In less than a minute they had climbed to their cruising altitude of thirty thousand feet, and were speeding towards the frontlines at close to twice the speed of sound.

After less than an hour of flying, they were beginning to near the edge of friendly airspace.

“Nearing the divide. We should start descending soon. Start warming up the visual masking unit.” Kang called out, as they closed in upon the boundary between friendly and enemy forces. Soon they would fly within the detection radius of enemy early warning radars, and so they had to descend to below treetop level to stay undetected. Even though it might sound impossible, the brilliant minds higher up have carefully planned a route through the river system, where they can traverse to stay well below treetop level.

“Roger that,” Rei replied, flipping a little switch which caused a loud mechanical whirr to stir up deep within their craft.

The visual masking system is one of the most advanced additions to their fightercraft to date, able to change the color of the skin of their plane like an octopus to blend into the background. In single target mode the system can even create a image to mirror the scene behind them in order to become virtually invisible to the naked eye and imaging systems.

However, the system took up an incredible amount of energy, and took quite a while to warm up in order for the projectors to work properly.

“Switching off radar and data link, we’ll be navigating purely on inertial guidance and by compass from now on.” Lenn said.

In order to prevent detection, they have to cut off all incoming and outgoing signals from the fightercraft, which could be intercepted and decoded by the enemy and reveal their position.

He rolled the fightercraft over upside-down to get a better view of the ground below. He saw deep green alpine trees, some jagged mountains far away, and a silvery river winding into the distance ahead of him. From up here, the river looked like a string laid down on a map, probably just barely enough to fit three fightercrafts side by side.

“That looks awfully narrow,” Lenn mumbled to himself as they descended towards the ground rapidly, slightly unnerved by the upcoming challenge.

“That’s what she…”

“No.” Lenn butted in, cutting off Kang halfway through his sentence. “Ying, keep your head on a swivel for bandits, me and the others need to focus on flying and navigation.”

“Roger,” Their gunner, Ying, said with her soft voice which never seemed to go much louder than a strong whisper. Her inward personality would make people think she’d prefer to sit behind a desk and design stuff, but for some reason she found a strange synergy with blowing stuff up, and that’s why she’s sitting at the front of the cockpit right now.

But to be frank, Ying is probably the person Lenn knows the least well out of his team, and by a very large margin. Ever since they were put in a team during basic training, they’ve never really communicated with each other outside of conducting missions. The rest of the team will probably agree with Lenn too, since even Kang’s jokey personality had failed to have an effect on Ying.

Carefully, he guided their craft into the narrow channel of the river, the belly of his fighter just barely skimming above the waves, and their powerful thrusters sending up a cloud of spray as they leveled out.

“Watch the spray, too much of it could return visual signature and reveal our position,” Kang said, not lifting his eyes off a map on his display which he was intently staring at.

“What’s my altitude margin?” Lenn asked, gently nudging the stick with the tips of his fingers in order to make tiny adjustments.

“Uhh…” Kang thought for a moment, opening up another window on his display with a whole array of constantly changing numbers. “Five meters plus minus four on the radar altimeter.”

Lenn whistled, “That’s not a lot is it.” He said.

“It certainly isn’t, as we approach it’s gonna reduce even further. We're currently two hundred clicks from our target site, that’s around ten minutes of flight at our current speed, which by the way you should probably slow down a little unless you want to pancake into the riverbanks.” Kang added jokingly.

They flew along the meandering river system, the trees growing thick along the banks speeding past them in a blur of green and brown. It amazed Lenn how nature seemed to not care no matter what humans do, even through an almost omnicidal war like this one.

“Ten clicks out from target site,” Kang called out after a while, “There should be a patch of sand along the banks where you can set down.”

“Copy,” Lenn said, stretching his neck to look a little farther down the length of the river, looking for the patch of gold Kang had mentioned.

Sure enough, ahead of them, on the interior of a corner, there was a large open patch of sediment left there by the slow flowing water along the inside of the turn. He eased back on the throttle, gradually bleeding off their airspeed as they got closer to their landing site.

A landing like this wasn’t hard, all Lenn had to do was keep the velocity vector on his helmet display centered on the landing site, and they should gently set down right where he is aiming. The VX-200 has swiveling thrusters which allows the craft to hover and land vertically when not heavily loaded with cargo.

“Hover mode engaged, transitioning to vertical fly-by-wire control,” Kang said, throwing a switch located to his left.

The powerful thrusters threw up a huge amount of steam, water and sand, as they descended directly on top of the outcrop. A pale blue hue shone off the exhaust of the thrusters and leaked into the cockpit as they swiveled forwards to slow their craft to a complete stop.

More and more dust and sand were thrown up into the air, completely obstructing their view out of the cockpit. Lenn has heard stories from veterans about the early days of the war, when nations still operated helicopters. A so called “brown-out” like this often led to pilots losing situational awareness and crashing their helicopters into the ground.

But right now that wasn’t a worry for him, as the advanced suite of sensors and computer systems aboard the VX-200 meant the craft could project a simulated model of the terrain inside of his helmet visor, and allow him to “see” without actually being able to.

Lenn felt the landing gears of his craft gently contact the soft upper layer of the sandbank, and pulled the throttle all the way back to allow the craft to settle its weight onto its wheels. The soft sandbank gave under the weight of the craft, and they sank a little ways in, perhaps up to the spokes of the wheels.

“Touch down!” Kang cheered, throwing his arms up with pretended enthusiasm. “Thrusters off, trim and fly-by-wire set to vertical takeoff mode, infrared masking off, cockpit lights off…” Kang said partially to himself, as he went through the checklist for a field switch off procedure. “We’re ready to go.”

“Alright,” Lenn said, a sense of relief washing over him as he shook off the sweat on his hands. The river run wasn’t easy, and he had to use almost complete concentration for almost twenty minutes. His mind felt tired, and his arms felt like lead, yet the adrenaline made him want to run a marathon without stopping. “Canopy opening… unbuckle guys, let’s get going.”

With a throw of a switch and a mechanical whine, the wide bubble canopy began to hinge upwards at the back. A little folded ladder extended out the right and left sides of the craft, allowing the crew to climb down with little difficulty.

Once everyone had hopped onto the sand, Lenn opened his mouth to speak. “Ahead of us in the trees should be the wreckage, a mile or so away. We’ll traverse our way to it, scramble any software left on the computers, destroy sensitive mechanical systems and classified tech. And, if there are any, recover the bodies of the crew. The bandit who shot them down should be long gone already, but figuring out the tech should take them longer."

“Roger that,” everyone said.

They pushed past the bushes surrounding the sandbank, and made their way into the depths of the forest.