The official fleet dataslate description for ‘Assault Drone Coxswain’ was a masterpiece of bureaucratic understatement. It used words like “high-risk,” “independent,” and “tactically critical” the way a serial killer might describe his hobbies as “socially engaging.” Once I’d read it and cross-referenced it with the unvarnished, blood-stained truths in the open node forums, a cold sweat beaded on my skin. The air in my tiny barracks berth, which usually smelled of recycled oxygen, ozone, and the faint, musky scent of unwashed goblin from three bunks over, suddenly felt thick and suffocating.
Well, scrot, I thought, the internal monologue a familiar, sardonic anchor in the rising tide of panic. Someone upstairs must be truly, pants-wettingly desperate. Grabbing a fresh conscript, a wood-rank nobody from a backwater hell-planet, for a posting like this was the kind of decision that got admirals quietly retired. Or eaten. Probably eaten.
Then again, considering the limited—and heavily fabricated—profile they had on me, I could sort of see the twisted logic. On paper, I was a goblinoid with a rare, high-tier Tech-Sorcery affinity and a noted talent for signal shielding and system infiltration.
To some overworked, under-pressure personnel officer, that must have looked like a golden ticket. They weren’t just getting a pilot; they were getting an electronic warfare suite, a counter-intrusion specialist, and a drone controller all wrapped in one ugly, easily replaceable package. The risk of me flaming out spectacularly was high, but the potential payoff if I didn’t was apparently worth a conscript’s life. In the grand calculus of the UPF, I was a rounding error with a useful skill set.
Technically, the job was simple. You commanded a ship. A small shuttle-boat, really, an ugly, functional brick of a thing stuffed to the gills with assault drones. It was designed to hit a planetary surface or a drifting hulk hard and fast, unload its metallic children, and then get away like a bat out of hell, leaving a storm of fire and ordinance in its wake.
The romance ended there.
Drones were disposable. The NCOs who led the meat-and-metal troopers on the ground were only slightly less disposable. The drop-ships we coxswains flew were basically two-piece affairs: a small, unarmed, and heavily armored fast tug about the size of a heavy fighter, attached by grav-locks to a giant ‘can’ – the drone container. The tug’s job was to get the can to the drop zone.
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My job was to survive long enough inside that tug to pop the can, release the drones, and then control the ensuing chaos. If you were lucky, and the mission was a clean win, you could swoop back in, reattach to the can, and haul it home for refit. If an actual infantry unit found it intact amid the wreckage, they could use it as a hardened command post or a beacon for extraction.
The real nightmare was the control aspect. The ‘can’ had a portable node for controlling the drones remotely, a necessity when your fragile, squishy body was kilometers away. But the universe is a malicious bastard. Big rifts, hell-worlds steeped in chaotic essence, and the twisted physics of drifter hulks were exceptionally good at tearing unaccompanied drone control away from a remote node. Static, interference, outright possession by warp-ghosts—if the controller wasn’t powerful and talented enough to hold the link, the drones would either go dumb, shut down, or worse, get subverted.
And infantry got justifiably, murderously upset if they called for drone backup that arrived and started enthusiastically disassembling their own units with laser fire. Or if the backup winked out of existence the second it entered the atmosphere, absorbed by some rift as fuel. It was a quick way to get fragged by your own side.
Sometimes you recovered some drones. Sometimes you didn’t. And on a hell-world drop, coxswains didn’t always come back. The mortality rate was a punchline told in hushed tones in the mess halls. Chances were, some algorithm had taken my supposed shielding talents, my “tech sorcery,” and my adept-level tech affinity, run a probability matrix, and spat out a number that was just barely better-than-average for mission completion. Good enough to roll the dice.
I could understand why it was either the luckiest break possible or a death sentence dressed up as a promotion. Independent command for a conscript was unheard of, a fast track that could, in theory, lead straight to officer candidate school if you survived and excelled.
That was the carrot. The stick was that the fast advancement came with risks so astronomical they were usually reserved for suicide missions. You didn’t get that kind of opportunity without a matching probability of ending up as a red smear on some alien landscape.
A third, more paranoid thought whispered in the back of my mind. Or they know what Gremlins really are. But the chances of that were so infinitesimally small it wasn't even worth the neural energy to consider. We were myths, ghost stories techs told each other when systems fixed themselves for no reason. I was safe in my anonymity, a singular, ugly goblin among millions.
