Incoming projectiles shot past the descending transports, their noses aglow despite the peacock-like deployment of silver descent parachutes. The transports’ earlier desperate maneuvers meant that they were moving too fast to evade now. To the enemy gunners on the ground, they must’ve looked like little cherry-red dot tracers in the sky—perfect target practice.

The humans knew it. The Kartesh knew it. Surface-to-space cannons just weren’t a good choice for targeting small craft. As terrifying as the beyond-supersonic booms of the shells were, it only put the marines at ease knowing that their enemies couldn’t hit shit.

“Shit,” the pilot muttered.

“What do you mean ‘shit’? Hey,” Coronel slapped the pilot’s back.

“Parachutes ahead,” the pilot said. The forward camera feeds were showing square aerofoils measuring in entire square kilometers. “They’re blanketing our trajectory.”

Kartesian materials science was crazy enough that no one was confident they’d just punch through the parachutes. More than likely, they’d get caught up in a tangle of textile nanotech that’d fuck with their sensors in the best case, or make for some aggressive chemical reaction with the transports’ hot cladding. Or just explode.

A few seconds of furious communications between the pilots led to a consensus. They were the ones holding these men’s lives in their hands, so their decisions outranked their nominal commander’s.

“Pulling out of formation,” the pilot announced. The other transports did the same. Although they couldn’t properly evade, they could make minute adjustments with their aerofoil controls, little square-foot panels flapping in and out of the transports’ skins by no more than ten degrees, bumping the airflow ever so slightly. At their speed, however, the ailerons couldn’t even raise all the way, and the pilots dared not to.

The formation dispersed. “Pick your continent,” they decided. Coronel’s pilot was gunning for the one named Australia. It might have had rare metals, or it might not. Who knew.

A blue blip on-screen disappeared, and its trajectory fell. “Fuck,” the pilot muttered, louder this time. “Confirming lifeboats… Alright, there’s a bunch.”

Those had been the ones heading for Central Asia. Well, even if those fellows landed in the Pacific, they’d be alright for a few months. Recovering them can come after establishing a base of operations. Hopefully, the Kartesh wouldn’t get to them, first.

The pilot projected the lifeboats’ trajectories and uploaded the data to the company’s tactical AI.

“Attention all units, this is Col. Herron,” the PA speaker buzzed. “We’re using Scenario 13. Out.”

Scenario 13. Prioritize stealth and build up forces to divisional strength before going loud again. How, exactly, they’d do that was up to the company. Actually, they were burning like a fucking comet at midnight right now, so how’d the commander think they could still go under the radar at this point?

Coronel led the 2nd Company. Assuming they touched ground intact, it’d be a textbook automata force multiplication strategy: they’d convert any bit of rock and steel they could find into a combat drone, then use those to overwhelm Kartesian ground forces. They just had to do it at breakneck speed, or else they’d be hunted down before they could even start.

“Fuck!” The pilot used a ruler to flip on ten switches at once. Safety belts went taught and dragged everyone’s heads and limbs back to their seats, locking down all movement.

The transport broke apart. The combat sound dampeners overreacted, blocking out all sound for just a moment. Even the alarms were shut out for a moment. The creaking and buckling of steel finally filtered through, followed by explosions like firecrackers—those were the heat shielding panels popping off.

That’s alright. The thing’s overdesigned.

The cockpit twirled and tumbled hard enough to kill an unaugmented human being, but the soldiers of humanity volunteered to push the boundaries of what it meant to be human. For the more organic of them, their subdermal combat skins constricted, and artificial hearts pulsed against the spiraling G-forces.

“How’s the rest of the company!” Coronel screamed over the blaring alarms.

“Eighty-percent green!” the co-pilot screamed back. The pilot was too busy flipping switches and jumping popped fuses with a packet of chewing gum.

Coronel’s head was bumping around without his permission, but he still managed to steal a dizzied glance of the screens. The forward camera feeds were dead, and so was live LIDAR.

“What’s our projected landing!” he asked.

“Some archipelago in the West Pacific!” the co-pilot replied.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

There were a bunch of archipelagos there. That wasn’t the important detail, though.

“What’s the lifeboats’ spread!” he asked.

The co-pilot tapped at a few panels. “Pretty fucking bad!”

“Anyone within 100 clicks!”

“A few squads!”

That was delightfully more than he’d hoped for. Hopefully, the sea’s currents would sweep the rest of his men to land.

The true rollercoaster began. The cockpit snagged against concrete and steel, tumbling end-over-end across all three axes at once, and the whole clusterfuck made a crushing, straining noise that overwhelmed the sound dampeners. Coronel’s seat straps were tensing in different directions by the second. His head was getting flung around, and bashed and bashed again against the headrest. Basketball-sized dents were appearing all around the cockpit’s walls. The co-pilot was screaming something.

Then it all stopped, like the sound was just shut off. The sound dampener’s indicator was green, so it was just on standby. Coronel looked around for a few seconds, confirming that his brain didn’t just bug out.

“Sound off,” he said.

The pilot and co-pilot groaned with a thumbs up. The limb and neck belts were loosened, now, but they were still firmly strapped down around their torso. Gravity was … downwards. They should climb out.

“Sir, wait,” the pilot said. “Deploying survey drones.”

Explosive bolts ejected a thick plate from the skin of the cockpit, then quieter air rushed out from pneumatic launch tubes hidden underneath. A screen came alive, and terrain data streamed in for the cockpit’s occupants to see.

“Looks like only one launch tube is unobstructed,” the pilot remarked.

The air outside was breathable, though still hot from the crash. Outside of the immediate crash site, the surroundings were on the low end of urbanization. Considering the tech level of the colony, they must have landed in a city.

And they’d just drawn a scar over a whole kilometer of it behind them.

“How far can that drone go?” Coronel asked.

“A few clicks,” the pilot replied, “then it’ll need to recharge.”

“Good. Have it be discreet. We need it to learn more about the locals.”

“The ‘locals,’ sir?”

Coronel flipped a lid at the side of his seat and hit a button, unlatching the belts from him. The pilot unbuckled in turn, but when he faced Coronel, he was presented with a handgun.

“Kartesian bioweapons. You read the file, didn’t you?” Coronel said. There was clambering against the cockpit door behind him.

Ignoring the sound, he went back to taking out more supplies from the survival cabinet behind the pilot’s seat. The co-pilot was already there before him, though.

“Huh? What’s this—woah!” the co-pilot stumbled back. Coronel looked at him, then to where he was staring. Inside the survival cabinet was a cat with a strange, gray luster. A Machine.

Come to think of it, they had a few Machines come on board with them when they got on the transports, didn’t they?

It chirped in binary, at a frequency high enough to be a sort of disjointed meow.

“Fuck. It can’t talk,” Coronel muttered. All Machines, no matter how diminutive, were better capable of discrete calculus than a human, but only a select few had any reason to replicate human speech. The larger the Machine, the more likely it had the spare processing power and hardware to replicate human speech—but they got a fucking cat.

… a cat that could interface with most advanced technologies better than any human or human AI could. All in all, it was sort of cute, and a Machine companion was a tactical boon. Without hesitation, Coronel mentally incorporated it into their team’s roster.

The cat jumped out of the cabinet, sitting down beside Coronel and looking up to him. It didn’t have skin, fully displaying its muscle-analogues, gray from the nanites that comprised it. As with most machines, it didn’t have anything remotely like a jaw.

Coronel’s retinal HUD flashed with a message: “Unit C4T-9L requesting tactical link. Accept?”

He accepted. “So, what were you doing in there?”

“Conducting last-minute inventory. Human pilot hastily closed the door,” its message read. It looked up at the pilot, holding its gaze.

“Why do I feel like it’s judging me,” the pilot said.

“Because it is,” Coronel said. “It says it was doing inventory when you closed the door on it.”

“Oh.” The pilot looked to the cat and slightly bowed. “Sorry.”

C4T chirped in binary. The human seemed to acknowledge this. Good thing it didn’t need to make excess bandwidth allocations just for basic communications, though it was sort of amazing how humans could understand the Machine equivalent of racking one’s hands over a keyboard.

Coronel also established tactical links with the pilot and co-pilot, Saito and Eliso, so now the three were using Coronel as a central node for their squad net.

“The two of you know how to use these?” he asked them, showing the survival rifle from the cabinet.

“From mandatory survival training,” Saito said. “Recreation during breaks, sometimes.”

“Same,” Eliso said. “We even had bear training.”

“Bear training?” Coronel parroted. “Bear training?”

“Ah, that was sort of an amazing one,” Saito remarked. “Don’t worry, sir. We airmen can kill most things—just, one at a time.”

That was going to be a problem. The clambering outside the door, which hadn’t ceased up until now, was joined by a second one.

Coronel looked down at the survival laser rifle in his hands. Crashed airmen could recharge it manually with a hand crank, or plop down a solar blanket somewhere. The muzzle flared out to accommodate the 50mm focusing lens, which made the whole thing look like a flashlight. It looked dumb, but it was powerful enough to blow off a limb, and the wide lens meant that minor scratches and dirt on the protective window wouldn’t do a number on the optical efficiency as easily. Still, a thin cover came with it. It helpfully popped off with a light flick fairly easily.

In exchange for its robustness, it was a piss-poor crowd control weapon: semi-automatic, and ten shots. That’s it.

The handguns fared a bit better. They had semi- and full-auto capability, loaded with typical solid gold 3mm with detonation-rated cartridges. Any shittier metallurgy would’ve made them fancy in-your-hand grenades, but humanity’s eggheads knew how to make excellent guns. A little wire stock folded out if anyone fancied a bit of stability in their life.

Problem being they only had five hundred rounds to share between the three of them—though, he wasn’t sure what C4T would use in combat.

“How’ll you fight?” Coronel asked.

It replied by showing off bayonets and stilettos coming out of its paws, tail, and at the ends of four extra cybernetic tentacles from nodes on its sides.

“Ranged options?” Coronel continued.

Its eyes blinked. Coronel looked closely, and realized they were laser diodes. They wouldn’t deal any massive damage, but it’d help make a country of blind men pretty easily.

Once the survey drone did its rounds, they’d break out.