Freya gently rubbed her new vest. She had taken the time to go to the mall and get some medical supplies, but when she tried to put everything in her backpack or her belt pouches she found she had run out of room. So she had to backtrack and get a vest she could store more stuff in. With her full combat load she was getting really heavy now. The good news was with her strength at one-fifty she could easily carry everything without slowing down too much.

Now that she had her vest she was literally at capacity for light armor. If she wanted to carry more things, she would have to switch to medium armor, which she was starting to wonder if she should. She wouldn’t be as stealthy as she was right now, but if she kept on getting new, out of template skills she might need to. So far, she had enough room, and it wasn’t a problem, at least for now.

Once she got all her stuff, she met with Cannon and the rest of her team in the briefing room. Turned out that Cannon wanted to check to make sure they had all their stuff. It was stupid and a bit annoying, but when she entered the briefing room everyone was inside doing the same things. Everyone from Mother all the way down to the individual fire team members. She noted that Cannon had a ton of ammo rods taped together. Monkeyman had enough munitions to blow an entire city away. Lurch had a bunch of random stuff stuffed away in his pack from rope to hacking equipment. When it came time for her to show her team what she had, she got a lot of funny looks.

“Why are you carrying medical equipment?” Cannon asked, looking confused.

“I got the off-template skill Medic.” Freya said, looking back at her entire team.

“How high do you have it?” Lurch asked, still looking at Freya funny.

“Maxed it out.” Freya replied.

“Is this a sabotage kit?” Cannon asked, holding up Freya’s rolled up tools.

“Yeah, I got shipboard systems maxed out for sabotage and hacking.” Freya replied.

“What else do you have off-template?” Cannon asked, tilting her head.

“Ah, bomb-making. I guess you can count piloting, and advanced drone operator. I’m also a Líng Zhònglì Zhàndòu level five master.” Freya said, looking at teammates, confused, but with a bit of pride. She decided to not tell them about her advanced degrees in communications.

“So let me get this straight…” Cannon replied. “...You’re an end-template sniper, and you have six different off-template skills?”

“Yeah.” Freaky replied, with a smug smile.

“We’ve known each other now for two months…” Monkeyman started to say, but Lurch butted into the conversation.

“One and a half months.”

“One and a half months…” Monkeyman said, seamlessly. “... and this is the first time you tell us you have all these skills. How did you get them, by the way?”

“I did tell you about Líng Zhònglì Zhàndòu. Hell, you saw me fight in a cage match.” Freya replied.

“But I was drunk.” Monkeyman replied.

“Listen up.” Mother suddenly called out, interrupting their conversation. “I’m not here to tell you what to do. You better know by now. Magic, I’m sending you the coordinates for your ship. The Navy guys want you to swing by the debris field and check it out. For the rest of us, nothing has changed. We go, find us an alien, and get it read by our VIP. Then we hide and survive. Anyone have any questions? Now would be a very good time to ask them.”

To Freya’s surprise, there were a few questions. They were incredibly technical and had nothing to do with her job while on the mission. She mostly toned them out while she stared off into the distance, eagerly waiting on the order for the mission to start. She mostly ignored the rest as she went over the data Mother sent her. There were no surprises in it other than that the diplomatic ship got into orbit before whatever happened, happened.

Once she was done, she put away her tablet and looked around. Across the way, she saw Sergeant Kruz trying to look like she was not bored to tears by the conversations, but she failed spectacularly when she yawned. Freya nearly laughed. Sergeant Kruz caught her looking and gave her a dirty look. Freya quickly looked away, only slightly embarrassed.

“Enough.” Mother said, sounding like she had had enough. “If that happens, then I trust your judgement. Choose and live with what happens afterwards. That’s enough questions. Honey Badgers on your feet!” Mother yelled. Freya joined the rest of her platoon as they stood at attention.

“With me!” She yelled and left the briefing room. The rest of the platoon fell out by fire teams. Mother led them outside across the grey landscape towards the lobby room. She stopped to look back at them as they all marched, by the door that would lead them to the real world. Or at least most of them. Freya still had to fly the dropship after all.

“Let’s kick some alien asses.” Mother said, with a hungry smile on her face. “For the Federation! For the Marines!” She yelled, as she raised her left fist in the air, and at the same time opened the door behind her without looking. Then she turned around and marched into the light. Freya followed on as the people behind her pushed her forward. She stepped into the light…

...And found herself in the cockpit of her ship. She spun her chair around and sat down. She looked at her sensors. She found that she was only fifteen minutes from the debris field. Her ship was coasting towards the field with the engines off, and the generator at two percent. which was the bare minimum to run the ship's computer. According to the logs, whoever had been guiding the ship remotely had left four hours ago.

She set off an active scan of the area, but nothing came back except the debris field. Even then it was just a cloud of dust made up from metal and other particles. She turned her powerful sensors onto the cloud and let the ship run a full analysis. It took forever for the ship to complete the rendering, but when it was done she could see what had happened to the ship prior to when it got destroyed.

Her ship’s computer told her that the diplomatic ship had been in the process of traveling towards the planet at a high rate of speed. Then it recorded four waves of OTIDS launching towards the planet in fast succession. The problem was that while they were technically in range to launch the OTIDS, no same person would send them off that far away from the planet. The entire operation took forty seconds to launch a little more than seventy OTIDS. Her computer told her that the ship had a hundred marines on board along with enough OTIDS to send them all off.

Then something had interrupted the launching. Her computer did not know why the ship had stopped sending the OTIDS, but it had thirty of them left when it stopped. Four seconds after the OTIDS stopped launching, something impacted the ship just under the bow and tore through the entire ship lengthwise. Freya didn’t find it all that strange that the thing had left biological signs behind. The only thing she pondered about was what kind of biological construct could survive the void of space. The way the computer had rendered its report, the bio construct that had struck the ship didn’t have any armor or protection on. There had been no survivors or escape pods. Nothing after the ship had been vaporized by the engines exploding.

That was also something that should not have happened. The entire ship had been gifted to the humans to transport beings who didn’t want to travel as energy beings. According to her computer, the engines were considered extremely safe and, when damaged, melted. They didn’t explode.

“So they saw something coming at them. Sent as many Marines off as they could, then the ship got hit. The problem is, what made the engines go boom?” Freya wondered, as she sent off her report. The signal she sent went to a buoy that was slowly circling the sun of the system. From there it would get sent to wherever the October was. Freya estimated that the signal would get to the October in roughly twenty minutes or so, even though the ship was much further away than it had been when it dropped the buoy.

As soon as her report was sent off she deactivated all of her active sensors, relying on her passive ones to warn her of danger. She had thirty minutes left until she reached the mission planet’s Karman line. That was a long time to float with just her passive sensors on. Still she was a scout at heart. Stealth, in her opinion, was clearly the best option when coming up on an unknown. Her ship had that in spades.

For the next thirty minutes, as she got closer to the planet, she kept her recording going. She didn’t send it off, but she kept it. She planned to send a report just after the Karman line then another one before she landed. Her thought process was she wanted to keep the October informed in case she zeroed out and was not able to respawn on the ship.

As she did, she couldn’t get over the stoppage of, if that was what it was, the OTIDS deployment. She ran several scenarios through her head on why she would stop a rapid OTIDS launch, but they failed to explain why the diplomatic ship would do so. It bugged her to no end. She hoped the people on the October would be able to tell her when she got back. That reminded her that she didn’t have any friends on the Gray side of the ship except for Petty Officer Diaz. Thinking of her Navy friend brought up how odd this mission was, and that she missed launching from the hangar after talking to Diaz.

“Bad luck?” She asked herself before she shook her head. “Get out of your head, Frey. No such things as luck.”

Freya checked the time and started spawning her squad a few minutes earlier than the plan called for. She knew that it wouldn’t matter in the long run. She made sure she added Mother to the list. Since she was flying the ship, there would be an open pod that would have been wasted. It made sense to spawn Mother in that open slot.

A few minutes later, the October’s spy satellites went online all around the planet. They were still pretty far out, but they were close enough to capture a live feed for most of the planet. Freya took a minute to see what was going on with the planet. It was times like this when she was really glad Mother made her get the command and control console. She paged through most of the feeds, not seeing anything that she didn’t expect, until she came across some lights flashing just at the edge of the satellite feed. She had no control over the satellite, but it didn’t matter because whoever had programmed it was good. The satellite changed alignment and the camera zoomed in on the flashing light.

The lights turned out to be explosions. The satellite was still too far away to see what was going on clearly, but both Freya and her computer agreed that the flashing lights were some kind of explosions. Freya waited breathlessly as the satellite got close enough for the picture to get clearer. What she saw made her smile.

On the feed there was a human-made civilian Mech, carrying what looked like a homemade gun, firing at a bunch of constructs in the distance. She couldn’t tell what kind of bio construct the Mech was fighting because all she could see in the feed was black shapes that were getting chewed up by the Mech. Freya guessed, mostly based on the size and the fact that the constructs were on the ground, that they had to be spy constructs. She did find it odd though. Outside the wave mission during the tryout, spy constructs never swarmed in large numbers.

The spy satellite got close enough to show a bunch of tiny, stick-like figures running away from the fight behind the Mech. She knew they had to be human survivors and she made sure that she was recording the feed. She was, and according to the logs on her console her AI had started it as soon as she saw the flashing lights. She smiled and absently thanked her subconscious for giving her AI the order.

The fight was taking place in what looked like an old warehouse. Or rather a newer warehouse that had seen some damage from a previous battle. The warehouse was one of those long, half-dome buildings that both the military and the colonial services liked. Most of the back had sustained some heavy damage and was mostly rubble. The front was pockmarked with what looked like bullet holes. The door, which looked intact, was open so Freya guessed the humans had been hiding in the building until the battle started.

Thinking about the survivors, she zoomed out a bit to see where the humans had got to. To her surprise, she saw a large caterpillar truck. It was one of the trucks she had learned how to drive on her last session in the training facility. The caterpillar truck was a modular truck, sort of like a train, but with large, all-terrain tires instead of metal ones. It was an old-fashioned truck that no one really used nowadays. The marines still had blueprints available, but they weren’t really that popular anymore.

She watched as the truck spun around and took off, heading towards the desert. She had no idea where they were heading because there was nothing out there but dirt that went on for hundreds of miles. Freya bit her lip as she saw the Mech start to run away, following the truck. She quickly went back to see where the constructs were, but found nothing. Nothing was chasing the Mech, and to her surprise there were no dead bodies. If she hadn’t seen them before she would have assumed there hadn’t been a battle.

She was still looking for signs of where the bio constructs had gone when she got a soft ping telling her that the pods were done. She looked at her camera to see her people step out of the pods and head towards the lockers to get suited up. Mother, Freya noted, didn't bother to wait. She was still walking naked towards the locker before she started speaking.

“Status report!” Mother called out in the back of her ship, and Freya’s ship picked it up.

Freya quickly checked her screens before answering. “Five minutes out from the Karman line. The diplomatic ship launched about seventy-four OTIDS towards the planet before it was destroyed. The October’s spy satellites have picked up fighting on the surface. It looks like a civilian Mech was fighting off a small swarm of small bio constructs that I believe to be spy constructs. It may have been protecting civilians. I’m sending everything to your station, Ma’am.”

“Very good.” Mother said, lowering her arms as the locker finished spraying on her armor. “Any idea what took out the ship?”

“It looks like a direct hit from an unknown, large bio construct. It holed the ship, and the engines exploded, vaporizing what was left of the ship.” Freya replied as Mother sat down at her station.

“Thank you.” Mother said, sounding preoccupied as she started up her console.

Freya turned her attention back to her screens and sent off a message to the buoy with everything she had. She knew that the feeds from the spy satellite were sending their own reports every so often, but she wanted to make sure the report got to its destination. Once that was done, she turned back to watching her screens. She was worried about the bio construct that holed the diplomatic ship. Something about the four seconds where the ship stopped sending out OTIDS was still really bugging her.

Whatever was bugging her about the four seconds really made her nervous, so she started checking her passive scanners obsessively. She had no idea what was out there, but those four seconds triggered something inside her. It got so bad she had to forcefully stop herself from bouncing her knee up and down. Trying to calm herself down, she searched the ship computer for random stuff trying to figure out what was bugging her about those four seconds. She got nothing, as she couldn’t put into words what was making her so worried. She gave up in frustration after about a minute or two of searching.

She was watching her sensors, roughly a minute out from the outer edge of the planet's atmosphere, when her instincts screamed at her to move away. Freya reacted by firing off nearly all of her maneuvering engines at a hundred percent power, banking to her right. Her sensors showed nothing for a second as she pushed her ship as hard as possible to the right. Then her damage control screen shouted at her. She had taken damage to the underside of her ship from some invisible beam weapon.

Not out of danger yet! Her instincts screamed at her, from the back of her head.

Mother said something, but Freya was still busy pulling her ship to the right when, about four seconds after the beam weapon had nearly taken them out, something twice the length of her ship, but only half of it wide, passed them by going at an extremely fast pace. It exploded a second later. Her damage control screen screamed at her as her radiation filters filled up then overflowed one level at a time until the last level, which stopped it from penetrating into her ship.

She watched as her ship auto-ejected the filters into space because they were far too hot to have them remain anywhere on the ship. Her weapons systems started chiming in. They had a target. The sensors had backtracked where the huge thing had been fired from. Looking the coordinates over, Freya was surprised to see it was fired from orbit. She quickly started actively scanning the area around the planet and saw hundreds of them floating, nearly invisible, around the planet. She immediately tagged them and fired off a message to the buoy for the October, showing what had destroyed the diplomatic ship along with nearly destroying hers as well.

“Magic, stealth is out. Get us down to the planet as fast as possible. We are still heading towards our initial LZ.” Mother called out calmly over the radio.

“Copy that.” Freya replied, boosting her main engines to eighty percent. As she did, her weapons system called out a warning that one of the large bio constructs that were orbiting the planet was starting to maneuver so that it was pointing at her. She waited until it stopped maneuvering to start evading. Her sensor tracked the bio construct, which moved at a stupidly fast speed towards her from a near complete stop. She had about two seconds to juke down for the beam part of the weapon to fire over her. It was hot enough that her damage control center yelled at her as it reported minor damage to the top part of her ship.

She boosted her engines past the safety mark at ten percent over a hundred as she raced away from the physical part of the weapon. She didn’t have the radiation filters to soak up the radiation any more. She bit her lip as the physical part flew past her and exploded. Her final radiation barrier soaked up some radiation, but luckily her ship was angled with her engines facing it so the heavier barrier there stopped the radiation.

“We can’t take another hit like that.” Freya muttered to herself as her ship auto-ejected the barrier. On her screen the heavy metal plates flew off behind her, leaving a trail of irradiated metal behind her.

Like she was reading her mind, Mother called out in a very calm voice. “Get to the surface as fast as possible, Magic. We can’t take a hit like that again.”

“On it.” Freya replied, angling towards the planet, her engines already in danger of overheating.

As she spoke, her weapons systems called out again telling her that another bio weapon was maneuvering towards her. Cursing, she pushed her ship’s power up again, hating the fact that her ship was so slow. The damage control screamed at her again, this time telling her how much it didn’t like what she was doing to the ship’s engines. It gave her eight seconds until she would have to either shut them down or lose them as they melted due to the excessive heat she was putting them under.

Freya made a split second decision and turned her ship towards the enemy weapon. Only then did she look at the distance and do the math. She smiled as it came out on her side for once. She angled the ship right at the weapon and held her breath hoping her idea worked.

Four seconds later, the bio weapon finished turning towards her, but it was already too late as Freya bumped her controls and passed over it, even as it launched. Her collision alarm went off, but only for a second, as the weapon passed under her without doing any damage. Then she was in the planet's atmosphere.

She dropped the power to the engines to forty percent to reduce the overheating. It worked, but she was still going too fast for her stealth systems to keep the ship hidden as it hit the denser atmosphere. Unless the enemy was blind, it would see her like the flying meteor that she was. She needed to slow her ship down, which she did by taking a long flight path down towards the ground. She kept an eye on the weapons above her, but her weapons systems didn’t alert her to any of them maneuvering towards her. In fact they remained nearly motionless as she flew under them. She sent off a report to the buoy again just to be sure.

“They don’t seem to want to shoot their weapons at the planet surface.” Freya said over the radio to Mother.

“Yes, they appear to want the planet intact.” Mother replied. “That’s good news for us.”

Then someone started squawking on the emergency channel on Freya’s radio.

“To ship entering Karma space! I repeat, to the ship entering Karma airspace! Backtrack. Backtrack. Strife. Champ. Four. Alpha.” The man on the radio yelled, before he repeated what he was saying once more.

Freya’s radio pinged, informing her that the man was speaking in an old army emergency code. He was warning them that communications were compromised or not secure. His codename for communications was Strife and he had coordinates to other military assets on the planet. Then Mother came over the radio and replied.

“Vayday. Vayday. Backtrack. Green. One-eight.” Mother called out in her ultra-calm voice.

Freya’s radio translated Mother’s message. She was telling him she understood and she requested information on other military assets on the planet. She would be in communication an hour from the end of this message. She also requested that there should be no more radio contact until then.

“Execute. Muscle. Rich. Seventy-two.” Came the reply, which translated into: Understood, below 200 hundred feet, and quiet. Which Freya took to mean he wanted them to stay below 200 hundred feet and to be as quiet as they could. She kept flying, bleeding energy away, as she slowly dropped towards the surface. Once her stealth systems turned all green, she pulled the ship in a slow half-circle so that she could start towards their landing coordinates.

As she did so, she noted that the spy satellites were stopping and returning to an extreme orbit around the planet instead of getting closer. The order came from Mother and made sense to Freya, after she thought about it. They were also mapping out all the enemy weapons that were in close orbit around Karma. Freya was really glad that Mother was in charge. She didn’t think she would have thought to do either of those things. Well, she would have ordered the satellites to find all the weapons, but she didn’t think she would have thought to order the satellites to back away from the planet.

The feeds from the satellites were tied up at the moment, tracking the enemy weapons, so Freya could only use her systems to scan the ground under her. She didn’t see any enemy below her, nor did she see any humans. That didn’t really surprise her because she had charted a flight path away from any human settlements just in case the enemy had taken up position near them.

“Ten minutes out, ma’am.” Freya sent to Mother, as she started up the respawn pods for the rest of the platoon. Both First and Second squads were up and ready. She still needed to spawn Third Squad and the VIP, as well as herself. The problem was that Third Squad would have to wait to be downloaded until they had landed, as there was no room on her ship for more people. She would have to wait until they were clear of the pods to start the cloning process for herself. Since Fred was taking over flying while on the planet, that would leave an extra spot for the VIP to spawn.

“Understood.” Mother replied. “We still on course for the original LZ?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Freya replied, rechecking her flight path, wondering why Mother was asking. With her command and control station, she should be able to see their course. Freya shook her head, not understanding, but not really caring why she asked beyond the initial reaction.

“Five minutes out.” Freya called out as they got closer to their landing zone. She kept a close eye on the ground below them, looking for the enemy, but didn’t see anything. There were no dome forts or roaming hordes of bio constructs. The land below them seemed to be completely empty, which was starting to worry her. She was flying below two hundred feet and had her stealth active. On top of that, she was going at twenty percent power which meant that she was going slightly faster than a hundred and fifty miles per hour. In this atmosphere, that was the perfect speed for the quietest running. She could go slower, but it wouldn’t matter as her stealth systems couldn’t make her ship any quieter.

“Two minutes out.” Freya called out as they got closer to the three mountains and the valley they had been training in since the tryouts. She still didn’t see any signs of the enemy. Everything else was the same though. The green algae was still there, as well as the mountains which matched up with their training missions.

Then she was flying past the three mountains and she was less than thirty seconds out. She called out a countdown as she slowly arrived at their destination, which was in the middle of the valley near a large, green algae spot. She set down and First Squad rushed out, just like they had practiced thousands of times during the training missions. They were quickly followed by Unicorn’s squad, who started setting up auto-turrets and mines around the ship. As they did so, Third Squad and their VIP were downloaded and released. They stayed on board, as that was the safest place for the moment. While they were finishing equipping themselves, Freya started the process to create her clone. As soon as it was done, she despawned, letting Fred take over.

The moment she opened her eyes, something felt off. The smell of ammonia hit her, and it felt like she smelled this exact smell before. She hesitated, trying to remember where she smelled this awful odor before. It wasn’t exactly like the sims, as the small of ammonia was fainter in the sims than it was in real life. She stayed in her pod until she gave up, hoping that her memory of the smell would return as she reached for the pod door.

She knew that she could take her time, as her health was high enough that she wouldn’t be hurt by it, but the smell when she opened the pod door hit her nose like a hammer. She quickly rushed out naked and ran to the locker. She clicked on her armor and less than a second later felt the warm printer fluid flow over her as her armor was printed right on her. She felt a thousand times better when her armor filtered out the smell. Reaching into the locker, she pulled out her weapons and turned to leave her ship.

She frowned as she got to the ramp. Something felt off. It was like she was suddenly having the strongest deja vu. It wasn’t just the smell, it was everything. From the ugly, white light from the sun to the sounds she was hearing as people talked to each other on the talk around channel on the radio. It got stronger as she stepped off the ramp. It felt like she had been here before. She had no memories of being on this planet before, but she felt like she had been. It only got worse the closer she got to the ramp’s edge.

She slowed to a stop as a faint memory came to her. She looked down at the dirt and knew she had done this exact thing before. If she moved her foot slightly to the side, like so, it lined up with her memory. She did and felt a very odd correctness follow. The world slowly faded away from her as she remembered herself squatting down. She followed her memory and it felt so right. Like she had done something so profound that the universe had changed.

She reached out and pulled off her glove. In the background she heard her name being called, but it was very faint and sounded hollow like it was coming from a pipe. She reached down and picked up a bit of dirt and felt the grittiness as she remembered doing the same exact thing before. She looked down at the dirt as she moved it along her palm, the greyness of the dirt seeming very bright against her skin.

“Hey, Magic. How are you doing?” Gunny Thompson’s voice said from behind her, just like her deja vu said she would be.

“Hey, Gunny.” Freya replied, as something caught her attention on the ground. She let the dirt drop as she followed her deja vu. She knew what she was about to see before she saw it. It was a yellow light shining on the grey dirt in an oval shape like the light was shining from in front of her.

“It’s Captain, now.” Thompson replied. Magic knew that before Thomspon spoke. She even knew what was about to happen next, but she needed to act it out. Her deja vu demanded it.

“Sorry, Gunny.” Freya said, following the lines she remembered from the future.

“It’s okay.” Thompson replied. “Can you tell me what you see?”

“I’m remembering the future.” Freya told her. “We’ve been betrayed, Gunny.”

“Betrayed by who?” Thompson asked.

Freya remembered to look up at where the light was coming from. She saw a man staring down at her. He looked very angry, to the point where she could call it insanity. “A man from a long time ago.” She told her former Gunnery Sergeant.

“Do you know his name?” Thompson asked.

“No.” Freya replied looking at the man as he started laughing. “He’s been dead too long for that.”

“What does he look like?” Thompson asked.

“Blue uniform, lots of medals on his chest. Gold frilly things hanging down from his shoulders. A red sash across his chest with gold outlines on the edges. A blue gem in the middle of the sash with gold spikes surrounding it.” Freya replied, looking at the man who had stopped laughing to look at her.

“How did he betray us?” Thompson asked.

“If I can’t have it, no one can.” The man in front of her told her. “Let it all burn.”

“He didn’t tell anyone about the contract with the Ketica.” Freya said, looking at the man, who now had an ugly expression on his face. “Because we didn’t honor it, we've proven to the Ketica that we are untrustworthy. Anything untrustworthy must be destroyed.”

“Is there any way to gain back the trust?” Thompson asked her.

“No!” The last emperor of the Terran Empire yelled and reached for her. The deja vu vanished as the man grabbed her throat. The world exploded into blackness.