Military Sci Fi Dropship Novels & Stories

She swiped furiously at her wrist-comp, searching for anything, a secondary airlock, a maintenance hatch—anything close by. Her finger stopped on a faint, almost entirely degraded schematic line directly beneath the command tier. The Captain's Gig. A small, heavily armored VIP shuttle designed for rapid planetary descent or emergency evacuation. It had its own independent power grid and life support, docked in a private bay just beneath the floor they were currently floating above.

I grinned. "You always know how to make an entrance, Lucas," I grinned. "Let's just hope everyone else liked it enough not to shoot me down," Lucas replied. The blur slowed ahead of me, dropping back until it kept pace just in front of my running mech. The camouflage layer on its hull faded, leaving the dropship's sleek grey shape fully visible. The ship was sleek, but in no way small-it was easily the length of a football field in scale. The structure resembled a massive, wingless airplane, screaming along on four nuclear-powered thrusters that kept it aloft. White block letters adorned its side, giving it a numerical designation: Dropship 13.

The shadows didn't just block the intruders; they acted as a vacuum, chilling the molten rock instantly and sealing the breach with a plug of obsidian. ​But the bore was a distraction. ​Above them, the sky erupted. Six Council dropships, shielded by Ouroboros "Ghost" cloaking, decloaked simultaneously. They looked like jagged metal vultures against the white-out of the storm. They didn't land; they hovered, deploying "Harpoon" cables that bit deep into the facility’s exterior plating. ​"They're boarding the terrace!" Maya cried out.

And then, on the horizon, a speck appeared, growing larger with each passing moment. As we watched, a magnificent shuttlecraft descended from the sky, its massive form casting a long shadow on the ground. The sleek vessel, designed to seat six with an expansive cargo hold, hovered effortlessly just a foot over the ground. David's eyes sparkled with pride as he declared, "This is Atlantis's own Star fleet, she is one of four, top of the line, and all yours! – my gift to you."

"You look like beetle. Shiny shell." "Thanks," I muttered. "Move out," Barzil ordered. We marched to the transport bay. The hangar was massive. Filled with the roar of engines and the smell of burning fuel—kerosene and magic. A sleek, predatory drop-ship sat waiting. Its ramp lowered like a tongue. I walked up the ramp. My magnetic boots clanked on the metal. Clang. Clang. I caught my reflection in the dark glass of the cockpit. I froze.

Instead, the heavy cargo clamps on its underbelly released with a loud metallic CLACK. A massive, steel shipping container plummeted thirty feet, slamming into the muddy center of the courtyard with an earth-shaking thud. The drone didn't linger. As soon as the cargo was dropped, the quad-rotors pitched aggressively. It banked hard to the left and shot back up into the smog, disappearing toward Sector 4. Silence fell over the Scrapyard, save for the settling dust. Three hundred armed fighters stared at the pristine, grey steel shipping container sitting in the middle of the mud. It bore the stark white logo of Aegis Innovations.

The drop loomed beneath us, a gray abyss. Right before the plunge, I turned to look at Julian one last time. "Julian," I said, my voice flat. "This baby? I'm giving it back to you."

"We didn't land on a home. We landed on a Sleeper Ship." The Arrival of the "Others" The signal Julian had been pulsing from the stars wasn't a "Goodbye." It was a Warning. A fleet of silver, needle-thin ships dropped out of warp in the upper atmosphere. They didn't belong to the Architects. They were jagged, black, and surrounded by a shimmering field of Anti-Matter. "The Void-Eaters," Commander Vax whispered, her knuckles white as she gripped her slug-thrower. "The scavengers of the deep dark. They don't want the people, Elara. They want the Shell."

Above the skies of Ren’veil the Night Dreamer served as a mobile base for tens of hundreds of gunships flying in and out of the massive ship delivering supplies to the planet below and the injured to its many hospitals. No one aboard the ship was able to rest easy knowing that their brothers and sisters waged a battle to free the world from the shackles of the corrupt. Kallen and her adjutants were toiling away rerouting what forces they had left to the fighters below and the supplies, they had brought were now dwindling.

"Purging biomass. Reclaiming hardware." From the underbelly of the massive Dreadnought, thousands of black streaks plummeted toward the earth like a meteor shower. They were "Void-Pods"—drop pods designed to deploy the Creators' shock troops: the Void-Hounds, twisted amalgamations of cloned flesh and cybernetic weaponry. "They’re trying to overwhelm the Dome's shields before the main cannon fires," Scarlett analyzed, her fingers flying across the Stellar Navigator while her jade brush painted frantic, glowing golden runes in the air. "System! Reroute all auxiliary power to the Nine-Heavens Defense Array!"