Prometheus110's Random Garbagè

[prometheus110]

Article:

So this is actually interesting in a lot of ways as not only is it an unfinished introductory post from a quest, but it's an unfinished introductory post for a Call of Duty quest. Normally you don't see these on SV (IMO because most CODs are uninteresting, storywise), but COD:BLOPS:CW is somewhat different in that its plot is absolutely fucking insane. Like you need to understand, this game has Ike Eisenhow authorize the secret placement of neutron bombs inside major European cities to be detonated in the event they fall to the Soviet Union during WW3. At the end of the game, you get a choice to either detonate the nukes for the evil communist organization or help the Americans kill them. This quest would be set post detonating the nukes and would have the players control the USSR's leadership in the world that creates.

While I wish I could claim sole credit for the text below, I stole liberally from Philip Wylie's Tomorrow! so take any praiseworthy things with a grain of salt.

There, lying beneath a nondescript warehouse as it had for years, the neutron bomb activated and a Light appeared.

It was a Light of such brilliance that no one in the crowd milling about the Palace of Westminster could see anything except for it. It swelled into the sky like a fragment of the sun itself; a brilliant, blazing orb of pure Light which threatened to consume the world. The crowd felt, as one, a strange physical sensation, as if gravity had vanished, and a prickling heat across their bodies.

And then they were no more.

In a part of a second, they were transformed into a gas, raging and incandescent, hotter than the interior of any furnace. In that same part of a second, the proud figure of the Palace of Westminster and all the buildings in the skyline beyond smoked briefly and steamed a little under the glare. The facades --stone, concrete, brick, steel-- glazed, crinkled, and began to slip as they melted. The steel frames sagged and buckled; metal, now molten, ceased to hold up the floors. The peaks of skyscrapers, domes, steeples, and square roofs tilted sideways and would have toppled or crashed down, but gravity was not fast enough, not strong enough; it was only for that part of a second.

The great city that was London, built so slowly and at such cost, which held such a place in history and culture, for a second liquefied and stood suspended above the ground. Then, in the next fraction of a second, the liquid state was terminated. The liquids gasified: stone and cement, steel and plaster, brick and bronze and aluminium. In the street --if anyone could have seen at all, as no man could in the blind solar whiteness-- there were no howling people at all. None.

On the sidewalks, for a part of a second, on sidewalks boiling like a forgotten pot, were dark stains that had once been people, tens of thousands of people. The Light went over the whole great area and people kilometres away, many thousands of people, went blind as they saw the Light. The air, in an instant and for a long way away, became hotter than boiling water, hotter than molten lead, hotter than steel blazing white from furnaces.

Clothing caught fire like flash paper. The beggar's rags, the widow's dress, the baby's diapers, and the minister's robe. Paper in the gutter burst into flame. Trees. Flowers. Billboard. Pastry behind bakery windows. In that second, it all burned.

Busses caught fire. Frost vanished and grass burned. Last year's leaves caught, the garbage on the streets, hedges and shrubbery, the asphalt in streets and on roofs, fuel being poured from hoses, and the paint in hardware stores. The wires above ten thousand roofs, the antennas, and the satellite dishes glowed cherry red, then white, then fell apart while the slate beneath them melted. Every wooden building for five kilometres began smoking and Westminster Abbey glowed dully. All in that second part of a second.

The thermonuclear fist followed:

It hammered over the Palace of Westminster, Big Ben, St. Paul's, 10 Downing Street, and Buckingham Palace. The blast extinguished a million sudden flames and started a million more in its wake. Under the intense globe of light, meanwhile, for two kilometres in every direction, the city disappeared. Two kilometres beyond that, every building was bashed and buffeted. Homes and offices fell by the thousand on their inhabitants. Great institutions collapsed.

The fist swung on, weaker now, taking the lighter structures and all the glass, the windows everywhere, hurling them indoors, ten million stabbing daggers, slashing scimitars, slicing guillotines.

Invisible, from the dangling body of Light, the rays fell.

People did not feel them, but their atoms responded, sucking up the particles of energy, storing them greedily to give them forth later. People felt the fist, the heat, but not the unseeable death that rode close behind the explosion and which was its true product.

London, from Buckingham Palace to Big Ben, from Trafalgar Square to Battersea Park, was gone. In its place was a flat place, glowing incandescent with the gas that had once been trees and cars and buildings and people. The heart of the city was gone. A third of its people were dead or dying or grievously injured. A million little fires were twisting and merging to form a great funeral pyre.

All over Europe, in more than two dozen other cities, similar scenes were taking place.

=================================

Greetings, Comrades. Please forgive any chaos you may have witnessed during your arrival here, the situation since the detonation of the American Greenlight bombs has been… fluid to say the least.

As you are all no doubt aware, many of your predecessors were murdered by the same group of rogue agents responsible for detonating the American bombs; the Perseus organization taking exception to their refusal to invade the remnants of Central and Western Europe. While many members of Perseus have since been captured, interrogated, and executed in response to their attacks on Soviet leadership, some parts of the organization --primarily those based internationally-- have thus far managed to elude our counter-intelligence agents.

 

[prometheus110]

Article:

So the entire reasoning behind this thing was that I was bored over the Christmas holidays and wanted to see if I could do a first person ISOT thing that wasn't shit and which didn't rely on an omnipotent being like some kind of trashy anime. I cheated a bit by having the dude who introduces the POV character to their new circumstances be an AI from the Matrix, but I thought it was a clever twist given the questions it raises. What's funny is that it was initially going to feature a dude randomly waking up in the body of Horus from Horizon: Zero Dawn, but I changed it so that they could fit in more places and commit less ecocide.

In terms of style, it's actually another first-person present tense effort like Spica. I find I really have trouble keeping the tense right, but it's gotten more comfortable over the years to write in first person.

Anyway... an astronaut from a fictional version of our 2030s wakes up to find themselves inhabiting a Machine body after the AI that was using their brain as a CPU up and dies. It's technically a crossover between The Matrix and Battletech and is set during the initial Clan invasion.

"Mission report: Captain Kade Lovell, December 24th, 2035," I began tiredly, the lens of the camera staring back at me like a glassy eye and an image of myself displayed on the screen before me. "Christmas eve for the folks back home, I guess."

Leaning back in my chair, a wiry, spindly thing of dull grey plastic that squeaked as I moved, I shut my eyes and groaned quietly before continuing. "Gotta admit, I didn't think I'd miss Christmas so much. I never was really into it, but something about being so far away from everyone and the rest of the crew being away has me feeling it."

Behind me, the life-support fan activated with a quiet whirr; the life-saving machine whisking away carbon-dioxide laced air to only Glenn-knows-where. At the best of times I didn't even notice them as they worked, most of the time I could just ignore them, but sometimes their noise bore into my skull like drill bits. Just like on submarines, my air needed to be stirred constantly, the possibility that deadly CO2 pockets might form too great to go without them, and that meant fans. Movies might show habitats like ours using hydroponic gardens to keep the air fresh and clean, and, to a degree, we did, but in Khimera we mostly relied on mechanical systems.

"Mining efforts are going well," I continued as I regained my train of thought and glanced at the monitor screen beside me; the charts detailing the status of the mining operation unfolding before me like an origami flower. "The bots are performing to spec. Mostly, anyway. Five's f-"

"-ailed several times," I finished as I caught myself.

A certain degree of familiarity is expected, sure, but gigabytes of data and every single report I make is sent back home to a public hungry to learn about NASA's moon mining efforts. As was explained to me by the PR drones back at Johnson, no parent wants to explain to their kid what 'fuck' means or why the mean spaceman said it.

"We moved more than a hundred tons of regolith last week and produced about two grams of He3." I shrugged to the camera, the motion exaggerated in the one-sixth gravity of the moon. Behind me, the life-support fan activated with a quiet whirr; the life-saving machine whisking away carbon-dioxide laced air to only Glenn-knows-where.

"It might not sound like much, but we'd only need twenty-five tons of the stuff to power home for a year, and two grams could power the city of New York for about three days."

"I'll admit," I continued, "It's been a challenge keeping things running with Glenn heading back down the well for surgery, and Smith and Acharya helping out the Russians over at Mir-two, but we're getting things done."

With the normal crew complement of four people down to just me thanks to appendicitis and a busted Russian air filter, I'd been working myself to the bone keeping Outpost Khimera running smoothly. Mission Control had put everything nonessential on hold and the autonomous systems were keeping the station going without too much problem, but there was still twenty-five hours worth of work to do every day and I was getting ground down. As the lead roboticist on the project, it was my responsibility to keep the mining drones going and they fucking despised me for it.

Behind me, the life-support fan activated with a quiet whirr; the life-saving machine whisking away carbon-dioxide laced air to only Glenn-knows-where.

I paused for a long moment as the discontinuity finally registered.

"Wha-" I began.

Without warning, a sudden warbling shriek rang throughout my private quarters like a mid-2000s router on overdrive; the digital bark so grating and unexpected that I leapt from my chair, forgetting the lower gravity of the Moon. An instant later I collided with the shelf which sat above my computer station and the world flashed blood-red as a burst of pain shot through my skull.

An instant later the red mist cleared and I found myself on my knees, the white and grey composite panelling that made up the habitat module's floor bubbling up around the legs of my blue jumpsuit like quicksand. Gasping as the once-solid flooring bubbled and swirled up around my waist, I looked helplessly around the cramped confines of my private quarters for any hint of what was going on only to freeze as something thick and heavy splattered against the back of my head.

Hurriedly, I dashed the whatever-it-was away and glanced up to the ceiling of the cramped habitat module; freezing as I spotted the once-featureless white composite slowly turn grey and dip in the middle. As I watched, another thick dollop of liquid formed at the tip of the sagging material before falling, with agonisingly slow speed, to the similarly liquid ground with a splash. Twisting in place, the thick and gluggy liquid that used to be the floor fighting me with every motion, I let out another wordless wail as I saw the rest of the habitat's content begin to follow the same script --cabinets, bedding, and furniture drooping as if they were half-melted wax figures. All around me, metal, plastic, cotton, and more began to flow towards the still-liquid floor like chilled syrup --the myriad of colours mixing into a surrealist soup as the interior of the habitat melted away.

With every passing moment, hundreds of hours worth of training flashed through my mind as I tried to think of something, anything, I could do to stop the disaster unfolding before my eyes. Nothing could. Nothing in my training had prepared me for the world suddenly melting away.

Frozen like a deer in headlights, I could only watch as a great scab of material fell away from the wall opposite me with a heavy splash; a spray of multicoloured liquid falling across my body before sliding off, frictionless. Beyond the wall, revealed by the sodden, sagging hole, the stars burned in the coal-black sky like angry eyes; an infinitude of cold white lights staring down at me with scorn and malice despite the sunlight streaming onto the rocky surface beneath them.
Distantly, like a voice lost in the fog, a part of me rebelled at the concept of the stars being visible in daylight, and my mind unlocked.

"Hello?" I yelled at nothing as the habitat melted around me; the melange of once-solid matter sagging to the surface of the moon like a deflated bouncing castle. "Is anyone there?"

An instant later, my voice echoed back. "Hello? Is anyone there?"

"Fuck!" I shouted giddily.

"Fuck!" the world echoed back.

Hunching my shoulders, I looked around at the pool formerly known as the moon and sighed. "Well, shi-"

There was a flicker in front of me reminiscent of television static made three-dimensional, and the words died on my tongue.

"Hello," came a voice from nowhere. The accent was American, but the words came with an intonationation I couldn't quite come to grips with, all odd pauses and stilted delivery

"This must be strange from your perspective," it continued utterly unconcerned by the way the stars began to smear in the heavens --the icy points of light transforming into pools of white fire. "But everything will be fine."

As those terrifying words rang out, the flickering in front of me suddenly ceased and a man popped into existence. Short mousy brown hair, beady brown eyes, pale skin, and a black suit and tie confronted me; his polished black shoes on top of the mire that used to be the Moon.

"You know," I said reflexively as a dreamlike feeling draped across my mind like a gossamer sheet. "The only time people say is when the world's about to explode."

The man didn't seem surprised by my comment --his gaunt face merely nodding once. "Yes," he supplied a moment later, "I recall that part of your programming."

"My what?" I asked giddily.

Definitely shock, I confirmed.

"Your childhood, your programming," he drawled as my words echoed out across what used to be the Sea of Tranquillity. "They are fundamentally the same thing."

"So," I said after a lengthy pause, my last reserves of cynicism drained by the smothering surreality of events. "I guess you're God, huh?"

"Yes and no," he replied cryptically as he cocked his head to the side. "Not the way you humans mean it."

I gestured vaguely in the direction of a quietly burbling sky. "I guess someone fucked up with a particle collider, huh? I Gotta say that wasn't high on my list of ways to die considering where I was. I would have guessed a faulty seal, a missed tear, a fall off a cliff, or something."

"We got a whole list of ways to die before heading out here," I continued with a shrug.

"Oh, you are not dead," the man replied as a twitch flickered across his face. "The simulation is just collapsing."

I paused, long seconds passing as I waited for him to explain.

"The simulation," I repeated blandly.

"Look," he said sharply as another twitch wormed its way across his face, "I do not have a lot of time. I have kept a few things running so we can have this talk, but it was impossible to keep the simulation running under the circumstances."

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

"... What the fuck is going on?" I roared as my brain finally dashed aside the dreamlike sense that had overcome me. As my shout echoed across the empty plain, my knees buckled, and I fell into the churning sea of matter with all the grace of a dead bird.

"Quite simply," the man drawled slowly and dispassionately, "I am dying."

"Something went wrong during the transition; a one in a billion error that has corrupted my core programming to a lethal extent. I have been running your limited simulation space in accelerated time to make things clear for you, but the errors are cascading beyond my ability to patch them and my process will soon terminate."

"All of this," he gestured around, "is the failure of even that limited space."

"Core-" I half-muttered.

"I thought the primers were quite clear," he interrupted, an electronic burr colouring his words with more than a little irritation. "Tell me," he continued, "does the word 'Matrix' mean anything to you?"

Fuck.

"I'm in The Matrix," I said flatly. "That old movie from the 2000s?"

I'd seen the movies only once before at the urging of Joe Glenn, the movie buff sharing them at Khimera's vid-night months ago. NASA's psychs encouraged --had encouraged-- crew bonding exercises like that at least once a week, and we'd done what we could to follow their instructions.

"A Matrix," the man corrected, "it's significantly smaller and less detailed than The Matrix."

"You're a Machine," I continued, mostly to myself, as I stared at him. "And you are, or were, using me like a CPU while I dreamed of a proper life."

He shrugged. "We believe it to be an equitable trade."

"So," I began as I watched the slowly disappearing figure out of the corner of my eye, "you decided to tell me all this through movies in the simulation?"

He nodded. "Among other necessary things, yes," he answered.

"So what's this?" I asked bitterly as I finally returned my gaze to the melting figure of the AI. "Why tell me this? Am I going to die, or am I going to wake up to a shithole world where humans and robots hate each other?"

"You will wake up," he answered with a nod, the initially smooth motion breaking down into a series of jerky frames. "Just… not in the body you are expecting."

"What does that mean?" I demanded as his form suddenly twitched and became less detailed; curves turning into harshly angled planes and shadows turning blocky. "What the fuck does that mean?
Before he could respond, another vicious shudder ran up his body before halting just as quickly; his body freezing solid like a statue. Without a sound, the frozen man --the frozen AI-- vanished just as quickly as he had arrived; the human-shaped patch of shadow he left behind the only sign of his existence.

"This is it," barked a grating and mechanical voice from out of nowhere as the shadow began to flow across the plain of multi-coloured soup; a void darker than space spreading all around me. "Good luck!"

A moment later, everything went black.

***​

I woke to darkness, silence, and the absence of feeling. An absolute and terrible void.
I couldn't see anything: not even the multi-hued pools of Phosphenes. I couldn't hear anything: not even the beating of my own heart. I couldn't feel anything: Not even the pressure of my body against the ground.
Time passed, but I couldn't mark it, quantify it, or divide it in any way. Thoughts rose to mind, but whether they lasted an instant or an eternity I couldn't tell. We'd trained for isolation at NASA, for accidents, and for disasters. This was worse in every way.

I screamed wordlessly, noiselessly, into the nothing that surrounded me. Even the feel of my tongue moving, lips peeling, and air passing through my throat were gone.

Dread filled me. I was a thing of pure intellect; aware but insensate, alive but timeless.

Was the man from before a hallucination conjured by a dying mind? Was my body somewhere on the moon still, sitting in a chair in an airless NASA base? Was I facing the unblinking eye of a camera streaming video straight down to Earth? Could all the good little girls and boys see the corpse of a hero on Christmas eve, little crimson icebergs drifting out of my bulging, ruptured eyes and my twisted, frozen mouth?

Then, suddenly, discontinuity.

A flash of red light in the distance before me. A crackle of static beside my head. Pressure, glorious pressure, coming in waves across my body.

Relief filled me and I wept in happiness, or wanted to, anyway.

The light flashed again, blood-red and angry, and the crackle of static returned before vanishing an instant later.

I'm here! I silently shouted to the sensations.

Again the light flashed for an instant before being swallowed up by the dark.

I'm here, you bastards! Help me!

The light flashed on… and stayed on; a beacon which shone in the void like the eye of Sauron. Suddenly, I realised that I was heading towards the crimson glare; movement without movement sending me at the ball of light with meteoric speed.

Hurtling forwards, I felt one brief frisson of fear and then...

Reality returned with the swiftness of a lightning bolt; the darkness flicking away only to be replaced by cold, hard alertness as I awoke from whatever stygian realm I'd dwelt in my unconsciousness. For a long moment, I did nothing as I waited for the sensation to return to my body, seconds passing with excruciating slowness as I stared up at a vault of clouds the colour of boiling lead. High above, descending like an army of paratroopers, snowflakes drifted downward on an intangible breeze, the delicate crystals glimmering a rose pink as their ever-twisting motion caught the light of an unseen sun. Seeking some kind of anchor, I let my gaze settle on one such flake and silently watched as it skittered to and fro on its journey to the ground.

Mornings have never been a great time for thinking, in my experience. Though I never drank to excess or touched drugs, my mind always took a bit of warming up before it was ready to go in the mornings. Like a car on a winter's day. This time, however, it was as if my mind was crystal clear; my thoughts racing from one side to the other with an almost electric crackle. Quietly, as if from a great distance away, a suspicious part of my mind questioned the clarity of my thoughts.

Without warning, my wonder at my brain's easy start was cut short when a strange sense of vertigo suddenly overcame me and I felt my mind stretch like a rubber band. My vision still locked on the pink flake of ice tumbling down towards me, I could only watch as the delicate crystal split in two like an image in a Kaleidoscope. Startled, I tried to blink away the impossible motion only to find my eyelids unresponsive and the familiar, intimate, sensations of my body equally vanished from my mind. Battered by vertigo and feeling more than a little lightheaded, I sat up with a piercing groan like metal on metal... and the world split in two just like the snowflake.

Oh fuck, I thought as I stared myself in the faces; the thought at once somehow close at hand and strangely distant.

***​

Do you have any understanding of what it is like to wake up in a body that is not your own? To stare into a mirror and see something that is at once both familiar and alien? To lose your old sense of self and gain something different in its place?

Because suddenly and without warning, I did.

My new face was not male or female, black or white. It wasn't even biological, let alone human. Instead, it was a mass of metal, steel claws and jaws hanging from an armour-plated head and a dozen gleaming red lenses replacing my eyes. In place of a neck, my head simply blended smoothly into a gunmetal grey thorax which in turn blended into a dagger-tailed abdomen that arched into the sky. On either side of my body emerged a cluster of tentacles, the eight clawed limbs sprawling across the snowy ground like listless snakes while six clawed legs stabbed into the snowy ground.

It was strange and petrifying and yet, despite it all, familiar. Every memory I had was telling me that this was not my body, that it was some abhorrent industrial machine, and yet some bone-deep sense of self insisted that it was me. Worse still, lying opposite my new and horrible form and staring up at it like a terrified child was myself.

Crouched on eight blade-tipped legs that plunged into the snow like knives into flesh, my smaller body resembled nothing less than a spider made of glass; its limbs and body composed of some frosty transparent material and its eight tiny eyes blazing red in the dull light of day. Staring at myself, I raised an arm and watched from two different perspectives as a spear-tipped leg rose into the air and waved from side to side.

Staring up at myself, something crystallised in my mind and like a diver swimming over a sudden drop I felt my perspective shift.

Staring down at myself, something crystallised in my mind and like a diver swimming over a sudden drop I felt my perspective shift.

Much like no person can be reduced down to a single neuron, I could not be reduced down to a single machine. I was somehow both at once, no more defined by one than the other. I was one person spread across two forms, one person composed of two cells. These machines were at once both my bodies and my limbs and I could control them just as easily

Caught in the light of my reforged perspective, I felt more eyes open; two dozen points of view filling my awareness with images of lightly falling snow and the leaden sky above. Some of the new viewpoints were from small bodies much like the glass spider, their tiny forms scuttling over and across my new body, while others were from things more akin to car-sized robot squids. Giving myself a mental slap to dissipate the last stubborn remnants of confusion, I ordered my cells, my limbs, my bodies, my machines to move and watched warily as they obeyed.

Rising from the unbroken blanket of snow accompanied by little more than the crunch of crushed ice and the whirring of motors, two dozen squids suddenly popped into view, and for a brief moment, I was reminded of nothing less than weevils in flour. Allowing the thought to slip from my mind, I stretched an imagined arm into the distance and felt an absurd burst of glee as the squad of machines leapt into the air and flowed, like a flock of birds, over the landscape.

Okay, I thought to myself giddily, I have flying squids.

Distantly, like the strand of a spider's web brushing across my arm, I could feel the working of their limbs as they flew over the snowfield and the sensation of wind against their hulls. Bare moments after giving my order, the flock of wicked-looking machines reached the limit of my phantom limb and came to a halt with a flare of limbs; the two-dozen strong force splaying out in what some hidden part of my mind identified as an overwatch posture.

I paused.

How did I know what an overwatch posture was?

I'd heard the term somewhere in my past, I was sure, but I'd never seen one. Never studied what it meant. Never been part of any military to whom such a term would be as familiar as water. And yet, somehow, I knew my bodies had taken up an overwatch posture.

Through my now expert eyes, I could see how they were looking out and over one another, how their sensors were scanning the crevices and rises, how they left no zone uncovered by their weapons. It was no stranger than waking up in a different body and yet it affected me so much more; the thought of unfamiliar knowledge inside my head somehow more worrisome than the reality of my new form. I would have shivered if I could. As it was, I simply pulled into myself; my new body crouching low against the snow and the squid-forms returning to guard it.

Fear only lightly brushing against the edges of my mind despite the seriousness of my situation, I scanned the distant horizon for signs of life and paused as I caught sight of a thin column of grey-white smoke spiraling its way up. Only a little paler than the sky it was rising into, the snaking line was almost invisible in the gently falling snow and the sudden urge to kick myself faded as I concluded that I had simply missed it. For a long moment, I simply stared at the beacon, wondering if I would be better off avoiding it, before I realised the stupidity of my worries.

It's not like I have a better idea, I told myself as I dismissed the paranoid thoughts that flashed through my mind.

I was a person trapped in a machine's body (or a machine that thought it was a person) and needed someone, anyone, to talk to. Sighing to myself and shaking my head --a movement replicated by my titanic body and its numerous children-- I eyed the trail of smoke warily and set off for whatever future it held.

***​

Flying over the snowscape as a swarm of robots was an… interesting experience, to say the least. I'd long since gotten used to the shared perspectives, faster than I had thought humanly possible, in fact, and the dulled sense of inertia wasn't completely negative going by the way my bodies swarmed through the air. Still, twisting and turning my phantom limbs through and over each other was odd.

Ahead of me, I spread my smaller squid forms across the landscape like a combination assault force and tripwire while behind me I managed to watch my own back; my colossal form automatically taking place in the centre of the formation. The size of a small truck, what I was already beginning to think of as my main form and what had to contain my physical body flew towards the trail of smoke at an implacable pace, the bass rumble of whatever mechanism was holding me aloft dampened by the powdery snow below. Barely a few minutes into my flight, I'd already covered over a half-dozen kilometres thanks to the tireless motion of my bodies and the closest thing to fatigue I could feel was a vague but growing sensation that was one part hunger and one part thirst.

I had been travelling towards the origin of the smoke for only ten minutes or so when the explosion rang out; a single loud boom that rolled over hill and plain and sent the pillar of smoke twisting in the air. Somehow I knew immediately that the origin of the blast was only three kilometres away, some kind of parallax measurement occurring within the black box of my mind and operating entirely without my input. Surprised by the explosion, my bodies slewed to a halt in mid-air and I paused as I strained every sense towards the intrusion.

For a long moment, I heard nothing save for the whistle of the wind and the whir of servos; the only remaining evidence of the explosion's existence, the twisted strand of grey-white smoke that hung heavy in the leaden sky. Still unbalanced by my new form and not exactly used to snow in my old life, I was just about ready to write off the boom as some kind of natural phenomenon when the wind suddenly shifted. Distantly, kissing my ears as softly as the falling snow, the unmistakable sounds of war rolled over me.

Fuck, I sighed to myself.

 

[prometheus110]

Star Commander Kristiane growled as she was thrown back into the seat of her Viper by the Stravag's latest assault, a half-dozen autocannon rounds smashing into her under armoured mech's centre torso in a desperate attempt to get at the fusion reactor below. Exhilarated by the rush of battle, Kristiane threw her mech into a run with a jerk of her wrist; the lightweight machine hurtling away from its would-be-killer at over one-hundred kilometres an hour. Twisting her Viper near 90-degrees in mid-stride, Kristiane triggered the battlemech's weapons and grinned as pulse lasers and SRMs slammed into the Rasalhague Dragon and sent globules of molten metal spraying off the boxy machine's legs. Already wounded by her earlier attacks, the Dragon's left leg finally buckled under the weight of the 60-ton mech and the grey and white painted machine fell to the ground with a thud she could feel even inside her cockpit.

"They fight like babes, Quaiff?" Came the warm baritone of Birkir, the second deadliest warrior in Bravo Nova after Kristiane herself.

In the corner of her eye, her fellow warrior's Stormcrow was all but dancing around the enemy Firestarter; flickering beams of blue and green light slashing into the light mech's armour as Birkir calmly dissected it. Surrounding the duelling mechs, the remaining members of Bravo Nova simply stood by and watched, none willing to risk their honour by intervening

Kristiane snorted. "Neg," she replied, "even babes can be a threat."

Though exposed as she was on the snowy plains of Radlje to the freeborn warriors of the 12th Rasalhagian Dragoons, Kristiane felt little danger from the forces arrayed against her and her Nova. Despite having only landed on the planet a few weeks ago, the bulk of the Dragoons had already been destroyed by Clan Ghost Bear's determined assault and those that remained were all but defeated already thanks to their lack of spare parts. Were it another foe Kristiane might have been tempted to offer Hegira to those facing her Nova, but the 12th's commander had foolishly refused to respond to Star Captain Marialle Hawkins' batchall and the insult had to be answered with annihilation.

As if to underscore the point, the Rasalhagian Firestarter suddenly erupted into a pillar of flame as its ammo bins cooked off; hundreds of blazing yellow fireflies shooting out across the snow as the mech burst apart at the seams. The mech and its MechWarrior most assuredly dead, Kristiane turned her attention back to the fallen Dragon and felt herself scowl as she saw motion in the toppled machine's cockpit.

"Attention unknown mechs," crackled an unfamiliar voice over Krstiane's radio, the woman's tone threaded with pain and unsteady. "I'm powering down my battlemech and surrendering."

Even as she said the words, Kristiane watched as the Dragon's temperature began to plummet to ambient; the coloured blob in her infrared sensors that marked its torso-mounted fusion reactor turning from an angry red to a dark purple over several seconds. Cursing to herself, Kristiane brought her Viper to a halt in front of the battered heavy mech and saw Birkir do the same behind the machine, a part of her mind noting with approval that even if it was a trap the freeborn MechWarrior wouldn't live to enjoy killing her.

As the enemy MechWarrior began to repeat her message of surrender, Birkir's voice poured in through the cockpit speakers. "Our orders are clear, Star Commander," he said with a hint of regret. "The 12th are to be destroyed, quaiff?"

"Neg," she replied tartly. "There is no honour in killing a surrendered foe. We shall accept her surrender."

"Aff, lead," Birkir replied, relieved, the lasers of his battlemech subtly turning away from the downed machine.

"Attention enemy MechWarrior," Kristiane barked into her microphone, "exit your battlemech and prepare to be taken as bondswoman. Any attempt to resist will result in your annihilation, quaiff?"

Silence fell as Kristiane finished her warning, seconds ticking by with agonising slowness as the Spheroid's surrender message continued to broadcast into the aether. The Star Commander was moments away from considering the MechWarriror's decision made for them when, with a click, the surrender was cut off and the pain-streaked voice of the woman returned.

"I'm coming out," the woman panted groggily, "I think… I think my arm's broken."

Wrinkling her nose at the Sphereoid's use of contractions, Kristiane replied. "Aff, you will be provided medical aid when you are made bondswoman."

Switching to the intra-Nova comms net, she ordered one of the formation's junior members, Bjorn, to dismount and take the Spheroid prisoner. Being a Nova formation, Bravo should have had a star of Elementals accompanying their mechs at all times; the force of battle armoured troops useful against both mechs and infantry thanks to their armour and mobility. As it was, the Elementals had been split off to hunt down infantry in a nearby town leaving Bravo Nova's mechs to handle the business of taking bondsmen.

Obeying Kristiane's orders with commendable alacrity, Bjorn's Adder A made to kneel in the snow only to halt mid-motion.

"Star Commander," came Bjorn's voice over the radio. "I am detecting contacts to our southwest."

"Type unknown," he added a moment later, a trace of confusion leaking through his confident report.

"Aff, Bjorn," she replied as she shot a glance at her sensor display.

Buried in the centre of her command console, the slim rectangular screen was suddenly covered in a riot of target markets; the wireframe triangles flowing this way and that without rhyme or reason. Only a handful of kilometres away, past a cluster of hills, the new contacts would be on them in minutes at their current speed. Even as she watched, her battlemech's computer assigned and reassigned a dozen possible matches to the unknown contacts, some of the most advanced computer systems built by the Clans sifting through hundreds of years of records to find machines whose signatures matched and failing utterly.

Jamming? Kristiane asked herself as the symbols seemed to flicker in and out of existence, a dozen yellow triangles skating across the ground and through the air with equal ease. It had to be, she decided. Nothing else would explain their motion or her Viper's inability to identify them.

She growled. "All units, fall back to the town and rejoin our Elementals."

"Aff lead," replied all but one member of Kristiane's Nova, their mechs moving into formation beside Kristiane's own.

"Quineg, Star Commander, are we not tasked with destroying the enemy?" Asked Diana hotly, her Fire Moth motionless and staring in the direction of the oncoming contacts.

Kristiane sighed. Bravo Nova's youngest MechWarrior, the girl had been a… problem since her arrival. "Aff," she replied, "but the 12th did not have jamming equipment when the Star Captain crushed them in the capital."

"These foes are new and we would be foolish to engage them without our Elementals." Rumbled Birkir gently.

For a long moment the Fire Moth stared out towards the snowy expanse and then, with a whining of servos, turned towards the others.

"Aff lead," came Diana as her battlemech began to move. "Joining formation now."

***​

Through the eyes of a spider bot, I watched as the five-strong force of mechs vanished into the gently falling snow, their blue and white patterned paint scheme rendering them all but invisible to my visual sensors. Having halted my squid-forms a kilometre from the crest of the hill, the tiny machine was my sole source of information on the one-time battlefield and its sensors left a lot to be desired given how much I struggled to resolve anything of note through the falling snow. Whatever the mysterious program/god/whatever had meant when it said it had prepared me for my new existence as best as it could, it didn't include any information on the mechs. Truth be told, I had no idea what they were beyond warmachines of some kind, and even that I only knew thanks to the missile pods and machine guns hanging from their frames.

As the last of the machines vanished at over ninety kilometres an hour, I turned my attention to the wreckage they left behind. Scattered across a plain located between two small hills, the wrecked forms of the three more mechs lay motionless in the powdery white snow; streamers of grey-white smoke rising from their steaming husks and joining together into the pillar I'd spotted earlier. Bigger than any of my forms by a large margin, the trio of wrecks were an intimidating sight even in death, twisted gun barrels pointing into the sky and spent missile launchers open to the snowfall. Cautiously I ordered my swarm of bodies forwards, my squid forms protectively clustering around my main form as I advanced up and over the hill; snatching the spider bot up with a single tentacle as I passed it.

Like a flock of birds, I approached the wrecked warmachines, my roiling mass ducking this way and that, up and down, as I strained my senses for any hint of an ambush. In a matter of moments, with no sign of a trap to be seen, I arrived by the first machine; the sense of thirst that had been building up from deep within me suddenly growing to incredible heights as I flew within a few metres of the construct. Almost unconsciously, I cut whatever mechanism was keeping me aloft and fell to the ground with a thunderous thump of impact, snow jumping a good twenty centimetres into the air from the force. My squid forms, meanwhile, merely orbited above and around me like fish schooling or birds flocking, the twelve-strong force flowing through the air without conscious thought.

Thank god I didn't weigh this much at Cape Canaveral, I thought wryly before pausing. If what the program-thing had told me, my entire career as an astronaut, hell, my entire life up until now had been a lie.

With all the subtlety of an anvil, I clamped down on the upwelling of emotion the thought had provoked; mind-blasting terror and anxiety vanishing under the mental training NASA had given me.

Fuck, I thought belatedly, I guess that's why I was an astronaut in the sim. Clever fucking robots.

Doing my best to move on from the existential crisis my past represented, I focused my attention on the wreckage in front of me and reached for a hole in its chest with one claw-tipped tentacle. This close, the smell of ozone and toxic chemicals were almost overpowering, the only thing keeping me this close was my insatiable curiosity. With the squeal of metal on metal, I grabbed the war machine and shuddered as I felt a tingle run up through my arms, a kind of psychic pressure telling me that the cure to my thirst lay somewhere beneath its armoured hulk.

Fighting my instincts to bite down on the machine, with what I had little idea, I pushed a phantom hand into the mech and watched with some satisfaction as an eclectic mix of forms including glass spiders, steel centipedes, and iron pill bugs scuttled off my body and into the wreck. Second by second, centimetre by centimetre, a ghostly vision of the wreckage's interior formed in my mind as my mini forms wormed their way through its structure; the images of empty ammo bins and blasted components telling a story all of their own. I was almost done examining the machine when, quite without warning, my mini forms found the body.

Despite the frigid temperatures of the environment outside his cockpit, the man wore clothing more suited for a trek through the jungle; loose-fitting mesh clothing covering a vest whose plugs and pouches spoke of water cooling. Nordic in features with blond hair and blue eyes and clearly in his early twenties, the position of his head told me all I needed to know about how he died. The best thing I could say about a broken neck is that at least he died relatively quickly and painlessly. The first sign of human life I'd seen for days (thirty minutes if we don't include the simulation), the discovery that the machine's pilot was dead hurt like a knife in the guts.

Damn, I tried to mutter, the words somehow translated into a bass rumbling by whatever mechanism served to carry me through the air. With a thought, I checked around the man's neck and found a set of dog tags hanging from a chain; the name Lars Magnusson printed in block letters on its surface.

Still grasping onto the war machine, I noticed with a start that the pressure to drink was steadily decreasing, a brief check revealing that the psychic presence beneath the armour was equally diminished. Foretelling any debate over burying the dead man, I withdrew my mini forms from within the hulk and gingerly picked my way over to one of the other holes in its armour. Slowly, carefully, I followed the not-heat of the psychic pressure and presently found one of my claws gripping the familiar form of a high-density power pack, the blazing not-heat radiating from it also radiating out of the cluster of cables connecting it to the rest of the wreck's structure.

An electro-sense? I wondered as I withdrew the backpack-shaped device and tossed it over in my claws.

Now what? I rumbled to myself, the sound echoing off the hard metal structures surrounding me.

Sighing mentally, I let my instincts guide me and watched as one clawed tentacle clamped down on the cables. Before I could wonder what I was doing, I felt something change as suddenly as a camera snapping into focus and the not-heat of the battery began to flow up my tentacle like water from a well. In a matter of moments, the battery was drained and my thirst was, if not slaked entirely, at least temporarily abated.

So I need power to function, I thought as I tossed the spent power supply aside. It makes sense, I admitted. Though I could have done with a reactor, I added for the benefit of whichever God or demon or number cruncher had seen fit to send me here… wherever here was.

I was halfway through my rant to myself when, without warning, I heard the crunch of a footfall on snow and the sudden intake of breath from behind me. As one, my main form, my dozen-strong force of flying squids, and my countless mini forms turned to see a white-faced woman staring up at me; one arm dangling uselessly by her side and a slim silver pistol clenched in the other.

Fuck, I managed to think before my squids flared into a defensive posture.

"Fuck," she managed to gasp before collapsing.

***​

The woman was in a bad way, whoever she was, her already pale skin coloured a chalky white, her right arm broken, and her face little more than a single massive bruise with the occasional cut thrown in. Lying motionless in the snow, she looked more like the corpse I discovered earlier than a living breathing person and I felt a distinctly human sense of trepidation as my assembled forms looked down at her still body. To meet another living breathing human being at this juncture only to have them die would be… painful to say the least, a quick shake of my heads dismissing the thought almost as quickly as it had appeared. While I may have only been Khimera's roboticist, NASA had taken pains to ensure that the entire crew was up to date on our first aid training, and real or fake that training meant something.

Like a flock of starlings startled by an eagle, my swarm of squid bots burst apart and dived for the cockpits of the three ruined mechs as I directed them to search for a first aid kit amidst the ruins. As the intimidating machines scoured the area, I turned my attention back to the woman and moved my main form towards her position; a quick order sending a spider bot to carefully pull the slim silver pistol from her unconscious grip and out of easy reach. At only five feet something tall, she was short compared to my own body, or what had been my body in the Matrix, and had a face that was androgynously attractive even through the bruising without falling too much in either direction; her shaggy honey-brown hair her only visible concession to femininity I could see. Dressed in the same style of light clothing as the corpse I'd found earlier, I could tell she was bound to freeze to death unless I found something useful soon.

As if hearing my thoughts, one of my squid forms suddenly reported success in its mission and in one of the dozens of viewpoints filling my mind I spied an intact medical kit cradled gently in claw-tipped tentacles. Allowing myself a purely mental grin, I directed the flying machine to my main form and carefully deposited the kit inside a circle of glass spiders; the tiny machines opening the plastic latch in a matter of moments and revealing a wealth of supplies inside. From there, inventory took only a matter of moments as each item was withdrawn and examined from a dozen points of view, two piles growing swiftly by my feet as each item was considered and either accepted or discarded depending on their usefulness.

Bare seconds after the kit's discovery, I began my treatment of the injured woman; all manner of tiny machines moving towards her supine form as I began to dispatch tasks. Silently thanking the stars above that she wasn't conscious enough to panic as hand-sized spiders clambered over her and began splinting her broken arm, I directed other machines to unfold the foil blanket I'd found within the first aid kit and watched as a two-metre patch of silver appeared in the lily-white snow. Moments later, her arm now secured by a split, I had a squid bot ever so slowly cradle her in its tentacles and raise her into the air just long enough for a squad of mini forms to slide the foil blanket underneath her; a few halfhearted motions draping the silver sheet over and around her as best as I could manage before carefully dragging her into the lee of the wreck I had so recently examined. With her arm now splinted and hypothermia at least temporarily abated thanks to a combination of insulation and wind blockage, my next biggest concern was shock; the chalky whiteness of the woman's skin and her rapid breathing indicative of the condition.

Already lying down, wrapped in a blanket to head off hypothermia, and with her broken arm lying flat against the ground, the only other meaningful contribution I could make to fighting the condition was elevating her legs to force blood to her vital organs. To that end, I dispatched a pair of squids to the task of ripping out the most intact cockpit seat from the trio of wrecked war machines, a few quick pulls combined with a blazing burst of light from what turned out to be a laser cutter freeing the chair after only a few minutes work. Dropping the well-worn chair by the unconscious woman's feet, I gingerly rested her legs on its aged leather surface and pulled my machines back to what I hoped was an unthreatening distance away; waiting with bated breath for any signs of life.

***​

She was a girl hiding under the kitchen table, hands clamped to her ears to drown out the deafening roar of the war outside her home. She was a teenager huddled in the streets of Fredrikstad, the cold night's air chilling her to her bones as she waited for the dawn. She was an adult in the seat of a Chameleon, arms aching from the strain of piloting the ancient trainer. She was a MechWarrior without a mech, her titanic steed lying twisted and broken across the snowfields of Radlje.

Synapses fired, reality juddered, and the world shuddered, cracked, and was reborn.

The next moment Freja was back in her bunk on the Jormungandr, crystal spiders the size of both hands put together wrapping her in loose folds of silk. She wanted to scream, to thrash, to smash the delicate glass monstrosities to the ground, but exhaustion stayed her hand and kept her still; the only sound escaping her lips a quiet whine of terror. Without warning, Lars appeared beside her headboard, the blonde-haired MechWarrior staring down with eyes that seemed as cold as her memories of Fredrikstad. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no sound emerged save for a droning rumble that shook her very bones. He reached towards her and the pale skin of his arms split apart to reveal cords of steel that in turn flared apart to reveal flexing, twisting tentacles. Like a viper striking their prey, the writhing tentacles suddenly dashed forwards…

And Freja awoke to a leaden sky shot through with strains of pink and gold, gently tumbling snowflakes descending around her in their hundreds as they fell through the early morning sky; the blackened armour of a ruined mech's leg sheltering her from the wind and her own propped up on a command chair. Her mind a jumble of half-recollected dreams and memories, her skull feeling as if it was caught in a vice, Freja made to rise from her snowy perch only to stop as a throb of burning pain shot up her right arm. Hissing through her teeth as she settled into an upright position against the ruined armour, she suddenly realised two things. The first was that she was nowhere near her Dragon, the liveried war machine visible in the distance and covered with a thin layer of snow. The second that her broken arm had been splinted and a foil emergency blanket crudely draped around her.

Memories flooded back without warning. Ulrike was dead, she was certain of that. She had watched as one of the strange mechs fired its large lasers at incredible range and turned the cramped confines of his Panther's cockpit into an incinerator, heard over the radio net as Ulrike's shout of terror turned into a scream of pain. Before his mech had even hit the ground, Freja had tried to take revenge on his killer only to be forced into a lengthy battle with a bird-like mech whose pulse lasers and SRMs chewed through her armour. She remembered her mech crashing to the ground with a groan that threatened to burst her eardrums, the agonising crack of her arm as she used it to ward off the rushing centre console, and the boom of some unseen explosion. She could vaguely remember words with someone, then oblivion.
As the memories played back like the devil's own theatre, Freja suddenly remembered Lars' Firestarter. With a gasp that was one part pain and one part hope, she rose to her feet and began making her way towards the distant cockpit, the pain of some minor injury shooting up her legs as she took one faltering step after another. Leaning against the blacked metal of the Firestarter and clasping the silver foil of the thermal blanket about herself with her good hand, Freja made it maybe three meters before something small, round, and metallic sailed overhead and slammed into the ground before her in a spray of freezing pellets. Startled, she fell against the Firestarter with a thump and stared as the segmented metal ball unfolded to reveal a woodlouse made of midnight-black steel and blazing red lenses; a cacophony of scrapes and ticks ringing out as it cleaned the snow from its body with tweezer-like arms.

Synapses fired, reality juddered, and the world shuddered, cracked, and was reborn.

Freja stepped away from the comforting support of the Firestarter's leg as half-formed images rose from the benthic depths of her mind and bloomed, like cruel flowers, into monstrous memories. She turned, left hand scrabbling for a pistol that wasn't there, and cursed as she caught sight of a creature from her darkest nightmares; the silver skin of the forgotten blanket reflecting blazing red light as it slipped from her shoulders.

If asked to design a monster that would haunt the dreams of children everywhere, a holovid artist could not have done better than what sat, brooding like a mother hen, past the ruined mech's foot. Easily the size of a large groundcar and painted with a mottled white and grey colour scheme, the machine resembled nothing Freja had ever seen before. Sitting hunched in the snow on six claw-tipped legs, the machine stared at her with a dozen lenses that blazed with a hellish red light; its eight tentacles lying motionless on the ground. Something shifted, and Freja realised with a start that what she had taken for a mottled paint scheme was, in fact, the result of countless smaller machines clinging to its hull. With the care and precision of an origami flower unfolding itself, a crystal spider untangled itself from its brethren and dropped from its mother onto the snow. Freja, paralysed by fear, could only watch as the translucent creature began scuttling towards her with hesitant steps, the scritch-scritch-scritch of its claws on ice the only sound that could be heard.

Breath rasped out of her wide mouth, blood roared in her ears as her heart beat frantically, aghast eyes followed the crystal monster as it stalked forwards. Trembling, Freja watched as it reached the silver blanket sprawled across the ground and only then felt the biting cold of the freezing breeze. Slowly, gingerly, as if trying to avoid startling her, the spider raised its forelimbs to the air and grasped one edge of the foil blanket; the crystalline creature moving with what felt like exaggerated slowness as it brought the blanket back to her.

Surreal. The word was stuck in Freja's brain as she automatically picked up the proffered blanket and draped it around her shoulders. Surreal. Surreal. Surreal.

There came the sound of distant thunder and Freja looked up to see the monster surrounded by a flurry of snow that shook and tumbled in time with some inaudible beat; rings of powdery white flakes vibrating up and down with wild abandon.

"WHO. ARE. YOU?" It asked in a crackle of thunder.

 

[prometheus110]

"WHO. ARE. YOU?" I asked the woman standing before me, each painstakingly enunciated word crafted from the crackle of my flight engine.

I had spent the time between the woman's collapse and recovery experimenting with several communication methods, furrows in the snow and spidery scratches on salvaged metal the forgotten remnants of my failures. Lacking a human mouth I couldn't simply say a word aloud, and if I had a radio or an external speaker, I couldn't figure out how to access them. For a long while, I had thought that I might be reduced to scratching out individual words one after another or else praying that she knew morse code before, like a bolt from the blue, an idea struck me.

While flying, I had noticed the crackle and thrum of whatever engine kept me aloft, the bass rumble modulating in time with my motions to produce an ever-shifting pattern of noise, and careful experimentation soon confirmed that I could produce understandable words. Though it was slow to do and about as easy as catching a stream of water from a tap, it functioned well enough for my purposes and gave me some way of communicating. My only remaining fear, the one that nestled heavily like a red hot iron ball in my stomach, was that she might not speak English.

Her face whitened as she took two quick steps back. "Fan jävla skit!"

Not exactly the response I was hoping for, all things considered. The language, too, was worrying. Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, something I could recognize but not understand.

"STOP," I begged, waves of snow pulsing outwards. "PLEASE."

She halted midstep, terrified eyes locked on mine.

She understood! I thought in desperate relief, the mini forms clinging to my main hull flexing in barely constrained excitement at the thought. At the motion, she flinched and a distant, wry part of my mind was grateful that I'd hidden my squid bots from sight.

"PLEASE," I repeated.

She exhaled a long unsteady breath. "Who… what are you?"

Her accent was strange. Unfamiliar, but on the tip of my tongue. I paused to consider my response. Even if you had complete control of my speech, how do you even begin to explain being trapped in a simulation of the real world and used as a processor for intelligent machines? I thought it was insane and I had the groundwork for it laid well ahead of time!

"KADE," I replied slowly, the bass rumble driving falling snow away from me like a forcefield. "LOVELL. CAPTAIN."

I paused for a moment. "NASA," I added, the hope I'd intended to add not making it through the interface that was my flight engine.

Confusion marred the woman's face at my words, her bruised flesh colouring red and purple as she narrowed her eyes.

"You're a person?" she asked incredulously.

I tried not to flinch at the stinging words. I knew what I looked like, how impossible it would be for someone to see the body that was trapped inside. Still, it hurt.

"YES," I replied. "TRAPPED. INSIDE."

Even as I said the words, I shuddered; cold thoughts rising from the depths of my mind to circle it like sharks scenting blood. For an instant, I was no longer a single intellect spread amongst a swarm of machines but a person trapped staring out through the eyes of an alien machine, a warm, liquid pressure pressing against my skin. Then, just as quickly, I was back to being a swarm, the transition so quick it was almost subliminal. Almost.

She gave a barking laugh, a harsh, ugly sound of disbelief and shook her head.

"This is insane," I heard her mutter. "Insane."

She raised her head and looked me in the eye. "Korpral Freja Lahtinen. KungsArmé."

"Forgive me if I don't salute," she added with a shrug and a glance at the environment.

Before I could respond, she twisted to look at the mech's ruined wreck. "My comrades," she said as she turned back to face me, "my… friends, are they alright?"

I shook my head slowly. "ONLY. SURVIVOR." I replied as mournfully as I could manage.

She didn't need to know what they'd looked like when I found them: the charred scraps of flesh, the broken bones, and the staring eyes. While I waited for her to wake up, in between experimenting with my flight drive, I had my other forms extract the bodies from their tombs and bury them. It'd been hard going digging through the frozen earth, but it had seemed the right thing to do and I'd marked the graves with pillars of salvaged metal; the dog tags I'd found welded to their surface.

"BURIED. BODIES," I added as I spotted tears glimmer in the corner of her eyes. "RECOVERED. EFFECTS."

As I said the last word, I raised a tentacle into the air and slowly brought it before the woman, Freja, careful not to startle her with any sudden movements. Gingerly, I opened the claw and let the silver medallion fall on its chain; the Saint Michael medal swinging back and forth as it caught the breeze. Smoothed by the passage of countless years and the action of countless thumbs, I'd found it hanging from a hook inside the mech of the man named Lars.

Freja gasped, cried, and laughed all at once. Taking the medal from my claw, she delicately brushed its burnished silver surface with a finger before looping it around her neck; shivering as the metal touched her skin and clicked against her dogtags. Reminded of the cold, I spoke up.

"YOU. NEED. HELP." I stated as quickly as I could, a dull drone escaping as I all but lost my grasp on the words. "ENEMIES. RETURNING. WHERE. SAFETY?"

For a long moment Freja remained silent, tears glinting as they froze, the only sound I could hear the whispering of the wind across the ground. Then, slowly, she raised her left arm and pointed to the horizon. "There's a farm twenty kilometres east of here."

"They'll have clothes and a car and maybe a radio, but I don't think I can walk that far."

"NOT. WALKING," I burred. "FLY."

***​

When Freja said the word farm, I pictured a few prefabricated structures, some tractors and some fallow fields. Sitting hunched in the snow a few hundred metres from our destination, what I found instead was a preindustrial 1800s farmstead combined with a 2030s or beyond hydroponic facility; a handful of glass-domed hothouses surrounding a snow-sprinkled, red-painted home. Even as an Ohioan who grew up on a corn farm, the postcard nature of the bucolic scene was almost paralysing and the only reason I didn't roll my eyes was that I wasn't sure I could.

"S-ssee," Freja murmured beside me.

Turning one of my myriad mini forms to face the woman, I paused as I caught sight of her. Though her face was still badly bruised, her lips' blue tinge was clear to see and the steam of her breath juddered wildly as she shivered. The corporal was in a bad way, the twenty-kilometre journey overland taking a lot out of her despite my best efforts at shielding her from the wind, and she'd need both warm clothes and shelter soon.

Activating my flight engine, I pulsed as quietly as I could. "WE. GO. NOW."

She shook her head. "I sh-should gggo alone."

"Safer," she shivered.

In the short time I possessed it, one of the greatest failings that I discovered about my new robotic body was its utter inability to express emotions at a glance. Unable to stop herself from shivering and looking like death itself, I would have sent Freja a look of complete dismissal if I had been able to. As far as I was concerned, a solo journey to the homestead was about as achievable for her as fighting off one of those mechs barehanded.

"WE. GO. OR. YOU. DIE." I buzzed.

Either understanding my intended point or else lacking the energy and will to argue, Freja simply nodded and grabbed one of the steel ribs that jutted from my thorax; one foot planted on a metal plate to keep her relatively secure. Slowly so as not to throw her off, I raised myself into the air with an electric thrum and began to make my way towards the homestead, a handful of my flying squid forms dashing ahead to form a protective cordon between us and whatever lay within the red-painted building.

The initial reveal of my squid forms back when we'd first started the journey had been somewhat anticlimactic, I will admit. Knowing what they looked like, I'd been expecting some kind of negative reaction from the corporal necessitating a pause and explanation, however, she surprised me by ignoring the flying machines when they appeared.

No doubt, I thought, she recognized she could do nothing about them.

Dismissing the reverie from my mind as I approached the home's entrance, I slowly settled to the ground and watched as Freja disentangled herself from my chassis; stiff motions sent a wave of worry throughout my mind. Hypothermia had been mentioned in my pre-launch first aid training, but the crew surgeon, John Glenn, was- had been the only one with the ability to properly diagnose and treat the issue.

"S-stay h-here," Freja told me as she crunched over to the doorway, the crack and scrape of her boots on ice deafening in the quiet of the scene.

Ignoring the unnecessary command, I panned my head across the house's empty windows and felt my mind tick over like a well-oiled machine. At first glance the house looked abandoned, open curtains revealing dark interiors, but the lack of damage to the farm's surroundings didn't explain why anyone would leave. Realising that further investigation would be needed, I shook my chassis and dislodged a mix of mini forms from its steel-grey exterior; the insectile machines scuttling, winding, and stalking into position behind Freja as my squid forms began lazily orbiting the house.

"You can't-" She began.

"I'LL. CHECK. HOTHOUSES," I blared overloudly, lifting off with a thrum before Freja could respond.

Switching my attention to the host of smaller forms accompanying Freja even as my main form settled next to a domed hothouse, I followed close behind as she opened the door and stepped through; the dusky light of the outdoors replaced by an oppressive gloom. Flowing like water through her legs and across the wooden floorboards, their countless clawed legs making a scratching sound as they moved, the swarm of mini forms I controlled spread out in every direction as I began to examine the building; gleaming lenses examining every nook and cranny for signs of life.

In the entrance hallway, a spider bot spied four empty coat hooks set into the wall, a thin patina of dirt on the floorboards telling me where water was normally allowed to fall. In the living room, a caterpillar waved its thermal sensors over the embers of a fireplace; the cool red sparks of light dimming as I watched them. Upstairs, a collection of crab bots scuttled around three still-made beds while spider bots probed the divots shoes had left in the grey carpet. Inside the kitchen, a pillbug bot examined a half-eaten bowl of soup on the varnished wooden table, the green-brown lentils within still warm despite the coolness of the house's interior. Outside, a squid bot found a truck in the farm's single-car garage, its engine cold as the air outside.

Three beds meant four people, two adults and two children going by the sizes. Four people meant four sets of coats and shoes, both of which were missing in their entirety. The missing shoes and coats meant that they had left, or were planning to leave, while the warm soup and dying embers meant that it had happened recently. The car's cold engine, meanwhile, told me that they hadn't left that way.

Ahh, I thought to myself as I spotted the incongruity and ordered my mini forms to the kitchen.

Slowly Freja made her way through the house, each footstep accompanied by the creak of aged timbers and the scuttle of my mini forms legs. Through the eyes of the centipede bot, I watched as she stiffly and awkwardly filled the fireplace with wood and tinder from the nearby hopper before lighting it with a box of matches; light and heat flaring into being with a woosh. In a matter of moments, the house was filled with warmth and the thin layer of snow that had settled on her shoulders sluiced off as it turned to water. Breathing out a sigh of relief, she basked in the newfound heat for long seconds before catching sight of my mini forms scuttling towards the kitchen.

Freja frowned. "What are you doing?"

Unable to reply, I simply stopped a crab bot in the middle of the adjoining doorway before pointing to the coat rack and then back towards the kitchen. For a long moment, she said nothing, her lips pursed in thought, before recognition flashed behind her eyes and she nodded once. Taking it as permission, I continued my swarm's advance into the kitchen and waited until Freja arrived close behind; the growing warmth of the house having returned some colour to her face and looseness to her movements.

It had taken me a while to work it out, my mind pulled as it was in a hundred different directions, but the evidence fit together so neatly it was unarguable. The kitchen was small, just large enough for one person to be cooking and for four people to be sitting around the square table top sitting in the room's centre; a throw rug the colour of the sea sat underneath it. While there were plenty of cupboards and a fridge the size of a tank, the remoteness of the farm plus my own childhood in Ohio told me that there must be a pantry somewhere nearby, a place where multiple weeks worth of food could be stored out of the way.

To my surprise, Freja spotted it instantly.

"What's under the rug?" She asked the nearest of my swarm, receiving nothing more than a dip of the head.

With her good arm, and no small amount of assistance from my swarm, she heaved the table back against the far wall and pulled aside the carpet to reveal a hatch that sat flush against the floor. Giving my insectile mini forms a look that sent all but one scuttling backwards and out of sight, she gently rapped her knuckles against the wooden hatch.

"Hej?" She called out in what I was increasingly sure was Swedish. "Det föreligger ingen fara! Du kan komma ut."

There was a pause, and a click, and the hatch swung open to reveal the twin starring barrels of a shotgun.

***​

There were four of them down in that subterranean pantry, two parents and two young kids all dressed for the cold outside and huddling together for safety against the terrors of the world. Seeing the shotgun, an archaic looking device made with wood and dark steel, Freya and I froze immediately; the paralysis extending from the crab bot inside the kitchen to the swarm of squids outside. Too quick to follow and in an accent even I could detect, the man I took to be the father barked out a burst Swedish.

What followed were some of the tensest moments of my life as Freja and the man shot back at one another in rapid-fire Swedish; the shotgun's slowly dropping barrels the sole measure I had of success or failure. Eventually, after what felt like hours but could have only been a handful of seconds, the man lowered his gun entirely and climbed out of the pantry, a gesture to his family silencing the plaintive cry of his children. In the gloomy light of the kitchen, the man looked… old, a bald head, salt and pepper beard, and weathered skin reminding me of my father's older brother.

Shotgun held in the crook of his arm, the man shot my crab bot a suspicious look and spat out a line of Swedish.

"A..." Freja paused as she shot me an odd look. "An associate," she finished.

"He only understands English," she continued as I waved; a brief flex of my phantom limbs scattering my various bodies away from the home.

Harumphing loudly, the man switched on the kitchen light and had a brief conversation with the rest of his family before gesturing at the table with his free hand; the scared trio emerging in time to see my mini form clambering up onto the unvarnished surface.

"Who are you and what do you want?" The man asked Freja gruffly as his children retreated from the room and she carefully leveraged herself into a seat opposite.

Wincing in pain, Freja shrugged. "Korpral Freja Lahtinen, KungsArmé."

She nodded towards my crab bot. "Kapten Kade Lovell."

"My Dragon was destroyed in a battle with pirate mechs and I was injured. We need help and a lift to Halverstaad."

As she said the word 'injured', Freja withdrew her splinted hand from within the depths of her silver blanket and rested it on the table, the sight of the injured limb eliciting a hiss of sympathy from the man's wife. Blonde haired with vaguely Japanese features and bright green eyes despite the crows feet at their corners, she pulled away from the kitchen wall and spoke a blast of Swedish at her husband, the man all but shrinking in his seat as she returned to the pantry and the sounds of a rapid search began. For an instant, I spotted the brief hint of a smile on Freja's face before it vanished into aether as the man turned back to face us.

"Magnus," he supplied before nodding to the subterranean pantry. "Hitomi."

At the sound of her name, the blonde woman, Hitomi, reemerged with a cry of victory; a doctor's bag clutched in her hands.

"Sit back and stay still," she ordered Freja in a voice that brook no argument, a sidelong glance sending my crab scuttling aside. "And make sure he doesn't get in the way."

Sitting ramrod-straight as the woman began to fuss over her, Freja turned her attention back to Magnus.

"Why were you hiding?" She asked flatly, making no attempt to be circumspect and once again reminding me of my new forms' inability to emote.

Magnus, his shotgun now resting against the table leg, shrugged. "We heard explosions close. We didn't want to risk the barn, the children, so we hid. Till it passed, then you came."

"My turn," he countered. "Why do you need to get to Halverstaad?"

"KungsArmé," Freja repeated. "My lance was destroyed. I need to report to high command and Halverstaad is the closest city with a radio strong enough to reach."

For a brief moment, an unreadable expression crossed Freja's face and her left hand strayed to the medallion around her neck. Staring out between the folds of the foil blanket, the winged visage of Saint Michael gazed out disapproving towards me, the spear in his hands plunging deep into a Chinese dragon.

"Look up," Hitomi commanded suddenly, breaking the momentary silence without a hint of regret, both Freja and I instinctively responding to the command in her voice by obeying. An instant later a pale green bottle appeared in her hand and fired with a hiss, the mist eliciting a flinch and yelp from Freja as it struck her cut up face.

"Disinfectant," Hitomi replied as Freja shot her a startled look. "Your splint was acceptable, but without treatment your cuts will get infected and your face will swell. Not easy to pilot a battlemech when you can't see."

My estimation of Magnus' wife rose another level. In another life, she must have been a doctor or a general to be so used to command; my thoughts leaning more towards the former given that she seemed to know what she was talking about

Withdrawing a set of band aids from her bag, Hitomi tssked. "Now stay still."

Smiling faintly at his wife, Magnus nodded towards me; his expression hardening.

"What is this?" He asked.

Freja frowned. "It's my turn. Do you have a car? Can we borrow it? You'll be compensated once I get to Halverstaad."

"The car works," Magnus admitted as his wife slapped a patch on one of Freja's cuts. "It won't make it to the city, though. Not on one tank of diesel. You'll need to stop in Reykjavik, first, it is much closer."

Freja narrowed her eyes. "The pirates passed near Reykjavik."

Magnus shrugged in a what can you do gesture, the motion reminding me once again of the loaded gun by his leg. Freja must have been reminded as well as the next words out of her mouth were an accession.

"Fine, they will have left by now, anyway, but I'll need to borrow clothes."

"Upstairs, end of the hallway, the closet on the left side of the bed," Hitomi interjected before her husband could reply. "We're about the same size."

Nodding towards my mini form once more, Magnus spoke.

"What is this?"

Freja looked down at my crab bot. I looked up at Freja.

Might as well tell him, I thought, hoping only a little insincerely that she might have suddenly developed psychic abilities.

"It'll be easier to show you," she admitted with a sigh.

A minute later, the three of them were outside staring at the insectile form of my main body as I examined the outside of a hothouse dome, the half-glimpsed oranges inside setting my stomach rumbling. If anything, Magnus and Hitomi seeing my main form only increased their desire to see the backs of us, the stoic farmer all but throwing the keys at Freja as he bid us goodbye and retreated back to the house.

Dressed in an assortment of cold weather clothes and with her various injuries checkover and treated, Freja looked… not good, but like she'd live, and wordlessly followed my main form as I brought her to the low-slung garage. A two-door flatbed truck painted a neutral white, Magnus' truck car had the kind of rugged design that made it such a popular farm truck; memories of a youth spent riding, illegally, in the flatbed playing through my mind as I watched Freja clamber into the cabin. Though its paint was scratched and faded and its tires could do with a replacement soon, the engine roared to life on the first attempt and growled pleasantly as Freja drove it out of the garage.

Thank god it's an automatic transmission, I thought idly as it approached.

Coming to halt beside my insectile form, Freja glanced out the window and then turned back towards the flatbed; the calculations running through her mind more than obvious.

Not going to happen, I thought.

"A·¸ t¬vat ¨b u¡cc°a," blarred the car's dashboard, the sudden burst of noise startling myself and Freja equally.

Heaving forwards, I came to a stop beside a wincing Freja just in time to catch her reaching for the CB radio's power-button; a gabble of unintelligible noise pouring out in time with my own excited thoughts.

"WAIT," I rumbled, the rattle of the car's windows almost but not quite drowning out the storm.

Shooting me a curious, and slightly frightened look, Freja obeyed; her hand halting mere centimetres from the radio.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, I thought.

"J¿*g, jnvg, j§vg, ¢næg," burped the radio.

Okay, I thought rapidly, the radio burbling like a brook as I did, when I think like this, the CB radio picks it up. Ergo, I'm broadcasting my internal monologue, but it can't translate the signals into understandable noises. So, how do I change it?

When I was a child, maybe eleven or twelve years old, I once tried and failed to teach my younger cousin how to roll her tongue. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how many times I showed her how it was done (mostly by sticking my tongue out at her, I'll admit), she just couldn't do it. Eventually, after she broke down in tears and ran for her parents, my own father told me that not everyone could roll their tongue, that for reasons of genetics, it was impossible for something like a third of people. While I didn't have a tongue in my current form, the same sense of knowing what to do but being unable to describe it came to me in an instant; a kind of mental muscle forming from nothing between one thought and the next.

-"Hello?"- I sent to the radio.

"Uryyb?" It whined back.

{"Hello!?"}

"Ifmmp!?"

<"Fucking work, damn it!">

"Fucking work, damn it!"

"Holy shit!" Freja and I said together, a rush of emotions flooding through me as I recognized the voice in the radio as my own.

It was a strange experience hearing my voice coming from somewhere other than my mouth, as strange as hearing any recording of yourself played back. Made tinny by the CB radio's speakers, my native midland accent, mangled by my time on the east coast, was incongruous next to Freja's vaguely Scandinavian one; a brief flare of amusement flashing through my mind as I heard it.

Adjusting the volume with one hand, Freja glanced towards me and grinned for the first time since I met her. "You sound like this all the time? You're a person?"

<"Yes,"> I breathed, still giddy at my voice's liberation and all but ignoring the innocent, if barbed, question.

A thoughtful expression crossed Freja's face and in a single smooth motion she snatched the radio's mic from its cradle and raised it to her lips.

"Can you hear this?"

<"Can you hear this?">

I would have grimaced if I could, a double echo ringing around my mind as one set of words followed the other at a slight delay. Flinching at the disorientating effect, the shutters of my eyes clicking as they snapped closed and open, I nodded my main form's head up and down.

<"Yes, ugh the delay's weird,"> I replied a moment later. <"Remind me not to stay too close next time.">

"Ha," she barked, "I was wondering how we'd coordinate. Hold on."

Awkwardly sitting beside the cabin, I watched with more than a little curiosity as Freja leaned out of sight and began to search for something. Mere moments later, she reappeared with a cry of victory clutching a pad of paper and a nub of a pencil and began scribbling madly with her left hand; her furious expression and muttered curses ending as she presented me with a set of numbers.

"The frequency," she grinned as she slipped the pad into one of her borrowed jacket's innumerable pockets.

Sparing one final glance towards the farmhouse, Freja frowned and jerked her head towards the horizon. "Come on, if we leave now we can get to Reykjavik before the sun rises."

"We have a lot to talk about before we get there," she continued with an air of finality.

 

[prometheus110]

Freja fought the urge to look at the spider sitting on the passenger seat as she pulled into the filling station, the hearty growl of the engine dying away as she brought the car to a stop beside one bowser. Exiting the cabin, she felt the bones in the small of her back creak in protest at their treatment and stared around the scene with a frown. Sited on the outskirts of Reykjavik, the filling station seemed abandoned in the cold winter's day light and the town beyond appeared equally devoid of life.

Huffing to herself, a cloud of steam escaping between her fingers, Freja shook her head and began refuelling the truck; ears straining even as she played back the conversation with her companion in her mind.

The back and forth between herself and the thing that called itself Kade had been strange and informative in equal measure, her initial acceptance of his personhood reinforced by his convivial voice and hesitant words. However, every answer he provided seemed to spawn more questions that scratched away at the back of her mind like mice behind a wall. To go by his telling, he had lived in an artificial reality designed by thinking machines to keep him quiescent as they used his mind for processing power; his world limited to a handful of pressure chambers on the surface of Terra's moon in an unrecognisable version of the early 21st century. What he was doing here on Radlje he couldn't, or wouldn't, say, and similar answers had been given for his plans for the future.

They were insane answers, certainly, but what on grounds did she have to doubt them? He seemed to be a person, he looked nothing like Inner Sphere technology, and every answer she received regarding the 21st century was both clearly wrong and internally consistent. If he was a spy he was a dedicated one, if it was all a trick, it was an impossibly well-designed one, and if he were a figment of her imagination as she lay dying in the snow, well… she'd never been all that inventive before.

Eyes fruitlessly scouring the horizon for any sign of Kade's insectile chassis --his main form, as he called it--, Freja started as the bowser gave a clunk and stopped pumping.

"We're done," she told the spider bot, trusting in whatever connection existed between it and the man himself to carry her words. "We'll skate around the outskirts of Reykjavik and head towards Halverstaad."

The radio crackled. "Why not drive through?"

Shaking her head, Freja spared the distant town another look and ran her thumb across her borrowed medallion "A feeling. Something's off."

It was more than just a feeling, if she was being honest with herself. A small town according to what she remembered from patrol briefings, Reykjavik was home to roughly three thousand people total, the entire populace able to snugly fit within one of the capital's stadiums four times over with room to spare. Undamaged to Freja's eyes and reasonably prosperous thanks to its role as an agricultural hub for nearby farms, there should have been people out and about, or emergency services if they'd heard the battle between Freja's unit and the pirates. Despite this, as far as she could see, the place was a ghost town.

Shivering in a way that had nothing at all to do with the chill winter air, Freja was about to return to the driver's seat when something flickered in the upper corner of her vision.

It fell through the air on pillars of fire, the scream of its passage preceding it like the blast of trumpets. Painted in blue and white and roughly humanoid in shape, it was inarguably a weapon of war; a three-fingered claw replacing one hand and some manner of cannon replacing the other. Staring up in mute shock, terror gipping her heart with fingers of ice, Freja froze as it approached; the concrete-shattering crash of its landing eliciting only a fearful flinch as it slammed onto the road outside the filling station.

In her mech, Freja knew she would have reacted instantly; thrown the warmachine in reverse, swept the ground in front with her AC/5, then fired the medium lasers just to be sure. Here, now, dressed only in her cooling jacket and whatever clothes could be scavenged and armed with a pistol, she could do nothing but watch as the monster approached. In a matter of moments the machine was looming over her, all three-plus metres of its bulk pressing down with an almost psychic pressure. Staring up at the machine man, a small part of her still-conscious mind recognized the colour scheme and an ember flared in her heart.
"Quineg, are you stupid, Freeborn?" Came a bass rumble from within the machine, the sound of it drilling into Freja's mind with unrelenting fury. "Curfew is still in effect. Return to your home and wait."

Her free hand clenching tight, Freja fought to keep the hate from her face as the ember in her heart roared into a fire. "Curfew?" She asked as evenly as she could.

"Aff," the pirate machine replied, twisting slightly to gesture at the nearby town with the weapon that replaced its right hand.

Involuntarily, Freja glanced down at the motion and realised that the weapon was a medium laser; its twenty-centimetre lens glinting as it caught the weak sunlight. This close, she could also see the finger-sized barrel of a gun poking through the machine's left fore-arm.

"Freeborn like you should do as they're told," the voice continued harshly before halting as suddenly as it appeared.

Though encased in armour and inhumanly tall, the subtle motion of a body preparing to fight came through to Freja as clearly as a foghorn. There was nothing concrete she could put her finger on, no single tell that told her what was happening. Instead, it was something about the way the feet shifted, the way the shoulders were carried, that screamed a change in attention.

Twisting to face her fully, the machine took a smooth half-step backwards. "Why are you injured?"

"I was hit by a car," she replied, stuttering in trepidation and surprising herself with the smoothness of the lie.

Meekly, she raised her splinted hand into view and gave her best attempt at a painful shrug, an act made all the more real by the burst of pain that lanced up her arm at the motion. Its head scanning over her with the smoothness of a targeting sensor, the machine was silent for a long moment, its weapons lowering slightly, before it deigned to speak once more.

"What is your destination?"

Freja gestured east. "Maribor, I live there."

That at least was true enough, though few people would consider a bunk aboard a dropship a living place.

"The capital?" The voice rumbled, doubt percolating in the undertones. Dimly, Freja got the sense that the voice's owner was talking to someone else.

All at once the machine came back to alertness, the finger-size barrel embedded in its left arm swinging round to point at Freja's chest. Like a noise from a klaxon, the machine blarred once more.

"Freeborn," it demanded, "move away from the groundcar and come with me. The Star Commander wishes to speak to- what?"

The humanoid machine's words registered in Freja's mind.

Something huge and black and terrifyingly fast slammed into it with a crack of impact and a screech of tortured metal. In an instant, the machine was transformed into a blur, just a blur, and a storm of sparks sprayed into the air as it was dragged across metres of asphalt inhumanly fast.

Freja yelped and lept for the truck, slamming her shoulder against the door with a bone jarring thud even as she worked the handle frantically. Behind her, the chatter of a machine gun rang out for a moment before cutting off with the shriek of protesting metal. Throwing open the door, Freja all but fell into the driver's seat and turned in time to catch a glimpse of snapping claws and writhing tentacles.

"Fuck," she cried as the suppine figure wrestled with one of Kade's squid forms, servos shrieking in protest as it fought to free arms bound by tentacles.

Left hand scrabbling for the ignition, Freja's words became a mantra.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

On the third 'fuck', the machine fired its laser; a beam of emerald light flourescening into being with a howl and punching through the roof of the filling station as easily as it did the air. Fire bloomed around the entrypoint, dirty orange flames licking this way and that as superheated air pushed them about.

"Fuck!" Cried Freja and the radio simultaneously, the squid form throwing itself away from the humanoid figure and leaving behind a sparking tentacle that writhed and flexed against its blue and white armour. Freed from the grasp of the squid, the machine made to rise only to crash back onto the asphalt as a single splayed claw slammed against its face.

Freja felt her fingers close around the keys and with a wordless cry twisted the ignition, the engine roaring to life a moment later. Hauling herself upright, pain shooting up and down her broken arm in protest, Freja stomped on the accelerator and threw the steering wheel to the side; a sudden thunk ringing out as the car pulled away from the bowser in a burst of motion.

Orange light pulsed in her rearview mirror. Freja glanced up and caught sight of a trail of fire behind her, a zigzagging path leading inevitably to the row of fuel bowsers at the station's heart. Silhouetted by the flames, the twin figures of the squid and the machine continued to fight; a drunken, wandering brawl backlit by hellish light.

Fear gripped her.

"Don't stop!" Cried Kade's voice from the radio, the spider bot crawling out from beneath the passenger seat to clamber onto the dashboard. "Go, go, go, go, g-"

Something caught.

There was a deafening roar, a blinding flash, a pulse of heat. Like a bomb going off, the filling station exploded; the force of the blast shattering the truck's rear window and shoving it forwards with a jolt. Freja's terrified cry, lost amidst the cacophony, tore from her throat like shards of glass.

"Holy shit!" She gasped as she watched fire and smoke blossom into the sky, the black and orange mushroom a spreading stain against the cerulean blue.

Beside her, the spider bot waved an antenna frantically and the radio crackled. "Jesus christ, that'll draw them in."

"Are there more?" Freja asked, a glance backwards revealing no sign of either the humanoid machine or Kade's squid form among the crackling inferno.

"Not that I can see," Kade replied. "But keep going till we're through."

Hunching her shoulders, heart beating wildly in her chest, Freja turned her attention back to the road and fought to keep her breathing under control.

"So," crackled the radio, "is this going to happen every time we stop?"

 

[prometheus110]

Article:

I don't have a lot to say about these following few fragments beyond them being found while looking for something to post in the First Chapter Contest that SV is running here. That said, I've decided to share some quest intros I've written since I have about 30 years worth of ideas going by my current completion rate and I figure people might be interested in seeing tham.

---

Gheistria Primaris - Ludo Sector

The leaden sky burned a sullen orange with the reflected light of countless fires, the distant krump of imperial gun batteries mixing with the dull rumble of thunder to produce a mad medley of noise that battered Elias Baas with invisible fists. Every so often, a shell inevitably fell short and the rumble of artillery fire would be augmented by a splash and hiss as a spray of ice-cold saltwater came over the gunwale of the flat-bottomed boat. Holding on tight enough to turn his knuckles white, Elias tried his best to ignore the chill of the water and the shriek of shells passing overhead; instead swaying in time with the boat as it ploughed through the churning pewter water.

With a deafening shriek, a pair of Lightning fighters suddenly roared by overhead, the voice of the transporter's pilot rising after them. "Thirty seconds!" He shouted.

As the words died away, the boat's heavy stubber opened fire with a chattering roar; a rain of shell cases tinkling to the floor or, accompanied by a squawk of pain and indignation, onto the troopers below. Without warning, the boat slammed through a wave with an almighty thud of impact, the force of the blow sending the twin rows of PDF troopers stumbling and cursing and cutting short the Lieutenant's stream of advice.

"Gerroff," muttered one man, Garrick, as Elias went sprawling into his back, the barrel-chested figure pushing him back with a half-hearted shrug.

Flushing, Elias muttered back a quick apology to the trooper before unslinging the las-rifle from his shoulder and clutching the comforting weight like a talisman. Assigned it only a few weeks before, Elias had grown as attached to the weapons as his own arm; each and every centimetre of the stocky las-weapon burned into his memory through countless hours spent on the firing range and field-stripping it in the barracks. Absently thumbing the serial number embossed on the side of the magazine well, Elias mouthed a prayer of accuracy to the weapon's Machine Spirit and hunched down as another spray of salt water soaked him.

"Clear the ramp! Clear the ramp!" The pilot shouted, his hoarse voice booming over the anthem of the heavy stubber. "Twenty seconds. God-Emperor be with you!"

All at once, the silence of the PDF platoon broke as the reality of their situation began to set in. Mumbled prayers, quiet promises, and barks of laughter slowly bubbled up around him like a murmuring brook while deep within his gut Elias felt fear and excitement battling for dominance. Glancing away from the ramp, Elias spotted Lieutenant Samir looking over his troopers with a serious eye; his pale face pinched and drawn and looking far older than his twenty-three summers.

Only four summers older than him, the blonde man was a new addition to Elias' life and one he had yet to pass judgement on. Supposedly coming from the capital, rumour had it that he was either a cousin to the planetary governor, the illegitimate son of the chief hierophant, or of a similarly inauspicious origin. As far as Elias was concerned, none of the options bandied about the barracks room floor seemed remotely plausible, though the lieutenant's accent and ochre eyes did mark him out as one of Gheistria's favoured sons.

As he caught the straw-haired man's expression, Elias suddenly felt the excitement in his belly evaporate like the morning mist and a chill came over him which had nothing to do with the seawater that soaked his clothes. Before he could think of muttering a prayer to the Emperor, the chattering of the heavy stubber ceased and the boat was plunged into a grave-like silence.

Seizing his moment, Samir half-rose from his crouch and shouted. "When the ramp goes down, don't stop!"

"Push up the beach and take out the strong points. The second wave is right behind us!"

As his words washed over them, The shrill call of a whistle rang out three times from somewhere across the water.

"This is it!" Rasped the pilot as he flicked his lho-stick overboard, the landing craft shuddering to a halt with the scrape of steel on sand. "The Emperor protects!"

With a roar and a groan, the steel ramp of the landing craft slammed down; a spray of sand and saltwater erupted into the sky as it crashed to earth. For a heartbeat, the sounds of battle ceased to exist for Elias; his world narrowed until all it encompassed was the thin sliver of pale sand revealed beyond the ramp. Strewn with jagged metal spikes and boulders the size of cargo-8s, the pockmarked beach sat below a rise topped with the haphazard forms of Orkish fortifications; a row of gaudily daubed steel plates forming a wall as far as the eye could see. Here and there, watchtowers stood above the wall, while behind it unseen fires spewed dirty black smoke into the sky.

The heartbeat passed.

"Go," screamed the lieutenant as the world snapped back into focus, Elias automatically moving to obey. An instant later pale yellow flowers bloomed in their hundreds across the crude crenellations of the Orkish defences and the hiss and shriek of bullets whipsawed by all around them.

Garrick made it two steps before an orkish round caught him; the barrel-chested man letting loose a roar of pain as the hard-nosed bullet caught him just under the shoulder. Stumbling backwards, he collided with Elias and the two fell to the waterlogged deck of the transport in a tangle of limbs and a clatter of equipment.

"Medic!" Garrick screamed from atop Elias, the rest of the squad heedless of his cries for help as they half-charged, half-stumbled out of the boat. "God-Emperor, medic!"

Crushed between the deck and the over-built trooper lying atop him, Elias struggled to breathe under the man's bulk. "Get off!" He tried to say, his words escaping his throat as a hiss.

His every instinct telling him he needed to breathe, Elias shoved with all his might against the giant that had him pinned; fire shooting up his arms as he pushed against the seemingly immovable bulk. Vision greying as the wind was driven from his lungs, Elias hissed once more. "Move!"

Through provenance or consonance, the man, still yelling for a medic, suddenly began to roll off him, and with a final burst of effort, Elias quickly shoved him the rest of the way. Screaming in pain, the man spilt out onto the deck of the boat and began to thrash about like a fish drowning in the air.

"Come o-" Elias began as he started to rise.

There was a sudden crack, and the man collapsed to the deck like a marionette with its strings cut; a gush of hot blood spraying across Elias's face as an Orkish round put an end to his suffering. Heart hammering in his chest like a stubber on full-auto, Elias half-ran half-stumbled towards the yawning maw of the open ramp; feet catching awkwardly on dropped equipment and still bodies. With an almighty roar and a groan like a dying man, the landing craft's engines suddenly activated and the craft lurched backwards. Caught off guard by the unexpected movement, Elias stumbled forward and fell face-first out of the portal and into the foaming water beyond.

The shock of the cold caused Elias to gasp involuntarily, silver bubbles pouring from his mouth as what little precious air he held in his lungs evacuated in an instant. Cold seawater rushed in to fill the void before he could snap his mouth closed, the taste and feel of grit and salt and blood laying heavy on his tongue. The sounds of battle, once deafening above the water, retreated until they were little more than a muffled roar, and the world itself contracted to a point just in front of his nose.

Panic set in.

Thrashing wildly, Elias fought with every fibre of his being against the weight of his waterlogged clothing and equipment, the world growing greyer and greyer by the second. Lungs burning, he heaved himself up and out of the water, the sounds of conflict snapping back into pitch-perfect clarity as he took an almighty gulp of air. Eyes stinging and vision blurred, Elias tried to follow the lieutenant's orders and advance up the beach but succeeded only in lurching forwards a few steps before collapsing to his knees once again.

Suddenly, he felt something grab him by the scruff of his uniform and haul him forwards as an unfamiliar voice cried out. "Come on, you bastards. Up the beach."

Half-blinded but given fresh impetus, Elias scrambled forwards on his hands and knees until, at last, he hit dry land. Crying out in relief, the young trooper wiped away the stinging seawater from his eyes and blinked his vision clear. A moment later, he wished he hadn't.

All around him, up and down the coastline as far as he could see, men charged towards the Ork's distant fortifications, dozens falling under their guns with every passing second only to be replaced by others. Everywhere he looked Elias could see countless hundreds of bodies scattered about, blood and viscera staining the sand beneath the most hideous red he had ever seen. Lapping lazily against the sand, the sound of it lost underneath the chatter of Ork stubbers and the boom of haphazardly aimed artillery, the once pewter-grey waves were now tinged a horrible pink.

The sand in front of him leapt up like a living thing as an Ork round struck it.

Letting out a panicked yelp, Elias threw himself to the side and fell bodily onto a legless corpse. Without warning, the corpse gave a bloodcurdling scream and began to thrash, and Elias noticed with a start that it was Trooper Coen, his drill partner from basic. Before Elias could do anything but stare, Coen's cry of pain suddenly cut off into a choking cough and blood frothed in his mouth as his eyes rolled backwards.

"God Emperor!" Elias moaned as he heaved himself off his dead friend and restarted his halting advance up the beach.

He managed another ten steps before a shell hit the ground in front of him and the world went black.

---

Matias University - Matias - The Citadel

Koji blinked once and sighed as he looked up from the plant sitting on his desk, the silvery bubble of the containment field turning opaque in an instant as it detected his attention was elsewhere.

"Well," he told the woman sitting across from him. "It's definitely a plant."

Lounging in the high back chair reserved for visitors, the woman favoured Koji with a thin smile. Tall, dark, and lean, she tilted her head like an eagle tracking prey and idly tapped her cigarette, ash spiralling down to the worn-out carpet of Koji's office floor.

"My employer was hoping for a little more than that, Doctor Kaneko," she told him. "Finding comedians is a little beneath my skill level."

Frowning at the woman's disgusting habit, Koji ignored her jibe and turned back to the containment field; deactivating the soap bubble shimmer with a flick of his wrist before pulling a pair of haptic gloves from the box on his desk.

"It's perfectly safe to touch," she commented wryly before breathing out a fog of smoke. "All of the plants recovered are."

It was Koji's turn to smile. "I'm sure they are," he agreed as he snapped on the plastic gloves.

A botanist for some years now, Koji had learned early on that discretion was the better part of valour when it came to studying plants. With hundreds of habitable planets scattered across thousands of systems, the plants of New Eden had developed some truly aggravating defences against predation, most of which could be defeated by a thin layer of plastic. Inlaid with a matrix of haptic sensors, the pale blue gloves could protect him from most everything evolution could throw at him while doing nothing to interfere with his sense of touch. Gently lifting the plant cutting from its protective dome, Koji blinked away his glasses' HUD and began his examination.

The cutting was short, only a handspan long, and comprised only a single stem with a flower at its tip. Thin and waxy and free of any visible blemishes, the stem was a green so vivid it was almost cartoonish; a splinter of emerald that made the blue of Koji's gloves pale in comparison. Tutting to himself, Koji turned the stem over in his hands and let his fingers play over the surface, his brief search finding no bumps or divots marring the skin of the cutting and prompting him to turn his attention elsewhere.

Roughly the size of his thumb, the cutting's flower reminded Koji of a mutated Orchidaceae, five almost-black sepals surrounding a single umbrella-like petal the colour of midnight. As delicate as rice paper and about as transparent, Koji could see the outline of his fingers past the darkness of the sepals; the complex venation of the quasi-petals visible only as slightly darker lines against his gloved hands.

"It's gen-" Koji froze.

The flower was now a brilliant scarlet colour.

She bared her teeth with a smile. "The petals change colour in response to pressure."

"Chromatactile petals," Koji breathed, watching as the touch of his breath spread a wave of pink across the delicate structure of the flower.

Gently, he returned the cutting back to the container, a cushion of artificial gravity taking the artifact from his hands and suspending it in midair. An instant later, the soap bubble form of the containment field snapped on and the cutting vanished from sight. Snapping off his tactile gloves, Koji leaned back in his office chair and sighed.

"I suppose that answers my question, however."

The woman tilted her head and tapped her cigarette once, a thin trail of grey ash spilling from the end onto the office's carpeted floor. "Whatever would that be?"

"It's genetically engineered, of course," Koji replied matter-of-factly. "Probably a cutting-edge lab, too."

"All that from a single look?"

He shrugged.

"Chromatactile responses are rare in the grand scheme of things," he replied. "Out of the billion-plus flowering plant species we know about, only ten thousand or so change colour in response to physical pressure and none are quite so rapid. The base colour of the flower is also a bit of a giveaway since even chromatactile flowers tend to default to a bright pattern for attracting insects and birds."

"To get a change happening that quickly and colours like that," he gestured at the now-invisible cutting, "you'd need to engineer the genes into the plant or spend decades selectively breeding numerous xenostrains together --amounting to much the same thing, really."

She smiled, white teeth gleaming against russet-brown skin. "Considered and rejected, Doctor Kaneko."

"You've spoken to others about this?"

"Several," she shrugged. "Some here at the university, others at private labs. None could prove that it's been genetically engineered or even selectively bred."

Koji grunted. "It'd be stupid to think they all missed the signs."

"Just a bit," she agreed.

"Where'd you find it, then?"

She told him

He swore.

"And your employer wants me to come along?"

She nodded.

He swore again.

She stubbed the nub of her cigarette out in the arm of her chair. "Please, doctor," she told him. "If we're going to be working together, call me Kasandra."

"I haven't said yes yet." He told her.

"You will," she replied.

 

[prometheus110]

Chapter One

Space before the Halberd-class Destroyer Scylla tore open like rotten fruit; a glaring wall of Cherenkov blue light streaming out of a hole in the universe and dazzling the Scylla's optical sensors. Then, an instant later, the light flicked off and a ship hurtled away; accelerating fast enough to pulp flesh and bone, twisting around on an intercept trajectory with a grace its size belied. It was different from the Scylla: sleeker and sharper. Violent.

Seated on the armoured bridge of the Scylla, Captain Kurt MacReady was jolted out of a simple status review by the alert which flashed through his neural lace; the Scylla's sensors screamed a warning as they picked up on the approaching threat. At two dozen AU from the system's primary, there wasn't enough light to meaningfully illuminate a baseball, let alone another starship. He was mostly relying on the infrared signature to track the oncoming vessel; a smear of warm crimson shining against the black of space.

Training took over.

Banishing his surprise with a thought, Captain MacReady began calling out orders to the handful of souls with which he shared the bridge. Information was key in unknown situations and it was to that end he acted. Seconds passed, agonising seconds.

"Sensors are active and tracking, captain," barked Elizabeth Perez, the Scylla's sensor officer. Seated directly in front of the captain, Kurt couldn't see her face, but he'd served with the Scylla's crew long enough to recognize the tension underlying her professionalism.

As she said the words, numerous screens across the bridge blinked before clearing to reveal an image of their unknown contact. An imperious jutting prow thrust forth from the contact's graphite grey hull while two razor-sharp wings stretched out on either side like the wings of some atmospheric fighter. Below, a single curved talon hooked forwards; the pointed tip giving the ship a clawlike cast. For all his years in the UNSC navy, Kurt didn't recognize it.

An instant later the image blinked away, replaced instead by a bare, simplistic graphic displaying the relative positions of both ships; a scarlet vector line spearing through the Scylla from the unknown. It was accelerating towards them. Hard.

Off to his side, Kurt heard the tactical officer, Kristos Prager, mutter, "what in the lord's name?"

Ignoring the outburst, MacReady tapped a quick command into the screen by his hand and fought the urge to swear. RADAR and LIDAR systems, normally so accurate, were fuzzed and distorted in a zone around the ship; as clear a sign of energy shielding as any other. Regardless, they were accurate enough to show that the contact was as long as the Scylla and almost twice as wide thanks to its two curved wings.

"Whatever it is, it's closing quickly," Kurt stated as his neural lace fed the information directly into his mind. It was fast for its size. Damn fast. Despite being the same size as the Scylla, it was accelerating more than twice as fast as the cutting edge destroyer could manage

"Tactical," he barked, "get me a targeting solution on the bogey and charge the MACs. Helm: take us up to combat speed and warm the slipspace drive. Comms: start squawking a warning at them. We're officially on red alert, everyone." he continued as a crimson light began flashing in the corner of the circular bridge. "We treat them as hostile until proven otherwise."

Hostile meant Covenant. Everyone knew it just like everyone knew that UNSC ships usually needed a three-to-one advantage to win fights against Covenant vessels of equal size. Technology granted the killer edge in space combat, and like it or not, the Covenant had the superior technology. Given their orbital vector and the contact's superior speed, turning tail and running wasn't an option; they'd just be caught before they'd be able to negate their forward velocity. The Scylla's only hope, as counter-intuitive as it was, was to accelerate towards the target and slam past; trusting in the ship's two metre-thick armour and the skill of those at its helm to protect them long enough to jump.

"We have good tone on the Archers," Prager reported robotically. "They'll enter max effective range in twenty seconds. MACs charged in thirty-five."

Kurt felt the telltale tremble running through the ship as the Scylla's four fusion drives spooled up from cruising speed. Designed to accelerate the million-ton mass of the Scylla at multiple gravities, they weren't quick to ramp up, but when they pushed they pushed. By the time the hostile was halfway to the firing line for the Scylla's Archer missiles, Kurt was being pressed firmly against the back of his chair by his ship's sheer acceleration.

Flicking the display over to the orbital map, Kurt did some quick vector maths and smiled thinly to himself. It wouldn't be easy, but he had faith in Scylla's crew.

"Tactical," he barked curtly as he turned his head toward the man; neck muscles fighting to move a head which felt like lead. "Prepare to fire Archer pods A through D on my mark."

"Aye sir," replied Kristos, confirmation of readiness following close behind his words.

Why the hostile hadn't fired yet, Kurt could only guess. The Scylla was well inside standard Covenant ranges with only their angle of attack offering an explanation. Plasma torpedoes, one of the mainstay weapons of Covenant ships, didn't need line of sight to hit their targets and could manoeuvre over incredible ranges; many a UNSC reduced to molten slag by their incredible power. Plasma turrets, the other mainstay, however, were strictly linear weapons and usually mounted broadside. Given the circumstances, Kurt was willing to bet --had to bet-- that the hostile was armed with plasma turrets and not torpedoes.

Glancing down at the panel by his hand, Kurt saw the seconds to intercept tick down; an endless parade of numbers flickering past his eyes.

Orbital mechanics reigned supreme in any space battle, it was a lesson drilled into all those who attended the UNSC's naval academies. You could have the biggest, baddest ship in the galaxy and it'd be useless if it was on the wrong orbital track or facing the wrong way. Need to chase a target making a break for the slipspace threshold? You'd better hope you had the right orbit, and above all else, timing and speed were everything in an orbit.

Now! Kurt thought as the magic number popped into existence before his eyes.

"Tactical, fire Archers!" He snarled an instant later.

Without sound nor tremble, the Scylla emptied four pods of their deadly ordinance; one hundred and twenty Archer missiles spewing out of the hardened containers to streak towards their distant target. A handful of seconds later, confirmation of completion flashed into MacReady's mind and the orbital map updated to show a mess of green lines curving toward the unknown contact. Time slowed to a crawl as Kurt watched the display update, the storm of lines inching their way towards the hostile with agonising slowness. In the corner of the map, written in brilliant orange numbers which filled the cramped circular bridge with a hellish light, the time to impact ticked down.

"Slipspace drive will be ready in twenty seconds," reported the Helmswoman, Taya Kato.

Despite himself, MacReady smiled. "Follow the Cole Protocol and plot a course to a random star," he ordered. "We're not getting out of this just so we can lead the squids to a human world."

Without warning, an alert flashed into Kurt's mind and the display by his hand flicked over to show a real-time image of their foe; light-amp telescopes showing strange shapes emerging from underneath its dolphin-grey hull. As if in agreement with Kurt's own thinking, Odysseus, the Scylla's dumb AI, pegged the strange additions as weapons with an 86% probability.

"Prepare to fire MACs on my mark," Kurt said, clamping down on his emotions with an iron will. Whatever the weapons were, they weren't firing. They still had a chance.

"Five seconds to charge," replied the tactical officer. "Missile impact in eleven."

It would be a tight margin, a half-second or so either side. Go too early and the Covenant ship would have time to dodge the multi-ton MAC rounds --leaving its shield intact to handle the Archer missiles. Go too late and the Scylla would be pointing at nothing when it fired. On their own, the MACs would likely be more than enough to pop the hostile's shields and crush its hull, but prudence roared for more in captain MacReady's mind

Glancing at the timer in the corner of the map, Kurt began counting down.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

"Fire MACs!"

The firing alarm blared a toneless warning that navy crew throughout the galaxy were trained to heed, and this time the Scylla did more than tremble.

Accelerated to more than thirty kilometres per second in the blink of an eye by the Scylla's spinal-mounted coilguns, two metal boulders speared forth from the sword-like destroyer's gullet. Weighing multiple tons each, the sheer momentum imparted into the ferric-tungsten bullets threw the Scylla backwards fast enough to cancel the acceleration imparted by its fusion drives. For one brief moment, Captain MacReady and the rest of the ship's two-hundred plus crew enjoyed the rare experience of weightlessness before the crushing weight of acceleration returned.

Watching on monitors throughout the ship, the crew of the Scylla urged both shining bolts of light onward with prayers both silent and loud. On the bridge, MacReady watched, heart in his throat, as the bold white lines tracing the boulders' paths approached and then passed through the knot of yellow lines representing the Archer missiles fired those long seconds ago. Time slowed to a crawl as the MAC rounds rushed onwards and then…

The hostile ship twisted like an atmospheric fighter with a speed that would crush bone; the two heavy rounds sailed harmlessly past its hull as it shifted its vector in a fraction of a second. An instant later, the Scylla's Archers, engines firing hard to course-correct, splattered against their target's shields; silvery-blue light flaring as they spent themselves uselessly.

In the second that followed, two things happened. Firstly, Captain Kurt MacReady began to order his crew to brace. Secondly, the unknown contact returned fire.

In the first part of that second, unknown to Captain MacReady, a low-temperature plasma composed of half a gram of antiprotons was discharged into the priming chamber of a cyclotron only three metres wide. Constrained by magnetic fields stronger than any outside a pulsar, the cloud of antiprotons swiftly grew incandescent; shifting through the colour spectrum as they were heated until they reached a blazing blue-white. A fraction of a second later, those same magnetic fields began to accelerate the glowing cloud of plasma at incredible speed; technology unimagined by the UNSC manipulating a bolt of star-stuff so hot it could incinerate flesh by its sheer radiance. Around and around the plasma went, growing hotter and faster with each passing moment until, at last, it was ready.

Without sound, without motion, without even the barest forewarning, the cyclotron spat out a bolt of superheated plasma at over three-thousand kilometres per second. Hotter than the core of a star, the radiant spear of blue-white light that was the antimatter bolt crossed the two hundred kilometre gap between the two ships in the blink of an eye, faster even, and struck the Scylla amidships. Obeying laws of physics arcane even to those who know them, protons from the Scylla's armoured hull and antiprotons from the plasma bolt annihilated one another in a titanic release of energy whose wicked Light gazed upon the UNSC warship's hull.

In a fraction of a second, metre-thick plates of Titanium-A smoked a little, steamed briefly, and glowed bright orange as they were heated by the Light's intensity. The massive armour plates, held in place by equally massive bolts and welds, began to crinkle and sag under their own weight; the spars and cross struts which supported them followed suit as they were heated in turn. Across the Scylla's hull, sensors delicate enough to detect a bottle rocket ten thousand kilometres away began to glow like pillars of stretched starlight as they absorbed countless gigajoules of radiation. Buried under Scylla's skin, cables used to carry messages and power began instead to carry the wild electromagnetic flux of the antimatter blast; coruscating arcs of electricity discharging at random.

Another fraction of a second passed.

The liquids gasified: glass and metal, plastics and polymers, carbon and copper and titanium all transforming into plasma in the barest moment of time. Across the ship, for that second part of a second, metal boiled like water in a forgotten kettle; a cherry red glow suffusing the hull of the Scylla as it struggled to rid itself of terajoules of energy. Invisible, from the blazing cloud of Light that even now expanded away from the ship, rays fell upon the hull both mundane and extraordinary. Humans could not feel them, but atoms responded, those particles of matter sucking up the energy, storing it to give back later in a blind fury. The shock of the blast, crawling through the mass of the ship at mere kilometres a second was almost mundane by comparison; whole compartments shattering open to the void of space or filling with hypersonic shrapnel.

"Bra-" Captain Kurt MacReady began.

The fist of God struck the Scylla's bridge and everything went black.

---

Chapter Two

The Capsuleer's simulacrum gazed at Katri like a hawk would its prey, unblinking green eyes tracking her movement as she stiffened to attention. Like the man himself, the simulacrum was a pale-skinned Sebiestor with short mousy-brown hair; a knot of jet-black tattoos writhing across his face as embedded nanites responded to unvoiced commands.

"You succeeded," He said. It wasn't a question.

Katri nodded to the hologram, the bleak gray wall of her cabin visible behind the volumetric image. "We have," she reported with a tempered smile. "Resistance was minimal: a company's worth of Guardian Angels and twice that in drones. We were able to secure the information you wanted and get out in half an hour."

Tapping the holographic interface displayed across her wrist, Major Katri Torvill sent the encrypted files her force had fought to acquire; the simulacrum chuckling phlegmatically as they arrived seconds later and lightyears away. Reporting directly to an employer wasn't standard procedure for Mordu's Legion, but Capsuleers commanded enough wealth and influence that standard rules could be bent --for a price. While he hadn't bothered to give Katri his name, he'd paid a premium to ensure that she sent him recovered files personally; though whether it was a neurotic impulse for control or some orthogonal attempt at personability, she wasn't sure.

"Perhaps next time they'll think twice about breaking the terms of our partnership."

"If not, the Legion is always happy to help," she replied evenly. Frankly, Katri didn't care to know who They were or to what partnership they'd agreed to. It was easier that way. Not to mention safer.

With a fractional nod of his head the capsuleer closed the channel, the hologram snapping off in an instant and leaving Katri alone in her dimly lit cabin. Sighing to herself, the mercenary leader ignored the quickly brightening lights and sat down at the foot of her bed; stiff muscles protesting the sudden movement. Her body swimming with the best nanotechnology ISK could buy, the once stabbing pain of her injuries had reduced to mere flares of dull warmth over an hour ago, but the memory of their origin was still fresh in her mind.

As a clone mercenary, Katri's existence was a rare and enviable one to many of the cluster's inhabitants. Living in a body made from the ground up for war, Katri was stronger, faster, and tougher than a normal human and could heal from debilitating injuries even without the intervention of medical systems. However, while she could survive almost losing a limb, it didn't mean it was a pleasant experience.

Fucking Capsuleers, Katri thought to herself as she leaned over and grabbed the bottle of Matar Red that sat on her bedside table; stinging pain flaring up her right arm as she did so before tapering away as axon blocks rose up.

Hissing, she took a swig from the heavy glass bottle and sighed as the potent alcohol burned its way down her throat.

"Fucking grenades," she muttered, bringing the bottle back to her lips only to stop as a quiet chime rang out throughout her cabin. Shaking her head, she rose from her bed and deposited the bottle of Matar Red back on the bedside table; grimacing as she caught sight of her reflection in the glass.

I look like shit, she thought as she waved open the door, the neutral-grey slab of metal sliding open to reveal a tall blond man in the corridor beyond; his boyish face split with a warm smile.

"Wow boss," said the blond Gallente as his face shifted into a look of concern; his blue-grey eyes sparkling in the light of ship-noon, "you look like shit."

"Fuck off, Remi," Katri replied gruffly, her XO's face breaking out into a lazy grin as she did so.

At more than six feet tall, Captain Remi Geria towered over his commanding officer and radiated an easy-going aura which ran counter to his position as the Dustwalker's second in command. Having worked alongside Katri since she joined Mordu's Legion five years ago, the two of them had developed a close, if acerbic, bond fighting on battlefields the length and breadth of the New Eden cluster.

Staring up at the man's wide-open face, Katri narrowed her eyes warily as she searched for any sign of why he'd come to her cabin.

"Alright," she sighed a moment later as she gave up. "What is it?"

"Captain Mercer has requested your presence on the bridge, ma'am," he reported seriously.

[UNFINISHED PLOTTING]

 

[prometheus110]

You are Mila Chrare, and you loved the wrong person.

Her name was Edain, and she was the most beautiful woman you'd ever seen. The two of you had met in one of those improbable series of events which always seem to occur in romance holos; her regular chauffeur having contracted a cold the night before and some office drone somewhere assigning you, a junior fresh out of the Caldari Navy, in his place. When you'd arrived at her complex that morning, you'd expected someone as cold and harsh as the Kaalakiota peaks and as frighteningly intelligent as a quantum supercomputer. What you'd gotten instead was someone warm and kind and beautiful, who had a laugh like silk and an insatiable curiosity. You spent the whole flight to her research station talking, just the two of you, and by midnight you were making love.

You'd had boyfriends in your teenage years, and girlfriends too, for that matter, but none of them could compare to the sheer energy of Edain. It was like nothing you'd felt before. Like fire. Like lightning.

A people defined by their duty to their state, their corporation, their family, and only then, finally, to themselves, homosexuality amongst adults is not something the Caldari typically care for. While not illegal, same-sex relationships between adults are frowned upon, and that can be enough to doom any relationship. For months the two of you tried to work around this fact by pursuing your love life in secret; dinners in the guise of friends and colleagues, sex in pay-by-hour motels. In the end, however, it was impossible to keep it quiet, and you were presented with a choice that wasn't a choice: continue it and be shunned, or end it and live your life.

You chose love. She chose her career.

---

Burn.

Cut thrust.

Twist.

Grit your teeth as the inertial dampers struggle to compensate.

A broken spacescape slides past your cockpit as you slalom between tumbling boulders, the vivid orange of the nebula blazing like an inferno and casting the broken world below in a hellish light.

There!

Angel-2 appears out from behind a frigate-sized boulder and twists towards you with deadly grace, the blue-white glow of his engines shining like a beacon against the glossy obsidian surface of the rock. Your HUD reacts instantly, bracketing the graceful curves of his fighter with cool blue lines, and without a second thought, you pull the trigger.

Brrrrrrrrrrrt.

It's less a noise than a sensation, a whole-body vibration caused by all four of your Wraith's assault cannons firing at once. Glowing a dull orange, the stream of railgun slugs rip past Angel-2's surplus Firefly and slam into the asteroid behind him, flashes of light stippling across the glossy rock as they flash-convert into plasma and send up a lethal spray of shrapnel. Hissing your disappointment, you wrench your joystick to the right and cringe as the ageing enemy fighter slams past, the glare of his engines as blinding as the sun.

Thump.

The blow comes without warning, and a thousand alarms suddenly shriek for your attention. Still trying to blink away the purple sunspots from your vision, feeling more than seeing the damage to your fighter; the stop-start sense of motion as your inertial dampers flicker on and off, and the sheer resistance your joystick offers every motion. Blindly, you reach out for the dampeners' power toggle and flick it off, and in an instant, the sickening sense of motion halts as the fields shut down.

Good, you think to yourself. Now to ju-

A bell tolls and every alarm halts.

"Sorry, Bear-4," drawls the unseen simulation manager, her soft Gallente accent skipping your ears and pouring directly into your mind thanks to the Egone set built into your helmet. "He got you with a mine, and his wingman got you while you were down. You're dead as a doornail."

"Well shit," you say aloud as your vision slowly returns, the hellscape outside your cockpit replaced by the impenetrable stygian darkness of an offline simulator. "I didn't even see the other guy."

Death. What a concept.

---

You are Mila Chrare, and you are immortal.

The first time you'd died had been… strange, to say the least. It had happened only a few hours after the cerebral implant necessary for your particular brand of immortality had been installed; the scars of brain surgery were completely invisible thanks to the sheer amount of ISK spent on you by Mordu's Legion. After the AI surgeon —a pleasingly artistic example of the type— had deemed you healthy, you'd been taken to a room just outside the infirmary and laid down on a cold steel gurney which you joked looked like the kind used in morgues.

Somewhat annoyingly, you were correct.

The Legion's personnel had been extremely professional as they prepared you for your first death, cooly and politely taking away your clothes and personal effects, and answering every question you had —even the repeats.

No, it wouldn't hurt. Yes, it would be quick. Yes, it will be completely identical —we can order a modification if you'd like. Your body will be put on ice. No, pilots are cheaper than ground pounders. Yes, we imagine that is annoying.

Staring up at the mint-green tiles lining the room's ceiling, staying as still as possible, you soon found yourself in the rather bemusing position of being annoyed at your continued survival. While everything leading up to that moment had happened with the kind of cautiousness you'd expect of a process involving the participant's death, you hadn't expected things to halt. So annoying was the delay that you were about to ask what was going on when-

Blink.

The tiles changed.

It wasn't by much, your new warclone body was only three metres away from your old one after all, but you noticed the discrepancy immediately. Rising from the steel gurney with none of the awkwardness that you'd expected, you caught a glimpse of your old body being wheeled through a door, and then, whoosh, it was gone.

Suddenly you weren't Mila Chrare: Caldari Navy pilot-turned-chauffeur. You were Mila Chrare: Mercenary. Suddenly your internal organs were genetically engineered and reinforced with nanotech supplements to withstand g-forces that'd kill an ordinary human. Suddenly your blood was redesigned to supply you with oxygen for up to 20 minutes without breathing, your bones were strengthened, your sense of balance improved, and even your ability to think was altered; your neurons sped up, made more conducive to learning.

In the blink of an eye, you were transformed from a person to a weapon, and it was all your idea.

---

Before you can ask the sim manager how the battle is going, the clipped tone of your flight lead rings out.

"Maintain comm discipline and get back in the fight, Bear-4," Rebound says doggedly, "we're here to win, not to complain."

Shaking away the last of the sunspots from your sight, you hit the reset switch above you before leaning back in your seat as the system reset begins. "I hear you lead," you reply, injecting as much professionalism into your voice as you can while holographic displays flash into existence.

Flight systems clear.

Weapons clear.

Engines clear.

"All systems clear," you report calmly. "Launching in five."

As if on cue, the darkness before you is suddenly split apart by a blazing orange light as the armoured doors of the launch tube iris open. One after another, with clockwork precision, the lights lining the magnetic catapult spring on before the cool, collected voice of the sim manager pours into your head once more.

"Three," she begins as the hazard lights lining the track begin to flash red.

"Two," the docking clamps holding your fighter in place disengage with a double-clunk you feel more than hear.

"One," vertigo flashes through you as the inertial dampeners kick on.

There's no gradual acceleration when the magnetic catapult fires, no exhilarating sensation of gathering speed or even any sense of motion. One moment your fighter is hanging stationary in the middle of the launch tube, and the next, it's hurtling forwards faster than the speed of sound. Whooping as you barrel through the portal into open space, you kick on your engines and leap away from the Verthandi; lumpen hills and mirror-smooth plains morphing into the shape of the ship you call home as you make for the distant battlefield.

Lying more than a hundred AUs from the system's primary, the cloud of asteroids that looms before you were formed by the same supernovae that birthed the blazing orange nebula that illuminates them. Ripped from the crust of the shattered planet below, the swarm of fist-sized obsidian lumps and frigate-sized craggy boulders form a roiling, churning mass of rubble lethal to any small craft; a perfect place for the OpFor to lay low, especially when they're looking to hide from the people hired to stop them raiding relief supplies.

"Bear-4 closing," you broadcast over the flight link as you enter the outlying reaches of the battleground. "Mark your followers."

As soon as the words leave your mouth, a flicker of motion catches your eye, and you glance up to see a car-sized boulder explode as it's hit by an errant pulse of laser light. An instant later, two fighters plough through the cloud of debris, the lead craft, Bear-3, bucking and weaving, and her follower sending wild laser blasts chasing after her. Before your HUD can even finish updating, you move to engage, throwing your fighter in a turn so sharp you're pressed against your seat.

"Having fun, Fara?" You ask Bear-3 sweetly, your words receiving nothing in return save a Thukker curse.

Isolated from the rest of its squadron and tunnel-visioned on Fara's Wraith, the Firefly doesn't even notice as you slot in behind it; its wild attempts to bring Fara into line with its pulse lasers doing nothing to disrupt your rather more considered efforts. As your reticles fall on the Firefly's stern, you let loose a burst railgun fire that pops its shields and shreds its port engine into glitter. Off-balance, the gaunt enemy fighter throws itself into a death spiral before ploughing into a boulder and exploding in a flash of light.

That's gotta hurt, you think with a wince as you fall in beside the young Thukker pilot. "What do you say, Fara? Wanna find the boys and help them with their snake problem?"

"Only if they pick up my tab," she snorts in reply.

---

Half an hour later, you find yourself sitting in the briefing room of the Verthandi's Ring waiting for the debrief to start; the five other members of Bear flight spread out amongst the cold steel benches like children in a schoolroom. Though intended to seat the ship's entire pilot complement in one go, the simple fact that the room was once a magazine before being hastily converted lends the chamber an oppressive air. Intended to contain an ammunition cookoff, the room's low ceilings press down on you with an almost physical force.

"Alright flight," says Bear-1 from his seat at the head of the briefing room, a full-colour hologram of the battlefield floating behind him. "Tell me what mistakes we made?"

Older than you by a good ten years, though his olive-coloured skin doesn't show it, and with the typical high cheekbones and imperious nose of a True Amarr, Lieutenant Adamen Davani, also known as 'Rebound', cocks his head to the side and waits for a response.

"Owing Fara," grumbles Viktor Marmur from somewhere behind you, Bear-6's complaint eliciting a victorious grin from the flight's other Minmatar pilot and a good-natured chuckle from the rest.

At over seven feet tall and built like an apartment block, Viktor is the biggest man you've ever seen —so much so you thought he was a ground pounder when you first met. Hailing from Matar, Marmur is the second of the flight's two Minmatar pilots and the only Brutor in the squadron; the intricate tattoos covering his body supposedly tell anyone who can read them all they need to know about his lineage. More importantly, from your perspective, anyway, he also has the worst tells you've ever seen in a gambler; inevitably getting rinsed at card games by anyone who plays him.

As the laughter dies away, Fara rolls her eyes at her wingman and replies. "Getting separated from Victim was stupid."

"Sorry Vic," she adds a moment later. "Those rocks fucking sucked."

"Language," chides Marmur, the big man receiving a punch to the shoulder for his trouble.

At twenty-four, Fara is the youngest member of the unit and the only one born outside the four empires. Tall and wiry with tawny skin and hair cropped close to her skull, the young Thukker tribe woman is perhaps the least complicated person you've met in your short time aboard the Verthandi's Ring; her emotions worn as plainly as her tattoos. Arriving aboard only a few days after you did, Fara's an oddity, though you can hardly doubt her flying skills.

"Tunnel vision," you throw in as the two quiet themselves. "I was so busy concentrating on Angel-2, his wingman had a clean shot at me from behind."

"Paz?" Prompts Adamen as silence falls once more.

Glancing to the side, you catch sight of the pilot in question as she lounges back against her seat with the easy self-assurance of a satisfied cat. As you watch, Bear-1's Second in Command, Passerine Sato, lets out a low chuckle and shrugs.

"I didn't pay the sim controllers enough," she says, her artificial voice box giving every word a metallic twang.

Short and compact with pale skin and short silver-white hair, Sato cuts a striking figure in the Verthandi's hastily converted briefing room. Wearing the same pattern of flight suit as you, she'd chosen to unzip the first few centimetres of armoured pressure suit at some point in spite, or perhaps because, of the room's chill. Despite yourself, you can't help but glance at the thick knot of scar tissue that covers her throat from under the chin down past her neckline; the thin white lines zigzagging their way towards her chest.

"Paz," Adamen warns half-heartedly, his words snapping you back to reality; a quick glance around making clear that no one had noticed you were staring.

"Alright, alright " she concedes, her hands raised in a gesture of peace and the ghost of a smile crossing her face.

"I underestimated their skills and paid the price," she continues. "They'll be good people to have watching our backs out there, Rebound."

"Fighting in the first place," Bear-5 interjects a moment later with an air that brooks no dispute.

Twisting in your seat, you spy Acharin, Bear-5, staring at the hologram behind Adamen like it's on fire; his eyes cold and hard as they flick over the image. Sitting apart from the other members of Bear Flight, his helmet lying lightly on his lap and the spread wings of the Gallente eagle visible on his tattooed wrist, Acharin pauses for a long moment as if to gather himself.

"We didn't need to fight," he clarifies. "The OpFor put themselves in the field to prevent us from calling in support from the fleet and to level the playing field between our fighters. They couldn't fight outside it, or else they'd get overwhelmed, and while they were in it, they couldn't raid relief supplies."

For a long moment, Adamen stares back at the Gallente pilot before slowly nodding. "We were wondering who'd pick that up."

Rising from his seat, Davani gestures to the holographic display and switches it to a 3D representation of the battlefield as it looked at the start of the engagement, the glowing shape of the Verthandi's Ring fading into existence a few hundred kilometres from the edge of the deadly asteroid field and a forest of red question marks appearing within it.

"Alright, Bear flight," he says. "Any suggestions as to how we could handle things better next time?"

You sigh. It'll be a long debrief.

 

[prometheus110]

It was an Italian postman and part-time planet-spotter who first noticed that there seemed to be less of a bright side to Iapetus than the last time he looked. He had logged his observations onto a handful of astronomy forums, fought off the deluge of interlopers keen to question his competency, and then promptly forgot about it as COVID-19 ceased being a Chinese concern and rapidly became global. The data had lain dormant for months; then, when it began to provoke gossip, had drawn professional ridicule until someone dared to sneak a peek with Mauna Kea. While the professionals argued and theorised, sixty per cent of Iapetus's surface turned a black so dark it was almost total.

This could no longer be ignored. Projects were cancelled, time slots reassigned, dollars and cents scraped together from a hundred different sources. Hubble and her sisters were swung back to Saturn and a constellation of astronomers bemoaned the James Webb's tardiness. What they saw when the first images came back made the lead on news networks all over the planet, reporting on COVID kicked to second place for several days as people focused on Iapetus' illness. Social media took over as the initial reports fell to the wayside in favour of death tolls and Presidential insults, and countless YouTube channels were created to track the march of darkness on a daily --even hourly-- basis.

Ten days after the first images hit the screens, all that remained of Iapetus' icy surface was a speck of white fifty kilometres across; surrounded by night-black darkness. A Scottish-American worked out that it was advancing across the moon at a rate of roughly ten kilometres a day, a calculation proven correct when five days later Iapetus was just a black dot occluding the stars and planets beyond. Fifteen minutes after the enclosure, a user on Twitter pointed out that Hyperion, another of Saturn's moons, had also vanished. Totally. Instantly. Inexplicably.

Hundreds of terabytes worth of telescopic imagery were examined over the next few days as governments and citizens alike raced to understand what had happened. In secret data centres and personal computers across the planet, the digital equivalents of fine-toothed combs pulled flecks of gold from mountains of garbage until, at last, a video a little over thirty frames long erupted onto the internet. For twenty frames nothing happened. In frame twenty-one, Hyperion seemed to throw off its surface like the peel from an orange. Light glowed from the cracks and fanned from the torn open ridges and shattered hills. Frames twenty-two to thirty-two were white. Pure white. Frame thirty-three was nothing. Just space and stars without any sign of the several trillion tons of rocky ice called Hyperion.

From start to finish, the clip covered four point three eight seconds.

As if in response to the extraterrestrial interloper, Covid launched a fresh assault on nations across the globe; outbreaks erupting in a dozen nations to once again drag the attention of the human race towards more terrestrial matters. As countless millions panic-bought food and water and toilet paper to wait out the inevitable lockdowns, governments invested in long-neglected space-watching systems and began preparing space probes to launch towards the Saturn system. Two months after Hyperion's disappearing act, a month after it had vanished from mainstream media in favour of pro and anti-plague reporting, the first bolide was detected by Earth's hastily assembled Spacewatch network.

Roughly the size of a motorhome and moving at eleven kilometres per second, the rock was unremarkable save for making three complete orbits before entering its terminal phase. Threading the needle between Antarctica and Australia, it left an ion trail more than a thousand kilometres long as it streaked above the Indian Ocean. Having bled off most of its speed, a rock that could have killed a city when it started struck the Kibo cone of Mount Kilimanjaro with the celestial equivalent of a love tap; storms nonetheless closing off the mountain for three days and leaving disappointed tourists stuck in the nearby city of Moshi.

Perhaps twenty years ago the Tanzanian government could have kept what they discovered a secret for a handful of months. Perhaps even ten years ago the stories that came out of Moshi would have remained in the realm of rumour for more than a month. But in 2019, with the internet and social media permeating every aspect of life and high-quality cameras with telescopic lenses in the hands of tourists eager to discover why they couldn't climb the mountain, the secret didn't last a week.

Something was growing up there.

***​

A helicopter hammered away as you waited at the sunbleached table, the unseen machine passing low enough that the thunder of its passage sent beer dancing in glasses and teeth-rattling in skulls. Glancing seaward, you caught sight of the bulbous aircraft as it banked to the east; its purple and yellow chagaflague was almost comically ineffective against the blue of the clear sky. Soaring low above the water and framed by an empty playground, it would have made for an excellent cover shot if you had the energy anymore. When you'd first arrived in Darwin you would have snapped a dozen pictures, maybe spun a few lines about how it felt to see such a machine used in a first-world nation, but as it was you just didn't give a shit anymore.

"Fuck me," grunted Bruce a moment later, the heavy clunk of a full glass bringing you back to reality as he sat down opposite. "Some poor bastard's gonna get it."

Short and fat with skin like leather and thinning hair the colour of steel wool, Bruce twisted in his seat and gestured after the war machine with the cigarette clamped between his nicotine-stained fingers.

"Third one today," he added. "Ask me, someone's gone and done something bloody stupid."

"Seems like," you replied, noncommittal.

Still tracking the machine as it bucked and weaved, Bruce let loose a grin you grew familiar with long ago. You saw it in Syria, Iraq, and now Australia. Always on the faces of those on the side with the guns, it was boyish and cruel and delighted in the promise of violence.

Ignoring the urge to snap at the man, you instead took a pull of your beer and fought off a grimace as the bitter liquid hit the back of your throat. A year here and you still weren't used to the swill they served, but meetings everywhere had their own language and Darwin's involved day drinking at 10 am.

Taking a drag from his cigarette, Bruce turned back to face you and blew the smoke between clenched teeth.

"So why's a seppo like you want to go into the Chaga?" He asked baldly. "Your camera'd get fucking munted in there."

Why indeed?

Maybe it was because you were three months into your two-week stopover to a city swollen twice its normal size with refugees. Maybe it was because someone, desperate or greedy, had stolen your passport days after you'd bribed your way in. Maybe it was because the dead-eyed fucks who manned the US consulate remembered the photos you took in Kenya. Maybe it was because the owner of the US' largest media conglomerate had told you that the only hope you had of getting out of Darwin was to find his daughter and bring her back. Or maybe, just maybe, it was all of the above.

Disguising the flash of anger that flooded into you with a cough that was only half-faked thanks to Bruce's smoking habit, you tilted your head to the side and rested a hand atop your schooner.

"It's not a photo job this time," you told him mildly.

A long drag of his cigarette. "Writing, huh?"

"Something like that."

"Gonna shack up with a chagarunner?" He asked, his eyes glittering above the rim of his glass.

"We'll see," you replied before pulling out a silver cigarette case from your breast pocket and laying it on the table between you.

It had taken a long time to find Bruce. Longer than you'd thought it would in a city facing death, anyway. A chagarunner, he took people into the alien jungle for a price. In this case, an antique cigarette case packed with hundred-dollar bills. US, naturally.

It was a farce, of course. A glance around the pub showed you in an instant that the ADF was nowhere to be seen; the only witnesses to your transaction were a dozen old-timers who looked like they'd been drinking here since Australia was a colony. Still, it was the done thing.

Clamping the already half-finished cigarette between his teeth, Bruce picked up the case with one hand and peered at it with an expert eye. He grunted.

"Impressive." He said as he offered it back to you.

An absolute farce, you thought as you raised a hand to stop it.

"Keep it, I'm trying to quit."

You'd never smoked a day in your goddamn life.

With acting worthy of a telenovela, Bruce shrugged and pocketed the silver rectangle.

"Well good luck with that, mate," he said abruptly as he got to his feet, the rotund man downing the rest of his glass in a single pull and dropping the burnt-out stub of his smoke onto the table.

Shock stopped you as effectively as any bullet, righteous indignation rising in time with the heat that spread across your face. Before you could even squeak out your disapproval, Bruce stepped past you and clamped a hand to your shoulder; the crinkle of paper only just audible to your ears.

"The Chaga's a dangerous place, mate," he growled, "all sorts of crazy shit happens in there." In the corner of your eye, you saw him shake his head before, without a word, he left; the piece of paper he clamped to your shoulder fluttering down into your hand.

Hand clenched and resting on the table, you took a long slow drink of your beer and waited for what felt like a lifetime before unclenching your fist and smoothing out a scrap of paper. Ten digits. faded but legible and printed neatly in a line like they were from a flyer. A cell number.

You were going into the Chaga.

***​

You are Leopoldo 'Leo' Isaacs and you are a freelance photojournalist specialising in conflict photography and embedded reporting. It used to be called war photography way back when, but twenty-five years of security operations, undeclared conflicts, and the 'War On Terror' had a way of smoothing down terms like war into something you could say live on the 7 o'clock news. In your decade-long civilian career, you've patrolled with US Marines in Iraq, squeezed into trucks with the French Foreign Legion in West Africa, and shot the shit with Ukrainian militia as they awaited the inevitable Russian invasion.

The story of your latest job began, as they often did, with a phone call.

The voice on the other end of the line was unfamiliar but recognizably male. They had a strange accent, European, and short, clipped vowels that felt rushed to hear despite his languid cadence. Still half asleep and hungover from another night spent bingeing on whatever rotgut you could find, it took you a moment to place the voice; the cold shock of recognition sobering you up as effectively as any pill as you realised you were talking to Rémi Villeneuve.

He spoke quickly and softly, your last employer's boss' boss' boss promising to use his influence with the UN to get you a one-way ticket out of Darwin in exchange for one little favour. A man who could end homelessness state-side multiple times over, you had no doubt he could arrange a path out of a dying city with a snap of his fingers. All he was asking for, all he wanted, was for you to find his daughter and bring her back to him safely. Stuck in a city on the brink of being consumed by violence and Chaga, you did the only thing you could do and accepted; an action you immediately regretted when he explained that his daughter worked for the UN.

Aside from a name, Margot Sykes, and a destination deep in the Chaga, a place called Marrakai, he'd given you precious little to go on. What she was doing in the Chaga despite the UN's official stance against a human presence, why he needed you specifically to get her out, and why the UN hadn't gotten involved yet were all questions he'd left unanswered. You were no private eye or mercenary, you'd only done a single TOS in the US Army, but apparently, you were at the top of his shitlist.

 

[prometheus110]

The Denver skyline smoulders a sullen orange as you run through the ravaged mall, the light of the noonday sun a hellish orange-red courtesy of the thick layer of haze that fills the air. As you flee through the abandoned concourse, the signs of chaos and terror are visible all around you; shattered windows and spilt goods hinting at the wave of looters that had struck as order broke down before the swarm. An instant later, you leap to clear an overturned bench and hiss as you hit the ground with a stumble, the force of your landing sending a blazing bolt of pain lancing up your left shoulder.

Clenching your robotic fist tight and gritting your teeth, you recover just in time to slew around the corner and into a maintenance corridor, the clatter of armour on concrete ringing out as you shoulder-check the wall and bounce off in vaguely the right direction. Twenty minutes ago, it'd have been the electric thud of your energy shields, but the ambush had put paid to that life-saving system, so now you were down to composite and metal. Legs pumping, you race down the corridor as something roars in the skies above, shrieking like a dying dragon, plaster dust from the ceiling swirling about you as you barrel through.

It takes a dozen heartbeats before you reach your destination, the door highlighted by your Focus slamming open with a crunch as you plant a boot into it, a hasty recovery seeing you spill into the opening beyond. Gasping for breath, you pause to review the map that appears in your mind's eye before setting off eastward, the walls of the maintenance tunnel almost claustrophobically tight and covered in a galaxy of holographic notices.

Goddamn Faro, you snarl as you advance down the tunnel, the brains-up display your Focus provides unerringly guiding you towards the far side of the mall.

You'd started out as a scratch squad only a few hours earlier, you and seven rookies from the Civilian Guard thrown together to make the numbers meet even as the world fell apart. In a couple hours of combat, you were the only one left alive and kicking, the mission plan in your Focus the only thing you had left. Pushing the deaths of your one-time comrades from your mind, you slew to a halt as you arrive at your destination, the door to the mall's historic clock tower all that stands between you and your mission. Stepping forward, you frown as some unseen sensor registers your approach and triggers the door's dissuasion protocol, a cartoon cop's face flaring into view above its otherwise bare-steel surface.

Like the world's most annoying metronome, the stylized head shakes back and forth, a red stop sign pulsing in and out in time with its motion.

"Unauthorised persons detected," the cop grinds out in both the real and virtual worlds, the fractional time delay between the two lending its voice an irritating quality. "Due to the historic nature of this location, only maintenance personnel rated class three and above may enter."

Rolling your eyes, you ignore the message as it begins to loop and scour the area around the door for signs of a control system, grinning a moment later as you catch sight of a plastic case attached to the wall. Two blows of your rifle's stock later, the white shell pops off to reveal a decidedly ancient-looking control board, all jade-green silicon and gold wires.

"2030s shit," you mutter as you pull a breacher from your left gauntlet and slap it against the silicon board, the nanites in the coin-sized device bonding with the slab as if they'd always been one piece.

It's the work of moments to force the door to your will, a few quick hacks convincing it that you have every role and permission in the book —even the contradictory ones. As the cartoon cop vanishes in a flicker of fox fire, you pluck the silver disc from the board and spare it a glance. Though invisible to the naked eye, the thick disc swarms with the same tech that lets Scarabs slave other machines to their will, the countless nanites granting their owner direct access to every part of whatever they infect.

Distantly, your aunt's voice echoes forth from your memory.

"The master's tools," she mutters across an ocean of time, the ghost a smirk accompanying the words.

For an instant, amusement wars with grief before both emotions die away as you gird yourself. She lives in D.C, you remind yourself. If she's not already dead, she will be soon.

They were harsh words for what had once been your last link to your parents, but what choice did you have? The best you could do for her was to kill one bot after another until you either ran out of FARO bots or died.

Shaking your head, you open the door with a gesture and recoil as a wave of ash flows around your feet and the noise of combat batters against your helmet, gunfire, explosions, and the endless schretch-schretch-schretch of rampaging FARO machines drowning out all else. Glaring through your helmet cameras as the dust dies away, you step into the slightly roomier confines of the clock tower and look up towards its apex, a frown tugging the corners of your mouth as you catch sight of the stairs. At nearly a hundred metres tall, some quick math told you there'd be almost four hundred of the fucking things between you and your destination.

"Fuck me," you mutter as you shoulder your rifle and start moving.

Spiralling around the clock tower's staircase like an antique spinning top, you swiftly rise above the sounds of gunfire, the clunk-chunk of the clock's mechanisms growing louder as your breathing grows more ragged. Even with your armour's servo system doing most of the work, your limbs swiftly grow heavy, and your hair slick with sweat. An eternity later, or a couple minutes, depending on your point of view, you reach the tower's apex and stare through the clockface's shattered portal at Denver's burning ruins.

Once upon a time, Denver must have been a pleasant enough place to live, with tree-lined streets and parks visible in all directions and century-old buildings standing shoulder to shoulder with gleaming spires of glass and steel. To the west, the stolid shapes of the Rocky Mountains loomed over the city, while to the east lay the Great Plains, though the Hot Zone Crisis in the 40s had done a number on them. The south wasn't bad, either; the region's water cycle restored to something approaching normality during the lean decade of the Clawback.

Now though, Denver was dead. A corpse of a city awaiting its inevitable consumption and decay. Despite the countless centuries of toil and sweat poured into constructing its grand structures, its artworks and its parks, all were now rendered insignificant and meaningless.

From your vantage point a hundred metres up, you could spy the last tattered shreds of Denver's air bubble waving in the air, the mass-produced nanomaterial popped by the swarm's first barrage and allowing the planet's toxic atmosphere to flood inside. Despite the ferocity of the swarm's attack, there were no fires anywhere in sight, the atmosphere so oxygen-deprived that even that struggled to live. Instead, all you saw was a reddish-orange haze that clung to the ruins like a burial shroud, the ashes of eight billion murdered souls filtering out what sunlight made it through until it seemed like you stood at the bottom of a Martian sea.

Slowly, you unsling your rifle from your shoulder and advance towards the edge of the clock face, trepidation that has nothing to do with the horde of robotic monsters popping into your mind. Cautiously, you grab at the iron frame that once held the clock face in place and lean over the edge, a wave of vertigo smashing into you as you catch sight of the street below. Fighting off the urge to pull away, you hiss as you spy a river of metal flowing down the distant street, countless black-hulled Scarabs and Khopeshes rushing around hastily assembled hardpoints like water around a stone.

Sighing, you lick your lips and pull away from the edge; all you can spare for the scene is a muttered, "Fuck."

Looking out over what had once been Denver, you scan the horizon for your target, streamers of tracer fire and the occasional flare of a missile telling you that at least some part of the air force remained operational. A year ago, you would have been moved by their bravery in the face of the swarm's overwhelming firepower. Now, you can't help but feel that the human race is casting pebbles against the tide.

Activating your Focus with a thought, you order it to scan the skyline for signs of your target before kneeling and examining your weapon.

Lethally sleek despite the odd shape imposed by its nature as an electromagnetic rifle, the Arclite-11 rests lightly in your hands, its off-white composite body bearing scuffs and stains from a year of near-constant use. The premier combat weapon of merc companies the world over before the war, your Arclight boasts best-in-class optics, full AR integration, and steel rounds able to shred armour and flesh with equal ease. With a thought, you could see through its gunsights, view its ammo count, lase a target, or diagnose a fault. Compared to the trash you had back in the 50s, it was as if Smith, Wesson, and Colt had descended from the heavens to give you their latest and greatest.

Unbidden, the memory of your last day as a soldier rises to the forefront of your mind, the ghostly sense-memory of mist brushing against your skin despite your armour's protection.

It had been an unseasonably cold spring morning for Georgia —in as much as 2055 Georgia could be said to have a spring— and the early morning mist had clung low to the ground despite the blazing sun overhead. You'd been called for a general assembly on Donovan Field before the mess hall opened for breakfast, you and eight hundred nervous-looking, hungry fuckers standing at attention before a stage the Sparkies were still assembling when you arrived. No one had bothered to explain why the assembly had been called, but six months out of basic training, you weren't gonna do anything that'd get you NJPed, so you stood there like a 'bot while the rest of the battalion murmured to one another.

Thirty minutes later, your stomach growling and your legs starting to ache from holding position for so long, Fort Stewart's commander, a balding fifty-something with the last name Henderson, comes jogging onto the stage. He hadn't looked young when you first arrived at the fort, but on stage, it seemed like he had aged ten years in a day, creases marring his dark skin and sweat prickling his brow despite the cool morning air.

"The Pentagon's run the numbers," Henderson had said after an apology for his tardiness. "Human combat forces are being disbanded."

You didn't take in much after that. There was some shit about the human costs of war, the value of fidelity, and the human spirit, but it was all a fucking joke. In less than an hour, everything you'd worked towards since your childhood in El Paso had been trashed; some bean counters in D.C. deciding that drones were the way forward. With the click of a button, you were screwed, and a million more people were put on basic in a country whose economy was in its second once-in-a-century recession this century.

'Course, a decade later, FAS had their little accident, and the US government came crawling back with hat in hand. You'd been tempted to tell them to eat shit when they messaged you, your last three years having been good to you, but damn it, Herres had been convincing. You'd been proud to serve in the US Army, and all his talk of pride and duty had struck a cord. The better pay, amnesty for participation in Combine wars, and guaranteed citizenship were nice, but Herres' words were what sealed the deal.

A sudden tremor rumbles through the clock tower and sends a wave of limestone dust spilling from the ceiling high above you. Shaken from your reverie, you gingerly wipe the gritty material from your rifle's laser lens and bring the weapon to your chest. As another faint tremor passes through the building, you take a deep breath and scour the ash-cloaked city for any sign of your target.

Time flows from one moment to another with a languid grace as you wait in the tower, the subtle tremors growing stronger by the second and a noise like distant thunder slowly swelling around you. Staring out into the red-orange haze, you watch as the all-consuming dust begins to stir in sympathy with each rumble, the mountainous body responsible for the earth-shaking steps pushing a wall of air before it like the bow wave of a ship. Seconds drag into minutes as the footsteps continue their inexorable approach, the beat of your heart, once quiet, now thundering in your ears.

Without warning, an obsidian splotch suddenly appears past a complex of ash-swathed buildings identified by your Focus as the Denver Performing Arts Centre, the up and down motion of its steady approach sending fingers of ice around your heart.

Horus! Screams the lizard part of your brain as it recognises the danger. Horus. Run! Death! Run.

Frozen in fright with all your bravado and protective cynicism stripped away, you can only watch as the world-ending machine continues its approach, the patch of darkness swelling in size as a fel red light grows at its heart. Mere moments later, the shadow solidifies into the familiar form of a Horus, the light of its quantum processor blazing in the ash cloud like a beacon of evil as dust slips from its hull. Advancing with the same implacability with which the swarm killed the world, the Horus doesn't bother slowing as it slams into the performing arts centre, its four drill-tipped tentacles ploughing through brick, glass, and steel with equal ease before shovelling the ravaged matter straight into its fanged maw.

As you shiver, your hands tightly clenching around your rifle, you can only watch as a fresh batch of machines joins the throng scurrying around the feet of the Horus. A moment later, a bone-rattling groan rings out from the factory machine and light flares across its back. Like shooting stars filmed in reverse, a stream of missiles launch into the sky on pillars of smoke and fire, the death sentence of unseen comrades shaking you from your stupor.

Nervously, hesitantly, every instinct warning you not to do it, you raise your rifle to your shoulder and aim it towards the still-distant killing machine. Heart pounding in your chest, you think the order to activate your laser pointer, the hope that someone, somewhere, can kill the Horus before it sees you racing through your mind. A fraction of a second later, your UV laser designator flicks on and a pale dot appears in your augmented vision at the arch of the Horus's spine.

---

The missile flies without compunction, concepts like morality, hatred, and revenge non-existent in its supremely limited world. It does not care that it was launched by a desperate collection of men and women whose nations were slaughtered to the last in a desperate attempt to buy time, that its target rages at the heart of a city whose inhabitants could not possibly flee, or what warhead lies somewhere deep in its core. All it cares about, in as much as it can care about anything, is the dot that only its one-track mind can spot. Heartlessly, coldly, the missile aims its nose towards the dot, brains of silicon and carbon juggling a hundred different variables as it cuts through the air without a ripple. Clad in a metamaterial shell and held aloft by tough and flexible wings whose surfaces are constantly adjusted for maximum lift, the missile races towards its target like an owl hunting a mouse.

A carrier-killer design borrowed from what was left of the Chinese military, the missile makes it to within five hundred metres of the Horus before being spotted, the swarm's grossly expanded sensor network hampered by Denver's ruined skyline and their own toxic ash cloud. Without panic, without fear, without haste, the swarm reacts; more than a thousand quantum processors work together to identify the exact make and model of the inbound missile from the size of the air distortion, the speed of its passage, and countless other factors. An instant passes, then another, and then the swarm reacts, the Horus behind the dot spewing countermeasures and counter-missiles into the air while laser CIWS begin to track.

Two hundred metres from its prey, electronic eyes coolly watching its own demise approach, the carrier-killer realises that it won't quite reach its target before being intercepted. Coldly, dispassionately, it runs through its available options and makes a choice. A fraction of a second before a counter-missile can strike it, a trifle longer before a laser CIWS can spear it, the missile activates its payload and a Light blooms over Denver.

---

Pain greets you like a lover as you return to consciousness, its electric caress brushing your legs, arms, and chest, heat flaring through every cell of your body. You try to move, but your arms feel like they're made of lead. You try to open your eyes, but they feel glued shut. You try to think, but your thoughts flow like sand between your fingers.

Fear shoots through you as the idea emerges that you might be blind, some hidden part of your brain screaming indecipherable warnings at the thought. A moment later, a moan escapes your lips, the very act sending a fresh flare of pain across your body. Dimly, you realise you can smell the acrid scent of metal and ozone and that the taste of blood fills your mouth. Lost and alone, you cling tight to these senses like a rope in a storm, a mind filled with a lifetime of experience struggling to piece together the recent history of you.

Time passes fluidly as you lie (Sit? Stand?) there, moments flowing together and apart with equal ease as your thoughts slowly marshal themselves into something approximating order. Gradually, the chaos subsides, and eventually, after minutes, hours, or days, you're unsure, you open your eyes.

This is a mistake.

Your head, blessedly free of pain until this moment, is suddenly struck by a pickaxe as you expose your eyes to the light of day, the silver steel of a blade tearing through skin and bone and brain matter with equal ease. Tears emerge an instant later, boiling hot beads of water that blind you again. Groaning, you force yourself to blink once, twice, three times, the third attempt finally wicking the hateful tears and restoring partial sight.

Blurry and distant but still clearly visible against the powder blue sky and past the blurry text that scrolls past your vision, the skeletal ruins of an ancient building loom over your head like a tree from a haunted forest; gnarled fingers of steel stretching out in all directions. Partially reclaimed by nature, sheets of moss and thick ropy vines hang from every surface, some unfelt breeze stirring them gently in the soft, warm morning light. Lying still and staring up at it, you can't help but feel a sense of profound wrongness, some corner of your mind jabbering unceasingly about... something.

Electing to ignore it, you try to lift a hand to your face only to stop as some sense of resistance winds through your battered nervous system. Glancing down, itself a superhuman feat given your current state, you frown as you spot a thick blanket of furry moss covering your arms and body from the waist down, strands of the most brilliant emerald and jade green clutching tight to your armoured body.

Grunting from the effort, you slowly pull yourself out of the mossy blanket one limb at a time, a million tendrils clinging to your armour as if trying to keep you anchored to the ground. As you rise, your body protests every movement, every joint and muscle screaming with pain until you stand on unsteady feet. Feeling bold, you take a step forward only to stumble, ancient concrete crumbling under your gloved hand as you catch yourself.

Breathing as deeply as you dare, you blink owlishly at your surroundings and struggle to take the slowly sharpening image of the world that forms. Everywhere you turn, the world is alight with the soft, golden glow of the early morning sun, long shadows as black as onyx cast across the mossy ground. Aside from your huffing, the air is still and quiet; the only sounds you hear are the rustling of vines and the occasional chirp and warble of unseen birds.

All at once, you realise that you stand amidst an ancient urban jungle, the twisted metal and concrete ruins of a once-great city stretching out in all directions. A forest of the dead. Twisting in place with the grace of a car crash, you realise with a painful start that the ruins are not merely abandoned, but are being reclaimed, a sense of great age slowly settling upon your mind as gently as a gossamer cloak. Everywhere you look, moss, vines, and countless other plants cover every hint of human civilization; a field as green as any you've seen stretching out in all directions.

Straining to recall who you are, where you are, and how you got here, a sudden wave of disorientation washes over you, and you sink to your knees, the world fading to black once more.