[center][b][color=#005bbc]Southeast of Ternopil, Ukraine[/color][/b][/center]
[center][b][color=#005bbc]Southeast of Ternopil, Ukraine. 4:30AM Local Time[/color][/b][/center]

[center][b][color=red]Operation: Hetman's Nightmare; A.K.A. Redshift[/color][/b][/center]

One hand gripping the cord above his head, the other idly pawing at his rifle's buttstock, Maksim stared unblinkingly out the window to his side and into the dark Ukranian night. He could hear scarcely little, aside from the drone of the floating coffin he stood inside and the muffled chatter of his fellow soldiers - but he was far more focused on the deadly dance about to unfold outside. Two aircraft - one painted in the colours of the Hetmanate, the other marked with the Whites and Reds of his own country - sped toward each other. The White pilot's aircraft was far more maneuverable with its two wings, dodging and weaving wildly out of the heavier plane's line of fire. Suddenly pulling upward, it...

Burst into flame as it was struck by red cannon-fire, spiralling toward the ground with a sound that Maksim imagined must've been an incredibly pathetic whimper. His shoulders slackened, the wind taken out of him - only to be abruptly shaken back to full awareness by a husky woman's voice, a gently scarred face looking back at him from over her shoulder.

"What's got your attention, comrade?" She asked. A sergeant - technically his superior - but he'd never known his commanding officers to be especially unfriendly.

"Escort fighter. One of the white biplanes, it just..." He pursed his lips, bringing his hands together only to suddenly spread his fingers in a crude imitation of a fiery explosion. "I knew the Whites were running on elbow grease, but [i]biplanes[/i]?" He snorted.

"Too busy trying to hand themselves back to the Tsarina to make anything else, I guess. Olga, by the way." The woman shrugged, nonchalant. "British scraps are better than nothing, I guess."

"Are they?" He said, earning a slight chuckle from the woman and the handful of comrades listening in.

"Better than the nothing we used to have." She said - and then, his entire field of view changed colour as the cabin was bathed in a bright green, a stark chance from the warm yellow of before.

"Go, go, go!" Came the sound of a barking officer's voice. Moving forward with the line of men ahead of him, Maksim watched as the aircraft's open door and the grizzled officer next to it rapidly came into view. His heart pounded in his chest. His first combat jump.

Before he knew it, the Sergeant leapt out of the plane ahead of him... And at the grizzled man's signal he followed, briefly deafened by the sound of a spinning propellor before it was quickly replaced by an onrush of wind. His body jerked upwards, compelling him to gaze upwards to see his vision covered by a circular chute.

Letting out a sigh of relief, Maksim gingerly gripped the cables, slowly turning his gaze toward the burning city to the northwest. 

Ternopil, was it? He couldn't exactly remember the name. The village beneath him, though, he was intimately familiar with - or at least how to capture the place named Village Seven. It seemed so small, from so high up - Maksim even swore he could see the advancing tanks far to the west from here, or even the volunteers advancing in from Belarus to the East-northeast. He couldn't, of course - the horizon stopped long before then - but he liked to imagine he could, even if the only light he had was a distant moon and a few clusters of burning buildings.

Even then, it didn't take eagle-eyes to notice how rapidly the ground was approaching. Bending his knees, Maksim pushed himself onto the balls of his feet the moment they made contact with the grassy earth - then he fell, rolling onto his side before frantically detaching his parachute. Grabbing for his rifle, he quickly pushed himself to his feet, struggling to gain his bearings until his gaze fell upon the fat, boxy shape of a landed glider and the tiny tank trundling down the ramp that was its opened nose.

[i]Good,[/i] he thought. He landed in the right place, already rushing to rendezvous with the vehicle and the rest of his squad, gathering around the vehicle as it began to advance. 

One, two, three, four, five, six... All-in-all, he counted one short of two dozen men and women scattered in loose formation about the tank and the pair of small artillery tractors following it. A handful of men had taken most of the few available spaces on the back of the tank, quietly watching the surrounding treeline. Maksim quietly joined them at the front, holding his loaded rifle across his chest - and without a word, the formation began to move down the nearby roads, into Village Seven.

If they could even be called roads, that was - to Maksim's eyes, they looked more like poorly arranged sections of packed dirt, stone, and gravel, hardly roads at all. More of note was the rail line that passed through (and briefly stopped in) Village Seven, though Maksim noticed there seemed to be fuckall else of interest, staring into the cluster of buildings ahead. 

Suddenly, the column came to a stop near the edge of the village as the man in front of him held up his arm, gesturing toward a large hill to the northwest. 

He could hear it too - even at this distance, the sound of old Russian artillery pieces firing in staggered succession was clearly audible.

The sound of artillery-fire was suddenly broken by the crack of a gunshot, whizzing by Maksim’s head and pinging loudly off of the tank’s frontal plate. Acting quickly, Maksim dove to his left, out of the way of the road - just as the tank opened fire, presumably stitching the building toward the town square with gunfire. Truthfully, he couldn't tell. He was far too busy frantically smashing his way through a window and into cover to pay attention to exactly where his legs were carrying him or what he was doing, as long as it took him [i]out[/i] of the line of fire. He wouldn't be much good to his comrades dead, after all, except as fertilizer, and-

Maksim found himself staring upwards as his ears caught the noise of the [i]ratta+tat-tat[/i] of machine gun fire above him. Unthinking, he charged up the rickety staircase, toward the source of the noise - and skidded to a halt.

A door blocked his passage. He didn't have the explosives to blow it apart quickly enough, and if he tried to bludgeon it down...

Placing a hand on the handle, he turned it, and...

[i]Clunk[/i].

Maksim sucked in a deep breath, pushing the door inward with a grunt and a shove. Bringing his rifle up to his shoulder, he briefly scanned over the room - two men, manning a Maxim gun, by the window - and opened fire, pumping a hail of bullets into their prone bodies before they even had the chance to realize what was happening. Rushing over to the window, he peered outside, just in time to catch a glimpse of the distant hill upon which the White artillery sat before it was consumed wholesale in a devastating rocket barrage, the noise soon drowned out by the droning buzz of aircraft passing overhead.