Rand stands over Marcus’s body, the young soldier’s blood still pooling on the platform deck. The grip of the AK2K is tight in his hand, the rifle’s weight a small anchor against the chaos. Toku hovers at his side, dreads tied back, dark skin gleaming under the red emergency lights. Lila lingers a step behind, hands empty, her large almond eyes flicking between the two men and the haze below. The central lift disc sits right in front of them, battered and scarred, the silo shaft yawning like a throat.
Lila steps to the control panel first, fingers dancing over the scorched keys. “Give me a sec,” she mutters, overriding the lock with a direct hack. The machinery groans to life, pistons hissing as the platform lurches downward into the silo shaft. “Yes! I’m useful!” Lila chirps triumphantly as the lift shudders and begins its descent.
Rand scans the haze below, jaw clenched. Marcus’s dying words loop in his skull. Twenty-two years. Zuhtou. MOSHUUS. Get to the ship. Vindication after twenty-two years feels like a joke. Too late. Too much lost. He feels the acid rise in his empty gut and shoves it all down, focuses on the descent. “Stay sharp. We hit bottom, we move fast.”
The platform drops thirty meters, grinding its way down through layers of smoke that thicken as they descend, before it freezes with a screech, gears and pistons seizing mid-shaft. The smoke here is dense and chemical, carrying the bite of burnt insulation and something else underneath it, something that reminds Rand of a welding bay and a slaughterhouse at the same time.
“Stuck,” Lila says, smacking the panel. “No override from here.”
Rand peers down through the murk. Ground level is another ten meters below, the shapes of wreckage barely visible through the churning haze. The walls loom close on both sides, railings bent downward and support beams jutting out at angles like broken bones. Unsafe by any standard, but it will get them down.
“We climb. Toku, you first, test the holds. Lila next. I’ll cover from up here.”
Toku nods once, unreadable eyes flicking to the drop. He grabs the bent railing and shakes the crossbars to test them, decides they will hold, and descends fluidly, each step deliberate and sure. Lila follows, less certain, her breaths coming shallow and quick. When her foot slips on a grease-slick rung that gives way beneath her, Toku’s hand shoots up from below and steadies her ankle without a word. She mutters a quick “Thanks” and forces herself to keep moving.
Rand waits until they’re down, rifle trained on the haze below. Leading two strangers. One quiet as a ghost, the other impulsive as hell. Am I getting them out or just deeper in? The doubt gnaws, but he pushes it aside. When Toku signals clear, Rand swings over the edge and climbs down last, muscles burning with the effort.
He drops the final meter and his boots crunch down into a landscape of wreckage. The bottom of the silo is a different world from the clean rows of cryo-pods above. Security units, bipedal robots, a dozen or more, are strewn across the deck in various states of destruction. Some have been blown apart by the improvised charges the Sol Libertatis soldiers must have dropped on their way up, chassis split open and internals scattered across a wide radius, circuit boards and actuator components embedded in the walls like shrapnel. Others were taken apart at close range, limbs sheared off, torsos caved in, one unit folded nearly in half around a structural support beam as though it was thrown there with tremendous force most likely from the explosion. A single unit near the base of the shaft is still partially functional, its upper half dragging itself in a slow, grinding circle, one arm pulling at the deck while the other arm ends in a sparking stump. Its optics glow a dull amber, targeting systems clearly gone, just the body refusing to acknowledge what the mind already knows. Hydraulic fluid weeps from a dozen ruptures across its frame, pooling black and oily on the deck where it has mixed with coolant from a ruptured overhead line into a spreading dark slick that catches the red emergency lighting and throws it back in dim, bloody hues.
The smell hits Rand fully now that he is standing in it. Ozone thick enough to taste. Burnt rubber and scorched alloy. Something chemical and sharp from the coolant mixing with the hydraulic fluid. And beneath all of it, underneath the mechanical reek, something organic. He scans the wreckage and finds it. A prison guard, one of the station’s own security detail, face-down in the debris near the base of a shattered robot, uniform soaked through with blood that has already begun to go dark and tacky on the cold deck.
He scans the rest of the bottom level quickly, looking for the other soldier, Marcus’s partner, the one the drone blast sent over the railing. The smoke is too thick and the rubble too dense. If the man is down here he is buried under it or lost somewhere in the lower shaft, and either way there is nothing Rand can do for him now. He holds on that for exactly one breath, then lets it go.
“Move,” he says quietly.
They push through the wreckage toward the only passage available, a haze-choked corridor leading away from the silo through a series of storage rooms and offices before opening up to the main passage that follows around the outer ring section of the station. Rand takes point with the AK2K at low ready, still only 12 rounds, eyes cutting through the swirling smoke. Toku covers the rear, moving through the shadows the way water moves through a gap, finding the path of least resistance through the carnage and makeshift barricades without appearing to look for it. Lila stays in the middle, arms close to her body, stepping carefully over the debris. Her eyes keep going back to the half-functional robot dragging itself in its slow circle. She watches it until the corridor wall cuts off the sight line, and then she stares at the wall for a moment instead.
The dense fog thins as they move away from the silo, the corridor ahead resolving into dim shapes and angles. Before they can fully orient, boots clatter on metal from a side passage. Two prison security guards rush in from the left, moving fast, not on patrol but running hard, their eyes forward and their weapons held loose at their sides. They are heading somewhere or away from something, and they don’t see the three figures in orange until they are almost on top of them.
The lead guard skids to a stop. His eyes go wide behind his visor, processing the orange uniforms, and the processing takes him just long enough. “Oh, fuck me. Prisoners. Freeze!” He swings his compact submachine gun up.
Rand drops to a knee behind a collapsed section of conduit housing, AK2K up, and fires twice. The rounds punch through the guard’s chest plate and exit through his back in a spray of dark matter that paints the corridor wall behind him. The man’s legs fold and he goes down hard, submachine gun clattering away, his body making a wet, heavy sound on the deck that has nothing graceful about it. His fingers keep moving for a moment after the rest of him stops, a reflex the brain hasn’t caught up to yet.
The second guard pivots, weapon swinging toward the muzzle flash, but the fog is thick here and he is already firing at where Rand was rather than where Rand is. Rounds spark off the conduit housing. The guard’s eyes sweep the murk, looking for a second target, looking for the third figure he knows was there.
He doesn’t find Toku because Toku is already behind him.
Rand doesn’t see exactly how Toku covered the distance. One moment the man is to his left, the next the guard’s head snaps back as Toku’s forearm comes across his throat from behind, locking the guard’s neck in the crook of his elbow. The guard gets one hand up trying to pull the arm away. He manages to get his fingers under it, which buys him nothing. Toku drives the heel of his free hand into the base of the guard’s skull with a short, precise strike, then wrenches. The sound is a single dull crack, wet and definitive. The guard’s body drops straight down with its neck bulging where it shouldn’t and a fading expression of shock on the guards face. Toku steps back from it before it finishes falling, not stepping away from a mess but simply moving to his next position, eyes already on the corridor ahead.
The whole thing takes seconds.
Rand is not sure how to feel, but he is impressed and concerned at Toku’s cold lethality. He rises slowly, scanning the fog. “Clear?”
“Clear,” Toku says, his voice never changing its register.
Lila hasn’t moved. She is standing in the middle of the corridor with both hands pressed flat against her thighs, her eyes fixed on the second guard’s body. The man’s face is turned toward her, eyes open, expression still carrying the surprise of the last second of his life. A thin line of blood runs from his nose and joins the pooling dark beneath his head. A head that sits at the wrong angle on a neck that wrongly bulges on one side. She stares at it the way you stare at something your brain keeps trying to reclassify as something else and keeps failing.
Rand steps in front of her, blocking the sight line. He doesn’t say anything for a moment, just waits until her eyes come up to his face. “You’re okay,” he says. It is not a question and not quite a reassurance either. Just a statement of current fact. “Good to keep moving?”
She nods. Her hands are still pressed flat against her thighs.
Rand turns and crouches over the bodies. Each guard carries a holstered Walther service pistol and an MP12 short-barreled submachine gun with spare magazines on their belts. He gathers the firearms and holds both pistols and one MP12 out toward Toku, looking up from his crouch. “I’m a man of my word.”
Toku takes both pistols without a sound and checks each chamber and magazine. Double stacks, nineteen jacketed hollow points each, one already chambered. He tucks one at the small of his back and the other at his front, secure and ready. He glances briefly at the body of the guard he killed, a single look with no particular content that Rand can read, and then his eyes are elsewhere.
Rand takes note of that look. Or the absence of anything in it.
He turns to the remaining MP12. He looks at it, then at Lila. His jaw tightens, protective instinct pulling against practical reality. She is green in a fight and has already demonstrated impulsiveness, but unarmed could be a death sentence here and he knows it. He ejects the magazine, checks it, finds it nearly full of polymer-tipped flechette rounds designed to tear through soft targets without punching through hull plating or station windows, and seats it back home. He holds the weapon out to her butt-first. “Here. You need more than nothing if we’re running into more of these guys.”
Lila takes it. The weight pulls her shoulders forward. She looks at the weapon the way you look at something you are not sure you can trust, and then back up at Rand.
He keeps his voice low and steady. “Safety here, thumb it off. Stock tight to your shoulder, not your hip. Short controlled bursts. Don’t spray and pray, you’ll burn through ammo and hit nothing useful. Aim center mass, exhale on the trigger. Got it?”
She nods once, wide eyes steady now. “Got it, Boss.”
Rand strips the spare MP12 magazines from both guards’ belts, four in total, and hands three across to Lila, keeping one for himself. “These are all flechette. They won’t do much against the robots, but they’ll handle anything soft. Load up, stay behind cover, and don’t shoot each other.”
Toku has already turned back toward the corridor ahead, pistols ready, watching the dark.
The smoke swirls thicker ahead, carrying the faint whine of servos and the heavy tread of metal feet somewhere deeper in the haze. Rand shoulders the AK2K and slings the MP12 across his back for when the rifle rounds run dry. “Move. Whatever’s out there, it’s more than those two.”
They push forward, the corridor narrowing as it curves toward the docking section. Rand takes point, eyes cutting the murk. Toku moves at the rear, a pistol in each hand, as quiet as the smoke itself. Lila stays centered between them, the MP12 held close, and as she walks she notices the weight of it settling into something more familiar. The way it sits against her forearm. The solidity of it. A small expression crosses her face that she doesn’t intend, half nerves, half something that might be relief, and she doesn’t examine it too closely.
The fog thins just enough for shapes to emerge ahead. Four bipedal security robots stand motionless in the corridor, man-sized, sleek alloy frames catching the dim emergency strips along the walls. Their arms lift in unison, forearms splitting open with a mechanical click, and green laser emitters glow to life, aimed straight at the trio with the flat patience of things that do not get nervous.
Before Rand or Toku can move, Lila lets out a startled yelp and squeezes the trigger. The MP12 bucks hard in full auto, muzzle climbing fast as flechette rounds spray in a chaotic arc. The recoil shocks up through her arms and she fights to drag the barrel back down, legs braced wide, but the gun keeps climbing. Rounds ping off robot armor in showers of sparks, doing almost nothing useful. One lucky flechette punches through a robot’s optic sensor and its targeting light flickers dark on one side.
Rand and Toku dive in opposite directions. “Jeezusfuck!” Rand barks, grabbing Lila by the back of her tank top and hauling her behind a pile of wreckage as a green laser sizzles through the space where her head was half a second ago. The beam scorches the wall and leaves a black scar and the smell of burnt metal hanging in the air.
Lila stumbles into cover, chest heaving, the MP12 in her hands with the slide locked back on an empty magazine. She stares at it. “Shit. It just kept going.”
Rand slides to the side and fires two rounds from the AK2K into a robot’s faceplate. Eight rounds left. The bullets connect and crack the housing but the machine keeps functioning, optics dimmed on one side but weapons still tracking. He pulls back behind cover and curses under his breath. Toku, more precise, fires both pistols in quick succession, cracking hollow points into the optic sensors of a third robot. The eyes shatter. The bot staggers, blind but still advancing, arms sweeping the corridor in wide arcs trying to find a target by sound.
Lila crouches lower behind the debris, fumbling with the SMG. “How do I…” She finds the magazine release and presses it. The empty mag drops free. She grabs one of the spares Rand gave her, but her hands are shaking and the magazine slips and clatters to the deck.
Green lasers slice the air overhead. One beam grazes Rand’s shoulder, burning clean through the ragged remnant of his orange prison sleeve and scoring the skin beneath in a line of white-hot pain. He grits his teeth and keeps moving. He lunges forward, grabs the nearest robot by the forearm, and wrenches the laser emitter around just as it fires. The beam lances across the corridor and punches through the chest of the robot that was flanking Lila’s position. That machine sparks hard, staggers two steps with its internals venting white smoke through the hole in its torso, and drops, servos winding to silence as it folds onto the deck.
Lila flinches at the sudden blast and loses the fresh magazine again. “You didn’t show me how to reload!!!”
Rand and Toku sync without a word. Rand forces his robot’s arm around again and Toku does the same with his, wrenching both emitters toward each other. The two beams cross in mid-air and slam into the remaining robots’ cores simultaneously. Armor buckles. Circuits explode in showers of white sparks, the internals cooking and popping as the sustained laser energy finds the power cells. Both machines crumple to the deck in a heap of twitching limbs and venting heat, the smell of scorched circuitry washing over the corridor in a wave.
The corridor goes quiet except for the ringing in their ears and the tick of cooling metal.
Lila pops up from cover with a fresh magazine seated, the MP12 raised toward the general area of the fight, and squeezes the trigger. Click. Nothing. The bolt is still locked back on empty.
Rand and Toku both go still in her line of fire, eyes wide for exactly one beat. It is the first genuine expression Lila has ever seen cross Toku’s face. Then they all exhale.
Rand walks over calmly, pushes the hot muzzle gently aside with one hand, and slaps the side of the SMG with the other. The bolt slams home and chambers a round.
Lila lowers the gun, sheepish defiance written across her face. “You didn’t show me that part either.”
Rand snorts once, the dark humor reaching his eyes. He looks down at the deck for a moment and lets out a slow breath, then turns back to her and holds up his own MP12. “You’re right. This was completely my fault.” He holds the weapon where she can see it clearly. “You figured out the mag release on your own. Now can you figure out the bolt?” Lila nods and mimics the slap he showed her. “Good.” He tilts the weapon to show her the fire selector. “Looks like I only showed you the Safety and the Fuck Everything settings. Between those are Single Shot and Burst. Keep it on Burst when you’re not on Safety and it won’t climb on you the way it just did.” He watches her cycle through the positions. “Finger off the trigger.” She complies. “Good. That brings me to the four things I should have told you before I handed you that weapon.” He raises one finger at a time. “Always treat it as loaded, even when you think it isn’t. Never point it at anything you are not willing to put in the ground. Finger stays off the trigger until you have made the decision to kill something, because a twitchy finger puts holes in people you didn’t intend to put holes in, including yourself. And before you pull that trigger, make sure there is nothing behind your target that you don’t also want dead, because rounds go through things. Got it?”
“Got it,” Lila says. “Don’t be a dumbass.”
Rand smirks. “Yeah. Don’t be a dumbass.”
Toku secures one pistol in his waistband and consolidates his remaining rounds into a single magazine. “Fourteen rounds left.”
Rand checks himself. “Eight in the rifle, one magazine of flechette for the MP12.”
“I got three clips,” Lila says.
“Magazines,” Rand and Toku say at the same time.
Lila rolls her eyes. “Magazines.”
Rand turns back toward the corridor and takes two steps before something on the torso of one of the downed robots catches his eye. He crouches and reads it. Printed across the chest in large block letters: M.O.S.H.U.U.S. Below that, in smaller stenciled text: Agility Dynamics Exercitis Line: LegionaryX.
He stays crouched for a moment longer than he needs to. Marcus said the name with contempt and with fear in the same breath. Looking at the stenciled lettering on the chest of a machine that just tried to burn a hole through his skull, Rand begins to understand why. Whatever MOSHUUS is, it isn’t standard prison hardware. This is something purpose-built. Something designed for exactly what it just tried to do.
He stands and moves toward the hangar without a word, jaw set, the answer to one question already breeding a dozen more.
| Book 1: Ares Alcatraz | Next Chapter |
