Rorik blasted awake like a howitzer, inhaling a tainted and terribly acrid night breeze. The fractured wall dug into his spine where he leaned, thick dust caught in his throat.

  He raked a hand through his long flaxen hair, then froze, eyes wide at the cold glass of reality around him.

  Aeroships and orbiting spaceships swarmed above the city of Baloen—roaring, swatting one another down with blazing luminants of destruction. Missiles and gunfire colorfully streaked through the sky in steady, explosive staccato.

  The rubble-strewn streets lay shrouded beneath the blanket of a starless night. Plagued with alarms and the distant screams of civilians fleeing for their lives.

  Towering gray cloudbreakers, once beautiful, now stood as skeletal tombstones marking the colony’s demise—glowing under pale moonlight, groaning as they swayed in Avansen’s fierce winds.

  Gales that fanned the raging infernos consuming city blocks, flames that devoured the horizon with an insatiable titian hunger.

  Alone, each was a dire catastrophe. But together they painted a portrait of death so vivid, that the word war was a tad timid.

  Hell more aptly defined it.

  With deliberate, hoarse pants, Rorik slowly anchored to reality and cringed at the dramatic thought. It wasn't hell. Los Angeles back in the day had it beat by a mile. Three even.

  It was just another battlefield.

  One that faded into the background as he remembered why he was there. His eyes traced the shattered road below, hollow as he wiped away rheum. The fact that he'd been able to sleep illustrated his ragged, down to the bone exhaustion.

  Rorik tried to pick apart his dream—a vermilion beach bordered by a neon yellow sea, topped with an azure crescent star. Vibrant. Strange. Or had it been a hallucination courtesy of The Veil?

  That liminal ocean of memory and time. A cold realm of uncertainty that weighed on him now. Immense, and indifferent as always.

  Whatever it was, it wasn't the first time his mother had haunted him. Vengeful as ever. But it was the first time he'd seen Cassandra when his eyes shut. Beautiful, brilliant, dangerous. Like most of the women in his life.

  His dick had a nose for trouble.

  Could it be an indication of growing feelings for her? A twisted premonition? A reflection of his own innate loneliness? What?

  A sudden shift in the air ripped his focus away, the sky became pregnant with a bulb of crimson light, accompanied by a dull growl. It grew louder. Closer. More menacing. Until it overshadowed all the explosive sounds of strife.

  With a flare, the clouds gave birth to a desolation round, oblong and soaring planet-ward with a vengeance. Crackling. Fiery. Pissed off. Before it rent into the earth like the cruel fist of an indignant god.

  The calamitous impact rattled the cloudbreaker beneath Rorik’s boots, ankles vibrating as its structure bobbed wildly. Night turned day as a swath of Baloen disappeared in a blooming flower of death.

  Rorik's ears popped, an agonizing ring drilled into his skull. Teeth tightly clenched as the rolling wall of dust and super-heated air roared over him. Debris peppered his face, eyes squeezed tight, every muscle locked against its intensity—fighting his damnedest to not bite off his tongue.

  Or worse yet, piss his shorts.

  The unnatural gale faltered abruptly, leaving behind only a whistling breeze. The earth stilled, almost eerily, and every gun on Avansen fell silent. A brief salutation to the newly disintegrated, Rorik morbidly thought, studying the budding mushroom cloud in the distance.

  He cleared his throat, dry as a desert carcass, then scratched at his stubble to—

  "Whoo! Straight flush, baby!"

  Rorik squinted over his shoulder down the hall at his back. Jakobs and Adrax, amidst broken desks and office debris, were fervently playing poker over a floating intangidisk. A small puck that depicted a rosy, shimmering projection of an old felt table.

  "Now you're lucky all of a sudden?" Jakobs threw his holographic cards down, a blinding sheen on the back of his bald head. "Where was that luck in that minefield yesterday? Still got bits of shrapnel in my underwear."

  "Lucky?" Adrax let out a dry chuckle. "Dude, you're just shit at the game. Dancing. Cooking. A lot of things now that I think about it."

  "Talking pretty tough for someone in strangling distance. You grubby-fingered mother—

  They devolved into a juvenile back-and-forth, noisy enough to rival the desolation round. A common bout that made Rorik yearn for a firefight. Sometimes they reminded him of simpler days, back with his old squad—the dream team. But more often than not their bickering was like an auditory colonoscopy.

  Opprobrious and cloying, if he was remembering the meanings correctly. He'd only ever used them to win at Scrabble.

  Rorik ignored them best he could, preferring to collect himself than babysit. His fingers drifted to the pistol at his side, then the camouflage compartments of his pewter fatigues. Magazines. Cleaning kits. Essentials. All secure.

  Going down the list until he slipped on the trauma-plate against the wall. Charcoal. Cold. A carapace of durtanium that hugged him tight like a weepy relative. Harder than titanium, light as cardboard.

  "For starssake! You born this stupid, or ya been practicing?" Adrax shifted a short burgundy strand from his face. "Who the hell would cheat for an eight fissen pot?!"

  "You! Next you'll say that big explosion messed up the—"

  "Will you please keep it the fuck down?" Rorik finally interjected, voice firm, yet softened by a sleepy purr. "Never know when a patrol will happen by, and I don't like getting shot right after waking up. Let me get some coffee in me first."

  “Fresh out,” Jakobs jingled the pot with a sly look back, face as punchable as humanly possible. “Wait. You were asleep that whole time?”

  Rorik scowled, then braced against the wall as a yawn tore free. "Yup."

  "But you were talking, answering questions and everything?"

  "If you say so."

  Jakobs’ pale, bearded face twisted into a grin, the kind that preceded saying something stupid.

  "Not giving you a dime." Rorik cut him off at the legs, thumbing over at the mushroom cloud. "But that big explosion means that BioMech got all they needed from the tertiary research district. Which means it's time for us to go."

  The boys groaned, doing a piss-poor job of pretending not to deal another hand.

  "Enough. On your feet. We came all this way to make money, right?"

  They glanced between themselves, then stood with a mix of curses and murmurs. Adrax hefted their supply pack onto his back and recovered the intangidisk. Jakobs thumbed his G4L-K9, flicking the selector at the base of its bull-pup frame.

  Rorik promptly slung his identical rifle before returning to the opening, teetering at the edge to bathe in the moonlight.

  The distant yellow satellite contrasted the fantastical crescent from his dream. Full, symmetrical. Its very presence threatened to conjure images of that surreal world: Cassandra, his anguish, his mother's rotted corpse.

  But Rorik was done dreaming. Instead, he took a deep breath, then allowed himself to fall.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The pit of his stomach churned as wind ripped past his face. Cold. Bitter. Howling in his ears as floors blurred by window after window.

  At the very last second, Rorik twisted head over heel, then smashed shin deep into terrastone with a tremulous crack—a peal of thunder that echoed down the street. Echoed through the marrow of his bones, before a pall of relative silence settled in a cloud of dust.

  Rorik yawned, then stepped over a smoldering tire, to the stench of soot and liquefied rubber. At street level, the moonlight couldn’t quite breach the spires, and the power grid hadn't survived the initial assault.

  He was effectively blind.

  Until his pupils stabbed into the dark, until hidden light bled from a fresh wound in the night. A diaphanous white glow that coated everything in sight. An unnatural and powerful spectrum that allowed Rorik to see things almost as bright as day.

  Once the boys landed he started off, rifle propped on his shoulder. Each crunching step underscored by the miasmic, low-orbit battle above—a half-muted maelstrom of weapons-fire, detonating in thermionic bursts that lit the sky with burnished flame.

  A breathtaking sight.

  War on a scale once limited to fiction and fever dreams. Rorik could lose himself in it for hours, though they rarely lasted that long. Lost studying the organized, yet ultimately unpredictable chaos.

  But he was only a half-decent pilot, and his job was down here. In the mud and shit where he belonged.

  With the fighting concentrated elsewhere, Rorik fiddled with his intangidisk, not yet expecting trouble. Tried his best to orient them toward their objective, but jamming made connecting to the command ship Devourer difficult.

  The miniature map warped inconsistently, unable to pinpoint anything besides cardinal directions, and a few major landmarks. After a few smacks and some negative shrills, he thrust the unruly puck into his pocket, preferring to trust what he'd already memorized.

  His motivation deflated with each step, every muscle ached for a soft bunk. Rorik had been done with this war days ago. This dust ball—some jackass had the nerve to call a planet—was getting more depressing by the second.

  Omni-Corp, their opposition, had focused the colony's funds on the underground genefarms. So much so that Avansen—Baloen City in particular—were less soulless now than before they blew them up. There hadn't been a single speck of human expression. No colorful venues, charming greasy spoons, or even something as simple as a public park. Everything was poured from the same mold. Lifeless. Gray. Terrible.

  Courtesy of dark, corporate masters.

  They turned into Walnurn street in loose formation, where most of the buildings had been reduced to mounds of shifting ash. Where scorched cars and debris decorated the sidewalks.

  Dark masters? What is this Star Wars?

  Rorik shook his head at the dramatic thought, perhaps more exhausted than he realized. He'd worked for every intercorp in Heartland Space five times over. Who was he to judge? He was no better. Not by one Wamu-rotten centimeter.

  His lips pursed as he studied the desolate apartments, burning ruins on either side. As if the expression could raise the dead or absolve his sins. Rorik was good at compartmentalization. Damn good. Yet occasionally even his brow sagged over pointless death, at the innocents caught needlessly in the crossfire.

  But what could he do? Endless war was about the only thing he was good at. A cheap excuse, he knew, but the best he had left.

  Out of some odd form of pity, Rorik allowed the pain of his hypocrisy to linger, let his compassion sting at the corners of dry eyes.

  Then willed it aside.

  He cared in his own way, but was by nature a predator—couldn't change if he wanted. All his kind were predators, and he'd never seen a lion weep for a gazelle. No. Not even once.

  A series of aeroships zoomed by overhead, four armed shale arrowheads of death. Flying low, far too quickly to verify. Rorik tapped a finger at the trigger of his ionic under-barrel, hopeful that they'd remain some other schmucks' problem.

  Jakobs rasped, smacking away a small cloud of dust as he matched Rorik's pace. "How much further, Lieutenant?"

  Rorik swallowed and blinked away his residual introspection. "About to cross through No Man's Land. Not long after that, fastest route. Pretty sure."

  "Wanna book it?"

  "Nah. The new blackout belts have done alright with passive sweeps. But everybody's got their scanners pointed at this sector, running'll make us targets."

  "I don't know, LT, judging by the rolls on the back of Jakobs' neck? Exercise might be worth it."

  "Haha," Jakobs grumbled with a half-glance. "But seriously, now that I'm up I want to hurry and finish this contract. ASAP. Got a new lady friend waiting back home."

  "Job first. Pussy second."

  "Should put that on a T-Shirt." Jakobs chuckled, stroking his lengthy chestnut beard. "But funny you should say that. Heard you and that new Lieutenant—Cassandra was it?—were bumping uglies all of a sudden? Care to comment?”

  "You like your lungs on the inside of your rib-cage?"

  "Goodness me, would've expected that from Adrax, he's a romantic sap."

  "Fuck you," interjected Adrax.

  "But from the Ladies' Man, King-Ding-A-Ling himself? Color me shocked, Jimmy."

  Rorik kept his frown buried deep. He hated the name Jim, Jimbo, Jimmy, or the Jimster with a passion. It was James—James Rorik, either would do. And as far as Cassandra went, she wasn't even that sensitive a subject, Jakobs simply didn't know when to stop. Like a giant, bald-headed gnat with pancake butt.

  But Rorik's snarky retort was cut short by a faint noise. Only noticeable due to its uniqueness amidst the deadly fanfare.

  Adrenaline dripped down his spine., and he motioned for them to halt at the edge of an intersection. There was an immolated pit at its center, pockmarked with cars and fallen aeroriders, all warped from emergency crashes. The outlines of charred corpses in every other cabin.

  Rorik took a knee and sharpened his senses, slowly amplified the discordance of Baloen to that of a freight train. Grating. Painful. Intimately familiar. With shut eyes and clenched teeth, he sifted through the onslaught decibel by decibel. Gunfire and all. Until the deliberate cadence of booted feet stood more apart.

  It was either an ill-timed parade, or a battle formation.

  A sizable one, headed towards them from the road to their left. With practiced, albeit weary eyes, Rorik weighed their options. Most buildings were rubble and there was little cover or concealment. None that didn't also put them in a disadvantageous position. A retreat or reroute was out of the question too.

  Their break had eaten too much time.

  Mission failure would drop their dependency score, and he wasn't parting with a single, fucking fissen. Not if he could help it.

  Finally, he settled on a structure labeled: Municipal Warehouse, a few doors down. He pointed, leaving no room for argument. The boys sprinted, then cleared its two stories with graceful bounds.

  Rorik threw a final glance, then leapt up after them. Gravel crunched under his weight, his rifle tucked low as he slid in-between them against the parapet. Braced. Jaws tight as the formation neared.

  Which as they did, the quiet hum of a combat platform joined the ruckus. A Big-Dick propulsion-model by the sound of it.

  "Want me to take a peek?" Jakobs whispered, calm despite the sweat threading his eyebrows.

  "You kidding me? A reflecting beam’ll give us away if you look. Ahurei?"

  Adrax blinked, surprised by the use of his real name. The greenest of them, his face was a perpetual mix of eager and nervous. "Rank before beauty, LT. If you don’t mind."

  "But he’s prettier than you too."

  "Oh, well." Adrax beamed, his youthful, umber face overrun with scraggly facial hair. "Rank and beauty before brains, LT."

  Rorik studied them both, dissatisfaction more than evident. Half-tempted to make it an order before he relented with a deep sigh.

  Useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle some days...

  "Armor’s angular, blacked out. Confirmed, Omni-Corp goons," Rorik called out, easing up an inch at a time. "Thirty strong. Two-by-column. T11 Combat Platform dead center—Big-Dick turret loadout. Couple of KT-86 synthenoids at the rear. Bipedal models. Nasty-looking bastards."

  The firepower was certainly impressive, yet the tank nor killer machines held his eye. It was the obsidian crate hitched to the T11’s rear. Its markings had been scrubbed, but he could still make out a sorting code.

  Odd-numbered with an HK-prefix. Which, if intel was accurate, meant it had originated at a genefarm. Not priceless. Not a king’s ransom. But its contents would certainly supplement their payout. Intercorps were awfully generous when it came to Genner DNA. Clone armies weren't cheap.

  Rorik slid back, fatigues crinkling against the terrastone. Jaw still tight, he raked through his greasy hair, greed and good sense at war behind his eyes. Old rivals, evenly matched.

  On one hand, they’d made plenty of fissens. Enough to last a good while anyhow. There was no good reason to take on random—

  A sudden gale stirred the dust at their feet. Then a blur of a shadow roared overhead. Cutting behind a cloudbreaker, an aeroship banked back around, blue engines flaring as it shifted to a hover.

  It drifted lower, slow, deliberate, hungry. Like a malefic metal mosquito. The crimson Omni-Corp omega stamped proudly on its rounded nose—a single eye drawn at its center.

  With a loud click, a pale searchlight flicked on. Blindingly bright as it swept the rooftop, before it finally settled. Right. On. Them.

  "Fuck me," Jakobs and Adrax muttered in unison, frozen in disbelief and anger.

  But Rorik, despite himself, despite his damnable exhaustion, managed a chuckle. Low. Dry. Almost manic. Resigned to the stupidity of the average day in his life...as the aeroship’s rotary cannon began to spin.

  If I didn’t have bad luck...