Descent is a tricky business if you don't want to be noticed. All the trick involved came from the trail you leave, all burning atmosphere and condensing water, jets of dust that accumulated on the hull during space-flight, magnetized there by the cooling process to be shed off in long, thin strands of brown and black and white that descended through the air, following the descent module. Night might black out the trail, but the heat signature and the light from friction would be there, not that any real monitoring equipment wouldn't pick up all the rest with varying types of sensors and simulations.
Hence the rest of the crew outside, polishing the hull while he kept the big, white egg-shaped device steady behind the planet's sole moon, large for it's planet's size. That was half of the trail problem that they were solving. He rubbed a green, bumpy hand across his forehead. Other than the polishing, the other part was easy. Fire a few magnetic torpedoes in their path, small ones so they would burn up fast, and then enter in that clear path. His comm line crackled to life. "Ten more minutes out here and we'll be done. A bit more of a buildup than usual, but we're dealing with it well enough."
"Roger." He wasn't worried about that part. It would get done as always, as it had been done many times before, many in a more hostile environment than this. He could see a few off color patches on the hull via the main screen, patches from shots taken when he wasn't so lucky to keep his crew under the radar. Main problem he had was his lack of ground information. He flicked the display over to the classified intelligence files that pertained to the mission, holograms sliding out of the display when he rested his eye on the two dimensional models present.
Fooling the naked eye was one thing, and he had that mostly covered. Heat sinks, pick a good position, go in at night. It was all the clatter he had to account for on the non-visible spectrum, not all of which were doable on short notice. The nested spiral design of the enemy structures reminded him of a classified file he had gotten a glimpse at once. It had been outside of his clearance level, and he hadn't thought much on it until now. His target had left without too much in the way of long-range sensors, mostly limited to a few miles at most. His target was also likely to have assimilated some of the native's tech into it's arsenal. Details on what it was exactly that he was hunting were on a need to know basis, a lip-biting situation when he saw how little it was that they deemed he needed to know.
The natives themselves weren't too much of a threat, not that any recent assessment had brought up, but they had some sensors there. Last report was from ten years back, and that meant a wide range of progress that may or may not have happened. He didn't bother much with guessing, finally turning the console back to an outside view. Play it like they had edged up a bit in everything and hope his target didn't get anything too current to scan with. He opted for pumping power into the frequency array and try to scramble the vibrations coming off. Make it seem like a glitch, a blip. Less focus on hiding the craft from optical light that would come off since it would be night. Ignore the possibility of radar. The craft would be going fast and while it was large, it wasn't gigantic, only 55 feet from tip to tip. He smiled to himself, imagining the blue planet that hid behind the grey moon. With luck he'd get to see some surprised faces today.
"Shed off" is redundant.
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