was only about a minute. We got the order, released the chutes, and were hauled out of the transport bay. In seconds my tank was in free fall. These things are heavy, the second-largest tank in the Jekotian arsenal. Only thing that made me happy was the thought that the Brenodi would be clueless. It's not every day that an armoured division falls from the sky.

That happiness soon disappeared. Even though it was a fifty foot drop, it was fast. I guess a one-hundred ton tank falls fast. My tank hit hard, crushing an AA gun that was trying to tear through my bottom armour. I broke my left arm in the fall, cracked it hard on something. Thank god for the standard military genetic-engineering, it would only be broken for a day or two, and I could still use it. For the most part. I heard countless impacts as the rest of the tanks from my division hit, then a gut wrenching explosion. One of them landed outside the drop zone, inside a mine field.

Then hell really broke loose. My tank needed time to get off the AA turret it fell on. I didn't have time. In fact, I needed more time; the engine was too hot to move the tank. I put it out of my mind, got into the control seat, and looked around. It was chaos. No, that's an understatement. With the tanks falling from the sky, it looked like Armageddon. Among it all stood a lone Brenodi tank. Then another, and another. They were waiting, the whole time, in concealed bunkers.

I screamed in fear and hit the throttle. I had to move; they knew it too. I keyed the comm and alerted my division. In moments we had regrouped and engaged the enemy. It was a hell hole. The Brenodi tanks were half the size of ours, exploding into fire storms of shrapnel when destroyed, blinding us while their comrades shot through the debris. I don't know how long we fought. Seconds? Minutes? Hours? It was nonstop explosions, nonstop chaos, nonstop death. There was debris everywhere, I couldn't tell friend from foe.

Then things got the worst they could. The transports, our only extraction option, were crashing. We were stranded in a hostile war zone, having barely survived an ambush, with no chance of rescue. We're going to be stuck here for days, weeks, maybe even months. We were able to salvage enough munitions from the Brenodi wreckage to restock the tanks, but we're stuck.

Private Jacob Allen,
Jekotian 83rd Airborne Armoured Division