Preparing to Launch

Once I was encased by the Hellpod, I could feel it being sealed and moved into position for launch while my HUD displayed the coordinates for where I would be making landfall, giving me one final chance to make some fine adjustments before I got shot out of the launch tube. This would be of some concern to any sane person but this is not a sane universe nor am I a normal person under normal circumstances either. This sort of risk taking was something that I will have to do to fit in with this universe and I’d have to keep doing it for my benefactor’s amusement while I was here.

With the available topographical data, I made sure I was going to be landing on solid ground before confirming the launch. There was no turning back now and I felt a lurch from the Hellpod I was in when I was shot out into a controlled freefall through the atmosphere, the air rushing past, heating and shaking the Hellpod during re-entry as the parasitic drag and compressed air in front of the Hellpod’s tip produced shockwaves and slowly ate through the ablative layer meant to protect the payload.

That said, as unpleasant and long as re-entry felt; being on the receiving end of the vibrations and all, it was ultimately very short in terms of the total time taken to reach the ground and I soon felt the thrusters engage to slow me down for landing approach so that I don’t end up a smear on the ground. With a hard jolt even through the shock absorption structure in the pod, I knew I’d landed and the pod’s lift mechanism pushed me out into the AO like a push-pop. Reaching for my MP-98, I was ready for action and scanned my immediate surroundings for any alerted threats while D.O. Hansson-Bjerke prattled on about something or other on comms. The saturation of bug spores lowered visibility somewhat but I could still see movement a decent distance away from me. In the back of my mind, I was glad that my suit came with a base level of filtration ability to keep

Thankfully, despite the hard landing, the closest bugs some 40 metres or so away by my best estimates through the spores appeared to not have heard my arrival so I was able to call in and toss out two activated stratagem balls unimpeded to call for supplies and a MG-43 to augment my available personal firepower before I took a quick glance at the tactical map on my wrist computer to get a better idea of where any friendly assets available through my enhanced security clearance might be.

Unfortunately, being that the mission was considered trivial in difficulty and my AO being relatively small as a result, I had no friendly assets in my operational vicinity to activate and was also on my own. Still, I pressed on, keeping low to avoid attracting more attention from the bugs before a roaming pack of Terminid Scavengers and Warriors got in my way on the way to where the Spore Spewer was marked on my tac map.

As there were no real options available to avoid contact, I switched down the MG-43’s rate of fire to its lowest setting for controllability and let loose a withering hail of fire at 630 rpm, seizing the initiative before the bugs caught on to my presence. With about a fifth of the 150-round belt expended to kill about 5 scavengers and 2 warriors, I have finally gotten some actual in-mission combat kills to my name without so much as a scratch on me which felt like a good sign as I proceeded with the mission.

The spore spewer itself was not too difficult to spot either despite the reduction in visibility though, the glowing bits kind of served as a beacon through the floating muck which was good news to me as I got closer to it. Figuring a bug structure with its size needed some manner of demolition, I called an Orbital Precision Strike on it to destroy the whole thing in one good hit.

The one good hit turned out to not be so good on the back of a misjudgement of throw distance with the stratagem ball landing a little further out than I needed but the angle from which the Super Destroyer was relative to the spore spewer evened things out and the shot from the ATLAS cannon destroyed it regardless, the round ripping through it before detonating.

With the spore spewer destroyed, the production of the bug spore muck in the air was curtailed in the immediate area and it began clearing up though it did take a while before visibility improved enough that I’d consider it to be completely clear. All told, the main target was taken down within 5 minutes of my making landfall and I still had 35 minutes left on the mission timer before I needed to extract. Being that I definitely needed to gather resources for myself and my crew, I set off to wander the AO to find anything I can take up with me or register as mine.

Perhaps it was a stroke of luck or just sheer happenstance of whatever was happening in my AO when the bugs took over but there was an abundance of what the ship crew had designated as low-grade resources available for me to both pick up and return with. Requisition slips, common-grade samples, medals and even some Super Credits. All of which would be very useful to collect for my later use to acquire more resources for my continued survival. There certainly wasn’t anyone alive to use these resources down here aside from myself and the bugs didn’t count.

As for enemy resistance, the bugs themselves barely factored into the equation during the mission and I felt like I could avoid contact without much in the way of difficulty. There were too few of them around to put up too much of a fight against me while I checked every single point of interest on the map for anything useful. Guess High Command wasn’t kidding with the threat assessment being trivial. The only thing that gave me trouble though was something I couldn’t simply fight my way through. There were two separate storage bunkers that required two-factor authentication before I could access the interior. Given that I was alone, that meant I couldn’t crack those open and I had to settle for the resources that were left outside, consisting of more ammo, a box of stims and a couple common samples.

Once I had picked up everything I could find, it was time to return to the Super Destroyer. Ironically, for a mission that was almost peaceful, it was at extraction that I would encounter the most difficulty all mission-long when I too late in preventing a scavenger from crying out for a bug breach just as I killed it with a short burst from my MP-98 as I had ditched my MG-43 for a SG-88 Break-Action Shotgun that I had picked up from an expired civilian who’d picked up arms for self-defence against the bugs, intending on keeping it for personal use and experimentation. Luckily, my assessment of what I needed before deployment turned out to be prescient and I managed to board Pelican-1 without injury… but I looked like I had buckets of bug guts thrown at me from the close-range fighting that I had to do with my MP-98 against scavengers and warriors.