The spoke corridor stretches ahead, wide enough for two lanes of cargo hauler traffic but feeling narrower with every step. Red emergency lights pulse overhead, throwing long shadows that make the walls look like they’re breathing. The air tastes of burnt wiring and copper. Somewhere far behind them the wrecked robot samurai cool, metal ticking as it contracts.
No one speaks for the first hundred meters on foot. Toku leads by half a step, the too-long katana carried low in both hands like a nodachi he is still learning the balance of. His dreads sway with each measured stride. Rand watches the man’s shoulders. Relaxed but ready. No wasted motion. No twitch toward the blade every time a distant clank echoes down the passage. Discipline. Rand files it away.
Lila trails a pace behind. Her breathing is too shallow, too quick. The graze on her arm has stopped bleeding but the strap of her white tank top is reddened with drying blood. She keeps the SMG up, barrel tracking the shadows, but her eyes are glassy. Shock settling in like frost on glass. Rand has seen it before. Seen kids her age hold it together until the fighting stopped and then fall apart when the adrenaline ebbed.
He glances sideways at her. She catches it and straightens her spine like she has been caught slacking.
“You good?” he asks. Low. Not soft.
She nods once. Too fast.
“Bullshit,” he says. No heat in it. “You just strolled through your first battlezone and blew up two killer robots with a power cell and a prayer. That’s worth being a little rattled.”
“I’m not rattled.” Lila swallows.
“Sure you’re not.” Rand lets a beat pass. “When I was your age I once pissed myself in a firefight. First real one. Didn’t even notice until it was over. Still made it back to the bird. Told everyone it was tea an insurgent threw at me when we busted through his door. Luckily the chemical smell of the bomb factory we raided masked the actual truth.”
A small, strangled huff escapes her. Almost a laugh. “Classy,” she mutters.
“Very. Point is, the body does what it does. Doesn’t mean you’re broken.” He nods toward the SMG in her hands. “You’re still pointing that thing in the right direction. That’s what counts.”
Lila looks down at the weapon, then back up at him. Something shifts behind her eyes. Not calm exactly, but steadied. She wipes her mouth with the back of her good hand and her stomach growls loud enough for all three of them to hear.
“Thai food,” she says suddenly. “I’m just thinking about Thai food. Keeps my mind somewhere else.”
Rand raises an eyebrow.
“When we get out of here. First thing. A whole spread. Pad Thai, Tom Yum, Massaman Curry, Mango Sticky Rice. And a cold drink that isn’t recycled piss.”
“Deal,” Rand says. “I’ll even spring for the good stuff. No off-brand garbage.”
Toku doesn’t turn, but his head tilts slightly. Listening. Measuring. Rand clocks it and says nothing.
They keep walking.
The corridor ends at a pair of massive bay doors built for heavy cargo haulers, easily five meters across. A smaller personnel hatch sits to the right, its access panel glowing dull amber under the emergency strobes.
Lila steps forward without being asked. She kneels and her eyes lose focus as the Neuro-T goes to work, pulling access protocols and cycling through lockout sequences with a speed her fingers could never match alone. Her fingers move fast despite a faint tremor, knowing that three failed attempts will lock them out entirely. This is her being useful. Contributing. Not dead weight. Rand covers the corridor behind them. Toku takes the left flank, nodachi in a loose guard.
“Power’s still live,” Lila mutters. “Lock’s on emergency lockdown. Give me thirty seconds.”
“Take twenty,” Rand says.
“Shitballs!” Lila exclaims on a failed attempt.
She pauses, not out of hesitation but because the implant is recalculating, and somewhere in the back of her mind she almost laughs at herself for worrying about triggering an alarm. The station has been screaming since the moment their pods cracked open. One more beep is not going to matter. The panel chirps once and the hatch hisses open a crack. Lila shoves it the rest of the way with her shoulder.
The central hub opens before them.
Warehouse-sized. Crates torn open, food packets and ration bars scattered across the deck like confetti after a party no one survived. Blood mixed with hydraulic fluid in long smears across the floor, still wet in places, still steaming faintly in the recycled air. Bodies and wreckage scattered everywhere in parts. A couple of Sol Libertatis fighters in mismatched armor that clearly didn’t withstand something sharp separating them into multiple segments. Prison guards in charred black fatigues. LegionaryX robots slumped with limbs twisted at angles their designers never intended. One guard’s torso ends at the ribs. The rest of him is somewhere else in the room and no one is going to go looking.
The smell hits hard. Copper and shit and burnt meat and spilled coolant. A LegionaryX coolant line leaks somewhere nearby in slow rhythmic pulses, hissing like a dying snake that hasn’t figured out it’s dead yet.
Lila freezes in the doorway for half a second. Then her stomach growls again, loud enough for all of them to hear. She steps over a dead Libertatis soldier without looking directly at him, boots crunching on shattered plastic, and crouches beside a ripped-open snack crate. She pulls out a foil bag of Watney’s Sweetfire Thai Chili Martian Potato Chips and tears it open with her teeth. The first crunch is obscene in the silence.
Rand watches her eat. Doesn’t say a word.
Toku shifts his grip on the nodachi. His eyes move across the carnage with the careful, unhurried attention of a man cataloguing threats, not horrors. Still silent.
Then the station groans.
Not the creak of settling metal or the echo of a distant explosion. Something deeper and more deliberate, a sustained mechanical shudder that moves up through the deck plating and into the soles of their boots. Then the pneumatic thumps begin in the walls around them, rhythmic and relentless, traveling the length of the hub in sequence, each one followed by the brief hiss of venting pressure.
Rand moves to the observation windows and looks up.
The first pod clears the hull from one of the pod silos on the outer ring with a soft pressurized sigh, spinning lazily as it emerges into open space. Then another. Then three at once from a different section. Then a dozen. The pods tumble outward in loose clusters, catching the distant sun as they go, their frosted glass glinting like scattered mirrors against the black. More follow. Dozens. Then hundreds. The ejection ports along the station’s outer hull cycle one after another in a long mechanical sequence, spitting out their cargo in clean, indifferent bursts that do not slow and do not stop.
Every pod is identical to the ones they woke up in. The same frosted seals. The same recessed handles. The same emergency stenciling along the upper rim. Inside each one, visible through the frost, a person. A prisoner. Someone sentenced to the ice the same as them, now drifting away from the only structure for a hundred thousand kilometers in any direction, with nothing but hard vacuum waiting for them when the power cells fail.
Rand stands at the window and watches. His jaw is set. His hands are still at his sides. But he cannot look away. He thinks about the hiss of his own lid opening. The blast of recycled heat on his frozen face. The first ragged breath of stale air that tasted like the best thing he had ever inhaled. If the drone had hit thirty seconds earlier, if Marcus had not found them, his pod would be out there right now spinning in the dark with all the rest. No alarm. No red lights. No second chance. Just the cold and the slow drift and the dark and the long silence after.
Someone flipped a switch and decided these people were not worth keeping. No deliberation. No warning. No appeal. Just a command entered into a terminal and a station that obeyed without question, cycling its ejection ports one by one down the lengths of the silos, purging its population like faulty inventory cleared from a warehouse shelf. Thousands of them. Each pod another name that nobody outside this station will ever know to grieve.
He keeps his face neutral. Keeps it inside. Keeps moving.
Lila has not looked up from the chip bag. She has not looked at the windows. She has not looked at the bodies on the floor or the frozen faces drifting past the glass overhead. She is looking at the foil bag in her hands and the orange dust on her fingers and she is chewing slowly and deliberately, and the set of her jaw says she knows exactly what is out there and has made a decision about what to do with that knowledge.
She crunches another chip. The sound dies and leaves a silence that doesn’t last, filled a moment later by the muffled thump of rapid gunfire somewhere ahead.
“Sounds like fighting up ahead,” she says around the mouthful. “Docking bay’s that way.”
Rand pulls his eyes from the window.
“Yeah,” he says.
Eight rounds in the AK2K.
The trio moves through the hub, boots crunching over debris and spent casings. Rand takes point, rifle low and ready, barrel sweeping the shadows between crates. Toku flanks right, nodachi in a relaxed carry that tracks every flicker of movement without appearing to. Lila stays center with her SMG up and the open bag of Watney’s Sweetfire Thai Chili Martian Potato Chips tucked under her arm like a grenade she might need later.
They pick their way through the wreckage. A Sol Libertatis fighter lies face-down, one arm stretched toward a spilled crate of ration bars as if he died reaching for breakfast. A guard’s helmet is cracked open, visor spiderwebbed, gray matter leaking onto the deck in a slow viscous trail. LegionaryX robots slump against bulkheads or sprawl in heaps of twisted alloy and sparking joints. One has its head caved in, optics dark, a final burst of coolant still dribbling from the neck joint in slow rhythmic pulses.
Rand kicks a dead guard’s sidearm on the way past. Empty. He keeps moving.
Toku stops at a LegionaryX that twitches once, servos whining as a damaged leg tries to push the machine upright. The optics flare red for half a second. Toku closes the distance in two strides, the nodachi flashing up and down in a single economical arc. The blade shears through armored neck plating with a hard crunch. Hydraulic fluid sprays in a high arc, painting the nearest crate in red-black streaks. The head tumbles free, bounces twice with dull clanks, and rolls to a stop against a ration bar wrapper. The body folds in sections, limbs collapsing like a marionette with its strings cut, settling into a wet heap on the deck.
Rand does not flinch. He keeps his rifle on the shadows beyond and covers the kill without a word. Toku flicks fluid off the blade with a quick snap of his wrists, then meets Rand’s eyes briefly. No nod. No expression. Just a look that says they are still breathing and he noticed the cover. Rand returns it. One beat. Then they move.
Lila watches the whole exchange without blinking. She crunches another chip. The sound feels almost defiant in the absence of conversation.
They reach the far end of the hub. Through the observation windows above, two ships detach from their moorings, thrusters flaring white as they pull away hard into open space. Exhaust plumes bloom against the stars and fade. Then two more. Then a third. The station is bleeding ships.
Lila stops chewing.
“That’s not good,” she says. Flat. “If our ride already left…”
“It didn’t,” Rand cuts in before the thought can take root. “Not yet. We press on.” He does not sound as certain as he wants to. Every ship that clears the docking arm is another second burning off a clock he cannot see.
Toku adjusts his grip on the nodachi and keeps walking. No comment. No hesitation.
Lila exhales through her nose. She reaches into the bag, pulls out a single chip, and holds it out toward Rand without looking at him.
He glances at the chip, then at her. A small, tired smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth.
“Stress eating is a team sport,” she says. Deadpan. “Besides. If we die in the next room I don’t want to go out knowing I ate the whole bag myself.”
Rand takes the chip and pops it in his mouth. The heat hits fast and creeps up into his sinuses. He chews once and nods, blinking against the burn. “Not bad.”
Lila holds the bag toward Toku next. He looks at it for a second and shakes his head once. Polite. Firm. No explanation.
“Suit yourself,” she mutters, and crunches another one herself.
They push forward and the gunfire grows louder. Sharp cracks of plasma, the chatter of automatic weapons, something heavy slamming against metal once and then again. A low sound that could be a wounded man or a failing engine, impossible to tell at this distance.
Rand raises a fist. Toku stops. Lila walks two more steps before she registers the signal and pulls up short, nearly walking into Rand’s back. He glances at her. She mouths sorry, tucks the bag of chips back under her arm and raises the SMG.
The final set of bay doors waits in front of them. Ten meters across for cargo, with the smaller personnel hatch to the side like the last one. The access panel glows amber. The fighting behind the doors has gotten louder, sharper, more desperate sounding. Something heavy slams against the other side hard enough to shudder the frame.
“Can you crack this one?” Rand asks, keeping his voice low.
Lila nods. “If it’s not completely slagged. Give me a minute.”
Toku moves to the side, nodachi ready. He scans the corridor behind them, then the doors ahead.
“Breach quiet if we can,” Rand says. “Peek first. See what we’re walking into. If it’s bad we fall back to the hub and find another way. No heroics.”
Lila kneels at the panel. “All roads lead here, Boss. There isn’t really another route.” Her eyes lose focus as the Neuro-T pulls the station map, runs probabilities, and cycles access codes faster than her fingers could manage alone.
Rand and Toku take up positions on either side of the personnel hatch. Covering their angles. Waiting.
The gunfire behind the door spikes hard. A scream cuts off abruptly, the kind that doesn’t taper, it just stops. Something crashes, heavy and close, close enough that the deck vibrates under their boots.
“Double shitballs,” Lila mutters under her breath, fingers moving faster.
A soft beep from the panel. The lock cycles. The hatch hisses open a crack.
Gun smoke drifts out in lazy coils carrying the sharp bite of ozone and cordite. Flickering orange emergency light spills through the gap and paints all three of their faces in shifting shadows.
Rand leans in first, rifle up and eye to the sight. Toku mirrors him on the opposite side, nodachi low. Lila stays back a step, SMG ready, the half-empty bag of Watney’s Sweetfire Thai Chili Martian Potato Chips still tucked under her arm.
The docking bay opens before them like a cathedral built for slaughter. Vast and echoing and terrible.
Rand scans the docking ports lining the bay’s walls. All of them show red, airlocks sealed, ships gone. All except one at the far end of the bay. That one shows green. An open airlock. A docked ship.
Between them and that green light, the fight rages.
No Sol Libertatis soldiers in this one. Not one. Just prison guards in black fatigues and riot helmets, the same men who probably locked them in cryo, fighting for their lives against the station’s LegionaryX robots. The guards are down to roughly a dozen. They shelter behind overturned cargo loaders and tool benches and the bodies of their own dead, firing in disciplined bursts. Flechettes and buckshot spark harmlessly off advancing metal frames. The robots advance in a relentless mechanical line, no urgency and no hesitation, their plasma rifles spitting green beams that melt armor and flash-boil blood in wet steaming bursts.
Rand sweeps the ceiling. A lattice of heavy I-beams and exposed conduits runs above the bay floor. Thick cargo straps and chains hang from them, suspending rows of massive crates and sealed shipping pods. Some straps look frayed. A few crates sway gently with the vibration of gunfire. He runs the geometry. Drop one of those crates on the robots, create a gap, make a run for the airlock. But the fighting fills the entire width of the bay and there is no high ground he can reach from here. No flanking route. Just a straight run through everything to the ship at the far end.
He exhales slowly through his nose.
The guards are losing. Badly.
One of them, a man in black with red piping on his shoulders, breaks from the defensive knot and sprints low and fast while the rest of his men lay down covering fire. Green beams return fire on the guards. Not one of them tracks the running officer.
He reaches a large unmarked storage crate sitting against the inner hull. The kind of crate that gets dropped off a supply ship and ignored until someone needs it. He slams his palm against the emergency release. The front panel drops with a heavy clang.
Inside is a mech suit.
Not a jury-rigged industrial loader wearing riot plates. Military-grade hardware. Heavy articulated plating. A backpack array of power cells and coolant reservoirs. A weapon mount on the right arm that looks engineered to chew through hull plating.
A ragged cheer goes up from the surviving guards.
The officer does not acknowledge them. He climbs into the suit without ceremony. Servos whine as the armor closes around him. Hydraulic clamps engage with a series of hard thumps and a deep cycling power-up tone rolls through the bay floor and up through the soles of their boots.
When the suit turns and the emergency lights find the face behind the visor, Rand gets a clear look at what is wearing it.
The man was human once. The architecture of a face is still there under the augmentations, a jaw, a brow, a nose that was probably broken at some point and never properly reset, but whatever was behind the eyes is long gone. The eyes themselves are optics now, glowing a deep surgical red that sweeps the bay with the same flat mechanical patience as the LegionaryX robots. Visible linkages snake from ports along his neck and collarbone into the suit’s systems, his nervous system spliced directly into the machine so that the suit does not feel like something he is wearing so much as something he has become. His hands inside the gauntlets are probably still flesh. Rand doubts it matters anymore. The weapon arm raises. The multipurpose rifle mounted there is the size of a man’s torso. An audible click as the selector cycles to full auto.
He does not turn toward the robots.
The cheering stops.
The warden opens fire.
Full auto. No warning. No hesitation. No announcement of what he is doing or why, because a man like this stopped needing reasons a long time ago.
The burst sweeps the defensive line in a single arc. Armor shreds. Bodies jerk and spin and fall. Blood fans out across the deck in bright arcs, painting cargo containers and the corpses of the already-dead alike. One guard’s head disappears in a red mist, there one moment and simply not there the next. Another breaks and runs, sprinting hard for the far wall, and the warden tracks him with calm mechanical patience, leading the target by exactly the right amount, and stitches a line of rounds up his spine. The man folds face-first and slides to a stop against a crate, leaving a long wet smear behind him.
The last surviving guard drops to his knees with his hands up. Shaking. His weapon on the deck in front of him. He says something, a word or a name or maybe just a sound, and the warden pivots toward him without any change in posture or pace. One burst. The man’s chest opens outward and he pitches backward and does not move again.
Silence falls across the bay. Broken only by the drip of blood from a cargo loader’s running board and the low sustained hum of the mech suit’s reactor cycling at idle.
The suit turns slowly. The red optics sweep the bay in a long methodical arc, moving across crates and bodies and the still-standing LegionaryX robots with the same expression, which is no expression at all.
Rand eases back from the hatch. “Close it. Quiet.”
Lila’s fingers move. The hatch hisses shut and the lock cycles with a soft click.
They stand in the corridor. The sound of their own breathing fills the silence.
Toku’s grip on the nodachi tightens until his knuckles pale against the wrap.
Lila’s hand trembles as she lowers the SMG. The chip bag is gone, dropped somewhere in the last few seconds without her noticing. Her face and the front of her shirt are dusted orange-red from the spice powder, which under the red emergency lights looks uncomfortably like dried blood.
Rand looks at the sealed door. Then at his two companions. Then back at the door.
“We’re not getting to that ship without going through him.”
He checks the AK2K one final time. Runs the count. Runs it again because the number does not improve the second time.
Eight rounds.
Not enough.
Not nearly enough.
| Book 1: Ares Alcatraz | Next Chapter |
