Elsewhere on the planet:

I was awake as my pod hurtled through the atmosphere, one of my giving me this extra minute of preparation. Projectiles, beams, and missiles designed to obliterate starships set the sky on fire as they saturated our drop corridor. They had already exacted their toll on our trio of transports who had slowed for a brief window to hurl their payload of 12 building-sized cylinders each. The Seed’s planetary defense systems had calculated the trajectories of our group within the incoming shoal of vessels and marked us as a high priority, for good reason.

Half of our pods were wiped out before crossing the Karman line, their contents spilling like weightless chaff before inertia streaked their burning wreckage through the sky. They were acceptable losses, their pilots losing only the time of being reprinted, packaged, and flown in in another wave. The remaining 17 of us wobbled and spun through the air as we danced in the thermal drafts and ionized gas clouds, throwing off the ground-based targeting systems with macroscopic Brownian Motion as we dashed below the firing angles of the orbital defense network.

I could see nothing with my sensors in my descent, my pod wreathed in a shell of plasma as meters of white, ablative material melted to reveal the metallic black armor beneath. I was immobile, my view fully dark apart from my HUD. Even still, the extra time to prepare was worth the discomfort. I took these precious dozen seconds to assess my loadout, review my missions, and ready my macros. Then, planetfall.

My pod traversed sideways through two abandoned skyscrapers as if they didn’t exist, before ramming itself through the ground of the native species’ city remnants. The cylinder finally came to a stop after punching through five subterranean floors of a parking garage and wedging itself into bedrock. A cavernous hole to the surface hung sideways, three levels above the top of my pod.

Once the insides of the pod stopped shaking around, I triggered my [Equip Custom Loadout] macro, shedding the beams and railguns built into my frame. Multi-missile launchers and smart-artillery slid their way through the maze of items to reach my front, the pod’s logistics system choreographing a swirl of activity to ensure things reached their target using only the dozen slots of empty space included for this purpose.

The modules strategically positioned in my rear carriage area were able to unpack and equip without a single movement by the transportation network, the packaging turning to powder, and falling due to another . My starting set of robots did the same and clung onto my body. A few special items I brought along were shuffled into my side storage compartments. The entire process took seconds, finishing before the sensors on my pod finally determined the outside had cooled down enough to take a peek without melting or getting fried. I saw my window and hit [Emergency Eject].

The delicate network of the pod’s internal logistics system restructured itself, preparing to dump all its power in a single surge of force, as the cap of the cylinder spun in a blur to unscrew itself before built-in explosive charges flung it sideways in the air to clear a path. I was flung into the air, my legs still tucked in transport mode with robots clinging on to me in a lumpy shell. Everything was relatively quiet as I whooshed through the hole in the street, suspended temporarily in the air, until the Spak Spak Spak of projectiles hitting armor started, almost instantly followed by the thunderous, paper-tearing sound of coilgun fire from across the river.

While this bank was still recognizable as the heart of a city, the other side had been transformed into a fortified concrete and metal wasteland, bristling with automated weapons emplacements and massive radiator arrays that made the air appear to melt. Lances of light streaked towards the sky, from entrenched anti-orbital batteries still firing at the fleet. A more pressing matter though was the several guns turning to face me of a far larger caliber than the piddly coilguns. I had a plan though, one that I enacted while still falling through the air. [Initiate Plan Alpha], I thought, my perception of the world slowed down to a hundredth of its normal speed for these few seconds after the drop.

A light courier that had taken two bullets to the body uncoiled from its position on my flank, revealing a four-shot tactical missile launcher.

The first payload was a round, a directional pulse of intense electromagnetism that detonated above the river, its core module flooding a 180-degree hemisphere with incomprehensible garbage across multiple wavelengths for several seconds. In that time, the three other missiles were flung towards the river, engines dead, before diving beneath the water, activating their boosters, and racing towards the water’s source: a massive hydroelectric dam flanked by imposing mountains already mined out and repurposed by the Seed.

They weaved through the murky depths, traveling halfway to their destination before the local defense network noticed. Streaks of bubbles whizzed by, only lighter guns able to track and angle down to shoot the steel fish. None hit. The missiles organized themselves as they swam, spacing out their approach.

The first one forced its way through the immensely powerful stream of water coming from a turbine outlet, before losing control and hitting a wall, detonating.

The 200 kiloton nuclear warhead immediately turned all the water in the turbine shaft into superheated steam, physically lifting the entire dam structure several feet before it flexed back down waving. The dam, after all, was strategically important infrastructure, and the Seed had been prescient enough to reinforce the dam enough to survive an orbital or even nuclear strike.

Then the second missile went in, arcing above the water to crest the rubble that had fallen from the cracks in the dam after the first nuke, diving deeper into the structure. The already weakened structure shuddered once more, failing in several places down the power generation halls and letting several thousand-ton turbine units spin free of their housing.

The final missile was overkill, the almost wrecked, crack filled dam fracturing and letting a more than a hundred-meter tall wall of water flood over the triangular valley-delta, carrying with it the remains of the dam itself. Anti-orbital guns still firing turned their surroundings into steam, crumpling their structures. The radiators were quenched, before collapsing due to thermal shock and squirting superheated coolant that boiled the water flooding the bay.

I was crushed between two buildings swept by the wave but survived, my robotic followers clinging onto my body cushioning the impact. I threw the rubble off me, finding it actually easier to walk underwater than on land. I began walking towards the direction of what was originally the opposite bank and prepared to dig. The mission was not over yet after all; the target node still sitting comfortably beneath hundreds of meters of fortified structure.

“Subtask 2 accomplished 26/30: Destroy orbital defenses, 2600 points awarded. Subtask 3 accomplished 99.3%: Disable external defenses, 993 points awarded. Penalty Assigned: Friendly fire resulting in damage of 5 pilot frames and destruction of 3 pilot frames: -5500 points.”

Ouch. I was definitely going to appeal that. I kept digging as I started up the bunker-busting module, the water falling below head level. My squad would have my back.

Hopefully.

It was a good plan, I swear.