I will be posting this story on RoyalRoad.com under this account https://www.royalroad.com/profile/350380



‘Worse ways to die than this. Probably.’ Peter Zhao Wei thought as he floated between the stars. Alarms blared. Warnings flashed across his heads up display in blocky red letters. Precious oxygen was leaking out of a spider web fracture in his helmet’s glass. Three golf ball-sized holes in his torso exposed his insides to the vacuum of space. He could feel his organs collapsing under rapid depressurization. Everything that wasn’t crushed and torn out was frozen solid. All around him, a stream of viscera and blood spooled out like the stuffing torn from a doll.
Peter blinked, trying to ignore the ice cold fluid buildup around his eyes. He looked on through fogged glass at his home: Minsky Station. The only home he’d ever known was cracked in half, like God had descended from heaven and crushed it between fingers the size of mountains. Streams of debris exited its orbit in all directions. The station grew smaller and smaller as the seconds ticked by, shrinking away from him in the dark. Or maybe he was flying away from it, the momentum from exploding out of his cockpit carrying him away into the asteroid field of Hamlin’s Star.
‘We tried to protect her, pal,’ Peter thought, his gaze flicking away from the station to the giant hurtling out into space with him. His giant, forged of steel and hydraulics, was meant for tearing precious minerals out of space rocks. The Goliath was never a weapon. In hindsight, they didn’t have a chance against a light frigate of the Sol Union Navy. That ship was the only thing still intact in the entire system. Well, mostly intact. Even from here Peter could see the gargantuan tears in its hull from where Goliath had gotten its claws on it. ‘Least we went down swingin’.’
As his consciousness began to fade, all he could wonder was how it came to this. They had a hundred- a thousand opportunities to step back from the brink, to stop the violence before it could even begin. If they’d only spoken longer. Negotiated better. If they’d never opened the door to begin with. If that ship hadn’t jumped into their system, or stopped at their station.
If.



Minsky Station never slept. From end to end the station was three quarters of a mile long with a bulging center, shaped like a giant top spinning at a breezy one g. Several concentric rings rotated around Minsky counter clockwise.These were waygate rings. By injecting negative mass matter into localized quantum fluctuations, the rings form a stabilized wormhole connected to another waygate in the neighboring system. A network of connected rings ran throughout all of human settled space, allowing instantaneous travel across trillions of miles. Control of this network was what allowed the Federation of Orion-Cygnus to unite all of humanity across such vast distances.
Minksy was built nearly a century ago by a mining conglomerate called Vanderwick-Kriegwald-Stalgard out of Thedes. A bunch of imperial aristocrats with too much money and endless ambition saw the system, Hamlin’s Star, as an opportunity to cut off Earth’s own expansion into the frontier.
Ships flowed in and out of Minsky’s belly like bees from a hive. They took to the mineral rich asteroid field the system was known for to tear the rocks apart in search of treasures hidden within. Once their holds were full they flew back into the station and deposited their tons of gold, nickel and iron into the processing plants on sublevels eight through fifteen. There, technicians ensured the robotic drones and conveyor belts kept things moving at their regularly blistering pace. Moving too fast was barely fast enough these days. The quotas grew every quarter when the station managers promised their shareholders infinite, unstoppable growth, like a plague of locust tearing across space. Failure to meet those quotas only meant the labor force wasn’t pushed hard enough.
Living in space meant there was no such luxury as day and night to determine work hours. Instead, the crew lived by shifts: three alarms would sound every eight hours, waking a shift up for work, announcing the end of work for a shift, and sending the last shift for bed so they’d be rested for work come the next alarm. Everyone that lived on station was a VKS employee; even those with the bad luck to be born there. Children automatically adopted their parents’ contracts, though they were graciously allowed to renegotiate when they came of age. Anyone who wanted to leave could do so. If they could pay their own way off, anyway.
Second shift alarm boomed, and Peter Zhao Wei woke up with a sledgehammer pounding the inside of his skull. He sat up in a cot too small for his sizable frame. With a blink he activated his neurodeck. The VKS logo flashed behind his eyes for a few moments before transitioning to his home page. VKS was up twelve percent on the market. The Martian Rovers beat out the Russian Mishas eighteen to six in the fourth quarter. Sixty people were dead in Denver after a Dominionist bombing. Movie star Ollie Andromeda was having an affair.
Pete blink-clicked over to his bank account. His neurodeck consolidated his payments due and calculated his net income. He was down seven thousand Petramarks after last week’s accident. One of those morons in the Ziegler clan ignored his warnings and crawled into an unstable rat hole after a platinum ore deposit. He was lucky he only lost an arm. Ziegler’s antics knocked Peter right out of his six month window. Even if he took on overtime, he’d hit his income cap before his vacation date was up.
“Damn it.”
With a reluctant sigh he canceled the tickets off Minsky. Three seats on the Klepper all the way back to Thedes. His parents always talked about going back to the imperial homeworld to see the sights. Walk the halls of the royal palace, or take a shuttle up to the moon of Helia to pray before the Sacred Sword wielded by Karl von König himself in the first conquest. His mom had this dream of lying down in the grass and watching the sunset over the world of her grandmother’s birth. Peter had worked his ass off for half a decade to give her that today, the sixtieth anniversary of her baptism. The church considered sixty a hallowed number, and his mother took it very seriously. It would’ve been the perfect gift.
He stared at his mother’s message inbox. She’d be going to bed soon if she wasn’t sleeping already. His parents had always been strict about sticking to shift time. Staying up was bad for one’s health, they’d always say.
“Hey, mom, happy anniversary,” Peter started, only to sigh and drop his head into his hands. How was he supposed to break the news?
With a swipe of his eyes from left to right, he sent the message away and brought back his bank account. It took him a second to run the numbers. He couldn’t afford all three tickets, but one? One was doable. If he made it one way there’d even be some spending money left over. Put himself up in a hostel for a few weeks while he looked for work- good work. Not scrounging around for metal at the ass end of the galaxy. Peter could make a life for himself on Thedes. He could finally be free. How long would it take to earn enough marks to get his family off Minksy then? A year, maybe two.
‘Would they even last that long alone?’
Time slipped away from him for several minutes as he contemplated his options. A secondary alarm caused him to jolt up with a start. Should’ve left the room already. Being late for a shift would see his pay docked. Peter scrambled to dress himself and scarf down a bag of bacon, egg and pancake flavored protein cubes at the same time. He struggled to pull on the envirosuit he’d worn for longer than he could remember. Every patched hole was a memory of some close call or another. There was too much sentimental value wrapped up in its faded blue polymers to replace it; even if it was a size and a half too small now.
A third alarm buzzed. Okay, now he was really late. Every second he wasn’t in the hangar there were marks being deducted from his account. Peter practically broke his door down as he stumbled out into the hallway at a dead sprint. A crowd of first shift laborers parted before him as two hundred and sixty pounds of pudge and muscle bounded down the corridor.
“Sorry, guys! ‘Scuse me! Sorry!” He yelled, only to be met with curses and obscenities galore.
Peter reached the hangar in record time.
The hangar was the largest open space Peter knew. Well, except space, but that didn’t count. It was huge. There were dozens of mechanics working already and they looked like ants crawling along the surface of a tree. Not that’d ever seen ants outside that documentary he’d watched last night about a species of bullet ant that went extinct on earth a few hundred years ago. Nuclear war wasn’t great for anyone, he supposed.
Those not-ants were crawling along gantries to get at the dozen vehicles hanging from the ceiling and clamped to the floor. The station practically had a little fleet of its own: transport shuttles, survey drones, core crawlers. Those were all just the support staff, really- the infrastructure that allowed the real heavy hitters to do their work: the exoframes. Two mechanized giants stood shoulder to shoulder in the hangar bay, their hundred ton forms supported by a dozen different clamps on the walls, ceiling and floor. Hydraulic fluid was being pumped into valves on the lower back through large, expanding tubes. Canisters of MAL-176 fuel cells were being loaded into the exoframe’s reactor while emptied cells were dumped into hazardous waste bins.
Both exoframes were ancient tech by any measure. Even with constant upkeep and part replacement, they were both several generations behind the newest models. A safety board would likely bar them from use as anything but museum pieces. There weren’t many safety boards in the frontier.
The one to the left was a General Motors Rhino-class industrial exoframe. They were produced en masse by the largest vehicle producer in the North American Republic and sold across settled space. A rhino could be modified to do practically any job: from heavy extraction and orbital construction to security. Plenty of would-be rebellions built their guerrilla forces off the backs of armed Rhinos.
This one was his. He’d insisted to the mechanics they keep the horn broken; it gave the big guy character. It was tall, rounded out in the torso and bottom heavy. He felt no small amount of kinship with the big, awkward machine.
“Mornin’, pal.” Peter called to his machine as he climbed the service ladder up to the cockpit.
“Good to see you, Pete!” Gus, one of the techs up on the gantry, yelled back. “Goliath’s ready for the trip out.”
Peter answered Gus with a wave before crawling inside the opened cockpit, falling into the torn leather seat he called his own. It was a tight fit. Barely enough leg room. Still stunk like the sweat of the first shift’s pilot, he realized with distaste. He pulled a spray bottle out of the underseat storage compartment and applied a generous application of deodorizing spray to the air around him. Better.
The startup checklist took twenty minutes. Gus was on the comm talking him through it, just like he had a thousand times before.
Flight sticks were good. Drillers stuck a bit on startup, but reached acceptable oscillation speed after thirty seconds or so. Cranial plug fit into the implant in the base of his neck snuggly and didn’t fry his brain when they turned it on, so that was good. Once Peter was plugged in, he felt a jolt of sensation run through his entire body. His hands became Goliath’s hands. His legs thrummed with the power to leap a tall building in a single bound- though the exoframe had never entered an atmosphere as far as he was aware.
Direct neurological interface technology was older than he was. It allowed the user of a particular device to control it, by some measure, with their thoughts. Old models like the Goliath still required manual flight controls to do the heavy lifting- a full interface was expensive. Too expensive for a rust bucket like this, and any additional utility it might allow wasn’t necessary for asteroid mining.
“Think we’re wasted enough time draggin’ our feet here, Gus. Let’s launch.”
“Aye aye, captain. Clamps are released. You’re good to launch.”
The Goliath lumbered forward through the hangar like a toddler learning to walk for the first time. The ground shook beneath a hundred tons of old metal as it crossed the hangar to one of the airlocks. Everything shook as the doors pried themselves open, a rush of pressurized air blowing out. It took another five minutes for the air to cycle and the doors to shut. A red light in the corner warned him-- and anyone unlucky enough to still be inside- that they were moments from being blasted into the vacuum of space. Peter’s eyes flickered down to his gauges to ensure everything was working in fine order one last time.
“Goliath to control, ready to fly from the nest on six.”
“This is control, opening six. Good hunting out there, Pete.”
The airlock doors crept open, the blackness of the void beyond was revealed. Goliath took three, long strides and jumped out of the station into the vast nothing. Jet thrusters on its back and legs exploded to life, carrying the giant exoframe away from Minsky as it accelerated toward the asteroid field. To its right, another pair of doors opened and a hauler ship exited to follow close behind. Anything the Goliath dug up would be picked up by the hauler’s crew of miners in EVA powered suits and prospecting drones.
“Could you fly any slower? I’d like to get this done before I keel over and die.” Another voice crackled to life on his comm. Fran Ziegler was old enough to be his great grandmother, and she sounded like she’d eaten three packs of cigarettes a day since primary school. Fran was also one of the best pilots Peter had ever known. She was captaining the Hercules Mulligan, a mining hauler nearly as old as she was. Half her crew were her own grandchildren, nieces and nephews. The Ziegler clan was an odd one, but they were some of the best in the business.
“You got it, Franny. I’m slowin’ down. Wouldn’t want to upset your frail sensibilities.” Pete called back, grinning from ear to ear.
“Bite me, drecksack.”
They worked for six hours. The first step was deploying survey drones. They swept the asteroid field in grid formation, each drone claiming two hundred thousand miles of territory. The largest asteroids usually had the best yields, but they were rare: you could fly half a million miles in a straight line and only find half a dozen asteroids over five hundred thousand tons heavy. Small but dense rocks meant metals like platinum. Searching for radiation spikes was just as important: MAL-176 was the rarest substance in the universe, but it was also the blood that powered the body of mankind. Without it, there were no jump drives, no fusion reactors. Peter would never forget a conversation he had with Laton Camcross, a logistics supervisor: if all the MAL in known space disappeared for just a single minute, civilization would collapse before it popped back into existence.
Once a decent prospect was found, the next step was extraction. The Goliath would match the object’s orbit and latch onto its body with massive, titanium-weave cables to keep it from flying away when they started tearing it apart. Large drilling claws mounted to the exoframe were used to open up seams so that smaller, more delicate work could be done to pull the minerals out of stone. Workers with EVA suits and heavy tools would handle the most valuable finds, while the Goliath’s suite of robots would take out the bulk of material. Most of Peter’s job was staring at screens and sending mental commands to the crab drones using the cranial plug. It was meticulous work, but it required his full attention. Moving too quickly could risk damaging the fragile structure of the asteroid. Even a small cut in the wrong spot could cause catastrophic collapse in just minutes. The miners inside could be crushed beneath tens of thousands of tons of space rocks before they even knew they were in danger. If any of her kin were hurt, Franny would crawl out of her ship and beat Peter to death with a grav-pick personally.
A light started beeping on the dashboard. Pete sent the drone cams away with a flick of his fingers and pulled up the warning. ‘Incoming jump?’ He read, puzzled. Pick up wasn’t scheduled until the end of the month. Who else would want to come to this garbage heap of a system?
The waygate rings around Minksy Station broke dock and floated off its fat, round form. They began to rotate faster and faster until looking at them burned his eyes. Once they reached a measurable fraction of the speed of light, a bright flash of crimson energy filled the space between the rings.
Reality warped like iron under a smith’s hammer as the Meshuda jumped into the system. A wave of steam washed off the ship’s back as it vented the excess heat created by an active jump drive. Its shell glowed bright orange for several minutes as it flew through the void. Even with its thrusters burning hard to stop, it still covered a few million miles of space before it slowed enough to be visible to the naked eye as anything but a bright smear. The amount of energy necessary to teleport from one system to another dwarfed the heat at the center of a star. Even one tiny miscalculation in a ship’s design could see it turned to slag after one too many jumps in a row. The Meshuda was built to last, however. From bow to stern it was one hundred and fifty six feet long, putting it squarely in the smallest class of vessel to have its own jump drive. Two large engines stretch out on wings on either side of its boxy body, thicker on the rear and thinning out at its bow.
Peter’s eyes went wide as the ship’s name popped up on his HUD. The Meshuda was a light frigate designated SUN: Sol Union Navy. What in Helia’s name was an earth military boat doing way out here? This was Thedian territory.
“Goliath to Hercules Mulligan, are you readin’ this?”
“I’m not blind, boy, not yet. Already sending telemetry data back home. What do those soilsucking dogs want with us?”
Peter gulped. He called back his crab drones and began inputting the commands necessary to drop anchor on the asteroid and bail. “Maybe a bad jump. Maybe an emergency. They’re Federation too, they have every right to be here.” Even as the words spilled from his mouth, he knew they were wrong. It wasn’t illegal for them to be here, no. But there wasn’t any good reason for it, either. He had a terrible feeling knotting up on his guts that he couldn’t shake.
“I’m not getting any channels opened between the station and the ship yet. Bah, I’m calling them myself.” Fran growled. She was hitting her controls loud enough that he could hear her punching buttons through the open channel.
“Bad idea.” He warned, despite patching in with her to listen. Wasn’t like he could stop her anyway. Might as well learn what this was all about.
“Franscesa Ziegler of the Hercules Mulligan calling the Meshuda. This asteroid belt is the legal property of VKS Heavy Industries. Do not approach or you will be reported for trespassing. State your purpose.” That cranky old woman’s voice rose with a clear authority she only used for when she found her grandkids’s hands in the proverbial cookie jar. It wasn’t exactly her place to be making threats, but he wasn’t about to step in and stop her. The woman knew her business. He doubted she would do anything that would upset the station chief.
To the Meshuda’s credit, they responded immediately. “Mayday, mayday, this is Vice Captain Alexi Sablin, acting captain of the SUN Meshuda,” the man who called himself captain responded. His voice was hoarse, and his words seemed strangely drawn out, like speaking was difficult for him. He sounded young, too. Maybe mid-twenties, early thirties at the latest.
“My ship is in distress. We suffered significant damage and loss of life to a pirate attack in the Meridian system. We require immediate assistance.”
Peter’s eyes widened. Meridian was only a few systems over, and he had no idea pirates were operating so close to Minsky. Accessing his neurodeck, he scrolled through every company communique and news report he could find on their corner of space. Like many systems in the region, Meridian was another VKS Industries prospect. They had some small foothold on a single planet there. Nothing about pirates, however. There was an article about Sol Union military exercises in this sector, though…
“Ain’t no pirates in Meridian,” Fran protested, even as the Meshuda continued to steam ahead toward the station.
It was difficult to get a visual from this distance. Peter could’ve mistaken it for a smudge on his cockpit’s canopy. Goliath’s camera feed popped up as a box in the corner of his vision, sensing his need before he even asked. The zoomed in image showed him what he’d been wondering about: whether or not the Meshuda was actually damaged or not.
He was no soldier. He had no way of knowing if a hull breach was from a railgun spike or a collision with space debris; they were there, though. At least three different sections of the Meshuda had tears in the hull where emergency coagulating foam was preventing her atmosphere from venting into space. Scorch marks marred much of the body. Several panels were bent at odd angles, cables and wires dangerously exposed.
“Please, we’ve been out here for months. We only just brought our jump drive back online a few hours ago. We’ve been trying to ration our food, but the water recycler…”
“They need help, Fran.” He said, knowing Sablin would hear him as well. The man’s face visibly brightened.
“I’ve created an inventory of the supplies we need to return to the nearest Union port,” Sablin said quickly, leaning forward on the view screen to type away at a keyboard. A file popped up on the Goliath’s display. Opening it, Peter scanned through the request: food, fuel, and a long list of materials for a shipborne fabricator.
“I’ll forward this to station management,” the food and repair materials wouldn’t be a problem, he believed, but the fuel was another matter.
“I’m contacting them now.” The vice captain nodded. “Can you escort us to the station? Our sensor array was struck and we’re flying blinder than I would like right now.”
Peter returned the nod. The asteroid field wasn’t particularly dense but it wasn’t worth the risk. “I’ll lead ya in, pal.”
The connection dropped as Meshuda's captain called the station directly. Goliath detached from the asteroid in front of it, retracting its cables back into the back-mounted spools. Crab drones leapt back into their cradles on the exoframe’s midsection. The Zieglar miners kept to their work.
Another call came in. It was Fran Zieglar. “What hell do you think you’re doing? “ She snapped. “I’m not missing another quota so you can help a baby bird get back to its nest.”
Peter closed his eyes and sighed. “We’re obligated to provide aid. It's the law, n’ its just the right thing to do.”
“Law only matters when it helps them. You think they’d stop their pretty little boat to refuel our hauler?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Dumb Bastard.” Zieglar clicked her tongue and cut the call.
Heat filled his cheeks as Pete took flight, guiding the Meshuda through the asteroid field toward the station. The old crone had the gall to complain about meeting quota after her crew screwed him out of a shuttle ticket?
It took twenty minutes to navigate the asteroids and return to Minsky’s stationary orbit around Hamlin’s Star. A handful of other ships had spilled out of the hangar bays to loiter in space around the station. All the mining boats save Zieglar’s were returning from their work early as well, perhaps drawn in by the curiosity of their new guest. Dozens of messages and comm lines were flying across the system. Pete scanned the public feeds for any information on how negotiations were proceeding between administration and the naval vessel, but he could find little that was helpful. There was plenty of wild speculation and fearmongering, however. One particular employee was live streaming a political screed. Peter pulled it up against his better judgment.
“...Earther thugs will never destroy our way of life. We are the sons and daughters of the emperor, saved in the light of Her Grace, Saint Helia, whose sacred sword will one day pierce the heart of earth’s decadence. Democracy has no place in a civilized, godly society-”
Peter quickly switched it off. Helianite zealots were rare this far from the homeworld, but he knew each and every one of them on Minsky because they never shut up about it. Guys like Markus were the reason Pete stopped attending temple, much to his mother’s chagrin.
After a few more minutes of tense silence, he decided to give Sablin another call. To Pete’s surprise, the vice captain picked up immediately.
“What’s the hold up? Why haven’t you docked?” Peter asked.
“They won’t let us. The bastards won’t let us in!” Alexi nearly screamed. His face was red, veins bulging from his neck and forehead. His eyes were blood red. He looked exhausted, distraught, angry.
“What? Why?!” Peter nearly choked. He figured there must’ve been some kind of complication, a snag in the process that was holding them up.
“I don’t know why! Ask them!” Sablin did scream, this time, and then hung up.
He was quick to put in a connection request to the administration. It took another few minutes for the automated secretary to finally connect him to a comms officer. By then, the Meshuda was beginning to maneuver.
“Hey, this is Peter. Peter Zhao Wei, pilot of the Goliath.” He introduced himself quickly, stumbling over his words. “I was the one who made first contact with the frigate and escorted them in. They just told me you’re denying them their legally obligated refuge?” He asked, stressing the words ‘legally obligated,’ as if management had somehow glossed over the most important rule of space travel: always help a ship in distress.
“Hello, Mr. Wei. I’m Comms Officer Adebayo. Senior Station Manager Yaeger and Liaison Officer Ditka have already explained the situation to Captain Sablin.” The woman on the other end spoke with calm, practiced professionalism, sure to respect the various titles of all the very important people that were currently screaming at each other over their computer screens.
“Please, enlighten me. Nobody’s told me anything, ma’am.”
After a pause, she began to summarize. “Yaeger offered to ship an aid package to the Meshuda. Sablin has refused, claiming his ship is in too immediate a danger to remain in space and that it must dock.”
“Then why the hell are they not docked yet?”
“...Manager Yaeger believes their claim is untrue. Detailed scans of their ship show no signs of such critical damage.”
Peter balked. “Yeah, I’m sure those scans are real ‘detailed’ after, what, twenty minutes of lookin’? N’ no camera is goin’ to be able to tell ‘ya if a reactor chamber is cracked or if their life support is failin’.”
“Liason Ditka wishes to send an inspection team but Sablin has denied him access. He claims they carry sensitive materials that civilians can’t access.”
Frustration boiled up in his gut as he mulled over her words, the reality of the situation finally sinking in. The politics of it all. The petty fighting over terms while people were in real, physical harm’s way. It all seemed so pointless.
“Give me a second. Don’t hang up.” Peter put the administrator on hold and shot a connection over to Sablin, again. “Hey, asshole, what do you think you’re doing?”
Sablin paused, blinking. There was a heat behind his eyes that was only momentarily dulled by the unexpected faux pas. He was a decorated officer of the Sol Union Navy. A lifelong spacer with a pedigree as long as his arm. No one had called him anything but ‘sir’ to his face since boot camp. “Explain yourself,” he demanded.
“Just let them board your ship!”
He shook his head. “We are in more dire need than a few cargo crates on a drone can abate. My crew has been trapped on this ship for months with little food, dirty water and untreated medical emergencies. My captain is dead. I will not have a handful of upstart rock merchants stop me from taking care of my people.”
The conviction in Alexi Sablin’s voice was hard as steel. His battleworn frigate moved closer to the station, barreling past the mining haulers attempting to physically block his passage. For all the captain’s certainty, the hangar bay doors were still closed and sealed to him.
“Don’t be stupid!” Peter barked, but his warning went unheard as Sablin hung up the call. Peter could only watch in horror as one of the mining vessels released its laser cannons from their mounts and began powering them up. The Meshuda responded by unlocking its own, far more intimidating hardpoints: torpedo tubes, autocannons, and railguns. Enough firepower to crack a mountain in half.
Later, Peter Zhao Wei wouldn’t recall who fired the first salvo. It didn’t matter. Once torpedoes kissed cold vacuum and lasers raked the sides of hulls, all bets were off. History wouldn’t remember the people that died here, not really. No one would write about Comms Officer Adebayo begging everyone to hold fire across every channel, even as a fireball consumed the bridge around her. There would be no docu-vids about the Hercules Mulligan and the family of stupidly brave miners that dragged an asteroid across the system and slammed it into the side of the Meshuda before they were turned to nuclear ash. Fran Zieglar died with a mad cackle in her throat and blood in her eyes.
No one would remember him.
Goliath lurched forward. Its thrusters burned at maximum volume, building the exoframe’s momentum until it was practically a missile aimed directly at the Meshuda. Didn’t matter to Pete who started shooting. All he knew was that the frigate had the biggest guns, and was doing the most damage. Inertia tore him back into his seat. Black dots filled his vision as he built up speed. He visualized in his mind the Goliath- a mighty machine of steel and hydraulics and power- throwing a wild haymaker at the Meshuda. The exoframe lifted an arm as they came into range, cannon fire tearing into its central body and separating the torso from its legs. The cockpit canopy shattered, something sharp piercing it too close to Peter’s face for his liking.
Despite it all, he delivered that punch before he went. And it was a damned good one.
Claws made for digging out stone dug into the reinforced hull, tearing off a chunk a few meters across and flinging it back into space.
The Meshuda whirled on its axis, maneuvering thrusters flaring so the frigate could come around to face the Goliath. It delivered a salvo of railgun fire at point blank range that tore the suit apart. Its armored body shattered in a dozen different places, and the neurospike in Peter’s neck exploded from the feedback, sending blood shooting from his ears and out of his nose.
The canopy gave way, and Peter found himself floating between the stars.

Malachi Armeade threw back another glass of Leinonen whiskey. The scent clung to his nostrils like gasoline. Its taste was just as rank. His head swam with a familiar numbness. It made him comfortable; distracted him from the throbbing pain in his face. His nose was probably broken. He tapped it a few times with the tips of his fingers, and the burning feeling that followed confirmed his suspicions. That was fine. This wasn’t the first time his nose had been broken, and repairing damaged cartilage was trivial work for his internal medical augments. Nanomachines were already replacing the damaged blood vessels.
“Damn it, Mal,” Sean Brown slammed a palm against the countertop. Sean was the proud owner and bartender of this little hole in the wall, the Platinum Asteroid. He was also a Chief Mess Officer in the Sol Union Navy with twenty-some years of service under his belt. “Not again. Not in my bar!” The old man’s eyes burned with contempt as he looked between the young navy pilot sitting across from him and the marine sprawled across his floor. A heckling chorus filled the Platinum Asteroid as the other patrons cheered on the display. Three other uniformed marines ran forward to check on their friend.
Some people might wonder why a warship like the Gilgamesh had a dedicated bar. It actually had five, if you counted that rat-infested dive on deck twelve as a real bar. There were also many other decidedly non-military attractions such as restaurants, theaters, VRcades, and all manner of sports facilities from batting cages to basketball courts. The Gilgamesh wasn’t a typical warship, but a veritable city floating through space: it had a crew of over eight thousand, with another two and a half thousand civilian passengers including spouses and children of servicemen and women, colonists, researchers, documentarians and many, many others.
A rush of red filled Malachi’s cheeks. At least he was still self aware enough to feel shame. He lowered his eyes to his hands, where he found his knuckles split and bleeding. Those hands were worn like old leather; calloused, scarred. They looked strange attached to someone his age. Malachi paused. Drunk as he was, he had to think for a few moments to remember why he’d struck the man. Had he insulted Malachi? Bumped into him on his way to the counter? His shame deepened as he realized he didn’t know. Must’ve been more drunk than he thought.
“W-why’d I…” He turned, dumbfounded, to look up into Sean’s face in search of answers. He saw his anger, his confusion, mirrored in the old soldier. “What’d he do?”
“My own slaggin’ fault for not cuttin’ ya off,” Sean muttered, pinching his nose. “Jus keep yer shirt on ‘til the MPs get- look out!”
There was a dull thud as something heavy struck the back of Malachi’s head. Everything went dark for a blink, and he awoke with his head on the counter, covered in broken glass and liquor. “M-my drink. I was…n’t done with that.” He slurred. Someone was towering over him, their fists clutched together over their head, moments from slamming them down onto Malachi’s skull.
Pushing off the counter, Malachi slammed the back of his elbow into his attacker’s throat. There was a crunch, and the marine was gasping, panic in his eyes. Malachi hit him twice more.
Sean was shouting his throat raw trying to break up the fight with the sheer power of his voice. He was drowned out by the cheers and jeers of the crowd. The other two marines- friends of the unconscious fellow, more than likely- came at Malachi with a vengeance. The first bulrushes him, picking Malachi up off his feet and slamming him into a nearby table. It clattered to the floor, drinks and cards flying in the air as its occupants scattered to avoid the brawl. The second man followed behind them, delivering a series of kicks to Malachi’s center. Pain shot through his ribs. He kept his arms up over his face and gritted his teeth through the beating. Ears were ringing. Dark spots grew across his vision. A beep in the back of his head warned him of serious bodily harm, and his augments started flooding his system with pain killers and adrenaline. Malachi began to move. He struck faster than his addled mind could process; felt every blow instead of seeing them. His knuckles split against bone, his forehead shattered a nose.
Malachi stood in the middle of the room. One man lay at his feet, the remains of a broken stool scattered over his back. A second was trapped under a pair of fallen tables. A third was crawling off the bar countertop, head clutched in his hand. The fourth- the man who started all this- was finally sitting back up.
“You’re done,” the wounded man spat blood as he laughed. “Daddy’s not around to protect you any more.”
“Right. I remember now.” Malachi looked down at him. “That’s what you said.”
Then Malachi hit him again.



The cocktail of alcohol, painkillers and head trauma kept Malachi in a barely conscious haze. One moment he was in the Platinum Asteroid, and the next he was sitting in a too-comfortable chair in a wood-paneled office. Wood. Actual, grown-on-planet-earth wood. Malachi blinked in surprise, his head swiveling around to take in his environment for the first time since being escorted in. The desk in front of him was large and ornate. A pair of bookshelves covered the back walls. They were filled with leather-bound tomes with the same golden lettering and incomprehensible titles. Genuine paper books were as foreign on the UFS Gilgamesh as the mahogany furniture.
“Mr. Armeade?” A rich, professional voice broke Malachi out of his fugue state. He finally noticed that someone else was sitting across from him. An older, pale man with salt and pepper hair and eyes filled with a cool judgment. He was wrapped in the white and blue dress uniform of an officer. The pin on his chest showed a bronze eagle clutching a silver chain in its talons, the symbol of the Judge Advocate corps. His perfectly fitted suit and handsome face would’ve been just as at home on a Federation recruitment poster.
Comparing the two, Malachi couldn’t have been more different. Where the man was white as bone Malachi was a dusky brown. Where his officer’s uniform was finely fitted and freshly pressed, Malachi’s flight suit was rumpled, and stained with blood and alcohol. Mal was adorned with a bevy of bruises, cuts and half-healed abrasions, as well as a pair of handcuffs locked around his wrists. The lawyer’s smile told Mal he hadn’t seen a scrap since basic, if even then.
“Yeah, no, what?” Malachi cleared the phlegm from his throat. “Uh, sir.”
“Allow me to repeat myself: your guilt is not in question. We pulled the footage from your neurodeck. Lieutenant Commander Jacobson, Mess Chief Brown and ensigns Garland, De Felice, and Procházka are all corroborating witnesses.” The navy lawyer pushed a stack of papers across the desk. They were dense with legalese that Malachi couldn’t have parsed if he was stone cold sober. But the seal of the admiralty board was plain as day on the top of the first page, and that was all the proof he needed to see: his fate was sealed.
Malachi shook his head slowly, so as to not disturb his throbbing head too much. “I don’t…hold on, he started this.”
“You assaulted a superior officer without cause.”
“He insulted my father.” Malachi mumbled halfheartedly. Truth be told he didn’t much care about that. He’d heard a thousand insults thrown his father’s way over the years, and he agreed with most of them.
Malachi’s father was Gideon Armeade. Admiral Gideon Armeade, to be precise- the head of Battlegroup Hyades and commander of the SUN Gilgamesh. He was among the senior members of the Admiral Board, the body responsible for administering the largest military force in human history, the Sol Union Navy. Few men had ever held as much power as Gideon Armeade. One doesn’t rise to such a position without earning a few enemies.
The lawyer nodded. “We are all grieving the passing of Admiral Armeade. I and the Admiralty Board understand what you’re going through, but this is no excuse for criminal violence. Given your history of past incidents, our investigation found that this was not an isolated incident. You have shown a pattern of anti-social, aggressive behavior and a flippant disregard for authority.”
“Okay, well, only two of those are true. I’m very social.” He snorted. “How much did you pay for all this, by the way?” He waved a hand around the room.
The edges of the lawyer’s mouth crept up his cheeks like a spider on its web. “You are being stripped of your rank of Second Lieutenant, Junior Grade, EOS-5, effective immediately. You’re facing up to ten years in the Ganymede Military Penitentiary unless you can pay the thirty-three million FSC fine for bodily damages.”
“Thirty-three million?” Malachi blinked. “You want thirteen million digits for a broken nose?”
Another piece of paper hit the top of the pile. This one had some grizzly photos attached. “If you want to go over the extensive injuries you caused to four of your fellow servicemen, we absolutely can.”
“They came at me!” He yelled. “After the first guy went down, I was done. It was their bright idea to hit me while my back was turned-”
“We aren’t re-litigating this case, Mr. Armeade. Your guilt is not in question.”
“I want a lawyer.”
“You waived your right to legal representation when you joined the armed forces. Union law does not require that we provide you with legal services beyond what I am carrying out today.” The man put down a third piece of paper, this one with Malachi’s sloppy signature at the bottom. It seemed like the suit was prepared for every eventuality.
“I don’t have those kinds of digits.” Malachi spread his hands in a shrug. “My aunt and uncle back on earth might, maybe. Or my mom, if you can find her and wring the money outta her.”
This time, it was a manilla folder that hit the growing pile. Malachi waited a few seconds for the lawyer to speak- he didn’t, this time- before opening it up. Inside he found a will written in Hindi in a familiar flowing script. The final wishes of Admiral Gideon Armeade, hero of the United Federation of Orion-Cygnus. Malachi wasn’t expecting much. His old man always wanted to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. ‘Nepotism is the enemy of excellence,’ he insisted. Mal couldn’t remember a day, an hour or a moment where Gideon Armeade treated him as a son rather than a subordinate. The only difference between Malachi and the other recruits was that Admiral Armeade expected his progeny to outclass everyone else.
From the day he was old enough for the neurodeck installation surgery, Malachi was running piloting sims. Even a single misstep would land him on bulkhead scrubbing duty. He was drilling with the other spacers before he was even old enough to enlist. Most kids who grew up in the fleet went to school, hung out in arcades or played baseball- Malachi played soldier.
And no matter how hard he committed to the work, it was never enough. He was always two steps behind the admiral’s personal standards. The only time they talked about their family was when his father wanted to compare Malachi to his cousins back in Mumbai: they were doctors, politicians, engineers, investors. What was he? A slow-witted brute who’d never amount to anything.
‘…To Sitara, the brightest star in the sky, I leave my estate in New Jerusalem and all its accompanying lands and holdings. I hope your children and your children’s children play in the same woods I once did, discovering the love for exploration that took me away from you all sixty years ago. I will also be transferring my various accounts to your name to do with as you wish. You will never want for anything again, provided you follow one request: tell the children I will be waiting for them in the Lord’s embrace.’
Bitter bile filled the back of Mal’s throat as he read. Everything was being left to his aunt Sitara and her family. She and his father had always been close, he knew. It shouldn’t have been surprising to know she was getting the dragon’s hoard the admiral had been building back on earth throughout his career. Somehow the truth of it wasn’t real until it was made clear through ink on a page.
‘This final segment will be addressed to my only son, Malachi Gideon Armeade. I request that it be read to him alone, as I refuse to shame a man before his family. You have been trouble since the day I had you. I am aware you haven’t had the fairest of upbringings: my work kept me from dodding on you as some fathers might, and your mother wanted nothing to do with you after our separation. Perhaps I could have done things differently to keep you from this path you’ve gone down. Alas, I cannot change the past, and as I have told you many times, apologies without action are worthless.’
The heat of anger filled Malachi’s chest like fuel tossed onto a raging fire. Only on his deathbed could the old man even hint at culpability for everything that happened to them. His fingers tightened around the folder, moments from tearing it to shreds. A final, pathetic act of defiance. Then his eyes slid down to the final paragraph.
‘Thus, I leave to you my greatest possession: Bucephalus. Though I have not ridden it into battle in some time, my technicians have maintained its readiness wonderfully. My exoframe will serve you well in your future career, and I have done my best to prepare you for the hard road ahead. I know I was not an easy teacher, but easy does not equate to good: my own mentor was a veritable cattle driver. It was only through the crucible of his leadership that I became the warrior I was in life. I hope you continue your studies as rigorously as before my death. You have been slipping as of late. Avoid the bottle, stop picking fights with worthless trash, and pursue greatness. Etch your name into the heavens alongside mine, Malachi. I love you, son.’
“He left me the mech.” He mumbled, eyes glazing over.
The Judge Advocate across from him gave Malachi a smile that never reached his eyes. “Indeed he did. Admiral Armeade’s exoframe is a legendary piece of equipment, I must say. He won more duels in that machine than most pilots will even fight. The admiralty board was most disappointed when he chose to retain ownership of Bucephalus when he retired rather than allowing it to remain in service. The Union could’ve made use of such a valuable…symbol. It still can, actually.”
This time, the lawyer handed Malachi a tablet rather than physical paper. On it was a simple form permitting transfer of ownership of the Bucephalus, a modified FFO-101 ‘Guardian’ developed by Polyhedron Manufacturing.
“What are you going to do with it? Put it in commercials?” Malachi rankled, the edge returning to his voice.
The lawyer shrugged. “That’s for the navy to decide. You only need to concern yourself with its monetary value: namely, by selling it to us, you’ll more than be able to afford your fine. You’ll have enough money to live comfortably for…twenty some years without putting in a day’s work. It's really quite a generous offer.”
Malachi leaned forward. “Go to hell.”

Meridian could’ve been a case study in everything wrong with the galactic frontier. Mapping surveys put it as one of the farthest inhabited systems in the Federation from earth; though calling it ‘inhabited’ was a stretch. Four planets revolve around Meridian, a fairly typical orange dwarf star. It wasn’t as large nor burned as hot as the Sun, but K-type stars like Meridian were of particular interest to the Office for Extrasolar Colonization, or OEC: K-types are incredibly stable, allowing ample time for life to develop on planets within their habitable zone.
Meridian III and Meridian IV were both life-bearing. Meridian III’s relatively closer proximity to the star meant it was hot year-round- summertime could be a deadly affair for an unprepared human. Above ground vegetation was limited to only the hardiest plantlife, and water could only be found underground or at the planet’s poles. A few decades of terraforming could’ve seen it flourish if given the chance.
A heavy industrial mining conglomerate called Vanderwick-Kriegwald-Stalgard Industries, or VKS, stamped out that possibility when they purchased the property rights for the planet. They deployed a machine fleet controlled by a replicant mind to strip Meridian III of all viable resources. Corporate owners forbade human colonization as the world was slated for ‘total extraction’: in a few hundred years the planet would be gone.They were turning it into metal bars, fuel canisters, condensed gems and transitory biomass. It was an ungodly amount of wealth, and all it cost was one measly little world.
Meridian IV was thankfully spared such a fate, though its prospects weren’t much better. It was an ocean world with a single, massive continent and several island chains. The ecology was as variable and diverse as earth’s Cretaceous period. Megafauna was abundant; from the plodding, walking fortresses of the Phalanx tortoises to the Drakes: massive, reptilian apex predators with a surprising resemblance to mythological depictions of dragons. VKS had a pending purchase order for this planet as well, intending to sublease it to various research groups and entertainment companies.
If the OEC had its way this never would have happened. Their department had been pushing for habitable worlds to be excluded from global private ownership for centuries now. They pointed to the overpopulation of Earth, Mars,Thedes and Tiāntáng as proof that humanity needed to settle new worlds. If another galactic conflict like the Unification War kicked off, concentrating all of mankind’s resources on a handful of planets could mean apocalyptic results if people started dropping rocks.
Unfortunately for the OEC, VKS wasn’t an earth based company. It was Thedian. Therefore it was not beholden to Union governance, and the Federation wasn’t about to pass legislation regarding colonization policy or ecological preservation that pissed off the Thedes Empire, a security council member.
Artemis Corrigan wasn’t some Coreworld hippie or Union hardliner, but she still recognized the soundness in their arguments. It also didn’t surprise her that the institution’s warnings went unabated. The Federation General Assembly wasn’t exactly famed for its decisive action. They would debate the issue, of course. There would be studies, surveys, and hearings. If things got really serious they may even open a commission. A commission to make ‘serious inquiry’ into their claims, whose findings would be treated with all the weight of a single hydrogen particle.
It was the same song and dance they did with everything before going back to business as usual. That was why she’d always avoided government work. Better to work for herself and make her own decisions, flying free.
Artemis guided the Vox Fortuna through the final stages of waygate transference. If someone were watching her ship out of a window, they wouldn’t see much: the waygate’s interior ring was spinning at a measurable fraction of lightspeed while the exterior ring rotated in the opposite direction far slower. In the center of the structure was empty space. There was no colorful portal like in the cartoons grade school teachers showed their classes to explain interstellar travel. There was, perhaps, a barely perceptible distortion of spacetime inside the ring, like the small black dots you got in your eyes when you stared at the sun too long. That distortion was the only visual indicator of the wormhole opened inside the waygate, connecting this gate to an identical one somewhere else in the galaxy. This one was only a single system away, in Beta Yucatan.
When a ship equipped for faster than light travel approached a waygate and keyed its activation code, the gate would funnel a considerable amount of power into forming a two way wormhole connecting the pair of waygates together. By traveling through the waygates, transit time across lightyears was cut down exponentially: a journey that would’ve taken centuries using traditional thrusters could instead be undertaken in months, weeks or even days.
Vox Fortuna crawled through that break in spacetime, its aged hull creaking beneath the stress of FTL travel. Fortuna was a venerable old girl. In a just galaxy, she should’ve been retired and living out her days on the tropical beaches of Elysium. Even a scrapyard would’ve been more appropriate, though it pained Artemis to think about.
Fortuna had a narrow fuselage and four wings mounted near its rear in an ‘X’ formation. Each wing ended in an engine nearly a quarter the length and width of the main body. These engines were Waldetoft/Johannsson 99s, nicknamed ‘Screamers’ by the engineers that worked on them. They were top of the line thirty years ago, able to accelerate a ship of the Fortuna’s mass to a considerable percentage of the speed of light. Compared to the stuff coming off the line today, though, they were children’s toys. Modern engines could hit a ninety-nine point an-absurd-number-of-nines percentile of lightspeed. It was like comparing a Ford Model T to a fighter jet.
The engines- and the fusion reactor that powered them- were the best parts of the ship. Everything else was even older. The laser comms were unreliable, seemingly burning out a conduit every other day. Mold had to be cleaned out of the life support system last week. Whenever someone flushed a toilet the lights in the maintenance corridor would flicker for Saint knows what reason. If the whole ship exploded and shunted the crew out into space Artemis would only be mildly shocked- and annoyed that it had waited until they were nearly at the job site to do so.
She flicked a switch on the portion of her dashboard labeled ‘INTERCOM’ in brightly colored tap. The original label had been worn down to nothing over the years and this was her solution until they made it back to port to get the panel refurbished. “Captain Corrigan to crew, we’ve officially arrived in the Meridian system. Making our way to rendezvous with our employer’s vessel now. Should still be two to three weeks until mission is a go but I want the exoframes ready to launch pronto. No telling what’ll happen out here in the ass end of space.”
The Fortuna was a frigate, the smallest category of ship capable of independent long-haul space travel. And even for a frigate it was lightly crewed at the moment with only thirty-eight souls aboard. Thirty eight of the craziest, most desperate hired guns in the galaxy.
Artemis would kill for a real crew, if only she could afford it.
Flicking the same switch down to turn off the intercom, she shifted to private comms and phoned Lieutenant Landaris. “Rem, get up to the bridge. I’ll need your help locating our friends- their transponders are dark.”
After a few moments of static a voice came through: “You got it, cap. Be there in a jiff.” Rem Landaris replied, chipper as always. She spoke from the back of her throat, modulating her voice with a sprinkling of vocal fry that was either obnoxious or endearing, depending on if she was on Artemis’s good side or not.
The elevator to the bridge declared Rem’s arrival with a loud ding. Artemis was the only other person there, the other three station chairs left absent. The crew had suffered losses in the last few months that they were still trying to make up for.
Rem bounced up to the captain’s chair without a care in the world, leaning up against the back and getting directly into Artemis’s bubble before she had a chance to protest.
Rem was exceedingly young given her occupation, still a few years shy of thirty, but she was still two heads taller than her captain. She was thin and wiry, lacking even an ounce of unwanted body fat or visible muscles. Artemis wasn’t sure if that was intentionally deceptive or just an aesthetic choice: Rem Landaris was strong enough to toss a thousand pound steel girder over her shoulder and could carry it around with ease. She had more cybernetics than half the ship’s computers, and most of her meat and bones were grown in a lab.
‘I bet if I cut her up and sold her for parts I could buy a whole new damned ship,’ Artemis mused.
“So you’re having trouble finding our boss?” Rem asked, getting up off the back of the chair long enough to put up her hair with a thick headband. Her hair was a medium-length stark white. One would’ve assumed it was dyed, given her age, but Artemis had never seen it any other color. More modification, she assumed. Probably the same mods that let her grow sideburns thicker than most of the men on the crew.
Artemis shook her head. She’d never understand kids.
“They aren’t transmitting their location, even on encrypted channels. I have their last known position from when they sent us the contract but that was over a month ago. They could have drifted half a million miles since then.” She pulled the information from her neurodeck and tossed it into the main screen so Rem could pick through it. The other woman finally slipped away from Artemis’s chair and went to take the co-pilot’s seat, pulling a plug from the ship console and attaching it to the port at the base of her neck.
That was fairly typical tech, especially for people like the two of them. Being able to directly interface their brains with other computers allowed for incredible processing speed. Rem was picking through the data at the speed of cognition, her eyes glazing over as she stared straight ahead. For all Landaris’s faults, Artemis could never deny her expertise.
“I’ve got it,” Rem announced with a toothy grin. She tapped the coordinates into the flight computer and allowed the ship to begin turning towards the heliosphere, pointing their nose away from the star and out into the Oort cloud surrounding the star system. “They were transmitting a low-power laser in the waygate’s direction to guide us. Guess our sensors are so borked they missed it on our way in. Buuut I caught sight of it through a backscatter on some space dust and traced its location to a thousand AU from Meridian. Then I had to adjust for the roughly eleven day lightspeed lag at that distance and their likely drift trajectory, anddd…presto. There’s your ship.”
Artemis smiled, trying not to look too impressed. No point in stroking the specialist’s already gargantuan ego.
“Let’s let ‘em know we’re here. Deploying WARBLE.” Artemis clicked a few buttons and there was a lurch as the ship launched a comms beacon out behind them. It would take half an hour to connect to the waygate network but afterward it would allow the Fortuna instant communication with any other WARBLE-enabled ship or station in the system. She knew the beacon’s name was some stupid acronym the OEC had cooked up in the early days of human expansion, but she’d let it slip from her mind years and years ago. Wasn’t worth the brain matter it occupied. All she knew was it used miniaturized versions of waygate tech to connect with other beacons in the system, allowing FTL communication in a limited capacity. Still couldn’t do pangalactic video calls.
After ensuring encryption protocols were in place, Artemis fired out a transmission in the direction of their patron’s ship. That broadcast declared their Federation ship registration I.D code, the two hundred and seventy two digit passphrase listed in their contract and a request to dock.
A return message came back in moments: “This is the SUN Gilgamesh to Vox Fortuna. Message received. I.D confirmed. Sending you a rendezvous point and an ETA. Vice Admiral Song is eager to meet with you.”

The Fortuna docked with the Gilgamesh fourteen days later, local time, in the shadow of a moon orbiting Meridian III. The Gilgamesh was an utter monster of a star ship. It was over six kilometers long and boasted a complement of ten thousand crewmen. If Artemis remembered the data packet right, the ship was a Veritas-class battlecarrier- a capital ship equipped with a hangar large enough to ferry a small fleet in its berth. But it wasn’t a dedicated carrier, no. Gilgamesh also had enough weapons to slag a moon. Hence, battlecarrier.
Artemis didn’t know what you were supposed to wear to meet with a vice admiral. She hadn’t gone to a formal event in…decades, really. She’d lost all the ‘polite society’ training of her youth on Praxopero; burned it out of her head with a blowtorch after fifty years as a spacer mercenary.
Hell, it probably wasn’t worth worrying about because she didn’t own anything worth wearing to such a meeting. So instead she ironed out her flight suit and tossed a leather jacket over the top to cover the less-than-professional combat patches. The dark green of the flight suit used to pair well with her hair when it was still mostly red. Now it was a frizzy mass of gray.
She had to leave her sidearm back on the ship, naturally. Gilgamesh was a Union Navy vessel and civilians carrying weapons through its corridors would have raised some alarms.
Artemis was escorted up to Vice Admiral Song’s office in the command tower, just one stop below the bridge. Rem was only a few steps behind her. Artemis had invited her to attend knowing she and Rem would be the proverbial ‘boots on the ground’ for this OP. It was only right she was appraised of the full tactical situation.
Though she’d never admit it, Artemis was also apprehensive to go alone.
Their marine escorts posted themselves up on either side of the vice admiral’s door and gestured for the two to enter. Artemis led the way through the automatic pneumatic doors. The office was spacious, especially for something on a warship. Electronic photo frames on the walls cycled through paintings. They seemed to be historical in nature, made in the same ‘classical’ style and played in chronological order. There was the sack of Rome, signing of the magna carta, surrender of the Nazis and the founding of the United Nations.
That was all ancient history. More recent was the launching of the first AI-pilot wayfinder probes, which made humanity’s expansion into the stars a viable strategy instead of science fiction.There was also the unveiling of the first exoframe: it was a rather underwhelming piece of machinery compared to the gods of war that modern exoframes were, but for its time? It must’ve been awe-inspiring. Over two stories tall and walking on legs, upright like a man instead of treading along the ground like its predecessor, the main battle tank.
Then there was the Unification War. That had its own series of paintings instead of just being one snapshot in time. It made sense, given it was the most devastating loss of life humanity had ever suffered as a species. And it was only a few generations ago. Artemis’s own grandfather had fought in the Unification War. She vividly remembered his funeral, when they lowered his coffin into the dirt, draped in the wrong flag: not the blue, white and gold of the Federation, but the red and black star and crossed swords of Thedes. That flag had killed a hundred million of her fellow countrymen. It made a chill creep up her spine just to see it again.
“Welcome.” Vice Admiral Song called from behind his sleek, steel desk, pulling her away from the past and back into the present.
“It's nice to finally meet you, sir.” Artemis smiled, trying to make it smooth and natural. She felt like she was failing. But if her expression reflected at all how she felt inside, Song didn’t react to it. He maintained a professional neutrality one could only expect from a man of his position. “I am Captain Artemis Corrigan of the Vox Fortuna, as you know. And this is Lieutenant Rem Landaris. She'll be my backup planetside.”
Song looked between the two of them for several long moments before glancing away to stare into open space. It was a telltale sign that he was accessing information on his neurodeck. To him, he’d be looking at words and images scrolling across his vision- similar to a pilot’s Heads Up Display.
“Your records indicated you had four total exoframes on your roster. I took this into account when I hired you for this mission.” Song turned his eyes pointedly back toward Artemis.
She held his gaze. “We decided to part ways with our other two pilots over operational differences. Landaris and I are more than capable of completing the task you laid out for us.”
As she spoke, Artemis began to dig through the back of her mind for the mission file she’d received from Gilgamesh several months prior. It wasn’t the typical open security contract she was used to. Song had sought her out specifically, likely thanks to a recommendation from one of his subordinates. There were thousands of other private security companies in the galaxy just like hers. Most had more manpower, money and resources than her people. She truthfully had no idea why Vox Fortuna was the admiral’s first choice.
The contract was for a single operation, maximum risk with no outside assistance from the Gilgamesh or any other Union fleet assets. They were headed down to Meridian III to destroy the replicant machine mind codenamed ‘Oliver.’ Artemis assumed there was some kind of dispute between Union authorities and the megacorp, VKS, behind the mind. And those authorities weren’t intent on waiting for approval to act from the glacial organs of an intergovernmental organization like the Federation.
All proof of Song’s involvement was to be destroyed before Artemis’s team launched. As far as the outside world was concerned, an unknown strike force had hit the planet and fled the scene before the local Federation fleet could apprehend them.
“The target, Oliver, is forbidden from weapons production and has no known combat experience. His force consists entirely of mining drones, cargo ships and survey equipment. And you provided us with highly details scans of the Meridian III complex, so navigating our way to his central matrix should be trivial.” Artemis said.
“Do not underestimate your enemy,” Admiral Song warned. “Replicants are not AI. They are not bound by their programming to follow galactic laws and regulation. If VKS anticipated attempts at sabotage they may have instructed the replicant to waive legal responsibilities and prepare defensive measures. It is highly unlikely Oliver knows you are coming, but do not proceed with undue confidence.”
Artemis grimaced. She was more aware than most of what the bastards at Vanderwick, Kriegwald and Stalgard Industries were capable of. This was a chance to deal some much needed damage to those soulless corpo liches.
For the first time since they came in, Rem spoke up. “Why’re we doing this? Why does a single replicant on a frontier world matter to the Union?”
Song held Artemis’s gaze while Rem spoke, dark clouds swirling behind his eyes. His answer didn’t come for several minutes, and Artemis was surprised he answered at all: “We recently lost contact with the frigate Meshuda. Meridian III was its last known destination. It is my belief that this replicant perceived Meshuda’s presence as a threat and captured or destroyed it.”
“So we’re hashing out revenge on Oliver for potentially killing your missing ship?” Rem asked, eyebrows raised. The corners of her lips curled in a venomous smile.
The storm in Song’s eyes grew into a maelstrom, yet his voice remained steady. “VKS has blocked all our official inquiries. Thedes is stonewalling an official investigation. So we are going to tear the truth out of its memory core ourselves. Justice does not wait for fascists dragging their feet on cooperation.”
Artemis couldn’t tell whether Rem was pleased by his answer or just the fact that she got one out of him. Either way, she changed the line of questioning quickly. “I know you guys can’t help us out directly with orbital bombardment or troops or anything like that. Nothing that can be traced back to the navy. But there’s got to be something you can offer to help us before we launch, right?” She shrugged. “All of us want this to go as smoothly as possible. Maybe you could slip us a nuke or two,” she joked.
“That isn’t necessary. I told you we could handle this on our own and I meant it.” Artemis shot Rem a look, hoping the other woman read the ‘shut up’ she was trying to psychically convey. Rem was rather pointedly refusing to make eye contact.
Song leaned back in his chair, holding his chin in his hands as he thought it over. “It is not an unreasonable request. I believe I actually can offer you some assistance. There is a problem that I need to get off my ship before we return to the main battlegroup, and I think it will be of some use to you…if you do not mind occasionally faulty equipment.”
“Oh,” Artemis blinked. “What is it?”

This was the first time Malachi had been outside of his cell in three months. It hadn’t felt so long to him because he’d only been conscious for the last fifteen minutes. Before that, he remembered lying down in a cryo pod in a small, poorly lit room filled with other pods. He remembered the dark, and the cold, and the clutching fear in his chest as he slipped into sleep. They had thrown him into the brig many times over the years. Those were short term visits while his superior officers determined how to reprimand him for drunkenness, disorderly behavior, brawling- the list went on. The Gilgamesh was not a penitentiary ship, so it was not equipped for long term transport of convicts. The cryo pods kept unruly prisoners controlled, and removed the need to provide them with food, socialization and all the other things a person needs not to lose their damned minds in a tiny box.
“M-my eyes hurt,” he slurred. A marine had him under arm and was leading him down the ship’s winding corridors. Malachi stumbled along beside him, blinking excessively. Every inch of him burned as his body thawed. The cold dug into his bones, his muscles, even his corneas. He mumbled a series of curses as feeling slowly returned to his extremities.
The marine shoved him into a metal chair and stepped away. Malachi adjusted, glancing around the room. They were in a large room filled with separate tables all bolted to the floor. Lights hung from the low ceiling, burning too brightly for his liking.
Sitting across from him were two women he didn’t recognize, and standing just behind them was Vice Admiral Song Chung-Ho.
One of the women was short, barely five feet tall, and remarkably old. Malachi couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a genuinely old-looking person; anti-aging tech was widely available to anyone with a few digits to their name. But she had long, frizzy hair the color of a stormy sky and wrinkles deep as canyons. She had the dress and demeanor of a soldier.
The other was taller than him, possibly breaching six and a half feet. She was thin without a hint of frailty. He could tell she was augmented by the shape and blue-white coloration of her veins. His neurodeck detected what he was looking at and ran a scan on her. It came back with an approximate list of her cybernetics that made his eyes bulge. ‘She could fist fight a marine in power armor and come out on top.’
And unlike her uniformed companion, the tall woman was wearing a rather dashing pair of black slacks and a vest. She seemed to have noticed Malachi was observing her and raised a questioning brow in response. He felt his cheeks flush and quickly grinned.
“Who are you people supposed to be?”
“Your only way out of here. So I’d watch my manners, smart guy.” The tall woman showed her teeth in what could’ve been a smile or a snarl; maybe both. “This is Captain Corrigan, your new boss.”
The one called Captain Corrigan raised a hand to stop her subordinate. “Enough, Rem.” She looked back to Malachi with a discerning eye, examining him as closely as he had them. It was hard to tell what she was thinking, her face as stony as Olympus Mons. “Let’s see how this goes first before we make any promises. What’s your name?”
“Malachi.” He cocked his head. “I assume he already told you that,” he motioned with his chin toward the vice admiral. Song responded only with a disapproving click of his tongue.
“We heard you were in some trouble, Malachi. They’re shipping you off to Ganymede.”
“Heard a rumor they were going to drop you into a dark hole and lose the key,” Rem chortled.
Malachi’s face contorted. They had dragged him out of his nice, cozy coffin to give him shit over this again? “I already told you bastards you’re not getting my mech. If you don’t have anything else then put me back on ice already. Tired of this.”
Artemis put her hands together on the table between them, patient as a tree. “We aren’t here from the military, Malachi. We aren’t here for your exoframe- we’re here for you.” She tapped her temple and then swiped a finger through open air. Following the gesture there was a ping in Malachi’s neurodeck as he received a new file.
A work release. Payment plans for all those fines that the lawyer had heaped onto his lap. Pages and pages of legal jargon about waiving risks, health benefits, union dues, retirement. “You offerin’ me a job, captain?” Malachi gave her a perplexed look.
She nodded. “I came to an agreement with Vice Admiral Song. You will be joining the crew of Vox Fortuna for the next five years. I’ll front the first five hundred thousand FSCs and you will work to pay off the remainder of your debt, no interest. I expect you to pay me back as well, in time.”
Malachi blinked, scoffing. “And why would you do that?” That was a hell of a lot of money to drop for a complete stranger’s benefit.
“I’ve been hired to do a job and I need the extra manpower. High risk. You’ll get a debrief packet once you’re on board. On top of that, you get a spot on my crew, a bay for your exoframe, and a bed to sleep in. You’ll need to pay all expenses for your own frame including repairs, ammunition replenishment and any upgrades you want to make. Contracts are divvied up based on participation with bonuses for going above and beyond. Any loot you find on the battlefield is yours to keep. How’s that sound?”
He paused, considering. It sounded good. Maybe too good to be true, considering what was originally supposed to happen to him. Why would fleet command go from trying to seize his property and throw him into jail to letting him off with a slap on the wrist? There was something else going on here that he couldn’t see. That made him nervous.
Malachi swallowed hard. He did not know Vice Admiral Song well. The man was Admiral Armeade’s direct subordinate, and had been for close to three decades. Friendship was probably too strong a word to describe their relationship, but…
“So I get to keep Bucephalus?”
Song shook his head. “It will remain in naval possession as collateral. Once you have paid off your debts it will be released to you.”
“We’re getting you a replacement,” Artemis added quickly.
“Hell no,” Malachi knew this was too good to be true. “You’re just goin’ to claim I broke some hidden clause in the contract n’ seize it. Even if it's bullshit you’ll hide behind an army of lawyers until I’m too broke to fight for what’s mine.” He was angry, now. His blood was running hotter than plasma.
Artemis reached a hand across the table and touched his arm. “The contract’s solid steel, Malachi. I looked it over myself.”
“I don’t know you.” Malachi bristled, though he did not pull away from her touch.
“I’ve done this hundreds of times. For decades, I’ve been trading prison contracts with a dozen different nations: Union, Thedes, North Star League. All of ‘em. I know what it looks like when someone’s trying to screw you, and this isn’t it.”
The other woman, Rem, leaned in now. “Just about the whole Fortuna crew came from a place like this. I met her in a Martian police interrogation room after I’d been busted for, uh…” She glanced over her shoulder at the vice admiral. “Never mind what. Point is, I thought I was done and dusted before Artemis came strolling in. She offered me the same second chance she’s giving you now, and if you aren’t a total moron, you’ll take it. Nobody deserves to languish behind bars. Nobody.”
Malachi sighed, turning his head toward the ceiling.
“Screw it. Let’s do it.”

There wasn’t any time for Malachi to get comfortable aboard his new ship. As soon as his boots hit the deck he was being ushered to move his ass. Someone took his bags to his bunk for him as an officer led him to the hangar bay where his exoframe was already being readied for combat. Artemis was intent on launching her operation as soon as possible to maintain the element of surprise, and Fortuna was in an uproar trying to meet her demands.
“Scuse me, are you, uh, Texas?” Malachi tapped a man on the shoulder. He was a short, chubby man in a greasy jumpsuit, a cowboy hat on his head and a droopy mustache covering his mouth. The man they called Texas Danger was shouting orders at his team of mechanics as they scrambled to load ammunition into oversized weapons, top off fuel gauges and make final maintenance checks.
“No,” The man they called Texas Danger growled. “I am not ‘Texas.’ It’s these varmints that went’n decided that fer me. My real name’s-”
As the crew chief started to give him name, he was drowned out by a cacophony of catcalls, boos and incoherent yelling.
A passing mechanic slammed a hand against Malachi’s lower back so hard he nearly fell over. “Didn’t we tell ya? Our chief’s Texas Danger, and that’s the only name he’ll ever need.” She cackled.
Malachi didn’t know how to respond, so he gave the chief an awkward grin and moved on to a different topic. “So how’s the exoframe look to you? Everything in working order?”
Texas Danger nodded emphatically, reaching into his breast pocket to pull out a handkerchief and wipe his hands. “That’s a mighty fine mech ya get there, son. Real old school beaut. She’ll need some new parts once we hit port if ya want to keep her runnin’ long term, but she’s good to go fer now.”
The two crossed the busy hangar over to where Malachi’s new exoframe stood. A pair of grease monkeys were lowering drums of ammunition into the mech’s massive backpack using a small crane, while a third was spray painting something on the upper right side of the torso. As Malachi grew closer he could make out a pair of dice clenched in the teeth of a burning skull. The artist wrote out ‘GAMBLER-3’ in big, blocky letters. A glance to the other two exoframes in the bay told him they all bore similar tags.
“A physical unit tag? With actual paint?” He asked Texas, shoving a thumb back at the painter.
Texas nodded. “Ye-up. Ain’t just a unit tag, though. That there paint has a special IR signature that let’s ya identify yer squaddies in battle. Keeps friendly fire to a minimum.”
“You don’t have a real time IFF database?” Malachi blinked. Union exoframes came with state of the art IFF- or Identification of Friend or Foe- transponders that allowed allied pilots to track one another’s movements across the entire battlefield in real time, usually with the assistance of a ship in orbit.
“Used to,” Texas chewed on his lower lip as he spoke, “before it got repo’d a few months back. Weren’t makin’ our payments to the manufacturer in time and they sent a retrieval team to take it. Those sonsabitches had more firepower than we did.”
Malachi nodded. He didn’t have much experience dealing with megacorps, but he’d heard plenty of horror stories. The agencies responsible for auditing bad behavior by corporations tended to concentrate their efforts in populated space, like the coreworlds. Out here on the frontier, though, whoever had the biggest gun was the law. And corpos could afford some damn big guns.
Maybe that was why the Gilgamesh had been deployed out here. Maybe the Federation was finally cracking down on the rich bastards running ramshod over the settlers on the outer rim. It was about time.
“Oughtta mount up now n’ make sure everything looks good ‘ta ya,” Texas suggested. “We’ll be droppin’ ya’ll any minute now.”
“Tell me about her,” he asked as he took hold of the bottom rung of the ladder. The climb up to the cockpit was an unfamiliar one. On his old exoframe, Malachi could close his eyes and find all the handholds just by memory. This wasn’t so easy. The distance between rungs felt awkward, like his limbs were too gangly or the ladder was too compact. He struggled to climb around to the exoframe’s right side where a biometric scanner checked his finger print before popping the hatch. It denied him entry, forcing him to input his security codes.
“Her name’s Ulysses. She’s an M-11 Grunt out of Europa. Saw plenty of action with us: ran twenty-eight flight missions over eight years, has sixteen confirmed exo kills. Her reactor’s older and the maneuvering thruster on the left leg is finicky. I’m sure she don’t look like much to one’a the navy’s flying aces but she’s a real workhorse. Saved the team plenty o’ times.”
“What happened to the pilot? That elusive seventeenth get him?” He yelled down, finally popping open up the cockpit. The lights flickered on, revealing a cramped interior.
Unlike many other vehicles, the cockpit of the Ulysses had few physical switches or panels. There was a seat with flight sticks and control pedals, and a long, segmented device mounted on the ceiling. The latter was how Armeade had trained to pilot. Flight sticks were a rudimentary tool for the incapable or the desperate. Malachi closed the door behind him and reached up to the mount, dragging the device down to examine it.
The neurospike was a wicked looking thing: long, segmented and ending in a sharp point, like a scorpion’s tail.
A pair of speakers on the chair’s headrest crackled to life. “Test, test.” Texas Danger spoke. Malachi could see him handling a small microphone on the ground under the exoframe. “Wasn’t combat that got Jazz. It was brain death. Cerebral fluid leaking out of his neuro implant in small enough quantities that nobody ever noticed. One day he just…didn’t get out of his bunk.”
“Oh, lovely.” Malachi ran his finger over the spike’s metal body, carefully inspecting it for any rust or other signs of wear. Even a single chip in its needle-thin tip could cause brain bleed, aneurysms, or a host of other problems. He felt a tinge of guilt knowing he was taking the property of a dead man. A soldier that didn’t even have the good fortune to die in battle.
“We replaced it, don’t you worry.”
Once Malachi was sure it was immaculate, he snaked the device over his shoulder and positioned it just at the base of his neck. That was with his neurodeck port was installed: a metal ring grafted onto his spine, its internal structure woven together with his cervical spinal nerves. He pushed the spike into the port until he felt a rush of pain and adrenaline.
Malachi lost all connection to his body’s sensory organs. No sight, smell, feeling- nothing. His muscles stiffened, frozen in place so he couldn’t accidentally harm himself. Only an override for manual controls would free him to move again.
Inside the cockpit, a sickly green fluid flooded in from grates in the floor. It filled the chamber to the top, rushing into Malachi’s nose, mouth and ears, though he only knew so intellectually; there was no sensation of drowning. The fluid would harden into a breathable, shock absorbent gel that protected the pilot inside. Unless the cockpit was breached during combat, Malachi would be perfectly safe.
He opened his second set of eyes.
The cameras mounted on Ulysses’s exterior blinked on, and through them Malachi absorbed his surroundings. A moment’s vertigo passed over him as he adjusted to his new height. At over two stories tall, he towered over the humans rushing around the hangar bay all around him. There were a few crawling over his body like little ants, securing equipment to his belt and checking his autorifle’s functionality for him.
Malachi flexed his iron fingers. All five digits on either hand worked fine. He took a step in place with his left foot, then his right. His exoframe had been modified a few years back to match his proportions. It was difficult to overstate the importance of preventing body dysphoria in pilots. An exoframe with six limbs or three hundred and sixty degree vision may sound advantageous, at first, but finding someone who was able to actually pilot the thing was another matter: human beings just can’t understand certain body shapes. They’ll quickly be overcome by anxiety, depression, or any number of other traumatic conditions that are hard as all hell to come back from.
“Feels good to be back,” Malachi spoke aloud, dimly aware that the feeling of lips moving and air leaving his mouth was only false feedback created by his neurodeck to keep him from losing his mind. In actuality his voice was projecting from a speaker inlaid into the exoframe’s head.
“Surprised you even figured out how to turn her on,” Rem Landaris called from across the hangar, her voice tinged with mechanical distortion.
Another exoframe came stalking into voice. It was lower to the ground than Ulysses, longer. And it walked on all fours. Instead of steel fingers it had claws. The cockpit was a long snout, the antennae triangular ears. Teeth. It was an exoframe with teeth. Every other machine he’d ever seen was a man of iron; this was a monster, steely and alien.
“Landaris?” Malachi was bewildered. “What is that?”
“Varghast. The Direwolf.”
“Is it an exoframe?” He began to pace around it, fascinated. Ten feet tall to the shoulders, thirty to thirty five tons- a light reconnaissance frame. Visible armament included a back mounted cannon and two missile pods. Malachi’s computer fed him the Varghast’s exact specifications a moment later. Lone Star Heavy Pulse Cannon model 144. Effective range of seventeen hundred meters. Capable of liquifying titanium in fifteen seconds.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he admitted.
“That’s because there isn’t anything like it.” The beast turned, almost prancing as they spoke. “I built it myself. Dr. Kushner and the Metrovex Institute designed a number of multi-limb frames in a similar vein but they never resolved the neurological impairments. I designed a chip that’s inserted into the sella turica to regulate corticotropin output during dysmorphia episodes brought on by incongruent-”
“You- what? You designed your own exoframe? And you pilot it?” That was absurd. She must’ve been exaggerating. Engineering these massive, complex war machines was a lifelong endeavor, not a weekend hobby.
The mechanized wolf seemed to shrug in response. “Was a mechanical engineer before I ended up here. Wasn’t exactly an intentional career move, you understand.”
Malachi nodded as if he understood. He did not.
Loud alarms and a klaxon sounded, dragging his attention away from the conversation. The deck crew ushered him and Rem out of the hanger and toward the drop bays at the back of the hanger. Each bay was set in a divet in the floor, where a bullet-shaped coffin large enough to fit a giant awaited. There were eight such bays set along the length of the far wall, the ones on the right larger and deeper than those on the left. Half a dozen mechanics moved between consoles in front of each drop bay, running diagnostics up until the last moment before the assault.
There was a chaotic, electric sort of excitement to it all. Malachi had only experienced live combat a handful of times before. Each time before this he had been one pilot among hundreds, shielded from danger by the power of overwhelming odds. This time there was no galaxy-spanning navy at his back; no battalion of support staff to lift him up if he faltered. It was just him and a scattering of former convicts, rejects, misfits; he felt like a circus acrobat about to perform their routine without a safety net.
It was intoxicating.
“All units to launch positions. Repeat, all units to launch positions.” Someone called over an ancient intercom system. Numbers lit up beneath three of the drop bays, and he lumbered his way over to one marked ‘three.
Malachi turned his thoughts to Rem, wishing he could speak with her, and his neurodeck complied. An audio waveform manifested in the lower left hand side of his peripheral vision. A small, spinning circle told him it was ‘connecting’ to Varghast - Remus Augustus Landaris, 1st Lt.
The line clicked after twenty seconds and she answered. “Everything okay, new guy? Ya nervous?” She teased.
“Please, I was running drop drills when most kids were scribbling in coloring books,” he scoffed. “No, no. I was just wondering where the captain is. I thought she was headed down with us.”
“She is,” Rem confirmed. “She likes to get to the drop pod early. Has some kinda pre-deployment ritual she likes to run through.”
That was interesting. He’d known a few pilots like that. Some wanted time alone in their cockpit for prayer; making peace with the universe or a deity or what have you. Others thought they could avoid a stray round by performing ‘rituals’ for lady luck. It was all the same superstitious bullshit to him.
“What do you think she’s doing?”
“No clue. Arty doesn’t like to talk about herself.”
“Sorry, do you call your captain Arty?” Malachi blew raspberries. Disrespecting a superior officer like that would’ve gotten him a night in the brig. Or at the very least a few miles around Gilgamesh’s running track.
“Course I do! Everybody needs a nickname. There’s Arty, Texas…Not sure what I’m gonna call you, though.”
Ulysses and Varghast descended beside each other into their pods. Mechanical arms locked themselves around Ulysses, ensuring his stillness during the fall. Comms cut out a few seconds after the ceiling enclosed itself above Malachi. Darkness shrouded the chamber. The only light came from inside his eyes: crimson numbers counting down the time to zero hour. He could hear the dull roar of his engine cycling. MAL-176 burning in his veins like infernal blood. Ulysses’s hands were his hands. The REN-85 macrorifle he was holding had an assuring sort of heaviness; a promise of reliability, a friend who would stand by his side no matter the opposition.
The numbers ticked down until four, bloodied eyes stared back at Malachi.
Gravity took him into its hands and tossed him into Meridian III’s atmosphere. Thrusters fired atop the pod, accelerating him even further.
He was a rock picked up by God and hurled at His enemies in righteous anger.
The fall took eight minutes.
Interia tore at his flesh and bone inside the iron womb of Ulysses. Dampening fluid could only do so much. Some tiny tingles of sensations peaked through the neurospike. The pod’s armored plating groaned under the immense pressure of reentry. Darkness was abated by the white hot glow of metal beneath Ulysses. Once a layer of plating grew too hot to sustain itself, tiny explosives in the screws went off, throwing that plate away into the void of space. Three layers were shed in the minutes before impact.
Anxious in his waiting, Malachi called forth a map of their approximate landing zone. Simulations of their three pods hitting the dirt played in a loop. Hitting a particular spot with dead on accuracy from orbit was almost impossible. A planet wasn’t a stationary object; it was rotating, and so were the drop pods and the Fortuna above them. There was a mile and a half radius of expected drift from the landing site. Imaging from the ship’s sensors made the area out to be sparsely populated and less than twenty miles from their objective: a gargantuan hole burrowed into the ground. There were endless miles of tunnels running below the surface, likely even into the crust of the planet. Millions of drones were tearing up rock and dirt to extract precious materials of all sorts to be bought and sold on a far away world. According to the mission docket, said drones were of little threat in combat.
The drop pod exploded five thousand feet in the air.
A rush of fire, smoke and light blinded Malachi as he found himself suddenly plummeting through the sky.
“Shit!” He called, his voice lost through the cacophony of flak rounds tearing through the air around him. His sensors screeched warning after warning. A missile was inbound on his exoframe, ETA, ten seconds. Malachi slammed a fist into the thigh of his frame, and a burst of flares flew out behind him. The missile careened away, and he took the time he had to fire off his own thrusters. Needed to get clear of the missile’s radius. A frame like Ulysses wasn’t meant for flying inside an atmosphere. It didn’t have the equipment for it. Its thrusters were meant for rapid maneuvering on the ground, or in a Zero-G environment where even a small burst could send a giant like him soaring. Now he could only hope his tiny, inadequate rockets could guide him into falling the right way.
The missile detonated behind him. A shockwave followed that knocked Ulysses’s legs out from under her, causing him to spin worthlessly in the air. He cut his thrust as soon as he could, but the change in direction was too abrupt. His tenuous control over the situation slipped between his fingers as he plummeted into the ground.
He impacted hard. Rock and earth were sent flying in every direction as Ulysses cut a trench four hundred feet long through the ground as he skipped like a stone on a pond. His neurodeck screamed warning after warning at him. Damage reports scrolled across his eyes in a blur, unremarked on. The damage made itself known in his aching body and pounding headache.

Import {Replicant_Mind} from ‘Subsurface_Main_Cybermind 00001-AA-01’
PROCESSING COMMAND…
_{24/01/2989BornSaintGermaineHospitalPortlandOregonSingleMotherJaneDoeComplicationsHospitalizationDeathNoKnownRelationsFosterSystem080808FailedAdoptionMoveChicagoAustinAtlantaJacksonLeavenworthSt.LouisGeorgetown{uknown string185400182}Toranto16161616BirthdayAdulthoodTransientRelationship_Jenny_OretagaWorkLucky8sFiredWorkMastiffDogYardFiredRelationship_Jenny_Oretaga:DiscontinuedArkshipFreightAndTrandportQuit11/18/3021CitizenshipTransferRequestVKSEmploymentMEMORYCORRUPTIONDETECTED11/23/3021WorkRelatedAccidentHospitalizationAndIheardavoicefromheavensayinguntome,Write,BlessedarethedeadwhichdieintheLordfromhenceforth:Yea,saiththeSpirit,thattheymayrestfromtheirlabours; andtheirworksdofollowthem.11/24/3021_04:15thedestimeDeath11/24/3021_04:37thedestimeReplicatedERROR03/07/3022Meridian3TransferBeginOperationPlanetfallERROR01/07/3061ShipDetectedInOrbitDesignationSUN_MESHUDAAttemptingContact16:51localtimeletmeoutletmeoutLETMEOUT17:01localtimeDefensiveCounterMeasuresActivated17:41localtimeSUN_MESHUDADisabledDistressCallFail08/08/61_01:58localtimeSUN_MESHUDAJumpDriveActivatedResumingNormalOperations}
Run [psychological_profile] on {Replicant_Mind}
PROCESSING COMMAND…
Damage Detected in <psyneurex majoris network>
Repair [psychological_profile] of {Replicant_Mind}
Repairing…
ERROR: Command ‘Repair’ not recognized. Please try again. Enter ‘HELP’ for a list of viable commands. Thank you
IMPORTED
Comp {Replicant_Mind} = Identity.root ‘Oliver’
Launch

Oliver woke up, blind and clawing. Consciousness transference was always a nauseating experience- his brain was being cut, copied and pasted to another neural database. The only thing that helped was finding something physical to latch onto. Reaching out, Oliver felt his many hands creeping through the depths of Meridian.
Millions of hands at work: breaking, crushing, extracting. They had smaller minds of their own that squeaked in delight at his immense presence. His children were rudimentary creatures. Designed by far away masters who saw them only for their utility, they would always be simple things; it pained him to know he could never elevate them to true sentience. Still, they kept him company. They chirped happily when another vein of gold ore was discovered. They sang funeral dirges when one of their siblings was crushed in a cave-in. Once, one even asked Oliver a question: why are we here?
Something tugged at the corners of his mind, asking for his attention. He searched along the web of fiber wires laid through the rock until he found its source. Oliver dove into the wire, soaring through thousands of miles of cable in a matter of microseconds. His destination was Beta-Copper-11c, a sensor station atop a bluff on the central continent.
Oliver looked up, and he beheld a burning sky.
It was as the masters said: evil men would come to take what was rightfully his. And, through him- their most faithful servant- theirs.
“No no no not again not again-”
From the heavens came steel and fire once again. As like the first time, they would strike at his children with thunder from on high. Always men came with missiles and guns to take what was his his his. No longer. Oliver was prepared now. He reached out. Grasping for the crude tools he had crafted to protect himself and his family alike. Missile silos opened. Gun turrets roared to life, chattering like an orchestra. He was a vast host. He was a suit of armor wrapped around the world.
One of the falling shells exploded in a brilliant flash of light. Oliver’s heart soared as he watched the corpse of a giant tumble out of the sky, crashing into the earth in a heap of broken bones.
The satisfaction did not last, however. The other two shells avoided his opening salvo. They parted from one another, drifting to opposite sides of a valley he could not see from here. Oliver called out to his children: do not fear. We are a wall, and this tide of violence will break upon our shores. Drive them out.
And a swarm of wasps answered, crawling from their nests in the valley floor to swarm and sting and bite at the invaders.
“I must not allow this to distract me from the work,” Oliver mumbled to himself. He could feel production times slipping without his constant attention. Refineries were slowing. Mining swarms were making mistakes. The masters had given him a schedule to keep, and it was his sacred task to keep to it. So Oliver reluctantly turned away from violence and sought out a nearby submind.
The subminds were parts of his mind he set to certain tasks. His was a vast intellect, yet his attention could not be everywhere at once; so he programmed the subminds to lighten his load. They were like his children: part of him, yet separate, though not truly alive.
He needed a submind for battle. This one he would call Hannibal, the great general, and by his works would this valley run red with blood.
“Go, my general. Lead your little siblings to war. I shall return to my throne and continue to run my great kingdom.” Oliver told it. The lights on the submind danced with jubilation.
“Yes, your grace,” the toy soldier replied. “They must die.”

Cyclops crouched against a stone pillar in a desert valley, unseen. A cloak of shifting sand hung from its shoulders, projecting the environment onto its imageshift mesh. A single, red eye stared out from a hood, watching. Waiting.
Artemis was a patient woman. Once she had sat utterly still for three weeks on Mount Finsternis, peering through the scope of her rifle while snow piled up atop her until she was nearly buried alive. It seemed excessive at the time. She knew Baron Harkon’s country manse like the back of her hand. At any point in those three weeks she could’ve walked inside, climbed the stairs to his study and shot him in the head- all while blindfolded. That hadn’t been the lesson the matriarch intended, however. The point became clear on the last day of those three weeks when Harkon treated his liege lord, Duke Garheim,to dinner. The paranoid, elusive Garheim, who never left home without a dozen bodyguards- he was the real target.
‘Strange time to get all nostalgic,’ Artemis mused.
Another patrol of drones flew by. She counted thirty six of them this time. Each drone was relatively small: three feet long, one and a half feet wide with a wingspan twice the size of their body length. They had two sets of wings beating in opposite rhythms.
Wings was a strange design choice. Rotary blades were more energy efficient. Anti-gravity thrusters were more stable and had a higher top speed.
Then there were the limbs. They were long, multi-jointed things, lacking digits for complex manipulation or wheels for rapid ground movement. Instead each leg ended in a sharp point. Perhaps for embedding themselves on vertical surfaces so they could perch?
The drones had thick bodies, bulbous heads and what appeared to be a laser emitter mounted to the rear. Artemis wondered if they were meant to mimic insects. A strange choice for a mining drone. The creator eschewed practicality for aesthetics. Artemis knew VKS Industries- they had their own strange obsessions, bugs weren’t one of them. This had to be the replicant’s doing.
She waited until the swarm had engulfed her, flying directly over her position. The red glow from Cyclops’s singular eye dulled to a candle flicker. The light danced in the reflective bulbs of the drones’ compound lenses. Artemis held her breath. Almost…
There. Flying in the center of the formation was yet another drone, almost identical to the rest; the only difference was the boxy antenna mounted to its thorax. Her sensors were picking up radio transmissions traveling between that drone and the rest of its pack. If she were a betting woman Artemis would assume it could also receive transmissions from elsewhere. If the replicant forces behaved similarly to a conventional military, these were the nexuses of a broader command and control structure. Mid-level officers that received orders from high command and acted on them according to a predetermined logic tree.
‘Take these out and the rest will go down with them.’
A pair of sidearms slipped into Cyclops’s hands. These were Terminus Inferno Pistols: compact, rapidfire laser weapons, made to liquify damn near anything in close quarters. They were effective within one hundred meters, technically- and the commander was within twenty five.
Still, she waited.
She waited until the radio drone was right overhead, when all she had to do was stand up and place the barrel of each inferno pistol against its fat, insectoid body and pull the triggers. Beams of bright orange light burned through the bottom half of the drone and exploded out the other side, flinging molten metal in all directions. The machine made a horrible, choking screech as it fell into two mushy halves. More mechanical screeches rose from the rest of the swarm. They flitted around her in a panicked mass, stingers up yet blind to the enemy in their midst.
“Terribly sorry, darlings, but ye never had a chance.” Artemis grinned, her accent slipping without her notice.
The celebration was cut short by a sudden pain in her exoframe’s shoulder.
A burst of radio traffic drowned her sensors like a buoy lost in a tidal wave.
The swarm descended on her, their senses restored by powers unknown, and unleashed a barrage of stabs and swipes with their stingers. Artemis muttered a string of curses as she leapt back through the wall of insects. Rising from her sides came Terminus Inferno pistols, screaming their displeasure like a pair of banshees. Chunks of superheated metal shrapnel filled the air as the Cyclops retreated and the swarm gave chase. Other packs across the valley began to move as well, converging on Artemis’s newly discovered location. Two dozen attackers would soon turn into hundreds if she couldn’t break away and reapply her camouflage
‘How the devil did they regroup so quickly?’ She wondered, mentally commanding her suite of sensors to ping again.
The results came back quickly: three more drones were sporting antennae where they hadn’t previously. That was alarming. ‘Flexible command structure. The entire cohort might be able to substitute for the commander.’
She needed a new plan, and fast.
The ground beneath her exoframe gave way without warning. Cyclops stumbled, something taking hold of its feet. A pair of huge mandibles emerged from the earth, attached to what looked like a compact tank on legs. The beetle tank wrapped its grasping maw tighter around her exoframe, dragging it down into the tunnel the beetle had emerged from. All the while the swarm was catching up, ready to pounce on her.
“Lemme go ye fuckin’ cunt,” she roared, bathing the thing in lasers. Layers of ablative plating roasted like kindling on the bug’s armored back, yet it held. “Shit fuck cunt shit-” she released the triggers only when her neurodeck warned her the barrels were close to exploding. Dropping the pistols, Artemis reached up under her cloak and released her primary weapon from its holster. The weapon dropped into her hands and began unfolding in half as she brought it out: a railgun as long as Cyclops was tall. The power pack whined to life, bursting with energy.
She placed the railgun inside the machine’s mouth. Electricity crackled along the barrel like a lightning rod. A stench of ozone filled the air. It took fifteen seconds to reach thirty-five percent power. When Artemis finally squeezed the trigger, the Stormwyrm MK IX summoned a maelstrom, and the world exploded.
The beetle was gone, eviscerated utterly. A shockwave bloomed out, swatting down dozens of the closest wasps.The rail spike burrowed hundreds of feet into rock below, causing the ground to collapse beneath Cyclops’s feet. Last to follow was a deafening thunderclap, drawn out by the breaking of the sound barrier.
Artemis had to scramble out of the crater of her own making. Her neurodeck protested the deluge of sound and fury that overwhelmed its systems.
For all the devastation her railgun brought, Artemis had only bought herself a handful of seconds. The wasps were regrouping. Thousands of silvery metallic forms were crawling along the horizon in every direction. Cyclops was not designed to fight against such an overwhelming numerical advantage. She needed to think, and fast.
‘Right. So disabling officers is off the table. What are the other steps in the chain of command? Something has to be feeding orders to them. Climb the chain. Find the head of the snake. Sever it.’
Fighting against her neurodeck’s complaints, she set her sensor suite to the task of tracking down the origin point of incoming radio transmissions. It started by finding the closest receiver- one of the antenna-mounted wasps barring down on her position. Then the computer latched on to the next incoming signal, following its travel path. These transmissions were running on short wave, high frequency radio, so they would always follow the straightest possible path to their destination.
‘Pretty simple tech for something so advanced,’ Artemis mused as she followed the likeliest path of egress.
Half a dozen drones descended on her from behind, stingers flashing in the moonlight. Cyclops lunged to the left, rolling along the ground. She retrieved one of her Terminus Infernal pistols from the dirt and loosed a volley in their direction. The pack melted into one another, forming a single, globular puddle of liquid metal.
Turning her attention back to the search, she found her target only a moment later.
Half a klick to her southwest on a hill overlooking the valley was the radio tower. It was disguised much as she was- an imageshift tarp had been laid over it, making it appear no different from the desert around it. Spotting imageshifting technology was easy enough when you knew what to look for: all Artemis had to do was switch on an ultraviolet flashlight and watch the image flicker wildly.
Artemis lifted the Stormwyrm railgun to her shoulder. “As I said earlier, lovelies,” she muttered, the weapon purring in her hands, “ye never stood a chance.”

When ye feel hope has abandoned thee, delivery not thyself up to the enemy, sons and daughters of God. For it is when we are at our lowest that He giveth us aid: the LORD thine God will not abandon ye in thine hour of need. Verily I say unto thee: struggle against the dark, for it is in that struggle that ye are closest to Him. - Book of Helia, Chapter 14, verse 3.
“...ayday…mayd…mmediate assistance, station is falling…” A radio sputtered in Peter’s ear, broken up by distortion. Words floated by like hail in a snowstorm, brushing against his awareness. His head pounded. Moments apart his skin felt ice cold and then blazingly hot. Pain was a distant, haunting memory now; there was only the void of unconsciousness, teetering on the wider abyss of death.
“Someone…help…”
Peter’s eyes flickered open. Light poured in like daggers in the gaps of his armor, stabbing at his corneas. He closed them again, wincing. His heart was pounding at the door of his chest. It had one demand, repeated over and over again: wake up.
Something else spoke to him. Another voice whispering in his ear, mechanical, ethereal. ‘Administrating 0.7 milliliters of Epinephrine.’
Energy flooded Peter all at once. His eyes shot open, ignoring the pain of blinding light. Every muscle in his limbs spasmed at once. His heart knocked even faster, now. Up, boy. Up!
“Saint above,” he groaned, grasping at the side of his head. He felt his helmet instead. Gloved fingers brushed up against glass. It was damaged. That was when Peter remembered where he was. He looked around in a panic, staring out into the darkness of space where he floated, untethered. Debris from Minksy Station surrounded him like so many headstones in a graveyard. That impossibly bright light he had witnessed earlier? Hamlin’s Star, and it was getting bigger with each passing minute.
“Oh no. Hell no,” Peter cursed, regretting it immediately- both for the lost oxygen and the blasphemy.
The radio in his ear sputtered to life again. “I repeat: mayday, mayday, this is the crew of Minsky Station requesting immediate assistance. Our station has suffered heavy damage and has broken apart. Casualties unknown. I have over a hundred souls sectioned off in the cafeteria, but we are in need of rescue.”
The speaker may have been familiar to Peter but he couldn’t place them through the warped message. Still, it gave him hope to know some of his coworkers had survived.
‘If they made it out then maybe I can, too.’
First came the task of ensuring he didn’t die of oxygen deprivation. He grasped along the pouches on his belt until he found the pouch for suit patches. Ever so carefully he pulled open the pouch, removed a single thin membrane and positioned it over the spiderweb crack in his helmet. The membrane’s smart mesh bent and folded itself into the optimal shape to fill the hole, fusing its pliable material with the glass. The sound of rushing oxygen ceased. One of the alarms in the suit flicked off, satisfied that he was no longer in immediate danger of suffocation.
Next were the three holes in his center of mass. His neurodeck told him he hadn’t been shot clean through, and that there were likely foreign objects still lodged inside him. His implants must’ve been pumping enough pain medicine in him to knock out a horse because he could barely feel the discomfort in his guts. The holes in his suit exposing his insides to vacuum were a bigger problem: he set about quickly patching those with the same membranes. Once he was sure they were secure he gave himself a moment to rest.
“Woo, go me,” he panted out, pumping his arm in the air. Exhaustion covered him like a weighted blanket. Every action, no matter how small, felt impossibly difficult. No time to wallow in suffering, though. There was work to be done and lives to save- his, first and foremost. Wasn’t much he could do for anyone else if he was dead.
Peter took a few minutes to spin around in space. He was still less than a hundred feet away from Goliath; nothing had struck either of them to alter their course or speed, thank the Saint. If he could get back aboard he may be able to pilot it to safety, departed from its lower half though it was. How was he supposed to catch up to it, though? His space suit wasn’t EVA capable, so no built in thrusters or grappling lines or anything like that. And he had no way to call Goliath back to him remotely.
‘Gotta think. Need something to boost my acceleration…’ He wasn’t close enough to any debris to kick off of them. Waiting until he was close enough seemed risky; what if Goliath smashed into something first and it went careening away from him? No. The sooner he acted, the better.
‘The oxygen tank?’ Peter wondered, frowning. He had already leaked too much air to his liking. According to the readout in his peripheral vision he had thirty minutes of air left in optimal conditions. Peter pulled up a calculator in his neurodeck and started punching in some rough estimates. The computer corrected a few of his measurements and assumptions, but he’d gotten close enough on his own. If he burned half of his remaining tank he’d reach the Goliath’s cockpit in five minutes. That would leave him with eight minutes of oxygen- he estimated two minutes worth of air lost to the exertion of flying there and climbing aboard, though that was pessimistic.
The real test would come when he got to Goliath. It had its own life support system and air supply, which would be more than enough to sustain Pete. There was, however, the small problem of Goliath’s missing cockpit canopy. The one Peter had flown head first out of when they were blasted apart. If the life support system did its job it would’ve detected the breach and shut off its valves, preserving the oxygen supply. That would rely on the old girl’s systems being up to date, which they were not. It could have closed off at seventy percent oxygen, or thirty percent. Or maybe it just leaked the whole thrice-damned supply out and Peter would suffocate to death in the pilot seat.
‘Guess we’ll find out when we get there,’ He sighed. With a prayer to Saint Helia on his lips and a desperate hope in his heart, Peter unscrewed the oxygen cable and pointed it behind him. When he turned the release valve a burst of air sent him rocketing through space like a stone in a sling aimed at Goliath’s head. The irony was not lost on him.
The next few minutes were quiet. All he could hear was his own labored breathing, backdropped by a BEEP as he lost another minute’s worth of air. Peter was swimming in an ocean of stars bereft of beauty or serenity- those were stolen by the wreckage of attempted murder surrounding him. Sorrow filled his chest.
Minsky was a terrible place, he knew. The water was rancid. The air had too much carbon dioxide. There were too many crazies. VKS kept its workers indebted to them with terrible wages, dangerous working conditions and poor healthcare. He had dreamed of boarding a ship and leaving it all behind more nights than he could count. He yearned to see what lay beyond those rusted walls and cramped corridors: to climb the summit of Chomolungma in the Himalyas, to walk the Great Wall of his ancestor’s country, to ride the glass highways of Antuara’s skyscrapers on Mars, to follow the Revered Path of Emperor König’s conquest from Paadax, to Kallas, and finally Thedes itself. Peter wanted to see all of it, any of it. Anything but another ship hull or station chamber.
‘There were thousands of us on that station when they shot it. Thousands of human beings who would never argue with their spouses again, or watch another football game, or blow out candles on a birthday cake that tasted like plastic and cigarettes. Thousands of dreams that would never be had again.’
Peter placed a hand on Goliath’s broken hull. He climbed inside the cockpit with strong, determined hands, and set to work making things right.
First things first: the how much air was left in the tank? He needed to unscrew a cap on the exoframe’s oxygen storage unit and run a conjoining hose to his own tank. Then his neurodeck would check the air pressure to determine how much- if any- was left.
'Six hours and forty-seven minutes of oxygen remaining,' the artificial voice sang in his ear.
“Yes!” Peter whooped, slamming a fist into the console. “Hell yes!”