Freya blinked as her alarm on her HUD went off. She looked around and frowned. She was back in her room after spending nearly all day and night at Pops. She grinned at the memory of Diaz and Monkeyman drunkenly kissing. It had been a dare, but Diaz looked like she was more than happy to do it. Freya sighed as she got up, and stumbled to her shower. She took an extra long shower, letting the hot water relax her whole body. She hadn’t used the jacuzzi yet, but if it was anything like her shower she knew she would be a limp noodle afterwards.

She got out reluctantly and equipped her uniform from her own personal locker that was in her bathroom. She had something similar in her old barracks room, but this one was metal while her old was a dull off-white plastic one. She threw her old uniforms, both of them because she had forgotten the day before when she first got her room, into the recycling bin. Once she was dressed she went to her kitchen, and bought a simple breakfast of toast and normal-looking fried eggs. She ate it in a hurry as she noticed the time on her HUD.

She ran out the door and down to where the muster room was. Like her old barracks this one had its own room just for mustering. She was ten minutes early, but most of her platoon was already there. She quickly found a spot next to Lurch and Monkeyman. Both of them nodded good morning to her, but kept quiet. Most of the platoon was quiet except for a few people mumbling here and there.

As the rest of the platoon slowly entered and got in formation she thought about what was happening. She had no idea what team she was in nor did she know who was going to be her team leader. She scanned the platoon looking at the numbers and knew if they kept to the same organizational set up then they had enough for three quads of three fire teams, as long as they kept the teams to four people each. She was still trying to figure out who were the new fire team leaders when Kruz and Mother walked in. Fred stepped out from formation and joined them as they stopped to face the entire platoon.

“Well, you people look partied out. I hope you got it out of your systems because I’m going to need you at top form for what comes next. We will be spending the next two months doing practice missions. There will be no sim missions until right before we leave. If you need credits, come see me and you can take out a loan. If you need mod or skill points then you’ll have to wait until the practice missions are over. I know this will eat into your advancement, but this isn’t a normal real world mission. This is the first battle of what we are thinking will be a long war. We are the tip of the spear, expect lots of rewards as long as you do your job to the best of your ability.” Mother said, looking them over.

“Muster will be at this time everyday. You will have thirty minutes to eat afterwards, then we will meet in the briefing room. We will go over what mistakes we made the day before and plan how to fix them going forward. There are no set teams at this time. We will go over who is in what team during each meeting until I see which people work best with each other. I expect to have full teams by the end of the month. If you’re not a fire team leader at first, don’t worry - I’m trying out new combinations. I want the best teams in place before we drop.” Mother told them.

“Kruz.” Mother asked, looking at the assistant platoon leader.

“Keep yourselves in line if you leave the camp. We had no one get in trouble yesterday, which surprised me. Keep it that way, and we will get along. Screw up and we won’t.” Kruz said looking at them with a strangely neutral expression on her face. It scared Freya more than she would have liked to admit it.

“Command staff meeting in ten minutes. I have a lot of go over. I’ll have the rest of your positions posted outside the briefing room five minutes before the full meeting. Expect to work all day at your best, or I will find a replacement.” Mother told them. “That is all. Dismissed.”

Then the platoon broke up and started going their own way. Freya watched them, surprised. She was used to being called to attention and then again to be dismissed, but this platoon didn’t do that. She wondered if it was because they were a spec ops platoon or if it was just how Mother ran the platoon. She thought about asking someone, but decided not to. She didn’t want to look like an idiot.

“So you think we are going to stay together?” Lurch asked, sounding vulnerable. He was still standing next to Freya.

“We might not for a short time, but once things get going we will be back together.” Monkeyman replied, taking a step forward so that he was facing both of them. “We are the Monkeyman gang. Now one is going to break us up.”

Freya rolled her eyes, but was silently happy to hear him say that. She checked her map and looked for the entrance to the training facility. She found it next to the entrance to something called a training and leisure space station. She had no idea what that was, but wanted to go and check it out in the worst possible way. She looked at the time on her HUD and noted she only had a few minutes until she had to report to the meeting. She was not sure she had enough time to get her training done, but she thought she had enough time to check out what she was offered. Plus she had a lot of mod and skill points she needed to use.

“Hey, I’m going to check out the training facility and dump my points. What are you guys going to do?” She asked them.

“I already went yesterday.” Monkeyman said, with a fake sad expression.

“I did too.” Lurch said nodding his head. “Why are you waiting ‘til the last minute?”

“Bought a new dropship. Didn’t have the time.” Freya replied.

“You didn’t spend the entire day buying it. You could have gone before or afterwards.” Lurch said, shaking his head.

“I was too worked up to go before, and I needed a drink after I spent close to two-hundred thousand credits on it.” Freya replied.

“Wait, how much?” Lurch asked, looking at her.

“I don’t want to think about it.” Freya replied, turning away.

She really didn’t want to think about it. She had been thinking about it all night at the bar. Though the fact she really needed to buy the mods for her ship never stopped popping up in her head. She knew it was an awesome ship that would last her a lifetime, but still it was a lot of money. The only reason she hadn’t messaged Diaz telling her to return it was the fact she still had enough credits to buy her ship one more time. After that she would be really broke. It felt weird that so had been, and to some extent was still, that rich.

She waved to her two friends and ran down the hallway to the training facility. She found that she was the only one there. Smiling to herself, she quickly brought up her stats on the console. Looking at what she got made her smile more. She had tons of skill points and a little over eight hundred mod points. She opened up her skill list to see what she could train and frowned.

She had a bunch of required skills that were listed in red she had to get. A quick check told her that it was all for the things she had bought. Apparently the October had gotten the word that she needed help when it came to picking her skills. She felt it was a bit embarrassing that she still had to have someone watching over her. Unfortunately she knew that without the October she would have skipped the training and gone for something fun. Shaking her head, she picked up the skills. They were a bit costly, but when she looked at just how many skill points she had left it wasn’t nearly that bad. Ironically, they all fell under ship systems. In the past she had used that skill to learn how to sabotage ships. Apparently now she was learning to use it for her ship.

She scanned through the much bigger list after she picked up the mandatory skills. The list went on forever. She had enough skill points to get a few doctorates, or learn how to drive an FTL starship. In the end, she exited out of the skill list as she didn’t have the time to really examine what she wanted to learn. She really didn’t want to complete her doctorate in corporate communications. She only got that to see if there was a way she could figure out how to bypass the government restriction on communication while on her last real world mission. She did have a vague plan on training up on how to fly a close support ship, but she didn’t know if she would need to keep a bunch of skill points saved up for something else for this upcoming mission.

She checked the time and cursed. She only had a few minutes until she had to be at the meeting. She opened up her mod list. Looking over at her stats she decided not to add to any of her highest stats, which were standing around fifteen-hundred. She decided to drop as many points as possible in memory. It was the only stat she was lacking if she wanted to fly close support ships. It was also a minor stat she needed to keep up with her sniper template even if she had already completed it.

She frowned when she added the points. It cost her twenty-five mod points to raise it once. Her windfall of mod points, which at first seemed amazing, was now looking pretty slim. She ended up raising it to one thousand and fifty, which cost nearly all her mod points. Then the cost went up to twenty-six points to raise it by just one mod point. She only had enough points to raise it twice before she ran out. She did so with a sigh. It left her with twenty-five points. Just one point shy to raise it once more. She decided to keep the leftover points instead of throwing them into something else. She finalized everything and closed out of the console. She unlocked the door and stepped into the white light.

Her skills training this time was really fun. She spent hours shooting things down with her Shand’s cannons and missiles. She started on the ground, killing things that were charging her grounded ship. It was like a video game. Then she found herself in the air, shooting at targets on the ground as she passed them by while evading their return fire. It was a lot of fun.

Her next skill was on the ground again. Here, she learned how to fire her artillery cannon. There was a lot of information she had to learn on how to set her ship up correctly so that when she fired her cannon it wouldn’t send her ship flying backwards. She had to anchor her ship to the ground, which took about a minute or two, depending on what her ship was resting on. She also couldn’t fire it unless it was anchored down correctly. It limited her landing areas once again. She couldn’t land in swamps or soft ground deeper than sixty feet or her anchoring struts wouldn’t reach bedrock.

Firing the cannon was a lot of fun. She only had to adjust the angle of the cannon to hit her target. She also learned that she couldn’t shoot too many UHE rounds in a single area if she didn’t want to run into the danger of cracking tectonic plates. That is, if the planet had tectonic plates. Still, it was humbling just how powerful her cannon was. There were also many rules she had to learn about shooting the cannon.

The biggest rule was that she couldn’t fire her cannon without permission from a gunnery sergeant or higher or, in the case of a spec ops platoon, the platoon leader. She had to ask permission each and every time she fired it. The good news was that Mother could give her permission to fire the cannon up to five times instead of Freya asking before each and every shot. Freya shook her head at the power that Mother had at her fingertips.

Once she was done with the weapons systems, she moved on to the command and control console. This skill cost her the most. She had to learn how to monitor everyone in the platoon while at the same time monitoring the battlefield. It was surprisingly easy to overlook someone in her platoon getting zeroed out.

Here was where her mods came in to help her. Her high perception and memory helped her keep track while her processing speed helped her think faster. Her Personal AI was extremely helpful as it enabled her to send signals faster to the squads she was commanding. She also learned that there was far more she could do with the command and control unit than what she had trained on, but she needed to add more systems and consoles to it.

The command and control console was built with plug-and-play capability, so that if a person had extra things they could easily add them to the console. Things like enemy communication decryption systems, or air combat systems where a person could take command of a fleet of assault or close support ships. Hell, with the correct systems and permissions, someone could command a planet-wide or even system-wide assault. Freya found the applications staggering.

The one thing she found that she didn’t like about her new ship was that it was fat and slow. It was faster than her last dropship before she put in the new engines, but even with the fastest engines she could put into the new ship, it felt so slow. Even her maneuvering felt off. Her turning radius was much bigger than her old ship. It took time to get used to it, but even then there were things she could do in her old ship that she couldn’t do in this new one.

The one thing she liked about flying her new ship was how amazing all the new systems she now had to hide her ship. She had a whole dashboard full of systems she could use to hide her ship while flying or on the ground. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but once she got used to it, she had a lot of fun. Her new ship, while slow and fat, was much more sneaky and had a hell of a lot more firepower than anything she had ever flown before.

She spent some credits flying her ship in the training facility into battle a few more times, just to make sure she was comfortable flying it. She also spent some credits to fire her new cannon. She didn’t buy more time on her cannon because she needed it. She spent the credits because of how fun it was firing the thing, and watching the damage it could inflict was really cool. It did far more damage than the Mechs could do in her old platoon. In fact she spent a lot more credits than she should have just to destroy a simulated city, or an army that was charging her platoon position. The anti-personnel rounds was just plain murder on an unsuspecting army.

She ended up spending a hundred credits on flying and shooting her cannon. She almost bought more time, but stopped herself. She had already spent a crazy amount playing around, she really needed to start saving again. Reluctantly, she left and found herself standing just outside the training facility’s door. No time had passed, of course, since she entered the facility, but she had spent a lot of time going through her stuff before she started her training. Looking at the time, she sighed and ran for the briefing room.

She was early, but all the command staff was already there. The room was much more luxurious than any briefing room she had ever seen. The seats were single seats instead of the bench seats she had seen before. They were also padded with what looked like white leather. The holo table in the middle of the room was huge, and there were screens hanging in front of every chair that showed more information than what was on the holo table. In just a glance at the one that was hanging over the chair closest to the door, she learned more of the mission planet than she had in the prior two missions.

The glance told her that she had been wrong on the duration of a single day. She hadn’t been that far off, but still enough that she found herself wondering where she had gone wrong. The time listed on the screen said that a single rotation of the planet took 42 hours and just a bit more than twenty-two minutes. She noted that the planet did tilt on its axis a bit and that could be the reason why she got the time wrong. Still she was a bit annoyed that she failed to calculate the time correctly.

The planet was a bit colder than Earth-normal on average, but not so far out from human-acceptable temperatures. She noted that there was only one city on the planet so far, but it had a bunch of smaller outposts that were made up of corporate and colonial services. The population was surprisingly large, for a newly colonized planet undergoing terraforming, considering that the colonization process had only started ten years ago.

The information that stopped Freya nearly in her tracks was the last bit of data on the screen. It was about the main export from the planet. The export was some kind of semi-solid crystal that was vital for FTL travel. She knew for a fact that the ships were energy beings. So why did energy beings need semi-solid crystals? Why couldn’t they manufacture them instead of mining them? She thought about it and came to the conclusion that something was off. It shouldn’t be hard to print the materials. Crystals should be one of the easiest things to print because of their rigid and repeating structure. Why mine them? She made a note to look the crystals up.

“Magic, good, you’re here. Let's get started.” Mother said, as Freya joined the command staff, which were herself, the squad leaders, Sergeant Kruz, and Mother, at the holo table.

“So this is Karma. I’m not going to go over the planet's data. Everyone in the platoon will be required to do that on their own.” Mother told them. “I’ll put up some more information about the planet as I get it. That will include our drop point, and enemy movements. We won’t know what is going on until we get closer.”

“First off, we need to get to know each other. I want to make up full time teams by the end of the week. I’m going to use what I saw in the tryouts to put together the teams today, but I expect you squad leaders to aid me after today. That reminds me - Magic, see me after this, and before the full platoon meeting.” Mother said, looking at her.

“I would also like to thank Magic for going over and above what I asked her to in buying her new dropship. I’ve seen the specs. It's like an assault ship. I put it up on the platoon net. I suggest you all check it out.” Mother told them. Then she chuckled “You should see what kind of artillery cannon we have access to on that ship. We can do some serious damage to the enemy with that thing. I want all of you to get or brush up on the shot-calling skills. I’ll have a list of acceptable skills up on the net as soon as we are done here. If you don’t have one of those skills, get one. The danger close on that thing is very short. I do not want anyone calling in friendly fire. Understood?”

Freya fought back a blush as Mother gushed on how awesome the dropship was. Freya felt a little better spending all the money on her new ship. She knew she could make it back in a few years once she was out, but still she was glad that the experienced Sergeant noticed. The rest of the meeting was mostly about stuff that didn’t involve Freya. There were some command things for team leaders that she listened to, just in case she ever had her own team. The rest was about stupid crap.

Kruz started talking after that. It was mostly boring stuff that everyone should already know, but the assistant platoon leader wanted to remind them about. Then Fred started talking about basic skill stuff that was expected for the fire team leaders to have, and how they were expected to keep on top of it. It didn’t apply to Freya because she was not a squad leader, but she did memorize it so that she had an edge on getting a team leader spot.

Mother tried to end the meeting by asking the squad leaders if they had any more questions. Freya held back a sigh as they all had questions. Drake wanted to know more about the enemy. Mother went over a few things, but it wasn’t that much more information than what they already had. Unicorn wanted to know about the timetable. Mother simply replied two months, and that she would have more information when they got closer. Then Drake asked another question and Freya tuned them out. Mother didn’t have that much information it seemed, and couldn’t answer their questions all that well. Most of the answers were ‘we will see what happens in the future.’

Freya was never more glad when it was time for the platoon-wide meeting. Mother motioned for her to follow her as the rest of the platoon filed in. Freya followed her new boss to a small area in the corner away from everyone. Freya knew as soon as she looked at Mother it was not good news.

“Magic, I first want to say that your ship is everything I ever dreamt for in the Marines. You went far beyond what I asked of you. Do you need a platoon loan?” Mother asked.

“No, Ma’am.” Freya replied.

“Okay. I know normally that final templates usually get their own squads, or in our case fireteams, but seeing as you’ve only been in the Marines for three years I can’t justify it. However, my plan is to put you second in command of the fireteam under Cannon for this first real world mission. You seemed to work well together, so I am hesitant to break up a good thing. Now, I have plans for Cannon after it’s over. Impress me, and I’ll pull Cannon off your team, and put you in charge. Screw up, and I’ll promote Monkeyboy in your place.” Mother told her.

“It’s Monkeyman.” Freya mumbled, as she thought over what Mother had just told her. “And yes, Ma’am.”

“Good, find a seat. We got a lot to go over.” Mother told her.

Status Screen

Name: Freya O’Malley

Rank: Corporal Level: 14

Template: Sniper

Enlisted points: 3,410,656

Credits: 221,177

Skill points: 57,692

Mod points: 25

Weapons:

E.S.I. Multi Heavy ASO

3 shot option Duralogistic shock absorbers with Nexus sound reducers Mega Colax purified battery pod (x4) Twenty heat sinks LNG rod ammo Angler 57 rifle scope with MAS vision High intensity lens

Armor:

Wrath EC Tier 5

Massimio Strength & Friction assistance Mega Colax battery pod (x4) Cloudforge Sensor alert Seven drones Memory Expansion Module Ove Standard Battery AIT Stealth boost

Side weapons:

Irish Nester

Mega Colax purified battery pod (x2) NG explosive rod ammo

Wingols 90-90

HPSG ammo rod (20 rounds)

Asy Minor short barrel energy rifle

Colax purified battery

Basic combat knife

Vehicles:

Dropships:

Goozden 501 Medium Armored Respawn Dropship Goozden 127 light armored Respawn

Adav two person Scout Quad

Stealth suite

Wetware mods

Health

Level: 85

Health Regen

Level: 85

Strength

Level: 150

Perception

Level: 1,500

Agility

Level: 1,500

Dexterity:

Level: 1,500

Memory

Level: 1,252

Processing speed

Level: 1,500

Personal AI

Level: 134

Skills cont:

Zero G Maneuvering

Level 5

Advanced Shipboard Tactics

N/A

Spaceborn Vessel

Systems

List

Martial Arts:

Líng Zhònglì Zhàndòu

Level 5

Master

Awareness Skills

List

Dropship Deployment Tactics (Single ship)

Level 15

General Rifle skills

List

Shooting skills

List

Advanced Targeting

N/A

Small unit tactics (Human)

List

Small unit tactics (Alien)

List

Government and Cultural training (Human)

List

Artillery Fire and Support

List

Skills:

Enhanced sensing

Level: 2

Tracking

Level: 5

Acrobatics

Level: 5

One time infantry Drop ship

Level: 1

Special Warfare

N/A

FTL Communication

Phd.+ Postgrad

FTL Communication

Alien Engineering

Phd.

FTL Communication Corporate

MS.

Alien Behavior and Culture

BS.

Engineer

Master

Advanced Drone Operator

Level: 16

Piloting

Level: 25

Silent Walking

Level: 5

Silent Combat Running

Level: 5

Hacking

Level: 5

Zero G. Combat

N/A

Bomb Making

*Non template skill*

Level 10

Driving Skills

List

First Sniper training

Complete

Government and Cultural training (Alien)

List

Leadership

(Squad level)

Level 10

(Completed)

Hardware mods: Suicide mod

Medals: Gold E Sharpshooter, Silver Cluster (With Honors) Badges: Cyber warfare