A dull whine infiltrates Randall Andersen’s cold consciousness, rising in slow waves until the lid to his cryogenic chamber hisses open and the noise becomes an insistent, piercing alarm that shatters the last of his sleeping silence. His eyes struggle open. He blinks away the disorientation, mind clawing for purchase on where he is and why. The last clear thing he remembers is the cold, sterile processing rings of Ares Station Prison. Ares Alcatraz, as it’s affectionately known. And the bitter taste of betrayal. As he pushes himself upright, a blast of hot recycled air hits his thawing face. He swings his legs over the side of the cryo-pod, muscles protesting the sudden demand, his ice-cold lungs dragging in the fire of ambient air like a drowning man breaking the surface.
He groans, voice raspy and unused. “Hell of an alarm clock.” He rubs the smoothness of his bald scalp, trying to ground himself in something solid. The alarm slices through the haze in rhythmic pulses, each one like a drill boring into his skull. Harsh red emergency lights strobe overhead, painting jagged shadows across the chamber and sharpening his unease into something more familiar. Something closer to readiness.
He climbs from the pod, every motion meeting resistance. His limbs protest, the icy numbness seeping away and leaving behind a suffocating warmth that clings to his skin. Each breath tastes faintly metallic, scraping raw at his throat. He flexes his fingers, half-expecting them to tremble after years in suspension, but finds his grip solid, the fabric of his orange prison uniform straining quietly against his biceps as he stretches. His strength is untouched by stasis. That small reassurance steadies something in him, though it does nothing for the knot of anxiety coiling in his chest.
Instinct takes over. Rand surveys his surroundings with the practiced efficiency of a man who has survived by doing exactly that. He finds himself in a towering prison silo, its multiple floors stacked in concentric rings, each level lined with cold coffins, all encircling an open central shaft where a disc-shaped lift platform sits dormant at the bottom level far below. The pods stand in silent rows, shrouded by the constant mechanical whirr of life-support systems and the relentless throb of red emergency lights. Far below, bursts of gunfire and frantic shouting echo upward through the shaft, each sound sharpening his alertness and waking muscle memory that time in the ice hasn’t dulled. Chaos has erupted somewhere in the depths of the station. Threats unknown. Allegiances unknown.
A sharp curse cracks the air from somewhere close below. “Goddamnit!” Rand drops behind his pod, adrenaline spiking, mind already running through scenarios. Another prisoner. A guard. Something worse. He hears a familiar hissing and risks a glance around the edge of his pod.
Another chamber is opening two pods down.
A wiry figure rises from the capsule. Long black dreadlocks spill over his shoulders, and as the red light finds his angular features, Rand runs a quick assessment. Dark skin. Narrow eyes that carry an Asian sharpness. The pod display reads KPAKA-OTOMO, TOKU. Rand files the name away without dwelling on it. What matters is what he sees in the man’s movements, fluid, deliberate, no wasted motion. The man named Toku climbs free of his pod the way trained men do, not stumbling, not reaching for the walls. He scans the chamber in one measured sweep, and when his gaze finds Rand behind his pod, neither man moves. A silent exchange passes between them. Recognition without trust. The acknowledgment of two strangers shaped by the same kind of world.
The uncertain silence holds for a breath before the voice from below rises again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” And then a third pod on their level begins to open.
Both men turn toward it as a young woman tumbles out, her movements unsteady, confusion cut across her face. Rand notes her quickly, then looks up to the display on her pod, REYES, LILLINA. Large almond eyes. Caramel skin. Jet-black hair still tangled from the pod. She presses a hand to the back of her neck before she’s even fully upright, a reflexive gesture, habitual and anxious, the kind of tell that means she’s used to hiding something.
She steadies herself and blinks hard, once, twice, and then goes still in a way that has nothing to do with fear. Her eyes lose focus for just a moment, aimed at nothing, fixed on something interior. The console she had glanced at on her way out of the pod, the station schematic half-visible on its cracked display, is already laid out in her mind in complete detail. Every corridor. Every junction. Every docking arm. She didn’t study it. She barely saw it. But it’s there, mapped and indexed and waiting, the way everything she has ever seen is waiting.
She sends a thought, out of habit, from the back of her skull, just behind her left ear, reaching outward the way it always did when she needed him. The signal pulses once, warm and familiar, searching for the answering frequency that was always there.
Nothing.
The absence is so complete it almost has a shape. She files it behind something she doesn’t have a name for and comes back to the room.
She finds the two men watching her and takes an immediate shuffle backward.
“What’s going on?” she gasps. “Who are you? Where am I?”
Rand is about to answer when an explosion erupts from below, hard enough to shudder the deck under their feet. He moves to the railing in three strides, the man named Toku a half-step behind. They peer down into the silo as thick smoke billows upward, its acrid sting reaching them even at this height. Armed figures move through the haze below, indistinct in the churning smoke. The gunfire is sharp and metallic, bouncing off curved walls, but beneath it runs an unfamiliar crackle and the hiss of something burning. Green light strobes through the smoke in bursts. A mechanical thunk reverberates underfoot, gears and pistons groaning to life somewhere in the shaft. The central lift is moving.
A green beam lances up from the chaos below, sizzles past Rand’s head, and sears a black scar across the ceiling. The smell of ozone and scorched metal fills his lungs.
Portable laser weapons. He thinks. How long have I been out?
He and Toku pull back from the railing as another explosion hammers up from below. A voice rises with it, close now, riding the ascending platform. “Hahahah! FUCK YOU NAZI ROBOTS!”
Rand sweeps the chamber. The young woman is crouched low behind her pod, wide-eyed and tense. Toku has already melted into the shadow between pods on the opposite side of the shaft, his eyes in constant motion. The two men exchange a brief nod across the space. They take separate cover without a word needing to pass between them.
The platform groans up into view, shuddering as its battered piston grinds into alignment with their level. Acrid smoke curls from the gap as a boarding bridge extends. Two young soldiers stand on the platform in battered fatigues, rifles at low ready. The taller one scans the chamber, boots crunching on debris. “Hey!” His voice is hoarse and urgent. “We’re looking for a Major Randall Andersen! Is one of you Major Andersen?”
For an instant Rand is still. The officer’s instinct says step forward, show no weakness, take command. The survivor’s instinct says the last time he trusted the wrong voice, he ended up in the ice for God knows how long. He weighs everything in the space of a breath. The angle of approach. The soldiers’ body language. The absence of any backup he can see. Leadership wins. It usually does.
“I’m Andersen.” He steps out from cover, hands loose at his sides, letting the red lights find him. He is betting on trust. Or at least the chance of it.
That half-second of exposure is enough as the soldiers’ eyes show a brief moment of relief.
Something moves in the smoke behind the soldiers. Rand’s eyes find it before his mind names it, a small dark shape rising slow and deliberate, the way nothing friendly ever moves. A faint whir. A glassy sensor eye catching the emergency light. A bead of green pulsing at its core.
“Down!” Rand shouts.
The drone detonates. The concussion hits him like a wall, slamming him backward across cold metal. The shockwave tears through the platform, snaps a railing, and catches one of the soldiers in mid-turn. The man goes over the edge with a bone-jarring arc and hits the lip of the deck hard before dropping down the shaft below. His scream is swallowed by the ringing silence left in the blast’s wake.
The smoke settles. Rand gets his bearings, ears still ringing. The surviving soldier is on the deck near the ledge, young and pale, one arm trying to push himself upright while the other hangs wrong. As Rand reaches him, the soldier looks toward the edge where something has just slipped over the side. His expression is blank with shock. “Shit,” he says quietly. “That was my arm. I needed that.”
Rand tears a sleeve from his orange prison uniform and goes to work on the shoulder, wrapping and twisting the cloth into a tourniquet with the soldier’s own service knife as a windlass. His hands move fast and sure. He works without looking at the boy’s face at first. He already knows what he will find there.
“Hold on. What’s your name?”
“Private Marcus.” He coughs, blood on his lips. A kid. Barely old enough for his voice to have finished settling. “Sol Libertatis.”
Rand keeps his hands moving. Keeps his face neutral. “Sol Libertatis. What is that?”
Marcus blinks, fighting to focus. His good hand finds Rand’s wrist and grips it with an urgency that has nothing to do with the pain. “You’re him. You’re actually him.” He says it like a man who trained for a thing and cannot quite believe the thing is real. “Major Randall Andersen.”
“That’s what my pod said,” Rand says. “Stay with me. What is Sol Libertatis?” Marcus starts to lose focus. “Talk to me kid, how do you know me?”
“You’ve been on ice.” Marcus swallows. “Twenty-two years.”
Rand’s hands go still for just a moment. Then he keeps working. “Twenty-two years.”
“Before the wars. You knew.” Marcus’s jaw tightens like he’s trying to organize something that won’t organize. “You saw what was coming. Your record was… it was impeccable. And you were still here. Still alive.”
“What wars? What was coming?”
“The Neuro-T.” The words come out like he’s spitting something foul. “The machines. General Haas. Chief of Staff.” He pauses, chest rattling. “Compromised. All of it compromised.”
Rand ties off the tourniquet and checks it. The bleeding has slowed. Not enough. “Compromised by who?”
Marcus’s good hand finds Rand’s wrist, grip weak but urgent. “The Zuhtou.” His voice drops, contempt thickening every syllable. “Pig-faced bastards. Pulling strings, with their tentacles and their minds. Dividing, conquering. They were already inside everything when the war started. That’s how it all split.”
A few feet away, still pressed against the side of her pod, the girl named Lilliana goes rigid. Her hand presses harder against the back of her neck. The word Zuhtou lands on her like a door slamming open on something she had sealed shut. Valentine’s Day. The Newark riot. A face in the crowd that wasn’t a face at all, something pig-nosed and wrong beneath a human disguise, tendrils she could barely see feeding on the screaming mob’s rage. She had buried that memory so deep she had half-convinced herself it wasn’t real. Now it has a name. She forces herself back to the present, but the chill stays.
“Stay with me,” Rand says. “Marcus. Eyes on me.”
Marcus blinks and finds him again. “There’s a ship. She’s called the Solvo.” He fumbles inside his jacket with his good hand, fingers clumsy, and pulls out an access card. He presses it into Rand’s fist. “Gets you in. Don’t lose it.”
“The Solvo is a ship?” Rand’s mind fills with more questions. “Where?”
“Docked here. Docking bay…” He loses it for a second, eyes going unfocused. “Get to her before the MOSHUUS take it. Get her to the Heemeyer Shipyards at Galt Station. Find John Marvin.” His grip tightens on Rand’s wrist. “He ordered the breakouts from Ares Alcatraz. He’ll explain everything.”
Rand keeps his voice steady. “Breakouts. Plural?”
Marcus’s eyes drift toward Toku and the young woman, then back. “You weren’t the only one.” A ghost of something crosses his face. “And I guess there were extras too.”
“MOSHUUS,” Rand says. “Zuhtou. What are they? What is all of this?”
But Marcus’s color is nearly gone, his breathing a shallow rattle that Rand has heard too many times to mistake for anything but the end. He knows better than to push. “Save it. Save your breath, kid. We’ll get you patched up.”
Even as he says it, he knows the lie for what it is.
Marcus’s eyes drift toward where his arm used to be. His voice drops to barely a whisper. “My arm feels the coldest.”
Rand holds his hand until the last breath shudders out of him. He stays still for a moment, jaw tight. Then he lowers the private’s hand with something close to care and reaches for the dog tags at the boy’s collar. They come free with a soft metallic whisper. He holds them in his scarred fist, feeling their weight, which is nothing, just stamped tin and a ball chain, but they pull at him anyway. A kid he never met crossed however much space and fought through whatever hell was happening below just to find him. Just to hand him a card and tell him to run. Rand doesn’t know what Sol Libertatis is. He doesn’t know what the Zuhtou are or what MOSHUUS means or who John Marvin is or what twenty-two years has done to the world while he was breathing recycled cold. What he knows is the weight of these tags and the stillness of the hand he just set down.
He pockets them and looks up.
Toku is standing three feet away.
The cold hits him before anything else does. Rand didn’t hear him. Didn’t register the shift in air or the soft compression of a boot on metal. A year ago, two years ago, ten years ago, he would have felt that approach the way other men feel a draft. Now a stranger is inside arm’s reach and Rand is only finding out about it after the fact. A dangerous stranger, he reminds himself. The kind who moves like he was built for exactly this.
Twenty-two years. He files it without dwelling on it. Something to test. Something to earn back, or reckon with if it doesn’t come back.
Rand registers it the same moment he registers that the dead soldier’s rifle is lying on the deck between them, exactly equidistant from both of their hands. Without a word, they both move for it at the same instant and lock on simultaneously, one hand on the barrel, one on the stock.
Rand’s grip tightens. “Let go,” he says, voice low and flat.
Toku’s expression doesn’t change. His dark eyes run a quick calculation. “And why should I?”
They hold for a moment, neither moving. Rand meets the other man’s gaze without blinking. He has two paths, one of them violence. “You don’t know me. I don’t know you. I understand that. But we’re all sinking on the same fouled ship right now.” He keeps his voice even and direct. “I’m Major Randall Andersen, Marines. I’ve led squads through worse than this and I’ve got the scars to prove it. I need you to trust me, and I’ll give you a reason to. You want out of here, you follow my lead. First gun we find after this one is yours.”
From behind her pod, Lilliana watches both of them, her mind processing the situation faster than either of them would guess. The big scarred one is the man the dead soldier came to find. The quiet one moved like a shadow and nobody saw him do it. She picks her moment. “OH, while you two sort that out,” she says, pushing off from her pod toward the nearest control console, “I’m just going to take a crack at the station systems. Maybe we can figure out where that ship is.”
Her fingers find a console on the platform and start moving.
Toku glances at her for half a second, then back to Rand. Then, slowly, he releases the rifle.
“Toku,” he says simply.
Rand takes the rifle and nods once. He checks the magazine. Twelve rounds. He keeps his face neutral about it.
“I’m in,” Lilliana says from the console, her voice lifting. “Station map. It’s not much, but it’s something.” She turns, takes in the two men watching her, and opens her arms toward the display like a game show host. “Lila Reyes. Newark, New Jersey. I don’t have a dick to swing in your little contest, but I have a knack for getting into places I’m not supposed to.” She holds the pose for exactly one beat, gets nothing back from either of them, and drops it. “Please take me with you if the plan is to escape?”
Rand looks over at the name REYES, LILLIANA and then back at Lila. “Lila, not Lily?”
“I’m not a fucking flower” Lila answers abruptly, then her disposition shifts as she worries she may have come off too strong.
Rand nods, small and deliberate. “Lila, find me where that ship is docked and the fastest route to it. Toku, watch our back.” He glances at Toku and lets a dry crack of a smile through. “Like I said. Next gun we find is yours.”
Toku doesn’t react. His eyes are already moving across the chamber.
The three of them get ready in their own way. Toku ties his dreadlocks back into a topknot. Lila pulls her hair up into two buns. Rand watches them both, then tears the remaining sleeve from his prison shirt, freeing both arms. Lila glances at him, glances down at her own uniform, strips the shirt off and ties it around her waist, leaving just her white tank top. Toku watches them both and rolls his sleeves up with the same measured deliberateness he seems to do everything.
Rand checks his twelve rounds one more time and turns toward the platform. “You ladies ready?”
Lila almost mentions that she doesn’t need to write the map down, that she carries a device behind her ear that records everything she has ever seen and can recall any of it on demand. Almost. Hari had stripped the networking capability from their black-market chips years ago aside from a direct, encrypted channel between just the two of them. This was to keep the AI from finding them, from malicious broadcast code and surveillance, but the storage and processing stayed intact. She still carries every schematic, every map, every manual she has ever read. Out of habit she reaches outward with the implant, searching for the warmth of a familiar signal.
Nothing.
He’s not close. Is he even alive? How long has it been. Twenty-two years?
Fingers snap in front of her face. She blinks. Rand is looking at her, hand already lowering. Toku watches from the rear without expression.
“You with us, Kid?” Rand asks.
“Yeah,” she says. “Sorry. Let’s go.”
“Time to go,” he agrees, and turns toward the dark.
| Book 1: Ares Alcatraz | Next Chapter |
