WRITTEN RECAP
The Third Drop begins with Ghost Squadron having accomplished something remarkable.
They captured the Black Veil.
Alive.
Mostly.
The pirate leader is locked in the brig aboard the Raptor while the squad prepares to return her to Sovereign Alliance of Virtue authorities.
That delivery will have to wait.
A distress report comes in from District H-12.
Power and communications have failed.
Local security forces have effectively collapsed and refuse to enter the district.
Civilians are cut off.
And the district administrator, Elaine Voss, has disappeared from the data tower and is believed to have been taken prisoner.
Command has decided this requires a military response.
More specifically, it requires Ghost Squadron.
One member observes that a communications outage sounds more like a job for the cable company.
Command disagrees.
The Raptor makes the jump.
Ghost Squadron drops.
Their individual pods slam down outside District H-12.
The situation is immediately more complicated than the briefing suggested.
Thousands of people are in the streets.
Tires burn behind a barricade.
Smoke hangs over the district.
A man with an amplifier is addressing the crowd.
He is accusing the Sovereign Alliance of withholding food and exploiting the colony. He calls for independence.
Ghost Squadron has walked into a rebellion.
Nyx performs a sensor sweep.
No mines.
No booby traps.
Just a very large number of civilians.
Considering what happened aboard the Vesper Dawn, everyone should probably regard "no mines" as excellent news.
Then someone fires a Skyhammer missile.
There is a moment when nobody seems entirely certain who did it.
There is another moment when everybody realizes what a Skyhammer does to a densely populated intersection.
The explosion tears through the barricade.
People die.
The crowd panics.
Ghost Squadron has been on the ground for only a few minutes.
Someone concludes that demotion may be in the future.
This is optimistic.
The surviving civilians scatter.
Then the shooting starts.
Snipers appear on rooftops.
Whether they were already prepared to attack Ghost Squadron or have simply decided that the heavily armed soldiers who just fired a missile into their demonstration represent an immediate problem is not especially important once the bullets start flying.
Ghost goes into Overwatch.
A sniper rises from a rooftop.
Ghost fires.
The sniper comes off the roof.
Another appears.
Nyx puts him down.
The streets erupt into a running battle.
This is where the squad encounters a problem they have not really dealt with before.
The enemy is hard to identify.
There are civilians everywhere.
There are armed civilians.
There are people in light armor.
There are snipers.
Some people may be security forces.
Some may be rebels.
Some may simply be terrified residents with guns.
Ghost Squadron has very little information.
Fortunately, they are heavily armed.
This becomes their operating philosophy.
At one point someone stops to question whether they are actually attacking the right people.
The squad reviews what it knows.
They were sent here to find Elaine Voss.
Snipers are shooting at them.
Someone launched a Skyhammer into the crowd.
And beyond that, nobody is entirely sure what is happening.
One trooper summarizes the situation perfectly.
They're confused and heavily armed.
The fighting continues.
Return fire turns every stray shot into another burst of plasma.
People who fire from windows and rooftops are immediately answered by weapons designed to fight armored military units.
Against lightly protected humans, those weapons are devastating.
Ghost Squadron cuts a path through the district.
They advance from one defensive position to another, repairing damaged armor along the way.
Atlas continues to demonstrate why giving him an oversized cannon may eventually become a matter for a military tribunal.
Cipher sends drones ahead.
Nyx handles reconnaissance.
Ghost attempts to command a squad whose operational doctrine increasingly resembles "shoot whatever just shot at us."
Eventually they reach one of the buildings connected to the rebellion.
Nyx scans.
Nothing.
Atlas opens the door.
Someone inside immediately fires a machine gun at him.
This is an important reminder that sensors are helpful, but not infallible.
Ghost Squadron storms the building.
Cipher throws a shoulder grenade through the doorway.
Atlas returns fire.
The squad pushes room by room.
Then a much heavier weapon fires from deeper inside.
Atlas takes the hit.
These are no longer frightened civilians with rifles.
Some of the fighters are equipped with serious military hardware.
Ghost Squadron keeps advancing.
The building turns into another brutal close-quarters fight.
Grenades go through doors.
Return fire snaps down corridors.
People appear from rooms just long enough to discover that powered armor reacts considerably faster than expected.
By the time the shooting ends, the squad has left another trail of bodies behind it.
Then they search them.
That produces a problem far more uncomfortable than enemy gunfire.
These people do not look like pirates.
They have ordinary identification.
Union cards.
Wallets.
Pictures of wives and children.
They appear to be local citizens.
Some were clearly armed.
Some fought Ghost Squadron.
But they are not obviously the criminal army the squad expected to find.
The table begins reconsidering who the good guys are.
The official answer is simple.
The Sovereign Alliance of Virtue is virtuous.
It says so in the name.
This explanation does not entirely settle the matter.
Ghost Squadron has its mission, however.
Elaine Voss is still missing.
And somewhere inside the building they discover another route.
A manhole opens onto an old ladder leading down.
Beneath District H-12 lies an abandoned transit system.
The squad descends.
The tunnels are ancient and partially collapsed.
Rail lines disappear into darkness.
Old platforms sit beneath the city.
Wrecked subway cars block much of the station.
Ghost Squadron had not even known this transit system existed.
Which makes it an excellent place to hide a prisoner.
Cipher sends the drone ahead.
Nyx performs another sweep.
This time the sensors find plenty.
Armed contacts are waiting across the platform.
More are behind walls.
And two of them are much larger than the others.
The enemy knows Ghost Squadron is coming.
The subway battle begins.
Fighters rise from behind the wrecked train cars.
Carbines flash in the darkness.
Ghost Squadron returns fire across the tracks.
Then one of the larger contacts appears.
He vaults across the rail line and lands almost on top of Nyx.
He is huge.
Armored.
And carrying a glowing shock maul.
The weapon makes the tactical situation immediately obvious.
Do not let the giant man with the electrified hammer hit you.
A second heavy fighter appears.
He does essentially the same thing.
The fight becomes chaotic.
Atlas takes combat stimulants that dramatically improve his reaction speed.
For several rounds, the squad's slowest heavy gunner is suddenly acting before almost everyone else.
This is extremely dangerous for the opposition.
The heavy fighters discover why.
Atlas's cannon punches through one.
Nyx and the others concentrate fire on another.
Cipher's drone trades shots with defenders across the platform.
Ghost keeps the squad moving.
The first group of defenders falls.
Then Ghost Squadron pushes deeper.
More Razor Dogs are waiting.
That is the name the squad eventually settles on for the rebel fighters.
Some are little more than armed civilians.
Others carry proper heavy weapons.
At least one is wearing powered armor comparable to Ghost Squadron's own.
This is no longer riot control.
It is a small war under the city.
Smoke grenades obscure doorways.
Drones are deliberately sent forward to draw fire.
One disappears almost instantly.
The tactic is judged successful because the destroyed drone revealed where the guns were.
Atlas's armor is disabled.
Repairs bring it back.
Ghost's armor is disabled.
Repairs bring it back.
People go down.
Get patched.
Stand up.
And go back into the fight.
Grenades tear through clusters of lightly armored fighters.
Heavy weapons hammer both sides.
At one point it begins to look uncomfortably close to the squad's first possible complete wipeout.
Ghost Squadron keeps pushing anyway.
The last heavily armored fighter goes down.
The remaining Razor Dogs try to hold their ground.
They cannot.
One by one, resistance collapses.
The station becomes quiet.
Ghost Squadron has fought its way from a burning street, through occupied buildings and into the underground rebel position.
They have taken heavy damage.
They have destroyed an impressive amount of District H-12.
They have killed people whose role in the rebellion may never be entirely clear.
And they still have not found the person they were sent to rescue.
Then a door opens.
A young woman slowly walks out.
Her hands are raised.
She is waving a white flag.
The immediate response from Ghost Squadron is to ask whether they should shoot her.
Someone suggests a Skyhammer.
Fortunately, there are no Skyhammers left.
The woman identifies herself.
Elaine Voss.
The administrator they were sent to recover.
She is alive.
Ghost Squadron has completed the mission.
Someone immediately suggests handcuffing her.
After everything that has happened, this somehow feels consistent.
The Third Drop ends with Elaine Voss freed and the Razor Dogs defeated.
But the mission has raised considerably more questions than it answered.
District H-12 was not simply overrun by pirates.
Its people were angry.
They were armed.
Some were organized.
Some possessed military equipment.
And some of the dead carried nothing more sinister than union cards and photographs of their families.
Ghost Squadron was sent to restore order.
Order has been restored.
More or less.
They recovered the administrator.
They crushed the resistance.
And they learned something important about life under the Sovereign Alliance of Virtue.
Sometimes saving the day and knowing exactly who the enemy was are two very different things.
For now, the mission is complete.
Elaine Voss is alive.
The Black Veil is still sitting in the Raptor's brig.
And somewhere, command is almost certainly preparing another perfectly routine assignment for Ghost Squadron.