Chapter 1

Krall 

The cruiser stinks of recycled air and wet canvas, like every other flying coffin I’ve ever dropped in. The scent seeps into everything—armor, skin, thoughts. It clings like mold, like the memory of too many operations run the same damn way. I sit sideways in the troop bay, helmet off, boots braced against the ribbed floor, chewing on a ration bar that tastes like sawdust dipped in disappointment.

Across from me, Lakka’s doing his best impersonation of a steel statue, visor down, hands folded over the butt of his rifle. The only part of him that moves is his eyes—locked on nothing, as if focusing hard enough might let him see through the storm we’re flying into.

“You know,” I say around a mouthful, “if I die here, I want it known that my last meal was this unholy brick. Pretty sure it’s supposed to be cherry-flavored. Taste anything but.”

He doesn’t answer.

“C’mon, Lakk. Lighten up. You’d think this was your first rodeo.”

“It’s not,” he mutters without lifting his visor. “Which is why I’m not laughing.”

“Yeah, yeah. ‘Discipline is survival.’ Heard it all before.” I toss the rest of the bar to the deck and lean back, stretching my arms behind my head. “But I’d rather die cracking jokes than clenching my ass so hard I break a vertebra.”

That gets a grunt out of Tovak, one of the riflemen sitting two rows down. “Pretty sure you already did, Sergeant. You're about as tense as a sexless priest at a strip club.”

The whole bay chuckles. Even Daxx, the sniper who barely speaks, gives a quiet snort. Morale—such as it is—rises a tick. That’s my job. Keep the spirits up. Keep the mood light. We’re Vakutan, yeah, but even genetically superior lizard-soldiers need to laugh before dropping feet-first into another crater-pocked hell.

“I’m just saying,” I go on, louder now, so the whole squad can hear me over the groan of the drop cruiser’s stabilizers, “Command says this zone’s mostly burned out. Place is dust and old bones. We’re mop-up. Take some shots, pose for recon, maybe piss off a few Ataxians hiding in trash heaps.”

“Isn’t that what you said before Veruk’s Fall?” Lakka cuts in, voice sharp.

I wave him off. “Veruk’s Fall had an actual heat signature on entry. This place? Ghost town. You saw the scans—nothing but broken buildings and static. Hell, if I’m lucky, I’ll get to nap in a bombed-out liquor store.”

The cruiser banks hard to starboard, inertia yanking at my insides. Someone pukes. Not me. I’m used to the rhythm—lean into it, ride the movement like a wave. The air turns sour, tang of bile and fuel burning my nostrils. I reach for my helmet, snapping the seals into place with practiced ease. Now I’ve got filters. I’m safe.

Almost.

“Landing in thirty,” the pilot barks through the overhead speaker. “Atmosphere’s thick with interference, expect minor sensor loss and rough terrain. Strap in. It’s gonna be a bumpy bitch.”

“That’s what she said,” I mutter automatically. Another ripple of chuckles. Even Lakka sighs, like he’s resigned to babysitting me for the rest of the war.

We lock into position, harnesses clicking across our chests, magboots securing to the deck. I run a systems check. Rifle, full charge. Armor integrity, green across the board. HUD's glitchy from the storm outside, but it’s readable. My pulse is calm, steady. My mouth is dry but not from fear—just anticipation. Another op. Another hot drop. We’ve done this a hundred times.

The cruiser shudders violently, like a giant’s fist just smacked it out of the sky. Outside, thunder rumbles—not natural, but the kind that comes from atmospheric burn and anti-air scraping the edge of our hull. Sparks spit from a conduit near the cockpit. The lights flicker once. The squad doesn’t flinch. We’ve all been through worse.

We hit atmosphere. Hard.

The deck rattles under my boots, and gravity shifts in bursts, like someone keeps punching the planet’s “on” switch. I glance at Lakka. His hands tighten around his rifle. No words, just a look. I give him a lazy salute, and he shakes his head like I’m a kid who just drank engine coolant.

“Boots in ten,” the pilot growls.

The bay doors scream open, and a blast of static-charged wind punches us in the teeth. Horus IV greets us like it hates us—sky roiling like diseased water, lightning crawling across gray-black clouds. Ash falls like snow. I can barely see the ground below, but it’s there—broken, pitted, smeared with the memories of a thousand dead.

“Drop!” Lakka shouts, his voice cutting through the wind.

I leap.

Weightlessness swallows me. Then gravity grabs my spine and yanks. I land in a crouch, magboots kissing cracked ferrocrete with a satisfying thunk. The rest of the unit drops in tight formation. Our boots kick up soot. Air filters whine. The ruins of Tanuki stretch around us like the bones of a dead god—skyscrapers gutted, streets choked with debris and melted vehicles.

My HUD pings with location data. All green. Squad formed up.

“Welcome to paradise,” I mutter.

“Tighten formation,” Lakka calls, already moving forward. “Stay sharp.”

I lag a bit behind, scanning the jagged skyline. The comms crackle. Interference. No surprise. Static’s heavy, makes every noise feel distant and underwater. Still, I’m not worried. The area’s dead. Intel says the nearest Ataxian unit was sighted three clicks north, and even that was two days ago. We’re here to poke around, maybe draw some fire, prove that there’s still something worth bombing.

It’s routine.

It's boring.

So I crack another joke, just to fill the silence. “Hey Tovak, bet you fifty creds I find a liquor stash before you do.”

“You’re on,” he calls back.

All of a sudden, the world ends.

A scream of light. A detonation that rips the sky in half. I don't even hear the blast, just feel it—like my organs are trying to crawl out of my throat. The ground heaves. A shockwave punches through the street like a tidal wave. My HUD explodes with red. All channels light up—screaming, feedback, static.

Someone shouts a warning. I spin.

That’s when I see it.

A towering mech—ten meters tall, bristling with artillery and painted in Kru colors—rises from behind a shattered building. Its main cannon is already smoking.

My squad is gone.

Just like that.

Fire engulfs the street.

And I’m airborne.

I slam into the ground hard enough to knock the air out of me. My vision blinks white-hot. For a second, I don’t know which way is up. The crater I land in saves my life—deep enough to shield me from the worst of it, but shallow enough I still feel the heat from the blast chew the air like it's starving.

My ears ring. No, not ring—scream. High-pitched, brain-splitting. My HUD’s fuzzed out, a stuttering mess of corrupted data and broken feed. Static hisses like angry serpents in both ears. It takes a second for me to realize that the screams I’m hearing… they’re not just in my head.

They're real.

I push up on shaky arms, my gauntlets scraping across hot, jagged ferrocrete. My mouth tastes like blood and carbon. I spit, then instantly regret it—my lips are dry, cracked, and now burning.

I peek over the crater's edge.

Tanuki’s gone.

Where there was a formation—my formation—is just ash and cratered streets now. Charred limbs and scattered gear, some still smoldering. The mech stands like a goddamn reaper in the smoke, twelve meters tall, matte-black plating disrupted by streaks of red glowing heat from overworked joints. Its cannons still drip fire from the last salvo. It rotates, slow and deliberate, looking for stragglers. A loose panel on its right leg sparks—nothing else wrong with it. It's fine. Unstoppable.

My HUD flickers. One by one, squad vitals blink out. Tovak. Daxx. Gherin. One after the next. Gone.

I swallow the bile threatening to choke me and slide back into the hole, pressing flat, armor scraping stone. My breath comes short and fast. I’m a good soldier—better than most. But right now? I’m just another bastard trying not to die.

Then I hear it.

A wet, gurgling cough.

I raise my head.

Twenty meters across the street, someone’s dragging themselves forward—slow, deliberate, painful.

It’s Lakka.

Or what’s left of him.

I scramble out of the crater before I even register the movement. My boots skid on debris. I crash hard beside him and instantly wish I hadn’t. My stomach lurches at the sight. His lower half is gone—just gone. From the ribs down, it’s all ruin and shrapnel and a smear of blood-soaked ash. His armor is cracked open like a tin can under pressure. I can see the twitch of organs inside. He’s trying to say something, but it comes out in a wheeze, a string of consonants that go nowhere.

“No no no no no—don’t you do this,” I whisper, dropping beside him, pulling medsprays from my hip. My hands are shaking. I drop one. “You hold the fuck on.”

I jab a medspray into his neck, dump another into the gaping cavity where his side used to be. Foam spreads, useless. Blood pours faster. His hand—still armored, fingers twitching—grabs my wrist. Not hard. Just enough to tell me he's still here. Barely.

“Lakk, come on,” I whisper, then louder, “LAKKA! Stay with me!”

His eyes flutter open. One is bloodshot and unfocused. The other stares directly at me. He doesn’t smile. He’s not dumb enough to think he’s going to make it. But he sees me. Really sees me.

“Shut up,” I say quickly. “Don’t waste breath. Save it.”

I slam another spray into his throat. Nothing. I rip open a compression pack, slap it onto what’s left of his side. The auto-seal hisses, tries to glue a dying man back together. Doesn’t work.

“Krall…” he croaks.

“No! No. Shut up. You don’t get to say anything. Not yet.”

He tries to laugh—it comes out a bubbling rasp. Blood leaks from the corner of his mouth.

I press on his chest, start CPR even though I know it’s too early. Too soon to give up. Too soon to accept the finality in that look he just gave me.

“I swear to all twelve gods, if you die on me I’m gonna drag your carcass back to Barrakus and prop you up at the parade grounds! You hear me?! Breathe!”

I slam my palms into his chest. Over and over. I feel ribs crack. Feel the useless flutter of a heart that doesn’t want to beat. I scream his name so loud my throat tears, then slap his cheek hard enough to leave a red mark through his scales.

He jerks.

Then stills.

Completely.

Just… stillness.

“No,” I whisper.

I sit there, pressing both hands on his chest, trying again, again, again.

“Come back, dammit. You were the good one. The smart one. You always did the right thing. You—you kept your gear squared, you actually read the protocols. You were the one Mom cried over when you left. Not me! She said I’d die in a gutter. I told her you’d watch my six! And now I—” My voice breaks.

I lean over him, forehead touching his. Blood smears between us. I don’t care.

“Lakk,” I say quietly. “I was just joking about the rations. About the liquor store. I didn’t mean it. You were right. This wasn’t a nothing op. You were right, and I was wrong, and now you’re—”

My voice fails. My hands fall to his sides. I stay like that for what feels like hours. Long enough for the mech to stomp away. Long enough for the ash to stop falling. Long enough for the fire to die.

The street goes quiet. Just the distant hum of the mech’s engines as it moves to some other sector. Looking for more to kill.

I finally sit up. My whole body is shaking, like I’ve been electrocuted. My hands are sticky with blood and medfoam. My armor’s cracked across one thigh. I can’t feel my left foot. Doesn’t matter.

I close Lakka’s eyes.

That’s all I can do now.

The world doesn’t end with a scream. Not really. It ends with silence. With an empty street and one broken promise after another.

And me, sitting in the ruin, trying to remember how to breathe.

I stay kneeling long after Lakka’s gone cold. Blood pools beneath my knees, sticky and warm, soaking through the cracked seal of my armor. The copper stink of it is thick in my mouth, my nostrils. I can taste my brother on my tongue. Feel him caked into the grooves of my gauntlets. Every breath hurts, every heartbeat feels like it ought to carry a scream with it—but none comes.

I don’t cry.

I don’t break.

I burn.

Somewhere past the static in my HUD, the last of the squad vitals flatline into silence. Comms dead. Channel empty. The only thing left on the net is the pulsing red emergency beacon from my suit. Useless. 

No one’s coming. 

Good.

Because I’m not going anywhere.

The Alliance is still out there. The cause is still alive. And now, so is my hate.

I stare down at Lakka’s ruined body, chest tight. His blood has begun to dry where it splashed my visor. I flick it off. Carefully, reverently, I pull his tags from the mess of shattered armor and melted metal across his collarbone. One side is blackened from heat exposure, the other still polished clean.

“Don’t worry,” I whisper. “I’ll make it count.”

I take his extra mags, pop a sealed medkit off his belt—not that it helped him—and slide his sidearm into my thigh holster. Not for use. For memory. For honor. Vakutan blood demands a reckoning, and I plan to deliver one bullet at a time. Lakka’s sword is still intact, somehow, slung across his back where the explosion missed it. I pull it free, the grip still warm. It hums faintly with energy as I thumb the activator. The blade whines to life, violet energy crackling like bottled lightning.

I snap it off and sling it across my own back.

I rise slow, boots squelching in blood. The mech is long gone, smoke still drifting in its wake. The silence is different now—less shock, more waiting. The ruins of Tanuki hold their breath, like even the dead are watching what I’ll do next.

I start walking.

Each step crunches broken glass, ash, bone. My path is crooked—dodging slagged vehicles, collapsed rebar. Lakka’s death sits in my chest like a lead spike, but it’s not weighing me down.

It’s sharpening me.

I flick through scans as I move—infrared, thermal, sonar. The atmosphere’s too thick, the interference too strong. Nothing solid pings, but a flicker of motion catches my eye—top left, over a collapsed storefront. Something small. Moving fast.

I stop dead.

There it is again. Faint. Barely a shadow. No armor signature. No IFF tag. No way in hell it’s one of mine. Civilian?

Doubtful.

I lift my rifle, center the reticle. HUD zooms in—sputters once, then clears.

A figure steps from the smoke, silhouetted by dying firelight.

Small. Slight frame. No armor. Tattered cloak hanging from delicate shoulders. Face obscured by ash and sweat and grime, but I catch the gleam of something around her neck—a pendant, metal, familiar.

No.

Not just familiar.

Ataxian.

The moment that medallion catches the light, time slows. My body moves on instinct.

“ON THE GROUND!” I bellow, voice raw enough to shred my throat.

She freezes. Eyes wide. Blue. Bright. Too bright. Her mouth opens—maybe to speak, maybe to beg.

I don’t let her.

In three strides I’m on her, shoulder slamming into her chest like a freight engine. She goes down hard, breath knocked out of her lungs. She struggles—kicks, claws. Doesn’t matter. I’m heavier, faster, trained for exactly this.

She swings a fist. I catch it midair, twist. She gasps as I wrench her arm behind her back, drop my knee to the base of her spine, pinning her flat against the rubble.

“Don’t move,” I growl.

She tries anyway. Brave. Or stupid. I don’t care which.

I fish a polymer strap from my belt and lash her wrists behind her with practiced, brutal precision. She spits something—words in Ataxian, maybe. Doesn’t matter. I press her cheek harder into the rubble.

“Shut up.”

Another strap—across her ankles. Then a third for the gag. She bites down when I try to insert it, almost catches my glove with her teeth.

“Feisty.”

I backhand her—not hard, just enough to daze. She gasps. I shove the cloth between her lips and cinch it tight. Her eyes—so goddamn blue—glare at me like they’re trying to burn holes in my skull.

“Save the attitude,” I mutter. “You’re lucky I didn’t just shoot.”

I haul her up, slinging her over one shoulder like a sack of angry laundry. She thrashes weakly, but she’s light. Fragile. She might be a scout, might be a medic. Might be a plant. Doesn’t matter.

She’s Ataxian.

And the war’s not over.

I don’t know what the hell she was doing wandering this deep into contested space, but I’ll find out. There’s intel to be gathered. Base locations. Patrol movements. Names.

Besides… I’m not done yet.

The mission’s not over.