Time: 2510.02.15

  Coordinates: Prime World Epsilon — Cadian City Military Spaceport

  The first thing Jack saw wasn’t victory.

  It was a goddamn graveyard.

  Through the transport’s porthole, Jack’s gene-modified heart hammered like a broken engine. He gripped the harness straps, sweat beading on his forehead. The void outside was choked with steel corpses—shattered carriers yawning open like torn mouths, their light sails ripped into paper shreds, coolant spraying out in glittering streams. A cruiser drifted in slow rotation like a gutted beast, its fusion core leaking blue sparks, its hull pocked with particle-cannon craters. A destroyer snapped like a broken branch, displaying a pilot sealed inside a melted canopy—heroes who would never fly again.

  Far off, the gravity corridor flickered, twisting starlight like a drunk god’s cruel joke. Black-market scavengers swarmed over the wreckage, picking it clean in this “meat grinder” hell, the way vultures strip a carcass.

  Jack’s Martian bloodline pumped at overload. His upgraded heart hammered under his ribs like it was trying to escape:

  Run, you fat bastard. This isn’t war—this is Cadian’s slaughterhouse, draining the whole system.

  Thirteen escapes, and now he was just another speck of dust inside the machine. No trick in the world could dodge this ashfield. The machine had finally grabbed him—and it wasn’t letting go.

  When the transport slammed into the gravity well, the deck groaned like stressed metal. The final landing hit like a hammer—hull crashing down onto ferrocrete. Atmospheric fire burned outside the window, then vanished as the ramp hissed open.

  What greeted him wasn’t silence.

  It was motion—endless, devouring motion.

  A gunship cut across the landing field, engines thunder-clapping overhead, afterburners scorching the pad. Waves of heat rolled over Jack, stinging his skin. Beyond the smoke, a Vector-class single-unit mech strode past, legs thick and brutal (1.1 meters each), spherical knee and ankle joints pounding the ground with a rhythm like a living titan’s heartbeat.

  This spaceport wasn’t a base.

  It was an exposed artery of the war machine. Fuel lines, repair bays, armored columns—everything moving, everything burning, everything being consumed. Jack’s thirteen escapes, his disguises, his cheap little tricks suddenly felt like childish fantasies.

  There was nowhere left to run.

  The machine had him now.

  It wouldn’t loosen its grip.

  Three hours later, Jack drove his battered mech—named with bitter humor Thor—to the 66th Armored Division headquarters. The base was a vast, heavily fortified compound northeast of the city, hidden from orbital view under a warped field-shield.

  At the gate, a guard glanced at Thor, expression hovering somewhere between amusement and pity, then waved him through. Inside, the camp glittered with seventh-generation mechs—polished frames, lethal and elegant.

  Next to them, Jack’s century-old antique groaned like a wounded animal.

  Laughter drifted through the air:

  “Hey, which museum did that exhibit escape from?”

  “Does that engine even ignite?”

  Jack took the stares and the murmurs with a blank face.

  Then STARK-2’s voice chimed in:

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  “Jack, I must inform you that based on their facial-expression analysis, if I were this mech, I would immediately self-destruct out of shame.”

  Jack cut STARK-2’s audio feed.

  He parked Thor—creaking, half coming apart—right beside the sleek seventh-gens, the contrast almost obscene.

  Then he started “asking for directions.”

  A survivor’s old habit: your smile lowers guard, your questions sound clumsy. Distract them. Spread them thin. Make them underestimate you. Then keep asking until you can practically feel them going insane—before you walk away.

  He thought: if he made enough trouble, maybe he’d piss off some officer with connections… get himself reassigned. Sent back.

  As his eyes searched for targets, he saw her.

  Less than a hundred meters from the recon barracks, a woman with a lieutenant’s insignia leaned against a vehicle. Slim, flawless, expensive. She radiated self-assured superiority—the kind that comes from never worrying about the next meal or the next dawn.

  You’ll do.

  Jack quickened his pace, wearing his most helpless grin.

  “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” he said brightly. “I’m new here. Could you point me toward the recon battalion?”

  He was careful—smart enough not to mention his own identity or rank, not to invite recognition.

  Sure enough, her gaze swept over him slowly, contemptuously. No words. Just a lazy finger pointing in some vague direction.

  “Oh, thank you,” Jack said, launching into a whole speech—without moving an inch. “But everything looks the same around here. So, uh… could you maybe draw me a map? On my datapad?”

  “You have a datapad, and you want me to draw?” Her tone dripped with disdain. “Don’t you know how to use navigation?”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Jack said cheerfully. “But I was born with a defective sense of direction. So… maybe you could take me there in person?”

  The lieutenant fell into a hard silence.

  Jack pressed on.

  “You’ve got a vehicle. It won’t take your time. We’re on the same side now—comrades.”

  He thumped his chest theatrically.

  “We’re fighting for this nation’s freedom! We’re defending our family, our friends—”

  Seeing that the 300-pound idiot was about to keep going, the lieutenant finally snapped. She yanked open the car door, got in, and said only one word:

  “Get in.”

  When Jack climbed in, her brand-new car noticeably sank under his weight. Her lips pressed together; she said nothing.

  A few minutes later, she dropped him at the command center.

  “Can you tell me your name?” Jack called after her.

  She stayed silent, started the engine, and prepared to leave.

  Jack leaned toward the window and shouted with a grin, “Thanks, Lieutenant! I’m Jack! I’ll buy you coffee sometime!”

  The car accelerated away, kicking up dust.

  Jack watched it go, thinking: Shame. She didn’t look bad.

  What he didn’t know was that inside the vehicle, the lieutenant’s mouth twitched.

  She remembered the way the suspension had dropped.

  Three hundred pounds.

  Under her breath, she muttered: “Fatty.”

  Then she laughed—short, contemptuous.

  In the recon battalion command center, Jack learned the commander was in a meeting.

  A few minutes later, Major Kincaid walked out—tall, narrow, with a weathered face like carved stone.

  Jack snapped a salute. “Second Lieutenant Jack Harlan, reporting for duty, sir.”

  “At ease,” Kincaid rasped. “My office.”

  Inside, the air smelled like ash. Kincaid lit a cigarette and studied Jack through a thin veil of smoke.

  “I read your file. You’re a mechanic.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Special operations training. Recon program. High scores.” He leaned forward slightly. “So tell me—why would a top-tier recon trainee voluntarily transfer to logistics and spend his life wrestling scrap?”

  Because I wanted to live, you bastard.

  “I just wanted to survive, sir,” Jack answered evenly.

  “Survive?” Kincaid crushed the cigarette. “Not many are that honest.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve always been straightforward.” Jack met his eyes.

  “So,” Kincaid said, eyes drilling into him, “you ran alone to survive, leaving your comrades behind?”

  Jack’s voice lowered, darkened. “My comrades stayed behind on the scorched earth. I’m alive so more people can know what their sacrifice meant.”

  Kincaid stared at him a moment, then asked again:

  “If one day you and I are on the battlefield, facing an enemy we cannot defeat—do you choose a glorious death… or do you run again and live like a coward?”

  “A soldier’s duty is obedience,” Jack said, expression hard. “If you choose to die for the nation, I respect you. But if you want me to die with you—” he paused, and his eyes sharpened, “—I will outlive you, sir.”

  (Quick, file a report, send me back. Marching into a guaranteed loss isn’t bravery. It’s stupidity.)

  Kincaid watched him for a long time without speaking.

  Finally, he leaned forward and pointed at a row of dog tags on the wall—hooks, some occupied, some empty. His voice dropped into something dangerous.

  “See those empty hooks? The last man who tried to be a deserter under my command is hanging there. I never found his body, so I carved his name into that wall as a memorial of shame.”

  He stepped out from behind the desk until his shadow fell over Jack.

  “This isn’t just recon. This is the 66th Armored Special Recon Battalion—the only one of its kind. Here, what keeps you alive isn’t luck.”

  He let the words drop like a sentence.

  “It’s discipline.”

  “Remember that, Lieutenant.”

  Then, colder:

  “Now get out of my sight.”

  Jack saluted and turned to leave, his heartbeat louder than any engine.

  No matter what he tried, he couldn’t slip the bars.

  He could feel it now: the war machine’s jaws had closed around him—

  And this time, it wasn’t going to let him go.

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