There was a red blinking light, a crimson beacon somewhere right ahead, beckoning to for him wake up.

  Wake up.

  Wake-

  A gasp escaped his lips, his parched throat coarse and rough. Something in Jackson’s mind called out, commands and instincts swirling around inside his head, intermingling in a tapestry of racing thoughts and confused memories, before they disappeared back into the void which he was trying to claw his way out of.

  Finally, a deep breath came through, cool air filling his oesophagus and lungs. His mind though was still spinning in a spiral of discordant sensations and memories.

  Images of a planet below, just visible outside of the canopy.

  Others like him, rushing past, getting into pods like the one he was in.

  Klaxons going off, red lights flashing from the sides of his periphery, canned voices echoing through metallic hallways.

  The rumbling under his feet, the flashes of a thunderstorm as he broke through the cloud barrier.

  Briefings. The armoury. The yelling of officers as they prepared for the jump.

  The other Skycorps troopers joining him on this fateful evening…

  Slowly, as Jackson was gathering himself, the picture began to make sense. They’d dropped on Odessa, in preparation of its reclamation from the alien invaders.

  Six months of careful planning, rigorous training, rearmament and preparation of new recruits. And before that, roughly a year since first contact and the invasion. One year, five months and twenty days since the attack and following occupation.

  538 days under an unknown invader. And he was here to change that.

  As Jackson opened his eyes again, he realized where the blinking was coming from: his drop pod had landed and was waiting on him to open the hatch, the red light placed right next to the release hatch. The cameras that would’ve normally provided him with a view of the outside had evidently not survived the landing, leaving the screen in front of him blank, only occasionally flickering in a rainbow display of broken LEDs.

  With his mind now awake and clear, Jackson began to check himself for any injuries but thankfully found none. His limbs were where they belonged. No broken bones. No dislocated joints.

  He also quickly eyed over his gear: His padded armour was still fine, the characteristic cloak issued to the men and women of the Skycorps was where it had always been, and the HUD of his helmet didn’t report any breaches. His armour plates, made of layers of ceramic, interspersed with nanofiber and Kevlar, were also still in top condition.

  Thankfully his visor had also survived the ordeal without a crack. Considering the lingering numbness in his skull, it seemed obvious to the trooper that he must’ve collided his head with one of the pod’s walls during impact.

  Lastly, Jackson reached up to where his rifle was mounted and found it promptly where it belonged.

  The M1-X 5C, though soldiers usually referred to the platform and its variations as ‘MIX’. This one was a shorter carbine version of the weapon, with an integrated suppressor built into its barrel.

  The platform followed a traditional design, pistol grip at the back, magazine in front of it, safety and selector switches at the sides, bolt at the back. The SCN had considered equipping the Skycorps with bullpup versions of the MIX but found that the negatives outweighed the positives.

  The biggest draw behind the MIX as a weapons platform was, after all, the compatibility between each of its configurations. From carbine to rifle to light machine gun, parts and ammo were all in some way exchangeable and compatible.

  And though the 6.8x51mm cartridge packed quite a punch, the sub-sonic rounds issued to the Skycorps helped keep its characteristic cracks in check.

  With everything where it belonged, he removed the carbine from its rack, switched off its safety and made sure it was loaded. For all he knew, the area in which he had landed could be hot, so Jackson was preparing himself to shoot his way out if necessary.

  Gripping the release hatch and breathing in, he pulled it down, before a moment later the front of his pod was violently flung away, crashing against a nearby abandoned car.

  With the realization that he was on street-level, Jackson understood why he had been so disoriented and presumably had lost consciousness. The drop had been fumbled…

  Though he still felt some pounding in his skull, like a bad migraine refusing to leave him alone, he was sure that his memories didn’t betray him. His team had been ordered to land on the roofs of three residential buildings, designated ‘Tango Triangle’.

  The three tallest buildings in that district – a mostly civilian one, safe from the more industrial structures and Highrise office buildings - providing oversight above most of the nearby streets and a key point for their enemies to defend against a counterattack.

  Orbital reconnaissance as well as drone surveillance had identified what they believed to be enemy anti-air on the roofs of those skyscrapers. Further installations and artillery inside the apartments were also a possibility, with the droptroopers ordered to neutralize or appropriate all of them.

  Orbital bombardment had been ruled out.

  Even a precision strike ran the risk of flattening another block of buildings next to it, not to mention the possibility of civilians being used as human shields inside the occupied buildings.

  Besides the fact that every ship in their fleet would be needed to establish and maintain orbital supremacy long enough to ensure a safe corridor for the rest of the strike force.

  As long as it was possible, the brass wanted to avoid sending slugs accelerated to super-sonic speeds into residential areas.

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  Thus, they’d been ordered to perform a surgical strike, with his and two other fireteams ordered to take the roofs, while the rest of the platoon would breach the skyscrapers from ground-level.

  Yet he wasn’t where he was supposed to be, Langstrom and Heermann were nowhere to be seen, and neither were the rest of their formation. Worst of all, he couldn’t even tell where he was.

  The street his pod had landed in was placed in an alcove in the ground, leading into tunnels on both sides. Above him he could see walkways, a few scant trees and the dark silhouettes of skyscrapers – a clear sign that he wasn’t where he should be, these were the wrong ones - as they contrasted the burning sky.

  That actually caught Jacksons eye.

  The heavens were lit up, dark clouds mixing with black smoke, lit up in an orange hue as the fires in the distance breached the darkness of night.

  While precision strikes on residential areas had been disallowed, the fleet had still performed attacks on some of the larger industrial areas on the edge of the city, where surveillance had spotted what looked to be enemy formations. One rather large fire on the horizon also seemed to have been the result of a controlled burning of some nearby forests, likely to ensure enemy reinforcements couldn’t easily come in from there.

  The result of it all was a sky that was a canvas of orange, pink, black and a deep blue, with heavy clouds obscuring Odessa’s moons Chornobyl and Poltava.

  Though the occasional streak of white plasma broke up the display of blackened shadows and light, as it flew towards the stars and disappeared behind thick clouds.

  They came from those same guns that Jackson and his comrades were supposed to take out.

  For that very task, three regiments of droptroopers had been sent into the city of New Poltava. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd, all in all roughly 30’000 men and women of the Skycorps.

  It'd been the largest deployment of the Skycorps on a single target since Lumen.

  The overarching goal was to secure a holdout in New Poltava, take out enemy defences, gather reconnaissance and help establish a landing zone in the nearby nature reserve.

  There was no proper spaceport here – that honour only went to Odessa’s capitol, Nebesni Vorota – but the reserve offered enough open ground to allow for landing proper mechanized infantry and an army of grunts.

  Yet those same plasma guns, which threatened to tear apart even Centurion-Class assault carriers of the SCN, were still active and still a threat.

  Checking the computer on his left wrist, Jackson tried to make sense of how much time might’ve passed. 01:14AM local time.

  Jackson guessed that he couldn’t have been out for more than half an hour. So, the window for them to open up a corridor for the strike-force wasn’t gone yet.

  Though for all his speculation, Jackson still couldn’t make out where he was. Much as he eyed the environment, none of it rang any bell of any of the maps he’d studied.

  It really did seem like he was in an entirely different district from where he should be.

  Loading up a map of the AO on his wrist-computer, Jackson tried to see if any street formation and buildings seemed to correspond to where he was, but no such luck. From here, he’d have better luck finding a needle in a haystack…

  Only a few street-signs were still functional… perhaps the downside to so much being digitalized, there were not too many options to orient oneself once the power went out and civilian GPS was down.

  In his current predicament, trying to get his bearings from here was a waste of time. He’d have to get to higher ground.

  Shouldering his rifle, Jackson activated night-vision on his visor and made for one of the nearby tunnels. There wasn’t a service door or hatch anywhere close by, so with no other option, he made for the darkness of the abandoned tunnels, hoping to find a way out…

  The year is 2199.

  For the last 120 years, humanity has taken to the stars. Breakthroughs in the harnessing and controlling of singularities – white holes - have allowed them to finally breach the seemingly unbreakable barrier that had once been the border of their solar system.

  By bending the very fabric of the universe itself, harnessing man-made singularities and their immense power, mankind found a way to manipulate the plane of their existence. Though the concept of wormholes had always been one steeped in theory and science-fiction, it had become the very principle on which man would finally expand into the galaxy.

  Distances that once had seemed impossible, were now being crossed in a matter of days, or even hours. The very principle of the flat nature of their universe, had become a canvas to their expansion.

  Folding space itself, to traverse distances unheard of before.

  And in the stars, they found a new home. Though the challenges were numerous, humanity stayed strong; though conflict was inevitable, Earth remained steady, establishing herself as the central government of the fledgling human colonies, even as some of them sought to distance themselves from the reign of Sol.

  War was inevitable, but in the end, they became stronger for it.

  Decades into the expansion out of their Solar system, five primary colonies had been established and became the pride of mankind, united under Earth and the Solaris Coalition.

  Each of them a marble in its own right, a jewel to be cherished, a new home to be embraced.

  Gaia, Neo Alexandria, Troitsa, Qadar

  and Odessa…

  But in 2198, first contact had been made.

  And with it, followed the drums of war.

  For the first time in its history, Humanity faced an intelligent adversary of non-human origin. Under the command of Admiral Callahan, the third fleet had barely managed to beat back the invader.

  Just long enough for the survivors to retreat and report their findings.

  Though they had achieved a close and pyrrhic victory by the skin of their teeth, humanity had also shown their new adversaries that they were willing to fight.

  But, Odessa was left alone and vulnerable.

  The colony was invaded not long after that first fateful battle.

  Since then, humanity and its unknown foe have butted heads numerous times in the void of space.

  Though these skirmishes were sporadic, blood was still shed in the defence of the little region of space mankind call their home.

  But now, the time had come for the counterattack.

  In reverence for a similar act of liberation over two hundred years prior, it was dubbed:

  ‘Operation Overlord’

  It was the first time that man would face his new foe on the ground.

  It was the first time that humanity would take the initiative since their retreat during first contact.

  The true battle for their future, had begun…