With a silent expulsion of gasses, the insertion pod separated from the ship hanging in low orbit. Contained within was DTU-343, better known as Drop Man. Drop Man was many things- a shock trooper trained for orbital insertion, an inter-atmospheric fighter pilot, an urban warfare specialist, a satellite technician, a Maverick Hunter, a mean son of a bitch to his trainees, a veteran of the Second Stardroid Invasion, a lover to many. Unlike many of his comrades, he wasn’t a Reploid. His body was largely built on the frame of a Sniper Joe- an autonomous bipedal combat drone- with the cognitive hardware of a Robot Master installed. This left him at a mere five feet tall, though it had never impeded his combat abilities.
Today’s mission was relatively straightforward. The Hunters had received reports that stragglers from Sigma’s uprising had taken shelter in the abandoned foundation of the final Wily Castle, out in the irradiated desert that comprised much of the west coast of the US. They were fabricating Mechaniloids to harden the position, doubtless searching for salvation in the old bastard’s vaults. Commander Signas had given the Hunters three days to prepare for the mission, doing long-range recon and working out a strategy. Drop Man volunteered to reprise his role as an orbital insertion specialist, returning to orbit and recruiting members from his old outfit, the Drop Corps. That made this officially a multi-branch operation. Their part in the mission was pivotal- they had to drop in behind enemy defenses and soften them up. This would open the way for an infantry charge on Ride Chasers- agile little assault hoverbikes.
As the Commander broadcast a final briefing summary on the mission’s main comm channel, Drop Man tuned him out. He knew the mission by heart already. Instead, he focused on picking out a song to play over the pod’s tinny speakers. After only a moment, he found the perfect one- an old city pop song from decades past. Outside the front viewport, he could see the blue limb of Earth.
His mechanical hands relaxed on the pod’s controls as the robot performed another gear check. The powerful energy pistol strapped to his thigh read green, its power cable firmly docked to him. The high-frequency knife sheathed on his belt was fully charged. Next to him, securely locked in place, was the special surprise he was bringing to tonight’s festivities, a large-
BANG.
The dim interior lights of the pod went dark, as did the status indicators by the controls. The inertial sensors in Drop Man’s body registered that he was now spinning. In the window, the Earth was rapidly oscillating in and out of the window. On a drop, if your view of the planet was anything but gradually increasing, something had gone very wrong.
The local comms array in his body picked up a signal from a teammate. “Alpha-Two to Alpha-One, you still with us?! It looks like you hit some debris left in orbit. You’re spinning out and leaking fuel. Your pod comms are out.”
“One here. Pod’s lost power. Link me to Fleet.”
Wordlessly, his comrade complied, relaying Drop Man’s signal to the immediate people in charge of the insertion.
“Alpha-Actual, this is Alpha-One. My pod’s out of commission. Hit debris. No power. Bare minimum, I’m landing off-target. Please advise.”
An indistinct voice replied, strained but attempting to sound calm. “Acknowledged. Alpha Team, stick to the mission plan. Alpha-One, we are scrambling a recovery team planetside and tracking your descent. Good luck.”
Flames were beginning to build up outside the tumbling craft, visible faintly in the window. It, and an intensifying roar, indicated that the squad had breached the atmosphere. A feminine voice crackled over the comms. “Alpha-Four to Alpha-One. I have eyes on your pod for the moment. It appears your primary airbrake is damaged, and your retro tanks got pierced.”
More bad news. The Orbital Branch’s drop pod system relied on multiple stages of brake to decelerate smoothly enough for the occupant to land intact. Of course, Drop Man would never have called the landings “smooth”. First was the airbrake, rigid petals of a metal flower that unfurled and caught the air. Second was the parachute. And finally, the retro rockets in the base of the craft fired in the final seconds of descent. With two of those systems out of the equation, it was going to be a hard landing if he was lucky.
“Alpha-One to Alpha-Three. Solution?” Drop Man couldn’t help but let a hint of panic into his voice as he spoke to the team’s technical specialist. The ping time for his link to each of his teammates was increasing ever so slightly, and while he lacked any real measurements, he knew this meant his pod was drifting further from the rest.
Three’s response came without declaring identity. This was arguably a minor breach of procedure, but given the time constraints, no sane CO would write it up or chew them out. “One, I’ve beamed you a schematic. By your left arm is a panel. Open it. Inside is some overrides and breakers. Flip the ones I indicated and hit the manual bootup. This should reroute power along a different bus and bring the pod computer online.”
Fumbling in the dark, Drop Man did as instructed, but there was simply a hollow click as he thumbed the red button. “Three, it didn’t do anything.”
A pause.
“Three?”
“I’m thinking, hold on!”
Another pause, followed by the silent receiving of data.
“Okay. I need you to try to stop the spin. Do the breakers up like I sent. Configure those override switches, too. Hook up a cable from yourself to Port B on the panel. Use the solution I gave you. It should read your inertia sensors and send power into the systems at specific moments. This should force the RCS thrusters to fire and slow the spin. Quickly, now!”
Once again, Drop Man flicked at the switches, double checking everything. Awkwardly, he shoved a hand between the metal seat and his hip, reaching for the soft case strapped to him. He extracted his prize- a short universal interface cable. One end entered a small port on his wrist. The other end went into a port on the panel. He pressed the button and held it.
At first, nothing happened. A moment later, the program running in his mind registered that he was at a particular angle, and power was sent from his core into the breaker box. The maneuvering thrusters hissed to life, briefly pulsing before stopping, waiting again for the ideal angle. Over the course of the next ten seconds, the dizzying tumble started to miraculously slow.
“Okay, Three, what now?”
“Above your head, there’s a thin panel. Pop it open. There will be two pull cords. Pull the right one when you’re at 4,000 feet! It’ll manually release your chute and set a fuse to fire the retros from the reserve tank!”
“How will I know when I’m at 4,000?”
“Shit. Uh, it’ll be in… three minutes and forty seconds. I’m sorry I can’t do more, sir.”
Drop Man sighed. “It’s okay, Three. You’ve done well, considering the circumstances.”
He paused, taking stock. “Okay. Alpha-One to Alpha Team. Alpha-Two is now in charge of the op. Stick to the plan. The boys on the ground are counting on those defenses being softened. Not much else to say.”
The team fell into a sullen silence. There was nothing any of them could do. Drop Man had been on drops that had gone awry before a few times in training. He’d emerged intact each time, but how much luck could one robot have? This was a bad one. He knew the odds were poor. He’d watched fellow trainees dig craters before. If there was any comfort, he’d probably either emerge unscathed or disintegrate on impact. You were either fine or painlessly dead. Little room for middleground.
The Drop Corps was one of the first strictly robotic outfits in the military. There’d been entirely robotic combat units before, but they tended to have at least a few humans doing support or maintenance or even command. In space, however, humans were scarce. It was simply safer to employ just robots, since they didn’t need oxygen. A few wings of the Drop Corps’ central HQ- an Orbital Branch space station in high orbit- were entirely depressurized, having only simple doors and windows between them and space. Those rooms were quiet, contemplative, peaceful, but by nature, utterly hostile to humans.
In short, dropping was only for bots, and the facilities to accommodate combat drops tended to reflect this. Plenty of humans could take it, mentally- skydiving was a sport, and HALO jumping had been used in military operations. But the speeds- and therefore, deceleration G’s- required for orbital drops to be effective were simply too physiologically risky for the fragile human body. Even the robots in the Drop Corps had to be modified to fit exhaustive safety standards.
Drop Man had originally been built to test the pods, among the first properly sapient robots to do flight tests. He’d enjoyed the work, enough to request to join up with the unit when it was formed. He was sent through basic training, and soon enough, he was in orbit.
As the details of the scarred desert below started to become disquietingly clear in the tiny window, those days felt many decades distant, though it had been less than five years. A notification in Drop Man’s vision popped up- the time had elapsed; he had to pull the cord. Time felt like it was crawling along at an agonizing pace, extending the anxiety of the moment into infinity. Every memory that rushed by felt centuries away. He tugged at the manual release. With a harsh jolt, the parachute caught the air- and he heard the distinct sound of a steel cable snapping. The chute was gone.
“Three! Chute snapped!”
By now, his connection with his teammates’ local command network was patchy, the pod having drifted to the edge of their signal range. Alpha-Three’s voice came through, crackling. “Left cord! Left cord! Le-”
The comm signal cut out. The left cord was yanked, and a second jolt hit the pod as the reserve parachute deployed. The ground was positively rushing at Drop Man, the Earth determined to slam the pod with maximal fury. The slow-motion feeling was replaced by a sickening speed to it all, an inevitable descent into hell. A third bump hit the pod as the reserve tank was mechanically emptied into the oxidizer tank of the retro rockets. The roar of the wind was overwritten by their scream. In a strictly measurable sense, he was decelerating, but he couldn’t feel a difference.
Drop Man’s pod slammed into the desert sands, the sound reverberating for miles as it fell onto its back. Pain and damage reports blasted every one of his senses. His vision faded into colorless static before fading back, but with a large crack in the center of what he could see. The visor covering his monocular camera eye was clearly damaged. Through the pain, he felt an oozing sensation around his waist. Weakly, he touched a finger to his midsection and lifted it back over his head.
The fingertip was coated in a viscous, bright blue substance that was faintly smoking off against the paint on his hand. It was Energen, the lifeblood of robots. The synthetic fuel was derived from crystals found deep in the earth. It was mildly corrosive but otherwise stable in its liquid form. The power cores within the chests of robots processed the fuel into electricity. Clearly, his abdominal tank was ruptured. Drop Man didn’t bother hunting through the damage reports. He knew it well enough by the mere exterior presence of Energen, as well as the sensation of it pooling against his hips and onto the chair.
A hissing caught Drop Man’s attention. The pod door’s emergency eject had somehow tripped. In a blast of compressed gas, the door jumped off, flying out of view, ripped from its hinge. He could now see into the night sky. Shooting stars raced past- the pods of Bravo Team, the wave of troopers launched moments after his squad’s wave.
His systems felt shaky, the pump in the Energen container straining itself to deliver what drops it could suck up to the core. In a very real sense, he was bleeding out, and the rest of his body was in pretty miserable shape. He couldn’t move his shooting arm, and his leg servos screamed a pain response when he tried them.
A slow burning sensation was reported from his internals. Some of the escaped Energen was oozing around inside the broken shell of his body. It was bad news. The stuff wasn’t anything like a strong acid, but it would still be bad for circuitry. The hardened casing that contained his cognition hardware was reporting a breach. That in and of itself was scary news- you didn’t want that case opened for almost any reason. If the fuel got on those circuits, it was over. No coming back. No chance of it. The recovery team would be recovering a corpse that couldn’t be repaired.
I can tell. I can fucking tell.
The stuff was definitely dripping that way. The pod was tilted at the right angle for it. He tried to calm himself- he didn’t know for sure that the IC case breach was aligned with the path of the drip. He didn’t know for sure the Energen would even make it through his neck and into his head. These assurances gave way to panic. Thrashing, he tried to get up, to readjust, to prop himself up at a different angle. All he succeeded in doing was inflaming the pain in his- well, everything. He screamed in agony before falling limp.
“God, please, let me at least shut down before it melts my fuckin’ IC. God, you bastard. You shit .”
No response but the distant crackle of heavy buster fire and a whistling breeze. Drop Man’s thrashing slowed. His body was getting heavy. Besides, the robot realized that moving about was probably speeding up the viscous drip’s progress. Despite the pain, he tried to relax and accept his fate. He started to think to himself that the anticipation before the impact had probably been worse than the burning-out his insides were currently experiencing. The pain was notable, though.
He started to think about people he wished were with him in the moment. Comrades here and there. People he’d wished to say goodbye to. Inevitably, his thoughts turned to the dead. One of his original squadmates had died on a high-risk op during the Second Stardroid Invasion. They’d drawn straws to see who would get the grim privilege of volunteering.
For many nights after, he gripped the charred dogtag that was recovered and sobbed digital tears. Later, when he joined up with the Maverick Hunters, he had the chance to visit the site of the mission, and though he never found exactly where the man had died, he found a spot that felt appropriate and left his recovered rocket launcher, a silent grave marker. For the most part, it had been closure, but Drop Man occasionally felt deep regret that he’d never had the chance to tell the man how he really felt.
Drop Man had a lot of lovers, or people he figured he would have eventually asked out. Many of the relationships were casual, somewhat held at a distance because of the demands of his job. They still meant a lot to him. Back at the Maverick Hunter HQ, there was a large Animaloid fighter waiting for his return- they hadn’t been chosen for the mission. Too big for a Ride Chaser or Armor, on a mission that was primarily a mechanized assault. They’d complained about missing the hunt, but privately, Drop Man was always glad when someone he cared about couldn’t put themselves in danger.
He was fully aware of the hypocrisy, but then, that’s just how being a soldier was, and he really did feel like working in the field was his fundamental calling. Reploids weren’t built with a specific purpose in mind, but Robot Masters generally had some kind of ingrained function. A part of it was just how their architecture worked, but some of it was by design- Robot Masters had been built for particular tasks.
Sometimes, this urge was hyper-specific. A construction bot would probably feel the most comfortable working on a building. Sometimes, it was vague, a sense of justice or duty. Idly, the dying robot supposed that for him, it was a bit of both. On the one hand, he’d been built to test drop pods, and indeed, he felt quite comfortable in the dangerous machines, drawn to a career involving them before he switched to the Hunters. On the other hand, he generally felt the most at home commanding soldiers, completing objectives, firing his buster. Being a soldier was just good.
Slitting up waves of reanimated Mechaniloids in the junkyard he landed in during the invasion was good. Taking in Mavericks had been good. You really felt the difference you were making, he thought. His reminiscence floated back to the start of the Maverick Hunters. Alongside most of the surviving Reploids that had fought in the invasion, he was in the first wave to join up. He’d been there at the press conference officially announcing the group’s commencement. He was among the many called up to the stage to have a medal pinned on.
Afterwards, he hadn’t had anywhere to go. HQ wasn’t opening until the next day, and there was no sense in burning fuel to get him all the way to orbit just to come back down the following morning. The Reploids had their barracks in the bunkers they’d come up from, but he was going to be listless for several hours. Awkwardly, he milled about the hallway outside the conference room, exchanging polite waves with the people filing out. One civilian, a young man that stood taller than Drop Man, approached nervously and offered to buy the robot a drink.
Graciously, the robot accepted. He didn’t exactly have a mouth to drink with- his face was simply an illuminated display projected onto the visor in front of his camera eye- but nonetheless, the pair ended up at a bar. Drop Man pumped the can of flavored Energen into his abdominal fuel port. His body was nowhere near sophisticated enough to taste the flavoring, but he smiled anyway. After some inept flirting from the human, one thing had lead to another, and the robot spent the night in his apartment.
“God dammit… he’s gonna be crushed…”
The man’s features swam in Drop Man’s view. Of his current engagements, the human was definitely the most sensitive. Not that any one of the people he’d held or been held by would be happy to hear of his passing.
“Shit…”
The robot’s senses were dulling. His vision was going grainy and the light amplification was failing, the color washing out. That didn’t bother him much. The view was just the sides of his pod and the night sky, nothing exceptional to miss. But unexpectedly, a shadow came into view, blocking out a portion of the sky.
“I got’m!”
The recovery team, perhaps? A surge of hope washed down Drop Man’s circuits, a fuzz of electrifying static that somewhat un-dulled his senses. His level of pain ramped back up as his hope for living kicked in. A large pair of mechanical hands reached into the pod and gripped his body. Drop Man yelped in pain as he was lifted, the hands bending his injured limbs in ways the broken servos did not enjoy.
An oddly familiar, high-pitched voice spoke. “Careful, careful! Don’t hurt him!”
“Doin’ my best, y’shit! He’s gotta fuel leak in’m, ain’t got time t’be the most gentle!”
Ungracefully, painfully, Drop Man’s dim world spun around so he was facing towards the ground, tilted so his head was somewhat upwards of his feet. Immediately, he felt the Energen ooze back downward. On the one hand, this meant it wasn’t coursing towards his IC anymore- but on the other hand, it meant what little was left in his tank was flowing out and away from the pump to his core. A wave of nausea and weakness overtook him, his vision almost completely disappearing in a gray haze of untuned television. Faintly, he heard the high pitched one again.
“Hold him still, I’m plugging in the battery…”
Drop Man’s hardware register noted a new device hooked into his wrist port. It had no driver and was only active on the power pins. It was a battery, exactly as the speaker said. The sensation of weakness ceased, and his vision returned to clarity. The robot’s body was still shattered in many places, but he felt less like death. He gingerly turned his head to see that on the ground, next to the huge feet of whoever was holding him, was indeed a beefy power bank. It was an unsexy cube of plastic with an LCD power meter and a cable trailing to his arm.
His rescuer set him down gently, but pain still flared. He resisted the urge to cry out, while also dimly wondering why he was bothering to resist. The shattered robot was now propped against the still-warm outer skin of the drop pod. He was still in a lot of pain, but nothing was actively flaring. As the immediate mortal peril subsided, an automated program started to somewhat suppress the pain.
Now he saw his crash site. It was on a ridge with a decent view of where he was supposed to have landed. He could see the ruins of the tower foundation sticking out of the ground, illuminated by flashes from buster fire. The other, more fortunate pods had made their mark, landing within the structure’s protective outer wall. He couldn’t see them from here, but he saw the smoke plumes from their landing. The flare countermeasures that had deployed with their chutes hung low in the sky above, glowing aggressively as they burned. The structure itself was a nondescript gray tree stump of sorts, stretching only three stories at most into the air. It only vaguely hinted at the foreboding tower that had once stood on the spot. Long before, it had shot high into the sky, a grey spire bedecked with ornamental skulls, inside which lived countless robots and their implements of war.
In front of Drop Man were several robots. Most of them clearly Robot Masters like himself. Behind them sat several idling four-wheelers. Closest to him was a hulking robot of indeterminate function, and a short robot in the likeness of a bipedal canine with purple fuzz. Despite the animalistic features, he was clearly not a Reploid. In fact, Drop Man had seen him before. Before he could ask, the dog-man beat him to it.
“Wait, you’re- DTU-343, Drop Man! We saw your pod going down, you’re lucky to be alive!”
A few years prior, Drop Man had indeed met the robot. His name was TNCN-001 Tanuki Man, and they’d bumped into each other after a training drop mishap had sent Drop Man miles off course. That time, he’d walked away from the landing intact, but still- he now felt sheepish about landing shittily near the same guy twice.
“Well, you guys certainly aren’t the UN recovery team…”
Tanuki Man was the organizer of a group of interest known as Tin Can. They were mostly made of outcast or questionably legal Robot Masters; and they were suspected of a lot of petty thievery among other things. Ultimately, they had largely escaped the long arm of the law, isolating themselves in a nearby ghost town in the exclusion zone left behind by the First Stardroid Invasion.
Drop Man recalled that Tanuki Man had actually been involved in a coalition effort involving the Second Invasion. He’d been the pilot that had flown the landing craft on the mission where his squadmate had met his end. Drop also knew that afterwards, Tanuki had taken on a command role, directing volunteers from his own ranks to move supplies and refugees around. He suspected that this involvement was a part of why the group had been spared a Maverick designation or a formal investigation. Nonetheless, an official dossier existed on them in the Maverick Hunters’ archives.
Distracted by his thoughts, he almost didn’t notice the short robot approaching him with some hardware in hand. It was a metal bottle with an attached hose and a valve with a screw thread. He eyed it with uncertainty.
“Woah there, bud, what’s that?”
Without stopping, Tanuki Man responded, “We’ve got to get you stabilized. The battery only has a few minutes of juice when it’s subbing for an entire Energen core. Hold still, yeah?”
The purple robot’s paw-like hand deftly made for the hole in Drop Man’s abdomen. The soldier’s less-damaged arm instinctively tried to clutch at Tanuki Man’s wrist, but his pain flared up and the arm went limp again. The paw slipped inside, doing something with a twisting motion. The minute motions this imparted onto his body caused, predictably, more pain. However, Drop Man’s core registered a fresh flow of Energen.
“I’ve hooked this bottle of fuel up directly to the pump. It’s worth about two and a half standard E-Tanks. Conserve your energy accordingly.”
Before Drop Man could respond to thank the robot, Tanuki Man continued speaking in his matter-of-fact tone. “Your head’s got some pretty bad damage. Emotive display on your visor’s completely blown. Any refractive filter enhancers on the visor are definitely out, too.”
Drop Man sputtered at the mention of the filters. “That hardware is classified, how did you-”
“It’s my job to know things. Point is, you busted it in the fall. Your underlying optics look fine, which should be obvious given that you’re, y’know, seeing. With vision. Your head plating looks like it took some damage. Diagnostics state an IC container breach. You really are lucky to be alive, Drop.”
“I know, I know…”
A moment passed. Drop Man spoke again. “Do me a favor and point me at the fireworks. I wanna see if the fight’s gone good.”
Tanuki Man obliged with the help of the larger robot. Drop Man winced as his body was adjusted. Several of the other present robots were already watching the battle. By now, there was heavy smoke coming from the outer wall of the former Wily tower. Many of the turrets were no longer moving or shooting. There were still heavy exchanges of gunfire.
“Y’know, you sure do know an, uh, illegal amount of shit. You know my visor tech by name, and you just happen to show up right exactly where I crash within a few minutes…”
A large Mechaniloid flyer in the shape of a bee tried to rise up and away from the distant chaos, only to be immediately struck down by a rocket arcing gracefully from an unseen launcher.
“Drop, you landed practically in our backyard…”
A turret on the wall exploded cleanly, leaving behind nothing but scorch marks.
“Bullshit. You just had a repair crew ready to go?”
Tanuki Man sighed before responding. “Look, this whole sector is our turf, and Wily Tower was a place we were welcome at back when it was still, like, there. If a bunch of guys connected to a recent major incident suddenly move in, we’re gonna be interested. If the UN starts sending scouts through our turf to check it out, we’re gonna listen in so we know when to keep our heads down. If, in the course of this listening in, we happen to hear someone’s having a real bad time, and we can help, we’re going to help. We run our own maintenance, so it’s not like the tools are ever far from ready. You’d probably be dead if we didn’t track your pod!”
Drop Man thought about his response for a moment, idly watching the distant flashes of light. “Look, I’m not ungrateful, but you oughtta to be more careful. In case you run into someone who gives way more of a shit about the letter of the law or whatever. I don’t personally give a fuck that you know about random bits of hardware or can crack our comms, because I know you guys aren’t out to fuck with us. But not everyone knows that.”
Before Tanuki Man could respond, his attention was drawn by something in the distance. “Look, they’re starting a charge!”
A squad of UN Ride Chasers were making for the main gates. They were facing a practical wall of energy bolts, but they weaved to and fro, dodging artfully. One took a glancing blow and started to lose speed, pulling off to retreat from the kill zone, back to the UN lines. Smoke trailed, but the driver seemed unharmed. Another started to get pushed out by focus fire, having to slide out of formation and looping around for another approach. The front two of the charge were almost under the gate, when one of them was hit.
“Jesus!”
The bike exploded, leaving a small crater in the sand. The occupant was thrown far from the bike. They didn’t move on impact. The lead rider looked back and seemed to shout, but he didn’t slow. The remainder of the bikes followed him in. With the defenses focused on the Ride Chasers bearing down on the entrance to the structure proper, the Ride Armor walkers that had been waiting outside the kill zone began to charge, gliding across the sand on their flat feet, propelled by jets.
Tanuki Man commented, “Seems like your guys are winning this one. Without the rest of the tower, the foundation is a poor position to have to hold. The bottom levels were just manufacturing. Wily’s Mechaniloid troops would walk right out to man the guns to prevent gate breaches, in theory. So the real defenses started basically exactly where the foundation ends.”
Drop Man mulled it over before responding. “That’s good. Seems like the steel rain helped soften ‘em up. Christ, that biker, though.”
Tanuki Man grunted. “Your pickup is gonna be here in a few minutes. Already hailed them and gave the exact location. They’re gonna get you to a repair facility.”
After a few more bangs echoed across the desert, the sounds of warfare grew muffled, an indistinct roar from inside the building. The Mavericks were on the back foot.
Exhaustedly, Drop Man spoke. “…Thanks for the rescue. Before you showed up, I was feelin’ bad for myself, thinkin’ about everyone I was gonna miss. Serious comms breach or not, you’ve given me another chance to minimize my regrets. Gonna go visit ‘em all the second I can walk.”
Though his cracked visor could no longer display his face, though he was in a constant dull pain, Drop Man was smiling.