The MOSHUUS stamp on the robot torso lingers in Rand’s mind like a bad taste. He doesn’t say it out loud. You were right… pig-faced Zuhtou… MOSHUUS… get to the ship… No time to dwell. They have to keep moving.
They push forward, boots crunching over spent casings and twisted metal. The corridor curves gently, following the outer ring’s circumference. Lila speaks up without breaking stride. “Up ahead it should open into a junction. It’ll continue around the outer ring, but there should be a spoke to the right leading straight to the hub, where the docking ports are.”
As they reach the junction the smoke clings, carrying the smell of burned rubber and flesh. The air thins only enough to reveal more wreckage. The junction is a slaughterhouse. Corpses lie in twisted heaps, Ares Station guards and Sol Libertatis fighters alike, torn open by bullets and shrapnel. One soldier’s chest is caved in, ribs splayed like broken fingers, intestines spilling in wet coils across the deck. A guard’s skull is a cavity above the bridge of his nose, eyes frozen wide, brain matter and blood pooling in thick dark puddles that mix with leaking hydraulic fluid from the ruined LegionaryX robots. Those machines are wrecks, chests blown open, limbs scattered from grenade blasts, circuits dangling like entrails, oil and coolant mingling with human blood in black-red slicks across the floor. The smell hits all three of them at once. Copper and ozone, burnt rubber, and the sour rot of opened bowels.
Rand crouches at a cluster of debris, sifting through it with the practiced calm of a man who has learned to be numb to scenes like this one. He finds a full AK2K magazine wedged under a shattered robot arm near a riddled corpse. Thirty rounds, undamaged. He ejects the old mag, seats the new one, and checks the chamber. Thirty-eight rounds total. He breathes a little easier.
He moves through the bodies methodically, pulling dogtags where he finds them, dropping them into his chest pocket without ceremony. Someone should know these people were here. Someone should have the names. He doesn’t think too hard about who that someone might be or when that might happen. He just takes them.
He crouches beside a Sol Libertatis fighter who caught a burst of flechettes across the chest and never got back up. The man’s armor is mismatched, civilian-grade plates over a patched undersuit, the kind of kit you assemble when nobody is funding you properly. Rand reaches down and peels the patch from the fighter’s shoulder. Shield-shaped, black background, silver and gray. A gladius centered in front of a sun ringed by planets, four of them, the outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, rendered in careful detail around the blade. Above the sword, Sol Libertatis in clean block lettering. Below it, at the very bottom of the shield in smaller text: NULLUS DOMINUS NULLUS TRIBUTUM.
Rand stares at it for a moment. Turns it over in his fingers. The stitching is tight and deliberate, not a mass produced thing. Someone made this with intention. He tucks it into his chest pocket with the dogtags and stands.
He glances over at Toku, who moves among the bodies without any visible reaction, recovering two pistol magazines from the wreckage. Rand watches him check each one and begin consolidating them with the same quiet efficiency he brings to everything. Filling two magazines to equal loads, balancing them evenly, one spare round left over that he tucks away without comment. Both pistols fed. Both tucked back into his belt. No wasted motion. No expression.
Lila averts her eyes from the carnage and steps past it without letting her mind process any of it. She moves to where the junction splits and points down the perpendicular passage. “That’s the way. Straight shot to the hub. Docking arms are there. Our ship.” She says it quickly, eyes already moving elsewhere, landing on the hoverbikes scattered near the mouth of the spoke. Several of them lie on their sides among the wreckage, a few smashed into LegionaryX frames. No human remains near them. She steps closer.
She rights the first one with a grunt and her Neuro-T stirs without being asked, pulling schematics from Hari’s hacked library, old hoverbike tech, not a perfect match but close enough that the architecture maps. She feels a small, quiet relief at that. Old enough that the service manuals still apply. She checks the power cell. Forty percent, no leaks. The second is similar, thirty-five percent with a minor scorch on the fairing, but the thrusters respond when she thumbs the starter. A third and fourth are worse, frames bent, one thruster dead, the front fork of the other tangled in a LegionaryX torso. She steps back and sweeps her arm over the two functional machines. “Hey. Found two bikes that might get us down there faster. No major damage I think. Fuel’s low on both but they’ll run. Probably.”
Toku looks at the bikes and nods. Then his head tilts, listening. A low rumble grows from somewhere along the curved outer passage, not behind them but ahead on the ring, echoing off the walls. It is coming fast.
Rand hears it a second later and snaps his eyes toward the sound. A flat-bed transport sled bursts around the curve, armored sides low enough for the guards riding it to lean out over the rails. Six men in total, SMGs raised, red emergency lighting strobing across the frame as it charges toward them.
“No time to test them,” Rand says. “Grab the bikes.”
Rand and Toku each swing onto a machine. Lila hesitates one heartbeat, the odds already running through her augmented mind, then jumps on behind Rand and locks both arms around his waist, MP12 slung across her back. “Don’t crash,” she mutters.
Toku is already moving, twisting the throttle. His bike lifts with a sharp whine and shoots forward down the spoke, Toku leaning low over the handlebars, smooth and immediate, the machine responding cleanly under him.
Rand follows. His bike coughs, sputters, sprays a shower of sparks from the front thruster, then surges forward with a lurch that snaps both their heads back. The handlebars vibrate badly at speed, a deep mechanical shudder that travels up through his palms and into his shoulders, and the power cell whines in a pitch that suggests it is working harder than it wants to. The bike floats six inches lower than it should, the damaged thruster compensating poorly, which means every slight dip in the deck plating jars them like a pothole. Toku is already pulling ahead on a machine that actually works.
The transport roars up behind them, SMGs barking. Flechette rounds snap past their heads and ping off the walls. Rand weaves the bike in erratic arcs, keeping low, making them harder to track, but the handling is sluggish and slow to respond, the front end wanting to push wide every time he leans into a correction. Lila’s grip around his waist tightens to the point of pain every time the bike stutters.
Toku slows just enough to twist and fire backward one-handed, but the angle is bad and the transport’s bulk shields most of the guards.
The transport commander makes a decision. The sled accelerates hard and pulls alongside them rather than staying behind, trying to box Rand’s bike against the corridor wall and force them to slow or crash. Two guards lean over the near rail, SMGs leveled at point blank range, too close to miss.
“Left!” Toku shouts from ahead.
Rand wrenches the handlebars hard left. The bike bucks and skids sideways, thruster screaming, and the burst from the SMGs chews a line of impacts into the wall exactly where they had been. The transport overshoots by half a length before the driver corrects.
Lila leans around Rand’s shoulder and raises the MP12 one-handed, bracing her elbow against his back for stability. She squeezes a burst and all of it climbs high, rounds skipping off the ceiling above the crouching guards.
“Don’t try for headshots,” Rand shouts back at her. “Center mass, lower!”
Lila drops her aim, exhales the way he showed her, and fires again. This burst tracks better, clipping the transport’s near rail and sparking off the guard’s armor without penetrating. Closer. She adjusts, leading the target slightly to account for the bike’s movement, and fires a third time.
The flechettes catch a guard just as he climbs over the sled’s side rail to get a better angle. The rounds hit him low. Very low. Groin shot. The man screams, clutches himself, and tumbles off the transport in a heap.
Rand winces hard. Toku’s head snaps around for a fraction of a second. Even the guards on the sled flinch, a collective grimace rolling through them as they watch their comrade rolling to a crumpled stop on the deck behind them.
“Center mass!!!” Rand shouts back at her.
Lila lowers the gun, genuinely confused. “Wasn’t that center mass?”
The transport closes the distance again, the remaining guards recomposing themselves, the commander pushing the sled faster to try to pull alongside a second time. Rand hammers the throttle harder. The damaged bike lurches and stutters, thrusters skipping, unable to pull away on a dying power cell. The gap narrows.
“Center mass,” he shouts again over the wind and gunfire, tapping the middle of his own chest with two fingers.
Lila nods and aims again as the guards regroup. The bike wobbles and throws her aim wide. The burst goes low again. Another guard howls, folds, and falls from the sled, holding his eviscerated groin.
The remaining guards look back at their second man down. One fatal second of distraction.
The spoke corridor stretches long and straight ahead of them, the far end still distant, the bike’s thruster whine climbing higher as the power cell pushes past its comfort zone. They are moving fast now, faster than the damaged machine wants to go, the handlebars chattering in Rand’s grip, the deck blurring below. Lila’s hair whips back against his face. The transport fills his peripheral vision, still close, still pushing. For one long second everything is speed and noise and the certainty that this cannot last.
Rand’s eyes go wide as he sees what is coming from the direction they are heading. He slams the brakes. The bike skids sideways, thrusters flaring hard in reverse. Lila’s grip slips and she launches forward off the seat. Rand’s hand shoots out and catches her by the waistband of her pants as she sails past him. The fabric yanks down past her hips. She yelps but stops flying.
Toku sees Rand brake and reacts instantly, his bike responding cleanly where Rand’s had not.
The transport has no such warning and no time to respond. It speeds past them both and plows straight down the spoke tunnel ahead.
Two massive shapes are already moving from the far end of the passage, filling the corridor wall to wall. Two and a half meters tall, armored in segmented plates that overlap like the scales of something ancient, their helmet crests rising in the distinctive sweep of kabuto, lacquered black with trim that catches the red emergency light in thin copper lines. One carries a katana extended low at its side, a single handed weapon at that scale, the blade alone nearly as long as Lila is tall. The other carries a naginata, the polearm’s shaft spanning the full width of the corridor, the curved blade at its tip catching the light in a slow arc as the machine shifts its weight. They move with the grace of something that was designed for exactly this, fluid and precise and inevitable, and there is something wrong about the way they move that Rand cannot immediately name. The LegionaryX units moved like machines. These move like something that has decided to move like a machine, the distinction subtle and deeply unsettling, every motion just slightly too considered, too deliberate, as if each step is a choice rather than a program.
Rand’s tactical mind tries to categorize them and finds nothing to hold onto.
The transport races straight between them. The robots slide to either side of the passage in a single practiced motion. The katana sweeps in a clean horizontal arc. The naginata swings low and then up in a diagonal that splits the transport’s armored siding like paper, the blade passing through welded steel and composite plating without slowing, shearing the entire front third of the sled away in a shriek of tearing metal. The screaming stops. Bodies slump. Blood sprays across alloy armor in thick arterial jets, painting the walls and ceiling in broad red strokes, and the sled careens another few meters before crashing into the wall, the sheared section spinning away to clang off the far corridor wall, wreckage scattering, torsos sliding across the deck in wet heaps.
Lila watches the heads tumble from the sled to the floor. It happens in what feels like slow motion, each one landing with a wet thump that echoes off the corridor walls. She thinks absurdly of watermelons falling from the back of a truck until one of the heads rolls to a stop facing her direction and stares up at her with its vacant, frozen expression.
Toku pulls up beside Rand. Neither of them speaks. Toku’s eyes are on the katana, tracking the thin line of blood still running down the blade to its tip. He watched that same weapon shear through the transport’s armored siding without slowing, the way a man cuts air. He has trained with blades his entire life and he has never seen anything do that. His expression does not change but he does not look away either.
The robots stand in the wreckage of the transport and do not advance. Their optics glow green in the emergency light. The katana hangs at the first machine’s side, blood running in thin rivulets down the blade and dripping from the tip in slow metronomic beats. The naginata rests across the second machine’s body at a diagonal, the curved blade still trailing a fine mist of aerosolized blood that drifts in the recycled air. They are looking at the three humans. Just looking. The optics move, tracking from Rand to Toku to Lila and back, and the deliberateness of it is worse than if they had simply charged. A machine catalogues. These things are doing something else. They are taking their time. Deciding.
The silence stretches. Ten seconds. Fifteen. The only sounds are the drip of blood from the katana’s tip and the distant groan of the station’s superstructure and the ragged breathing of three people who are trying very hard not to move.
Toku’s eyes move between the two machines, reading their stances, the angles of the blades, the weight distribution. His voice comes out low and flat, not quite to either of them. “Oni,” he says. Just the one word.
Rand does not ask what it means. The way Toku says it is enough.
The katana robot tilts its head a fraction. The motion is small and precise and entirely unnecessary for any functional purpose, their optics still green in the emergency light.
Weapons snap in unison with a sharp motion that breaks the stillness and flings the blood from both blades in a wide spatter across the passage walls.
They were not protecting the guards. They just killed all of them. Rand forces down the bile rising in his throat.
Lila steps back as Rand releases her waistband. She tries to pull her pants up without looking away from the machines, fumbling with her gun and her waistband. “They weren’t on their side,” she says quietly. “And they sure as hell aren’t on ours.”
Rand breaks left toward the naginata robot, drawing it away from Lila, putting himself between it and her. “Fall back!” The machine swings the naginata in a wide horizontal arc that fills the entire width of the corridor. Rand drops flat and the blade passes over him close enough that he feels the displaced air across the back of his neck. The naginata continues its arc and connects with the wrecked transport sled behind him. The impact is not a clang. It is a detonation. The remaining sled structure folds and tears, a full meter of armored siding shearing free and spinning down the corridor in a shriek of metal, debris skittering across the deck in every direction. Rand stares at what is left of the sled for one involuntary half second.
That would have been me.
He scrambles up and fires at the machine’s joints, three rounds, then three more, working the shoulder linkage where the armor segments overlap. Bullets spark off the plating but one punches through a gap and throws a burst of sparks. The machine adjusts its grip on the naginata shaft and brings the weapon up for a downward strike, slower than the horizontal sweep but with the full weight of the machine’s frame behind it. Rand rolls hard to his left. The naginata’s blade drives into the deck where he had been standing and the impact sends a shockwave through the plating that he feels through his boots three meters away. The blade has buried itself four centimeters into the deck. The machine wrenches it free without effort. Thirty-two rounds left. His shoulder wound burns with every recoil.
Toku has flanked wide to the opposite side, pistol up on the Oni robot wielding the katana. He fires twice. Hollow points skip off the armor plating without penetrating. He grunts and stashes the pistol without ceremony. He has already shifted to watching the katana, reading the arcs, timing the rhythm of the machine’s movement. It is not random. The strikes follow a pattern, a formal pattern, and he recognizes the structure of it the way you recognize a language you studied once and half forgot.
He darts in and ducks a sweeping horizontal strike that whistles close enough to clip one of his dreads. He rolls under it and grabs the robot’s forearm housing, trying to wrench the blade free. The sword is mechanically locked to the hand by linkages he cannot break with grip alone. The robot counters immediately, a backhand pommel strike that catches Toku square in the sternum with the full leverage of a two meter arm behind it.
The impact is not like being punched. It is like being hit by a vehicle.
Toku leaves the ground. He travels two meters through the air and hits the corridor wall shoulder first, bouncing off it and dropping hard to the deck. He lies still for a moment that is one moment too long. His vision whites at the edges. Something in his chest grinds when he tries to breathe, not broken, probably not broken, but something has shifted that was not shifted before. He gets his hands under him and pushes up, arms shaking, and makes it to one knee before he has to stop and wait for the corridor to stop tilting.
The Oni turns toward Lila.
Lila retreats, heart hammering, her steps shortened by the half-dropped waistband she has not fully fixed. She stumbles backward over Rand’s damaged bike and goes down hard, landing with her head beside the power cell that hisses and sparks from the earlier abuse. She scrambles back to her feet and raises the MP12. She fires a burst at the machine’s optics, figuring center mass meant nothing to these robots, she was going for the eyes, and the rounds spark off the helmet crest and jaw plating without effect. She fires again. Same result. The machine keeps advancing, katana rising.
She needs a better plan. Her Neuro-T chirps faintly, a sound only she hears, as stored schematics surface without her asking for them. The old hoverbike tech from Hari’s hacked library, close enough to what she is looking at. The power cell schematics overlap with the sparking unit beside her and an overload sequence rises in her mind from A Modern Anarchist’s Cookbook like a reflex. Reroute the cell, spike the output. She drops to her knees beside the bike and starts prying the access panel open with her fingers.
Rand keeps his giant samurai moving, staying at the edges of the naginata’s effective arc, firing in short bursts at joints and gaps in the armor. This machine is slower than the other with the katana, each swing committed and difficult to redirect mid-stroke, but the consequences of a single mistake are absolute. It swings again, a diagonal this time, and the blade catches the corridor wall at the apex of the arc, carving a half-meter gash through the bulkhead plating and spraying sparks and insulation foam across the deck. He is genuinely concerned that this blade could open up the hull to vacuum.
Rand uses the machine’s recovery time to close distance and drive three rounds into a gap he has been opening in the knee joint. The servos whine. The leg stutters. The machine shifts its weight and compensates and keeps coming. Twenty-seven rounds left. He fires again, working the same gap, and the machine slows for half a stride as something internal protests. Then it adjusts. It shifts its angle of attack to favor the damaged leg, redistributing its weight, changing its footwork. Rand stops moving for one involuntary second.
It adapted.
He files that away in the part of his brain still running cold and keeps moving.
Toku is back on his feet. His breathing is wrong, too shallow, each inhale cut short by the grinding thing in his chest, but his eyes are clear. The machine is three strides from Lila and closing. He raises the pistol and puts two rounds into the gap between the helmet’s rear fan and the neck guard. The shots spark off the joint as the bullet ricochets around between the skull plating and the helmet. No real damage but the distraction is enough. The Oni stops. Its optics swing from Lila back to Toku with the slow deliberateness of something that has decided to finish what it started. That is fine. That is exactly what he wanted. Toku feints left and draws a downward slash that buries the blade deep in the deck plating.
The machine Oni wrenches at it and the blade does not come free immediately, caught in the deck’s substructure. Toku closes the distance fast despite his chest, grabs the arm, and takes a second pommel strike to the lower ribs for it. The breath explodes out of him. He hits the floor and rolls clear by instinct alone, gasping, black crowding the edges of his vision, and comes up against the wall with his back to it and nothing left in his hands.
He looks at the Oni. The Oni looks at him.
It has the katana free. It could cross the distance in one stride. Instead it pauses. The optics hold on him, green and steady, and for a fraction of a second that has no business existing in the behavior of a programmed machine, it simply waits. Not a processing delay. Not a reboot flicker. Something else. Something that looks uncomfortably like consideration as it looks over at Lila who is still fiddling with something she’s bent over, facing away with her pants still around her knees.
Then Lila twists the relay on the power cell.
The whine builds fast, climbing past the point of no return. The robot fighting Rand notices the movement and pivots, optics flaring. It swings the naginata toward Lila in a full overhead strike that would split her and the bike and the deck beneath her in a single blow. Rand lunges and hits the machine’s damaged knee with his full body weight, not enough to bring it down but enough to throw the strike wide. The naginata hammers into the corridor wall six inches from Lila’s head, blade biting deep into the bulkhead, and sticks there. The machine wrenches at it. Lila has no time to register how close it was before the cell detonates in a sharp electrical crack and an electromagnetic pulse rips outward in all directions.
The blast puts Rand and Toku both on the deck. Rand hits hard, shoulder flaring white, ribs screaming. Toku tumbles, grabs at his chest, and rolls to a stop against the base of the wall he was already leaning on. He does not get up immediately this time. He lies there with one hand pressed flat against his sternum and breathes in careful measured increments.
Both robots freeze. Optics go dark. Limbs lock in place, the naginata still buried in the bulkhead, internal systems cycling through emergency reboot. They have seconds, not more.
Rand scrambles up and lunges. He drives the AK2K barrel into a cracked plate in the robot’s torso, one of the gaps opened by the fight, and pulls the trigger. He empties what is left of the magazine into the cavity. The rounds hammer through internal components, ricocheting around inside the armored chest, shredding circuits and servos. Hydraulic fluid jets from ruptures in the housing. The robot shudders from its feet to its crest and collapses in a heap, snapping the naginata’s pole, the polearm blade still lodged in the bulkhead. Magazine empty.
Toku is moving. It costs him something visible to do it, one hand still pressed to his chest, jaw set against whatever the grinding thing in his ribs is telling him, but he is moving. He climbs the side of the katana robot, boots finding purchase on blood-soaked armor, and draws his pistol. He fires point-blank into the linkages connecting the katana to the hand until the metal shears. The sword drops free and clangs on the deck. The robot reboots. Optics flare back on and lock onto Toku at close range. It swings a free arm. Toku drops beneath it, scoops the fallen blade off the deck with both hands, and drives it into the machine’s torso with everything he has left. The blade bites deep. Armor splits as Toku drags the blade though armor and servos. Internals rupture in a spray of sparks and dark fluid. Hoses and pistons drop from the mechanical wound like a disemboweled demon. The machine shudders, staggers, and goes down slowly, spilling oil and grinding gears across the floor as it settles into stillness.
The corridor goes quiet except for the tick of cooling metal and the sound of all three of them breathing.
Toku pulls the blade free from the wreckage and does not stand up right away. He kneels beside the machine with the sword across his thighs and breathes. His hand moves to his sternum and presses there once, carefully, feeling the damage, cataloguing it. The blade is long across his lap, longer than any katana has a right to be in human hands, the grip too wide for his fingers to seat properly around, the balance wrong, the weight distributed for something with a longer reach and a stronger frame. He turns it once. At robot scale it was a one-handed weapon. In his hands it is something else entirely, a nodachi in everything but name, two-handed, unwieldy, built for a thing he is not. He thinks about what it would take to make it right. The grip refit. The tang ground down to human proportions. A swordsmith who knows what they are doing.
He decides it will do for now. He stands, slowly, one hand still hovering near his chest.
The naginata protrudes from the wall where it was lodged, the rest of its broken shaft on the corridor floor, curved blade catching the emergency light. He looks at it once and leaves it there.
Rand ejects the empty AK2K magazine and swaps to the partial one from earlier. Eight rounds. He slings the rifle and rolls his burned shoulder carefully, ribs complaining with every breath. He looks down the passage ahead at the large bay doors to the central hub, the ship waiting somewhere beyond them.
He looks back at Lila, still sitting on the deck with her pants at half-mast and blood running freely down her arm, the MP12 resting across her knees, staring at the two wrecked machines with an expression that has moved past fear into something quieter and harder to name.
“We keep moving,” Rand says. He lets a glint of dark humor reach his eyes despite everything. “And Lila.” He shakes his head slowly. “Keep your pants on.”
| Book 1: Ares Alcatraz | Next Chapter |
