The tech on the bridge of the October looked up as the door opened. He watched as his captain walked in, followed by the ship’s Marine colonel, and another Marine officer. The officer was a captain which was really rare in the Marine Corps. He wondered if she was an intelligence agent. They had weird ranks.

“Status?” His captain asked him, as she sat in her chair.

“I’m picking up a recent debris field of a large FTL ship that had been made by non-humans. If that wasn’t odd enough, we found a Federation message buoy in the field. The message is scrambled, but it came from a diplomatic ship.” The tech said, confused.

“Is it from the SBR1?” The Marine captain asked.

The tech dropped down to 0.6 time and checked. He quickly dropped to 0.2 time as it wasn’t immediately clear. In the end, he had to have the October help since everything was so scrambled. They couldn’t confirm it digitally, so they had to go with a visual inspection. While not a clean indication it was really from the SBR1 since it could be faked, the buoy looked like it was. At least it had all the correct markings. The October gave him a percentage on how likely it was to be from the diplomatic ship. It was higher than he expected.

The tech sped up time again once he got his confirmation and turned to tell his captain, but had to wait as the captain was talking to the Marine captain. “You know something.” The captain accused the marine.

The Marine captain, ignoring his captain, turned to him before she spoke. “Is it?” She asked him. Nervously, he looked to his captain for guidance.

She gave him a short angry nod. “We are about 73.6 percent certain that it is. We had to go all the way to visual because the signal is so scrambled. While it doesn’t look fake, the possibility is still there.” He replied, looking only at his captain.

“Well?” The Naval captain asked, looking at the lower-ranking Marine.

“SBR1 was the closest ship. It was diverted to see what was happening. We haven't been able to raise it since it was diverted. We feared the worst.” The marine told the other two.

“Why wasn’t I notified about that?” The Marine colonel asked, sounding really angry.

“Need to know. Sorry Colonel, it was decided that you didn’t need to know until such time as we found the ship.” The Marine captain, who the Tech now knew had to be an intelligence agent, replied. “I’m sorry sir, but my boss didn’t want that getting around.”

To the tech’s surprise, the Marine colonel just nodded like he understood the reason. The tech knew if it was him, and they sent him all the way out here to face an alien threat, he would want to know everything that was going on. The tech turned back to his sensors and his job. He had been really scared when it was announced that the Ketica had taken one of their colonies. It was the same fear that ran through the ship when word got out. Any other race and it would have been fine, but the Ketica were bogeymen. The ability to corrupt data so that you couldn’t respawn was terrifying.

He never thought he would have to face the Ketica when he enlisted. In fact they hadn't bothered the Human race since way before the war of independence. Hell, even the Empire hadn’t had problems with them except that one time. Even then, they got a treaty of non-aggression out of it. He would have never, ever joined the Navy if he knew that he could die by just doing his job.

The military was a safe place where you could live your life without too many consequences. Eat all you want, drink all you want, and wake up just the same as you went to bed the previous day. There was no fear of getting old, fat, or even injured outside a sim, and, even then, when you got back everything was put back together again like normal. The only fear he or anyone else for that matter had was the fear of being kicked out. Being in the military was like one big competitive game. The only thing you had to worry about was not getting enough E points to stay in.

The tech’s attention was jolted back to what was going on when the captain started speaking again. “The Ketica don’t have any anti-ship weaponry. That means this is not just the Ketica. I’m not taking my ship into an unknown situation like that.” The captain said. The tech didn’t know who she was talking to because he was facing his screen.

“Agreed. We need more information. Captain, that falls under your purview. Launch your team.” The colonel replied.

“You’re not in my chain of command, Colonel.” The intelligence agent replied. “But I agree with you. When do you want us to launch?”

“Now.” The colonel replied.

“My team is currently in a sim. I don’t want to pull them until they are done. They need the experience.” The intelligence officer replied.

“Full stop.” The captain said loudly. “I want an orbital trajectory circling this position. I do not want to get any closer.”

“Aye aye, Ma’am. Full stop.” The tech replied, as he dropped down to 0.8 time so that he could quickly drop out of FTL and change their heading. There was no such thing as a full stop in space. Everything was in constant motion, mostly circling each other as they moved outwards away from the center of the galaxy. The October slowed down, and dropped below light speed. New course plotted in, the tech turned his objective speed back to ship normal.

“Out of FTL, course plotted.” The tech said, once he was back to normal ship time. He watched his screen as his captain approved of the course change and the October started to change direction.

“Not to belabor the point, Thompson, but I really don’t want to hang out here any longer than I have to. Please, cancel the sim, and send your people out.” The tech heard the captain say.

“Very well.” The intelligence officer replied. “Send my team’s dropship out on autopilot so we are not wasting time. We can send my team in as soon as it gets close enough to do any good. How many days will that get me?”

“At max time dilation, five days.” The captain replied. The tech knew, once below light speed, time became their enemy. The human brain, even a digital one, could only be slowed down so much when not an energy being. You couldn’t freeze time. That was simply impossible. You can get close in FTL, for short periods of time, but if you stay too long bad things happen. Even as an energy being, you could only slow subjective time down so much before people started feeling the strain. During the Empire, a lot of people went insane because of that.

Then the tech realized that the rest of the marines wouldn’t get all that much time to train now that they were below light speed. He slowed time down and crunched the numbers. Currently, before they left FTL, the marines had about six or so months before October reached the planet. Now, unless the captain wanted to spend a lot of time traveling around in orbit, his mostly likely guess was two to three months. That depended on if the captain wanted to do one orbit or two. Either way, the tech knew that was a bad thing for the marines. A very bad thing. Trying to think of something else, his thoughts turned to the captain.

The tech knew his captain wasn’t that smart to just pull the numbers up like that. He knew that his captain had to have slowed her personal time down because there was no way she could have come up with that number off the top of her head. There were too many variables involved. Unless the October had done the calculations and passed the information on to the captain. That was very possible. In fact, the tech changed his mind - the October most likely had crunched the numbers and given the answer to the captain.

“Okay. That will give me four days for the sim and one day for stand-down and briefing. That will work.” The intelligence officer replied. “Do we have any more information about the planet that I can pass on to my team?”

“I’ll send you everything that I have.” The tech heard his captain say.

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Freya sighed as she left the hangar. Some of the fun of flying her ship was absent at the moment. It felt weird to have passengers riding in the back. Sure, she had them before, but not officially. Aside from hauling Mechs and their pilots around, she never had people come in with her to her ship’s hangar. Her new loadmaster had taken care of getting everyone situated, so she really didn’t have anything to do with them once she spawned in her cockpit. As she looked back at the video of all the people sitting in their seats talking to each other it felt weird.

That wasn’t even the worst part of having passengers. No, that went to Mother. The moment Freya sat down in her chair she noticed that she was being monitored. A quick check told her that someone was using the CC station to check on her. She knew it wasn’t that Mother didn’t trust her or anything like that. It was simply one of the functions of the CC station to monitor everyone that was under the controller’s purview.

The cockpit was Freya’s oasis. The one place she could be alone while on a mission. The one place where no one could see her, except the October, and now that was gone. Having someone watch her feed was very distracting. Command and Control units were normally only for gunnery sergeants and above, mostly as it was a waste at a platoon level. Platoon leaders didn’t have enough people under them to justify a CC. On top of that, they were still expected to fight while commanding their teams. They couldn’t do that sitting someplace safe monitoring a bunch of feeds. Knowing that Mother was watching felt very uncomfortable to Freya.

Her ship felt off as well. It was slow and, even with all the maneuvering engines, it didn’t turn like her old ship did. When she changed directions a bit too sharply, in atmosphere, she felt the back end of her ship swing out a bit more than the front part of her ship. Like her ship was drunk and couldn’t take a turn without an extra step sideways. She knew better than to trust what her body was telling her. She spent way too much time in the training facility to understand that it was very easy to fool her body into telling her lies. With enough spinning it would be very easy for her to not know which way was up, even in gravity heavier than Earth’s norm.

That was not to say flying her ship wasn’t fun. It was. There were a lot more toys she could play with sitting in front of her, and it wasn’t just her weapons systems either. She had an entire panel that dealt with electronic warfare, and sensor avoidance. That wasn’t taking into account just how powerful her new active camo was. For all practical purposes, she was invisible to everything but the October’s sensors. It was like flying something completely different than her old ship. While her new ship was slow and flew like a drunk on a weekend bender, it was incredibly sneaky.

Freya looked down at her screen that was showing the mission planet. It showed a lot more information than she needed. The good news was her Personal AI seemed to help her focus on the things she needed to see instead of being overwhelmed with information. Information that was critical to flying the ship was color-coded on her HUD. Things like weather patterns at the entry point into the atmosphere were highlighted in red, while other less important things were highlighted in yellow and blue depending on how important it was at the moment. It wasn’t something that Freya had bought. It just happened as soon as she looked at her new screen.

The upgrade to her sensors was not because of her new sensor suite. Not completely. No, that fell to the Command and Control station that she bought and placed in the back of her ship for Mother. The problem was, it was doing its job relaying all the information about the battlefield, which was in this case space around the planet and the planet itself, to her on the screen all at once. She could fix it by resetting the control panel for the screen, but thankfully her Personal AI took care of the information for her. It still had way more information than she needed, but now because of the color codes she could skim through all that information and pick out what she needed.

Freya resisted the impulse to increase the ship's speed from eighty percent to ninety percent. She felt a little frustrated at how slow she was going. As she passed into the planet’s atmosphere she increased her passive sensor avoidance systems to one hundred percent. She knew that the Ketica had no real anti-ship weapons, but as her grandfather always said ‘just because you know something doesn’t mean that what you expect will happen.’

To her relief, nothing happened. She looked at her crowded sensor screen, giving it her full attention for a few seconds, and frowned at what it told her. She rechecked the information as her ship slowly dropped towards the surface. She keyed up her radio when her screen came back with the same information yet again.

“Mother, you seeing what is going on in our AO?” She asked her boss.

“Yeah, I’m seeing what you’re seeing.” Mother replied, sounding annoyed. “Looks like the October is playing fast and loose again.”

“What do you want me to do?” Freya asked as she looked at a Ketica base sitting right in the middle of the valley they were supposed to drop into and search for civilians. A quick, closer look told her that there were far too many patrols of constructs wandering around for a safe landing anywhere in that valley. There were even patrols roaming around the mountains. Freya hoped Mother was smarter than her because she didn’t see a way to land or hot drop anyone into their AO.

“How the hell are we supposed to do our jobs in something like that?” Freya asked herself mentally. “Is this some extra hard crap that comes with being in a spec ops platoon?”

“This isn’t going to work.” Mother said over the radio. Freya looked over to the feed showing Mother sitting in her chair at the CC station with her fingers flowing over the controls like she was playing a piano.

“We are forty-five seconds out.” Freya told her, after checking her flightpath.

“Understood.” Mother said, her fingers not slowing down at all.

“Ok, I’m moving our AO.” Mother said after a few seconds. “Our new AO is here. There is no way there is anyone hiding in that valley, but that’s not our primary mission anyway. Our mission is to capture a live Ketica and have our VIP read it. There are way too many constructs for that to happen in that valley. There is a small outpost that looks promising here.”

Freya had already changed her flightpath and heading as soon as she got the new coordinates, but she appreciated that Mother took the time to explain her reasoning. She was worried about changing the AO. She was not sure that the October wouldn’t mark the mission a failure as soon as they landed outside their original AO. She took a deep breath, and hoped that Mother knew what she was doing.

The new AO was half a continent away from their original AO. It added another four minutes to their travel time. It would have been faster if she could fly in a straight line, but there were a few enemy bases between the new AO and the old. Her new sensor screen showed her the outpost that Mother was talking about through a feed from one of the October’s spy satellites. It was a dome-shaped building that was about a hundred feet in diameter. A few warriors stood sentry outside the dome, and she was sure that there were more constructs hidden in and around the area.

She looked at the satellite image for a good deployment area. There were a few hills she liked, and one of the green algae pods was big enough for her to land in, but she quickly tossed that out. If she landed there, then her artillery cannon would be useless. She kept looking until she found what she was looking for. It was between two hills that were roughly eight miles away from the outpost. There were a lot of hills between the outpost and the area she picked which gave ample cover for her people if they got caught in a firefight. It also had a clear shot for the cannon on the roof of her ship to fire on the outpost.

She sent the coordinates to Mother then waited for approval. As she did, she got an update that her squad, which included her clone, was ready to upload. She looked at the feed as her squad came out of their pods. She had started the clones as soon as she finished her preflight check-offs so that they would be ready as soon as they landed in the mountains, after she dropped off Second Squad. They quickly got their armor and weapons equipped as Mother updated them on what had happened. Freya left her clone alone and started the process of spawning most of Third Squad. She had to leave three people out since one of the pods had her clone in it. Normally she would have two people left out of spawning anyway, since they had to spawn their VIP from PsyOps, and Sergeant Kruz had to be spawned. But that situation changed now, since Freya’s clone was stuck in the pod until she could spawn. She took a second so that she could set the rest of Third Squad up to spawn as soon as a pod was free.

While she was finishing up that she was also flying around to avoid what was left of a small, ugly human city. She took a second to look at it. The city looked like it had been made up of small white boxes laid out next to each other in neat little grid patterns that created nice straight lines for roads. The city had large empty black areas though, and many of the small boxes were damaged or destroyed. The sensor spotted movement inside the city, but it wasn’t anything human. According to her sensors, it was the bio constructs who looked like they were dismantling what was left of the city.

It was only then that everything became real for Freya. It was then she realized that this might be what was happening on Karma right this second. The sim might be a live recreation of what was going on, or as much as the October could see. There might even be people hiding out in that city, and there was nothing they could do about it. It was a sobering thing to consider. It gave Freya chills just thinking about it.

Freya flew close to the ground with her active sensor avoidance systems active, so as not to be detected. Here her new ship was clearly superior to her old one. There was no way she could fly this route if she had been in her old ship. In this one, she flew close to, or even over, some patrols without them ever knowing that they had been there. Freya found it fun, if a little bit nerve-racking.

As she got closer to the lonely outpost, she angled away so that she would circle around from the far side of it compared to the base. Not that she was expecting them to see her, but again she decided to be cautious. It would add twenty second to her flight time, but she didn’t think it mattered in the long run. The mission was already FUBAR. Might as well keep going.

She landed between the two hills, closer to the furthest hill from the outpost. It was mainly so that the cannon had room to fire over the hill instead of hitting it. She deployed her ship, but didn’t lower the ramp in the back as she was not sure what Mother wanted to do. She did check to see if the outpost had spotted them, but there was no activity from the done nor from the warriors that stood guard.

It was only then that she realized that they hadn’t failed the mission. In fact they didn’t get anything about the objectives nor the mission itself. It made her worry since it was the first time this situation ever happened. She scanned the area around the ship with her own sensors for any enemies, but it was clear. She knew that before she scanned the area, since she was getting a live feed from the October’s satellites. Still she did it just to be sure. She was interrupted out of her dark thoughts as her radio crackled to life.

“Magic, drop the ramp then let Fred take over. I want you out here with the rest of your team. Drake, set the defenses down. Unicorn, have your people set up a perimeter around the ship. Stay under the ship's active camo.” Mother ordered.

“Yes, Ma’am.” Freya replied, as she set up the ship's weapons systems so that they were ready in case a patrol stumbled across them. She took a second to look around as she hit the switch to lower the ramp. Nothing felt out of place, nor was there anything she could see that needed to be done. Feeling a bit sad at the knowledge that someone else would be sitting in her seat the second she despawned, she moved Fred up to spawn in the pilot’s position as soon as she was gone. Then she left the cockpit.

She opened the eyes inside the pod and looked out at the bay. It was mostly empty except for a few stragglers who looked like they were waiting their turn to leave the ship. She quickly got out and, after a look around, she went to her locker and got her combat gear on. As soon as she was done she looked to Mother, who seemed to be busy. She quickly turned around and jogged down the ramp to join her team.