Freya took a deep breath as she entered the atmosphere. There was an area around every enemy planetoid that marked red for danger. It was where the danger of anti-ship weapons were the most concentrated. She wasn’t clear if she passed the red zone, it was just that the weapons fire from the planet was less. According to her sensors, she would be in the red zone for roughly fourteen seconds. While that didn’t seem long, in a firefight where everyone was shooting at you that was a lifetime.

Freya gave herself a couple seconds to check on the OTDSs (One Time Drop Ships) as they streaked by her. They were much faster and far more stealthy than she was. According to her computer they had a nine second red zone. That was a long time for a OTDS. Freya bit her lip, worried.

“If this is just the start of the mission, just how bad will the rest of the mission be?” She wondered to herself.

Her sensors lit up and screamed at her as the incoming fire started. There were a bunch of anti-ship weapons she had to worry about. The first were all the anti-ship clouds that were fired from Cloudforges on the surface. They were like floating mines that even if you missed them they would chase after you. Luckily Freya’s ship was much faster than most of the clouds she could expect to see out past the heavily fortified Paradise worlds.

The next thing she had to worry about were the energy weapons that were being fired from the surface at her. On her sensors they looked like someone was shining lights in the sky. They were lethal flashlights though. While there was a possibility that she could survive getting hit by almost everything else, the energy weapons, if they hit her, would guarantee her destruction.

After that came the anti-ship missiles. They were like flying shotguns that fired both energy pulses and ballistic ordinance. They were nasty pieces of work. The first and the biggest line of defence was her electronic warfare. In most cases it was literal battle of who had the best sensors. Not that there wasn’t anything she could do to help her electronic warfare systems. There was and it was basically stay as far away from the missile path as possible.

The last threat were all the various projectiles that were being shot at her. The projectiles filled the sky traveling at almost too fast speeds. There was everything, from pieces of metal to hardened plastics. Their job was not to destroy her, although a lucky strike could, but to damage her ship in such a way as to reduce her electronic warfare system’s ability to protect her.

Her best defence against everything that was being fired at her was to be as unpredictable as possible. So the first thing she did was reduce her speed. She was coming into the atmosphere at ninety-eight percent power. Freya immediately dropped to eighty-five power output and started her evasive maneuvers.

Her sensors were lit up like a nightmare worse than she had ever seen before. They were showing thousands of missiles being fired blindly hoping to catch her descending to the planet. They were also showing blankets of ballistic materials that were flying everywhere. It was so bad it looked like it was raining upward with lethal projectiles. Hundreds of energy beams were shining up from the surface in disorganized and random patterns and speeds. Freya gnawed her lip even harder as she watched the nearly overwhelming death come looking for her.

Less than a second later she was in the red zone and her world narrowed down to her sensors. The time for thinking was over and her body reacted as she was trained. She weaved in and out of the paths of the energy beams, always moving away from the next closest missile flight path. She was in the zone for about twelve seconds when there was a loud bang followed by a wailing from her computer, screaming that her ship had been damaged. The yoke in her hand started vibrating and the pedals seemed to get a lot less responsive.

The damage report popped up to the left of her HUD. The report showed that one of her maneuvering engines was glowing red. Cursing, she reached out with her left hand to begin the process to shut the engine down, but before her finger could find the touch screen the vibration stopped. The pedals were still a lot lighter than they should be, but the ship was easier to control than it had been.

Remote commands accepted. System shutdown of Maneuvering Engine 8 initiated.

Freya was too busy to give more than a passing thought to what the notification meant, but she guessed that she somehow used her Personal AI to command the shutdown. “Cool.” She muttered to herself, as she pushed her speed up to compensate for the loss of the engine.

Two seconds later she passed through the red zone and the insane barrage of anti-ship fire slowed down. It didn’t stop but she had some breathing room. She checked on the OTDS that were far below her now. She cursed when her sensors were unable to account for three of them. She had it do an advanced search but they still came up missing. She didn’t have the time to check her recording to see if they were destroyed on the way down or just damaged, so she recorded the event in the log and sent a message to the platoon’s command staff.

She checked her flight path and saw that she was more or less flying in the right direction so, still avoiding incoming anti -ship fire, she changed her vector and headed in the direction of her first drop off. She checked the timer on the respawn pods and noticed that the first round of spawns were going to be done before she got to the drop off. She hesitated for a second then set the downloads to the clones to be as soon as they were complete, then set the next spawns to as soon as her platoon mates closed the pod doors.

With that done she checked on what hit her. She cursed when the sensors showed her that she flown right into an anti-ship cloud. There was not much she could have done to prevent it so in reality it was just some bad luck. Still it rankled that she damaged her ship for the first time.

“No mission bonus this time.” She muttered to herself, not really feeling all that bad about not getting the bonus. “Sorry about that.” She told her ship, as she took her hand off the yoke to pat the console in front of her. She felt far more upset that she damaged her ship than that she would miss the bonus.

“You guys still alive?” She asked the two mech pilots under her.

“Not sure.” Came the reply from One.

“I puked.” Done replied.

“We get hit?” One asked after a few seconds. She sounded more normal.

“Lost a maneuvering engine.” Freya told her, looking over at her damage report notification. “We’re still good to deploy.”

The sensors in the dash pinged and she looked down to see that the surviving OTDS had landed. She checked the location and found that they were slightly behind where they were supposed to be. She boosted the power to her engines to make up the time. She logged the information and sent it off to the Platoon’s command staff. She got another sensor ping warning her that she was getting too close to an energy beam weapon’s path. She adjusted her flight path and moved on. She was still avoiding incoming fire but the closer to the surface she got, the less fire she was seeing.

“OTDS just deployed minus five. We are going to be late getting to the secondary rendezvous point because of those damn energy cannons.” She told them.

“Can’t be helped. Let’s just get down on the ground as soon as possible.” One replied.

As she was talking to One, she checked where the energy weapon was firing from and cursed when she realized it was firing from the edge of the city where she was supposed to drop first and second squads off. She knew that meant that they would have to work fast in getting the busses because the locals would be aware of their presence. Once more she logged the event and sent it off.

“They’re going to know where we land at the first drop point. There’s an energy battery inside the city. I logged it and sent it off to Sergeant Torres.” She told them, after she was done sending it off. One cursed in response.

Ten seconds out, the spawn tubes finished downloading the first of her platoon mates. “Get your gear and get ready. We had some trouble coming in. The OTDSs deployed with five KIAs. They will know where you are as soon as you drop. This is going to be a hot drop.” She told her platoon mates over the bay speakers.

“It smells like something is on fire back here.” Mon said as he moved out of his pod. He was acting squad leader of first squad, since One was deploying separately. Freya took half a second to admire his naked form before answering him.

“Took a hit, and lost an engine. We’re good. Five seconds until we are over the bus station.” She warned them. She hit the button that dropped the ramp in the back as she spoke. She got a notification that told her the pods were in use again as the rest of first and second squads left their pods and got geared up.

Freya flew over the outer parts of the city at nearly ninety-two percent engine power. She directed her ship towards the first drop point as the buildings below her blurred by. She came in hot and only slowed down at the last second. She yanked up on the yoke to slow her speed down as she did. As she was slowing she counted down the seconds for her passengers.

“Three, two, one. Drop! Drop! Drop” She told them, as she raised the nose of her ship and lowered the back so that it was closer to the ground. The camera in the back showed them jumping out the back of her ship. First squad jumped together first followed by second squad. Freya didn’t stop to watch them fall the twenty feet to the ground, instead gunning her engines just as her sensors warned her that she was being targeted by the energy cannon.

She got a notification that she remotely logged the event and a second notification that the event had been sent off. “By Evlis, I love my personal AI.” She muttered to herself, smiling.

She flew over the forest as she raced to get into position before the assault on the prison. The trees blurred not far below her as she kept her ship as close to the forest as she could to prevent the energy weapon from targeting her.

A voice from the radio broke her concentration. “B127 from H-2, what is the status of spawns?” Freya identified the voice as Sergeant Leni.

Freya checked the spawn times and reported them to the Sergeant. “H-2, B127, three minutes and twenty-two seconds.” She replied. She didn’t bother explaining why she was running late because she knew that the Sergeant was getting her event logs. As long as Sergeant Leni was reading them she would know everything that happened on the way down.

“Copy, three minutes twenty-two seconds. Proceed to the third drop position. Drop the first payload. Retreat to first fall back position and wait for the second payload to load.” Sergeant Leni ordered.

“Copy. Proceeding to third drop and to unload. Will fall back to first fall back and will wait for secondary payload.” Freya replied, as she increase the power in her engines.

“Hot drop in fifteen seconds.” She told One and Done over the radio. She concentrated on using her Personal AI and her computer screen to begin unlocking the Mechs. She got a notification that the computer recognize her remote command. She smiled as she did so. She was enjoying her Personal AI way too much.

“You get any closer to these trees I’m going to get knocked off.” Done complained. “I hope you’re planning to give us more room to drop.”

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch, Done. I got you.” She told him right before she lowered her ship to be closer to the trees just to mess with him.

“My socks! Seriously Magic, my collision alarm is going off.” Done told her, sounding nervous over the radio. Freya smiled and thought about going lower but decided not to because she was as low as possible without endangering the Mechs below her.

“Eight seconds until hot drop.” She warned the two. She logged the event remotely and sent it off.

“Hell yeah! That’s what I’m talking about.” One yelled over the radio.

At four seconds out, Freya spotted the prison in the middle of the woods. It was smack dab in the middle of a wide clearing. She adjusted her position. It would give the prison more time to see her but it would give One and Done a better drop position.

At two seconds, the prison’s defences opened up. Her sensors screamed at her showing multiple incoming missiles, but she knew they were going to be too late. There was just not enough time for them to shoot at her. She was proven right as she avoided direction collision with them and they sped past her. Her sensors reported that the missiles deployed after she had already passed them. Their payload spent uselessly as she sped past them.

As she came up to the prison, she realized she hadn’t given One and Done any countdowns. “Dropping now.” She yelled into the mic and hit the emergency release. She never slowed down as she passed within twenty feet of the front gate of the prison. She target some of the guard towers as she passed with her nose gun and unloaded her entire magazine into them. Her sensors reported direct hits to the towers but she was already too far past them to see the results. Her nose guns automatically reloaded from the ammo pods under and to the rear of her ship.

She waited for a few seconds then reversed her engines and came to a screeching stop nearly falling out of the sky. She landed roughly, crushing some trees below her. She got some minor damage reports but nothing serious. She checked on the timers to the pods and saw she still had a few moments until the next six clones would be ready for downloads.

Since she had a few minutes, she watched the prison break on her sensors. One and Done had already taken down the gate with high explosive rounds. One was in the process of jumping over the razor wire into the courtyard of the prison. Done was covering her by lobbying smoke rounds into the courtyard. Her sensors reported that third and fourth squads were already scaling the wall behind the prison and would be in position in less than a minute.

Racing towards the prison were six busses. Her friend or foe (IFF) sensor reported that they were being driven by first and second squad members. Freya smiled as she thought that, while the attack had kicked off early, it was going well. She knew that there was nothing she could have done better as the air defence was much better than they had expected. She was lucky to get past the red zone with just a broken engine.

She was reviewing reports of explosions inside the prison when she got the alert that the pods were ready to download. She hit accept and seconds later the pods opened up and six members of sixth squad stepped into the back of her ship. She set the pods to spawn the rest of sixth squad and added the members of her squad next. She was not going to be in the first round of spawns though. She still had to move her ship to a better hiding spot.

She did add Sergeant Torres to the queue. He had been among those who had the bad luck to be shot down in their OTDS in the red zone. She didn’t see the Sergeant’s name at first and had added Jacob to the list to be spawned next. She quickly deleted his name from the queue and added her platoon leader. She did add her body to the last queue with the rest of the respawning platoon members so it would be ready when she was done hiding her ship.

The six marines left out the back of her ship and headed towards the prison. Freya turned her attention back towards the fighting. The prisoners were starting to leave the prison buildings and the guards who had given up were walking towards a remote corner of the courtyard. She watched as sixth squad took control of the newly freed prisoners. They started singling out the two-hundred and fifty prisoners that they had to keep alive.

It wasn’t as one-sided fight as Freya would have liked. She was alerted several times as someone was added to the queue to be respawned. Freya watched the action as well as the respawn timers. At the same time, she kept glancing at her sensors looking for any response from the enemy. Freya hated waiting in her ship. She really wanted to be out at the prison in the action but she knew she couldn’t afford to be away from her ship. Even knowing that it was vital that she remained with the ship, it still annoyed her.

It didn’t take all that long for the platoon to take the prison, with Tike and the other marines with the Engineer template blowing open the prison cells, making the work much faster than what it could have been. Freya checked on the busses progress and winced. They had just reached the halfway point. She checked for any pursuit and, for the moment, she didn’t see any. She logged the event and sent it off.

Sergeant Torres and the rest of the respawns had spawned by the time the busses arrived. He directed the cleanup while the busses finally pulled up to the prison. They packed all six busses with the prisoners to the point they were standing on top of each other. One and Done led the way down the road in front of the busses. Freya was starting to get concerned with the fact the there was still no response to their attack, when her sensors alerted her to six ships heading their way. She logged the event and sent it off.

The six ships were flying high in the sky and come from the direction of the city. Sergeant Torres set up some large anti-ship weapons taken from the ammo pod on her drop ship. Freya watched the six ships get closer, biting her lip again. She was still watching the ships with dread when her sensors alerted her to incoming enemy missiles. She breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t energy weapons being fired.

As soon as the enemy fired their missiles Sergeant Torres ordered the anti-ship guns to fire. Freya smiled savagely when the energy weapons tore apart the incoming missiles and went on to take out the ships, who must have thought they were too high for any normal infantry unit to engage.

Two of the six ship survived the first barrage from the anti-ship weapons. Freya watch them panic and split up. They deployed their electronic warfare and they disappeared from her sensors. It was too late though as the second salvo fired along computer predicted routes. The results were the deaths of the last two ships.

One of the missiles got lucky and survived the anti-ship fire. Freya watched with growing dread as the platoon’s anti-ship weapons were rearmed. She could easily do the math in her head and it wasn’t good. She was proven right when the missile fired off its payload before it could be taken out by the anti-ship weapons. One and Done were fast enough to avoid the explosion but the first two busses were caught up in the fireball. Freya winced at the deaths of so many civilians. What was worse was that the road was now blocked by the two burnt wrecks.

“Magic, get that ship out of here. Go to the primary fall back position. Toast, get that bunker set up.” Sergeant Torres ordered over the radio. “One and Done, weapons free. Target any and all military assets. If it has a gun, it dies. Understood? Leni, take your squads to the mountains but abandon the busses. Wilson, back Leni up. Sixth squad with me. We need to get the package moving. Move it people, that was their fast response unit. The rest will be coming soon.”

Freya looked at the respawn timer and shrugged. The next wave of respawns would spawn in less than a minute but orders were orders. She closed the ramp in the back of her ship and lifted off. She kept as close as she could to the top of the trees. She boosted her ship to nearly eighty percent engine power as she traveled to where she would hide it for hopefully the rest of the mission.

She found the pond right where she saw it on the map while back on the Monarch. Increasing her speed once again, this time to eighty-four percent, it took her roughly ten seconds to get to the pond. She did an end-over-end maneuver to reduce her speed to almost nothing once she was over the pond. She let the ship fall slowly towards the pond. She used her maneuvering engines to keep her descent slow, so that when she entered the pod she was barely going ten miles an hour. With one of her maneuvering engines offline her landing was a bit rough. There was a splash as the ship hit the pond but it wasn’t that bad. It did jolt her though, sitting inside the ship.

She lowered her nose so that when the ship hit the bottom of the pond the back was pointed upwards. When her ship came to rest the back of her ship was about a hundred feet from the surface. With their environmentally sealed battle uniforms, swimming to the surface wouldn’t be a problem. The problem would be getting into the suits once out of the pods.

Freya set up her active camouflage even though she was one hundred feet below the surface of the pond. She had a feeling they would need the respawn pods badly in the next two weeks. She thought about everything that had happened so far in the mission and shook her head. Mission time was only thirty minutes and yet it was the most action she had ever seen in the opening part of a mission since she joined the marines and she hadn’t even spawned yet.

The timer went off telling her it was time for her to download herself into the respawn pod. She did one last check around the cockpit before she pressed the download button. She woke up in the pod less than a second later. It was dark in the back of the ship. She got a notification about the environmental hazard on the other side of the pod doors. Dim lights clicked on pointing her to the closest locker. She took a deep breath and cracked the pod’s door. The water poured in. The water was freezing and she was shivering even before she was completely submerged. She took one last deep breath just before the water rose over her head. It was now or never.

She pushed the pod door the rest of the way open and swam in the near total darkness to the locker to her left. She placed her hand on the sensor and the console lit up. She pressed the button for her battle dress uniform. The prompt came up asking her if she wanted to equip her uniform. She accepted the prompt, desperately needing to breathe now.

One she second she was floating naked in the water and the next her uniform was around her. She still had to hold her breath for a couple of seconds as her helmet had to vent the water in the suit. She was starting to see stars and really needed to breathe. A couple of very long seconds later her helmet was done venting the water. She took several deep breaths of the odd-smelling air. She shook her head, trying to get the water drops that were on her eyelashes off before they dropped into her eyes.

Her armor automatically switched to dark vision so she could see the others around her in various degrees of getting ready. Near the back of the ship in the last pod two people were helping a third who was panicking. They dragged the thrashing third person to the locker and put the marine’s hand on the console. Seconds later the marine was dressed in his battle uniform.

Freya looked around and relaxed. Everyone else was dressed and ready to go. She swam upwards towards the ramp. The others followed her as they swam up towards the surface. Freya looked around the water as she rose upwards. Aside from a bunch of little fish swimming around them, she didn’t see any hazards. It never occurred to her to look up what kind of aquatic predator might live in the pond. She was glad that she didn’t see any of that here.

They didn’t break the surface but stayed about ten feet or so below. They swam together towards the edge of the pond. When they got there, Freya rose up first with her active camouflage on and her old energy rifle at the ready. She swept the area but saw nothing.

“Clear.” She called over the radio and the rest of the marines rose up from under the water. Freya led the way forward onto land with the rest of the marines following her.

“Now what?” Jacob asked, as the marines took up positions around a big tree.

“Now we stay and protect the ship until the bunker is done.” Ed, the squad leader of fourth squad, said over the radio. “Petey, take Magic and make sure we’re alone. Petey, don't be a dick and listen to what she tells you. She’s the scout, not you. You make the decisions, you have the rank, but, by Geya, listen her.”

“Aye, Aye, Corporal.” Petey replied.

It was all Freya could do not to roll her eyes at his overly military response. She resisted the urge to shake her head at him. He could be such an idiot. As she thought about it she realized she really didn’t like him. She didn’t like how he was always trying to order everyone around at breakfast. She thought about it for a few seconds and realized what she hated was the way he treated everyone around him. It was like he thought everyone was a child he had to take care of instead of a marine.

“Okay Magic, let’s get going.” Petey said, walking ahead of her. She knew he was trying to sound like a leader but it came off all wrong. Instead of sounding like a leader, he sounded like a condescending git. She took a deep breath and let out her anger.

“Petey, maybe I should take point. I have active camo.” Freya said, trying to be nice. What she left unsaid was that, while she had active camo, he did not. He also stomped around making a racket. She tried to tell herself that she was being overly sensitive but he got under her skin in the worst way. She took another deep breath then smiled at him. She lost her smile a second after his response.

“After you, oh mighty scout.” Petey said, condescendingly, as he stopped and waved her forward without looking at her. Freya resisted the urge to hit him in the back of his head with the butt of her rifle as she walked past. It was a close thing.

“Ok fine, I hate him.” She thought to herself, as she walked deeper into the woods.

Freya led them straight out from the pond for about a hundred feet before she led them to the left and around the pond in a slow circle. During the patrol, it annoyed Freya that he showed some competency when he followed behind her at a good distance and didn’t crowd her.

“Stop it.” She told herself, as she felt a flash of irritation when she held her hand up and he stepped into some brush doing a very good job of hiding himself without the benefit of active camouflage. “He can be annoying but he’s halfway decent at being a soldier.”

She stopped long enough to deploy a sensor cloud from the cloudforge in her armor and set it on the largest scanning area she could set it to. It would have less information, but it would give her an earlier warning if something was coming for her. Her mini map popped up with a bunch of small animals, but nothing that would be a threat to the marines. She set her cloudforge to recreate the cloud as soon as it recharged so that she would have one in the air at all times.

It took them a half hour to circle around the pond. When they got back, Freya left Petey to report in with Ed while she went off alone away from the marines and found a good position to set up watch in the slowly darkening forest. She switched out her old rifle with her big one and settled down to wait. She kept an eye on the local wildlife. While her information didn’t list any dangerous animals that were known to be on the planet she was still worried about what was not in the information briefing.

The first moon popped its head nearly an hour later. It was much smaller than Earth’s moon and looked like a small, white dot in the sky. It was noticeably bigger than the other twinkling stars in the sky but not by much. Several hours later, the second moon rose over the horizon. It was nearly two times larger than Earth’s moon. It was blue in color and, like the moon that circled Earth, it had large impact craters visible on its surface.

Sometime near the middle of the night, Toast radioed them to meet him at a new set of coordinates. Freya took point position with the annoying Petey following behind her. Five minutes later, Freya found Toast and the rest of her squad around a hole in the ground. The only person that was missing was Tike, who Freya guessed was inside the hole creating the bunker.

“Morning, people.” Toast said, as the rest of the temporary squad walked out of the brush. “Ed, can you set up a defensive line around this hole. Magic, Patterson, I need you guys to roam the perimeter, at least fifty feet out. We should be done with the first part of the tunnel system by daybreak.”

Ed apparently agreed because he started giving orders to the rest of the temporary squad. Freya found Patterson and the two of them walked away from the rest of the marines. They started circling around the area where they were digging the first tunnel. Freya had a feeling it was going to be a long night.