Freya walked around her ship running her hand around all the scratches. It looked a lot worse now that the ship wasn’t in thirty feet of water. Shaking her head she headed back towards the ramp at the back of her ship. She briefly tapped the name plate with two fingers on her right hand as she passed it by. She paused just afterwards and frowned as she got a bad feeling. She felt an odd sense of impending dread. She looked around trying to spot what was making her feel bad, but everything looked fine.

She pulled out her checklist and for the first time in a very long time went down the list making sure everything was working fine. Still feeling that something was off she went back out and did a more thorough check on the outside of her ship. She took her time and really examined the scratches. She even broke out her maintenance scanner from her sabotage kit and scanned the scratches, but it came back fine.

Still feeling that something was off she got into her pod and despawned. Once she was inside her cockpit she quickly sat down and turned everything on. She went through the onboard checklist with a fine tooth. She sighed half in relief and half in frustration as nothing turned up other than normal.

“RDS B127, you on yet?” A man asked on her radio.

‘RDS B127, responding.” Freya replied as she warmed up her engines.

“This is Kissimmee, Flight leader for the mission today. I’m sending you the flight specifics now. Basically, we will go in with my four assault ships in lead wedge formation. You will be in the middle in the number five position. Four miles out we will break formation. Two and four will continue on to the first landing zone, while the rest of us head to LZ 2. You will break with three there. I’ll drop to the deck and make a speed run to LZ 3. That’ll end your part of the mission. Read up on the briefing and get back with me on channel eight if you have questions. Otherwise we will meet up when you get to the camp’s LZ.” The Flight leader of the assault ships told her.

“Yes, sir.” Freya replied as she brought up the flight specifics.

The assault ships were going to fly in a Vee formation. Her position or the number five position was in the middle of the Vee behind the number one or point ship. The ship in the second position was on the right of the lead ship, while the ship in the fourth position was on the same side behind and slightly behind the ship in the second position. In other words the entire right side of the wedge was going to head to the first landing zone while the rest headed towards the second LZ. According to her orders, after they broke off she would take the number two position as the three ships headed to the second LZ. Then about a half mile out the ship on the left hand side and herself would break heading towards the bridge while Kissimmee who was in the first position would head to the south side of the island with her platoon.

It was a typical mission for a dropship backed up with assault ships. She had done a bunch of missions just like it when she was getting qualified to fly her ship. She had even flown a few missions in an assault ship just like the one she was flying today when she was getting her advanced drone qualifications. She had a lot of fun flying an assault ship, but the Marines valued dropships over assault ships.

Kissimmee was, according to her flight orders, a warrant officer in the Navy. While a Marine could be an assault ship pilot, there were just not that many who were qualified to do so. Also most who were qualified were most likely too busy at the moment with other missions in subduing the mission planet. The Marines like their pilots fly dropships instead of assault ships if possible as the dropships were for the most part much more valuable to the Marines than an assault ship was. Not to say that the assault ships weren’t important, they were. It was just that dropships aided in the biggest advantage that the Federation Marines had in fighting wars. Respawning of troops in a combat zone.

Once everything was checked off Freya flew to where camp’s LZ and landed in an area that was highlighted on her screen as her ship's personal landing zone. Once she was down she kept her ship running as she lowered her ramp. The landing zone was empty except for her. The assault ships hadn’t landed yet. One her sensors she could see the company forming up by platoons around the clearing.

As she waited for the assault ships to land the feeling of dread came back. Or maybe it never left and she was just too busy to notice it. She looked around at her sensors looking for anything wrong, but again everything came back as normal.

“Maybe it’s me missing the Mechs.” She thought to herself. It had been a while since she had flown without them. It seemed reasonable to her that she was just missing them.

“But why do I still feel like something is going to go horribly wrong?” She thought to herself as her sensors pinged her telling her that the assault ships were in-coming. Leaning back in her chair she watched the ships land and worried that she missed something.

Even feeling off as she was she still admired the assault ships as they landed. They were boxy in shape, but with the corners chopped off and replaced with anti ship weapons. To Freya they looked like cardboard containers that a person would get from a fast food restaurant for takeout minus the weapons of course. There was a missile rack on top of two of the ships while the other two ships had dual rail guns instead. All in all Freya thought they looked very deadly next to her short and slightly chubby dropship.

She watched as the company broke cover from under the trees and ran out into the field towards their designated ship. She watched with amusement as Patterson came running out of the forest alone towards her ship. He looked awkwards as hell as he ran by himself to her ship. It made her smile.

“I’m in.” Patterson said once he was inside her ship. He was talking right to her camera. She closed the ramp and waited on the rest of the company to finish loading up. She watched as Patterson sat down on the floor and tied himself in with straps from a compartment on her ship. He sat to the rear of her ship next to the two tanks of bakT (the cloning fluid) and printing fluid.

“Magic, Kissimmee. What is your status?” The Flight leader asked her.

“Passenger loaded and ready to lift. Awaiting orders.” Freya replied, feeling excitement growing in her gut.

“Roger. Lift in order of position. Five sec delay. ” Came the reply as Kissimmee’s ship lifted off.

Five seconds later the number two ship lifted off which was followed by the third ship five seconds later. When it was her turn she boosted her maneuvering engines before boosting her main engine. She rose steadily straight up until she was about two miles up. Then she lowered the nose of her ship, and moved into position.

“Hey Magic, what’s the in flight movie today?” Patterson asked, looking at the camera.

Freya smiled despite herself and lowered a monitor in the back for her to watch what was going on. She split the screen four times so that he could watch a feed showing nearly every direction outside her ship.

“Better?” She asked him.

“I was joking, but this is cool.” He told her waving his hand at her camera.

“Jackhole.” She replied amused as she turned her attention back to flying her ship. The feeling like something was off was not going away. It wasn’t getting worse, but it wasn’t leaving her alone either.

The flight time for the trip was forty-eight minutes, and they traveled undisturbed for most of the trip. They did pass a few ships below them, but no one fired at them. Her sensor labeled the ships as fishing boats, but her training told her to always assume that ships like that were hostile until proven otherwise. At best they could radio in their position. At worst they could have hidden weapons aimed at them. Lucky the ships didn’t fire on them and her sensor didn’t report any radio signals from them. Well, at least that it could read.

“Breaking in two minutes.” Kissimmee warned over the radio.

Freya blinked as she looked around. “We are already that close?” She asked herself as she checked her position on her map. Both her Personal AI and her map confirmed the warning.

“Breaking in one minute.” Kissimmee warned as the time to break closed in.

“Look I just have to ask. Why the hell did you put a Mac 127 on a dropship? A recurved one at that. I mean that’s a lot of power for a dropship.” A man who her radio identified as Buffalo asked. He was in the third position in their wedge.

“Keep the line clear!” Kissimmee ordered angrily over the radio.

Freya blinked at the comment. She thought about the comment. “Why wouldn’t I. More power means more speed. Speed means I get too …”

Freya had no warning. One second she was flying, the next she was crashing. Her body reacted much faster than her brain as she fought to keep her ship in the air as warning from her ship's damage control came flooding in. She was much too busy to read everything, but her Personal AI informed her that First, third, and fifth maneuvering engines were offline on her starboard side. It also informed her that her fourth maneuvering engine was heavily damaged but operational on her port side. It also informed her that her seventh, ninth, and eleventh engine below her ship were also offline. It also told her that there was a fire in her main engine. It recommended that she shut it down before it exploded. She did that as she struggled to flip her ship onto it’s back as all the maneuvering engines on the top of her ship were undamaged.

Her ship shuttered badly as her damage control informed her that she had been hit again. If she had been there in person she would have died as the front part of her ship was shot up by something.

“It’s a good thing it's a digital cockpit and not a real one.” She told herself as she struggled to keep the ship from falling into the ocean. She was less than five hundred feet above the ocean. She let her mind go on autopilot as she reacted. There was no time for thinking, only surviving.

A part of her was still there watching what was happening, but the rest of her was reacting to what her Personal AI was telling her. She was coming down too fast. She needed to slow down. The ocean sea state was high. There were a lot of rolling waves. She was going to have to find a troth between two waves to slide between or break apart as a wave hit her. The rest of the flight were gone.

That made her take her eye’s off her screen for a split second to look at what her combat screen was telling her. All the assault ships were gone. There was only smoke and bits of metal falling to the ocean below. In fact her screen told her that the nose of her ship had been damaged as her flight leader exploded in front of her.

Her eyes went back to trying to survive falling into the ocean, but her Personal AI informed her what had happened. She had been hit by an energy weapon from St. Ahun island. She had been hit first. There had been no warnings. Nothing showed up on her screen. None of her electric warfare sensors noted any build up of energy to indicate an anti ship weapon.

She should have died right away, but her Personal AI showed her that she had juked her ship to the left at the last second and took only a glancing blow to her ship. She had no memory of juking away from the energy beam. The other ships didn’t react fast enough and were taken out one after another in less than a second. And now she was falling with very little control towards an angry ocean.

The good news was that she was falling forward as well as down so if she could find a good place between the waves there was a slight possibility she could survive the landing. That made her think of Patterson and the pods. Her Personal Ai informed her that Patterson was not in the ship any more. It had no idea what had happened to him only that he was gone. Her cameras in the rear of the ship were all offline.

It did give her some good news. Two of her pods were still working as well as six of the eight memory banks. The Memory banks was where her real ‘cockpit’ was located. It was where her digital self was located while she flew her ship. If they had all been destroyed then she would have ‘died.’ There were eight memory banks for redundancy in case of catastrophic failure during flight. For the first time since training she was glad that she had that many memory banks on her ship.

The collision alarm started screaming about three hundred feet from the surface of the ocean. She was still falling too fast, but there was very little she could do about it with only five maneuvering engines working to guide her ship. That turned to four engines as her fourth maneuvering engine died. Her Personal AI informed her that it was on fire, but she was too busy to do anything about it as the ocean came up terrifyingly fast. At the last second she spotted a troth between two waves and she pulled her ship towards it.

She came down using the back side of the wave to slow her down. She didn’t have time to pat herself in the back as she slid down the wave into the troth because the second wave was on her before she had time to do anything else. What was left of the nose of her ship rose up out of the water, but the rest of the ship remained on the wave. That made the back part of her ship fall lifting the nose of her ship higher into the air. She had a split second before it came done with a loud bang. She had just enough time to acknowledge the information that her Personal AI sent her about the ship integrity being compromised before everything went dark.

It was only dark for a split second before she opened her eyes inside a pod. She found herself leaning on the door as she woke up. She looked through the heavily scratched plastic door to see what was left of her ship. She could see sunlight and large waves through what should have been another set of respawn pods directly across her. There was nothing but twisted and jagged metal now. That and the ocean.

She blinked as she realized that she was not only alive, but had somehow been respawned inside what was left of her ship. For a second she had no idea what to do. She could think. She could feel panic crawling up from her chest. Then a memory of her drill sergeant pounding on her door screaming for her to get out. It was from the first time she had spawned on the Monarch.

She opened the pod door and fell into the water inside the back of her ship. It wasn't that deep, only waist deep, but she was naked and it was very cold. It felt like lightning shot through her body and her chest stopped moving like someone had clamped an iron strap across her chest. She couldn’t think as the pain and fear tore through her body. Somehow she found herself in front of a locker. It was only when the lights from locker controls penetrated her brain that she calmed down enough to realize that it was still working. There was a red light warning her that it was low on fluid, but she nearly cried when she read the prompt asking her if she wanted to equip her armor.

She eagerly tapped the yes button and cried out as her armor enfolded around her. Warmth soon followed as her suit registered that she was near hypothermic. She quickly equipped her weapons then looked around. There was only one pod that wasn’t damaged enough to make it not operational, it was the one she had come out from. That made her check the bakT levels. It was low. Very low in fact.

She had enough to spawn a single person, but that was it. She checked to see who she could respawn and blinked in shock. The entire company had been killed. Everyone from Gunny all the way down to the lowest private first class in fourth platoon were open for respawn. Everyone but her was dead.

She closed all the other platoons names out first as she thought about what to do. She looked at the list. Gunny was at the top of the list with Sergeant Torres, but then so was Toast and the other squad leaders. Her finger lingered over Sergeant Torres for a few seconds as she debated with herself then she lifted it up to the first name and clicked it. The pod door closed and darkened as it started to respawn Gunny Thompson.