>>6249891[3/9?]
You have them jump in pairs, electro-optical camo kicking in as they drop. Nothing but a faint ripple in the air, like the trails behind the lighter’s engines, were visible. Or rather, invisible, given the darkness. If the natives of this planet could see into the infrared, they’d be able to see the stealth drones glowing in the night, but they couldn’t, and so flicking the fields on for the drop wasn’t a risk. Once all eight are on the ground, you begin drafting a plan. The fortifications around the city might be enough to keep an army with nothing but ladders, towers, and rams out, but you were quite certain that your drones could scale any wall that got in their way, and bust down any door. Ideally, though, they would not need to break anything to find what they were looking for. Breaking things left evidence, and the last thing that you wanted to do was sabotage your relationship with the von Eisenbergs for nothing.
You might not have made the decision to not kill them yet, but until you did, it was better not to do anything stupid.
The drones remain more or less in their landing spots under the curving arc the lighter had made around the edge of the city, only repositioning enough to place themselves in drainage ditches, bushes, and treelines for concealment, while they await your orders. Those orders are swiftly drafted. Four pairs of drones begin approaching, converging on the city’s outer walls from four different points. You could’ve landed them directly into the city, but it was best to not draw too much attention. In the pitch black darkness, the drones could very easily be mistaken for large humans at a distance, in the unlikely event that anyone saw them at all, but flying a lighter over the city, engines roaring, to drop eight drones onto the streets below? Well, that was harder to explain by mundane means. Besides, the walls were no impediment. Where they were stone and rubble, the drones could hammer their fingers in through the mortar, making their own handholds to climb with. Where they were clad in great sheets of metal, they had to make use of grapnel guns. In either case, the walls were scaled with little fanfare.
The city beyond would be little more an impediment than the walls behind it. The occasional night watchman, fumbling through the city with a lamp clutched in cold hands, was searching for ne’er-do-wells and reprobates, not highly advanced infiltration and reconnaissance drones. Using their position on the walls, and the abnormal verticality of the city, the drones are able to maintain their altitude, creeping along the roofs of houses as silently as possible to remain out of the line of sight of anyone that might come looking. At worst, someone in the buildings they were scrambling across might hear something unusual, but by the time they’d be able to investigate, the drones are long gone.
