Freya looked out at the pile of dead bodies in front of her from where she was sitting in the dropship by the ramp. There were three ways to transport another squad in an overloaded dropship that applied to this situation. The first was leaving the ramp down and having some of the squad secure themselves to the door while the rest hung off, in this case, three ropes that hung over the edge of the ramp. The squad members would then hold on to each other while the people on the outer edges would extend their outer arm and leg to prevent them from spinning in the backdraft. The downside to this method was they would still get whipped up and down occasionally. To prevent injuries from getting whipped too hard, the dropship would have to fly slower than normal. Mother vetoed this method.

The second method required having the dropship fly overhead using its active camo to cover those squad members who didn’t have active camo to hide them. Or an alternative method was mixing the squads up and having only those on the ground who had active camo. Then have them run to the secondary fallback position. Both this method and the alternative method were too slow. Mother vetoed them.

The last method was the most common one, but on this mission the most risky. This method had the entire squad kill themselves, and respawn when they get to the secondary fallback position. If there were any hidden denial spheres within range, then there was a very high probability the platoon would lose an entire squad. Mother decided to go with this option. Her rationale was time was of the essence - this method was the fastest option. That left Freya looking at twelve dead marines laying in a pile where they had killed themselves as the ramp closed.

Freya looked up, after the ramp closed behind her, towards the respawn pods as they started cloning all of Third Squad. No one would know if their information was scrambled until the process was complete, and that would take five minutes for clones to be grown and the marines’ data to be downloaded. Freya wished Mother had delayed long enough to test if it would work or not. All they had to do was have one marine volunteer to kill themselves to test it out. If it worked, then they would know it was ok to kill off an entire squad of marines. When the suggestion was brought up, Mother simply said they didn’t have time to test it out, and what was stopping a denial sphere from showing up in the five minutes before or after the test? Freya could understand the logic, but she wasn’t the only one who was a bit freaked out by what Mother had done.

Freya could feel the dropship lift off. She braced herself as the ship picked up speed. There was very little feel of movement from the ship, but she was a slave to habit. The feel of motion was still much stronger in the cockpit than in the back of the ship.

“We got movement. It seems we have knocked over an ant hill. Every unit in the surrounding area is heading our way.” Mother said over the command channel. “I’ve instructed Fred to avoid our secondary fallback position as it will be compromised in the near future. I’ve instructed him to head towards the southern pole of the planet. From what I’m seeing, there are no enemy forces currently there.”

“Ma’am, a question.” Drake replied, when Mother clicked off the radio.

“Go ahead.” Mother replied.

“What about our secondary mission?” He asked.

“It’s too hot, at the moment, to go looking for them.” Mother replied. “We would draw too much unwanted attention on any civilians we might find. The best thing for them at this time is for us to be as far away as possible from them. If or when the heat dies down, I promise, we will go looking, but for now we’ll wait this out.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.” Drake replied.

Freya pulled out her tablet and logged in to the dropship’s computer. She clicked on the tab for the October’s spy satellites, and brought up its live feed. She noted that, before it brought up the live feeds, it showed a number of satellites were already offline with icons showing they had been taken down by enemy action.

The feed showed them flying high in the atmosphere, and at a pretty fast pace. She would have flown lower, but she wasn’t flying at the moment. The satellites showed them flying over the continent where they had snatched their prisoner, heading south. The satellites also were picking up vast enemy unit movements. According to what Freya was seeing, nearly every unit on the continent was moving. Granted, not every unit was converging on their last position, but enough to see why Mother wanted to leave so fast. So far, it looked like no one had spotted them yet.

She heard someone move closer. She looked up to see Lurch shifting beside her to get a look at her tablet. She tilted it so he could see. She looked past him to see Monkeyman also cranking his neck to see as well. She tilted it once more and it angled so that all of them could see.

She heard Monkeyman curse. “By Tom’s toe, that is a lot of movement.” He said quietly. Freya could only nod. “Can you bring up a view of the southern pole?”

She did as he asked, and, just like Mother had said, it looked abandoned. There was a blue highlight on the map to indicate a human settlement, but when Freya zoomed in, all she saw was a crater where the settlement had been. The crater was filled in with what looked like snow, so Freya concluded that the settlement had been destroyed a long time ago. She couldn’t age the crater because of the snow, so she had no idea when the settlement had been hit. That made her wonder if the settlement was destroyed by humans or aliens. She didn’t remember any intel on if the colonies were getting along with each other or if there was some kind of conflict going on before the aliens invaded.

She was still looking at what was going on with the mission planet, when she had a pop-up notification that there was a download error on all ten people who were trying to respawn. The pods tried two more times, but with no luck. The ship’s computer reported corrupt data, and shut the pods down. Seconds later the pods went dark as it started to reclaim the failed clones. Freya looked back down at her tablet, trying not to get upset. From the quiet curses on the talk around channel, Freya knew she was not the only one to notice the pods go dark.

The flight time to the southernmost continent took a little over three hours. Her old dropship could have made the trip much faster, but not this new one. She wondered if she could have plotted a course that was a bit faster, and started to mess around with her tablet getting all the information she needed. Once she had it, she did the math. She did find that, yes, she could have plotted a better course, but in the end she would have saved only about a half hour depending on the crosswinds at the height that Fred was flying at.

Time hours slowly passed, and Freya put her tablet away. She had a few hours to kill, so she turned on her music, and killed the time by doing some college courses on her armor’s entertainment display. Lurch ended up falling asleep while Monkeyman looked like he was reading something. Freya was in the middle of writing a paper when there was a loud bang and the dropship shook.

She immediately grabbed onto the tether behind her as the dropship started to spin. She looked to her left to see a large hole in the hull of her ship. The hole was about three feet wide, and looked like someone had taken a chunk off the left side of a respawn pod along with the rightmost edge of a locker. On the floor by the hole was a headless marine, being held in place by another marine who didn’t seem to realize he was holding onto someone who wasn’t alive anymore.

Freya, with the weakest strength in the platoon, had no problem holding on as the hole tried to suck her out of the dropship. It was when the ship’s nose dipped downward and then started to spin like a top that she started to have trouble as the g-forces increased, pinning her to the side of the ship. Especially when it started to spin really fast. It made her really annoyed when she could see other marines up and moving around. They were moving, if not easily, against the g-forces by pulling themselves around.

“Pull out!” She mentally commanded Fred as the ship dived, but after counting to five in her head she made a decision. She closed her eyes and tried to get her Personal AI to connect with the ship's flight control channel. Normally, it would be impossible unless she accessed it through the wiring in the bulkhead, even then she would have to hack her own ship’s electronic warfare defenses. But, her blessed little mod had grown large enough that it connected after a second or so.

The first thing it showed her was that the simulation cockpit was there, but Fred was missing from it. That should have been impossible since there were a bunch of backups for it, but, for whatever reason, her Personal AI showed her that, while the cockpit simulation was running, Fred was not there. That meant there was no one to control the ship. They were free-falling straight down at an insane rate of speed. Freya immediately tried to correct the situation, and pull out of the dive while at the same time stopping the spinning.

She found the task extremely difficult because she didn’t have a stick to control her ship. The g-forces were still pinning her to the bulkhead of her ship. Instead she had to activate each maneuvering engine one at a time mentally with her AI. Her Personal AI made it somewhat easy to do as all she had to do was think about it, but she was still frustrated by how awkward it felt without using her hands. What was worse was the ground was coming up at a frightening pace. Then, by some miracle, she corrected the spin and mentally fired on the correct engines to pull the ship up and the ship responded.

Her altimeter flashed a red warning as she pulled up. It showed her lowest height had been eight feet. She could believe it, as the screen that her Personal AI was projecting from her armor got fuzzy when snow from the ground blew up all around her for a half a second. Then the ship started flying upwards again, away from the ground.

The g-forces that the ship pulled upwards would have made an unmodded human pass out, but thankfully Freya had enough Health mods to stay conscious. Still, her vision got a bit dark around the edges before she leveled off a bit. Now that they weren’t under immediate threat of death, Freya ordered her AI to bring up another window to show what shot a hole in her ship. Her eyes flickered over to it and she gasped.

The window showed black explosions all around where they had been flying. At first she thought it was some kind of flack gun because she could make out little black things flying out of the explosions, then she realized the black things weren’t shrapnel from the explosion, but flying bioconstructs. The enemy was firing balls of the things into the air where they would explode, sending out waves of the bioconstructs. Frantically, Freya moved her sensors around looking for where she was being fired on from, but all she saw was that endless land below her covered by snow. She angled her sensors to look upwards and cursed. There was something above her.

It was really hard to see and impossible for her to make out. It appeared like a sensor ghost on her screen, but unlike a sensor ghost it didn’t go away after a second or so. Freya cursed as she immediately banked away from the sensor ghost that was trailing her.

“Sit rep!” Mother called over Freya’s private channel.

“Fred’s gone. Cockpit simulation is still running, but he’s not there. Ship’s damaged, and we lost a few maneuvering engines, but we’re still combat ready. We have a cloaked enemy ship above us. I’m trying to lose it, but it’s got a lock on us somehow.” Freya replied, as she brought up her damage control center in yet another window.

The damage control center was blinking several red and yellow warnings. One of the yellow warnings was the active camo. Her ship’s auto repair was trying to fix it. The screen gave it an eighty percent repair with a minute and seven seconds before complete. She knew she had lost a few maneuvering engines just by how the ship flew, but the damage control center showed her that four engines were blinking red and seven more were yellow with repair icons on them with various percentages and times of repair.

“Active camo is damaged, but is being repaired.” Freya said over the radio as she banked again and black balls exploded all around her sending bioconstruct towards her. “Four dead maneuvering engines, and seven being repaired. Enemy ship is firing black balls that explode and send flying constructs everywhere. Sensors indicate we were hit by one of the constructs. I don’t think we will survive if we are hit by one of those balls.”

“Very well.” Mother replied, sounding oddly calm. “Can we make it to our LZ?”

Freya was quiet for a few seconds as she banked again, trying to get in range to fire anti-ship missiles at the ship above them. Her combat screen flickered from red to green as she suddenly banked to the left, bleeding off speed and energy. She stabbed the button, firing an anti-ship missile. The flight time indicated four seconds. It got within two seconds before it was shot down by a flying construct fired directly from the enemy ship.

Freya dipped down to regain her speed and took a quick look at her map. She was far too busy to do the math in her head, but thankfully her AI inputted the numbers. The ship's computer came back with a new flight plan. Freya glanced at the numbers, and nearly flew her ship into a cloud of biocontructs that had exploded from a black back ball to the left and in front of her. She banked to the right hard and her sensor started flashing red as four more balls came at her.

She felt hands surround her keeping her from flying from where she was sitting as the g-forces pulled on her body. She ignored it, trusting whoever was holding on to her to keep her safe as she flew the ship. She banked the ship back to the left as the black balls changed direction and followed her. She dipped the nose of the ship down to gain more speed, hating the fact that the enemy ship was above her. That meant when the enemy ship dipped after her it potentially would have more speed when Freya would have to pull up and level out.

The only good news about being chased was that the enemy’s weapons had to fight the speed to catch up to her. Meaning that it would take longer to hit her than her weapons would when it got in range. That didn’t mean that Freya wasn’t firing all of her Shand’s auto cannons at it. She was, because she had greater range since the enemy ship was moving towards her. By doing so, the enemy ship was flying towards the bullets. It forced the enemy ship to stay further back than what was optimal for its weapons.

The bad news was that the black balls had a flight time, that Freya absently counted in her head, of ten seconds, which was a lifetime in air combat. It was staggering the firing of its black balls of death every two seconds, firing four in a set before it paused an additional four seconds before it fired another set of balls. It took about six seconds of flight time until it got in range to be lethal. That meant that she had to dodge for four seconds each time a black ball came in range of her ship.

Freya cursed as the tracking ability of the balls got steadily better with each ball of black death that it fired at her. She knew she had to change something up or sooner or later one of them was going to get close enough to hit her. Cursing again, Freya had her decision and leveled out a bit. The enemy ship, which was still above her, closed in.

“If I can’t outrun or outfly it, I’m going to have to fight it.” She thought to herself. She let the enemy ship get closer, so that its weapons lost a second of range on her. She dipped back down when her combat screen lit up green. She set all her weapons to auto fire since she was far too busy to shoot them manually. She had to spin her ship a bit so that all of her weapons could fire on the enemy ship, but it was a slowish spin and only added a bit of g-force to her and her passengers.

Then, out of nowhere, her active camo came back on. She immediately banked to her right in a very tight arc. She bit her lip as the black balls of death got way too close to her ship, but she smiled like a shark when they didn’t explode. She continued her arc, killing her speed while she turned off all her weapons.

The enemy ship continued to fire its black balls, but now they were more spread out and didn’t track her ship. She did note that they were set to randomly go off, so that the enemy had changed tactics back to what she was calling flack gun tactics. She kept moving forward, but she still bled speed letting the enemy ship slowly catch up. It did stop its descent to preserve its potential speed, but Freya was fine with that. Her missile flight time dropped from three seconds to two then to one.

Freya spun her ship sharply and fired all of her missiles. She got off six missiles. The enemy shot down four. The first missile to get close overflew the enemy ship, but the last missile struck it dead center. The explosion ripped the ship in half. Its front half shot upwards while the back half of the ship dropped sharply downwards. It was followed a second or so later by the top half which started spinning.

“Yeah!’ Freya screamed, throwing her hands in the air, as she watched the broken ship fall. “How weak are you that a friggin’ slow as hell dropship can outfight you?!”

“Sit rep.” Mother said bring Freya back to reality. She had completely forgotten about everyone around her. Feeling embarrassed, she scanned the surrounding areas for any signs of the enemy. She made sure to look closely for any sensor ghost, but her sensors didn’t spot anything.

“We’re in the clear for now.” Freya replied, once she was sure.

“Can we make it to the LZ?” Mother asked.

Freya checked again and nodded her head. “As long as we don’t run into another ship, we should be fine.” She told her boss, still looking at her sensors.

“Bring us in at the fastest speed you can safely fly.” Mother told her. Freya noted how calm Mother sounded. She found it irritating.

“Does she know just how impossible that was?” Freya thought to herself, a little sourly.

“Yes, ma’am.” Freya replied, as she adjusted her course. The dogfight had really taken her way out of the flight path that Fred had set towards the LZ. It made her think about her fight, and she checked the path she took while fighting and snickered. The flight path looked like a crazy line jerking all over the place. It looked to her like a weirdly long lightning bolt. She screenshotted it and saved it as a photo in her armor memory bank.

She made sure to fly low, about five hundred feet off the ground. According to the flight path Fred had created, he had been flying about four miles above the surface of the planet. She wondered if that was the reason they got discovered and later hit. That made her think about what was slowly taking down the October’s spy satellites. Did the enemy have some kind of hidden warship in orbit? It would make sense, since, as far as she was aware, the Ketica didn’t have the ability to teleport.

Now that she had time, she checked on the satellites, and she noted more than half of them were gone or offline. She wondered about the ones that were marked offline. Did that mean that the Ketica could hack the satellites? If that was true, how much trust could she place in the images she was seeing? Feeling a bit apprehensive she keyed up her radio.

“Ma’am, what are the odds that the Ketica can hack the October’s satellites?” Freya asked Mother over the command channel. She would have used Mother’s private channel, but she didn’t have access to it. She needed to be a fire team lead or squad leader to have access.

“Why do you ask?” Mother replied on the same channel.

“It might be me being paranoid, but there are an awful lot of satellites that are marked offline on my screen. I was wondering how much we can trust what we are seeing from the rest.” Freya replied.

Mother was quiet for a few seconds, then responded. “It might just be that they are damaged and not destroyed. But let's be careful. Give me a sec. I’m going to change our safe haven. Is there any way you can hide us from them?”

“It’s illegal, but if you give me an order I can take my transponder down. It’ll take me about a minute to do it, and they’ll know I did it.” Freya replied, after she thought about how to do it for a few seconds.

“Alright, for the safety of the mission, I’m ordering you to turn the transponder off. As soon as it’s down, I want you to head towards these coordinates.” Mother replied.

“Yes, ma’am. Understood.” Freya replied, as she received the new coordinates.

She set the autopilot and went to work. There were times when it was ok to turn off a flight transponder, like when a ship crashed behind enemy lines, so there were ways to do it electronically. The problem was it would send out an encrypted ping to let any Federation forces that were in the area know where she supposedly went down. It was also designed to send a very short message if you needed it to. She simply wrote about possible enemy hacking of Federation satellites, then shut her transponder down.

She immediately banked to the left and slowly circled around 270 degrees to fly in the opposite direction she had previously turned towards. Instead of turning northeast she was now heading southwest. Her new LZ was an empty ice field in the middle of nowhere. Freya did the math in her head and came up with a forty-five minute flight time.

“Transponder is off. New flight time is forty-five minutes.” Freya told Mother.

“Understood.” Mother replied.

Roughly five minutes later, Freya was relaxing, leaning back against the bulkhead, when her ship’s sensors spotted enemy units on the ground emerging from the edge of the continent where the ice met the ocean. Massive hordes of enemy units started heading inward towards the center of the continent. The number of enemy units that her screen showed her was crazy. She was not sure if what it was showing her was right. According to it, the enemy had been hiding millions of enemy units under the ocean.

“Ma’am, you seeing this?” Freya asked.

“Yes.” Mother replied, still sounding way too calm. “I’m sending you new coordinates. We are abandoning this continent. Head to these coordinates.” Mother said, sending Freya new coordinates on her screen.

“This is starting to look ugly.” Sergeant Kruz said, butting in on the command channel.

“Yes.” Mother replied. “It makes me wonder if something is going on that we should be aware of. But it really doesn’t matter. We have our mission to win. No point adding problems that may not be there.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Sergeant Kruz replied.