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🔻

Cham

Kuuyin took the corner as fast he dared, tires screeching on the pavement as his squad car spun into a reckless drift. Beside him, in the passenger seat, his partner Aru Tosi, a rookie three weeks out of academy, white-knuckled anything he could grab onto.

“Dispatch, this is Unit India-432,” Aru relayed into the receiver as Kuuyin brought the vehicle to a halt. “Officers Cham and Tosi responding! We’ve arrived on scene!”

“10-4, 432! What’s your sitrep?”

Reaching overhead, Kuuyin slid back a ceiling panel concealing an overhead gun rack. From the burning vehicles and bodies strewn across the pavement, peashooters and pepper spray was not going to cut it.

“Oh hells, dispatch! There’s bodies all over the street!” Aru continued. “There’s heavy gunfire coming from the factory at…uhh…631 Lone Elm! What’s ETA on backup!? Over.”

Kuuyin handed Aru a rifle. The rookie took it, his face going pale.

“Receiving you Unit 432. Backup is three minutes out. Hold for additional units. Over.”

“10-4 dispatch,” Aru said, taking “holding for additional units. Over.”

Kuuyin grabbed a second rifle from the overhead mounts.

“What’re you doing!?” Aru exclaimed.

A screaming figure flew out of a third story window. Kuuyin winced when the unfortunate soul fell onto a chunk of flaming wreckage, impaling himself on a shard of twisted metal.

“Oh fuck,” Aru groaned, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Get yourself to—” Kuuyin started, but was interrupted by shrill screams coming from the man impaled on the wreckage. “Sinno’s balls….”

Another body flew out of a third floor window, followed by an explosion.

“Cham!?” Aru shouted.

A pungent odour of urine filled the vehicle. Kuuyin resolved not to mention it. Fresh off the training courses and this rook was already neck deep in a kind of shit even Kuuyin wasn’t trained for. This was HTac’s territory. Hells, this was so out of hand, the military was probably the only group with a hope of containing the carnage.

As he was reaching for the radio receiver, a loud thud came from the engine. All the lights went out in the vehicle. For a moment, Kuuyin sat there, frozen, looking at a smoking hole blown through the hood of the vehicle. Dread seeped into his bones. His heart was in his throat and racing photons across the void.

“Fuck this,” he swore, unfolding his rifle’s buttstock.

“Cham! What’re you doing!?” Aru exclaimed.

“You want to catch a stray bullet?” Kuuyin asked, throwing his door open.

“No!” Aru fired back.

“Neither do I,” Kuuyyin said, unfastening his seatbelt.

He ducked out of the car and crouched down behind the vehicle. Bulletproof glass and armoured doors were nice, but the more layers of it between them and whatever was going on inside that factory the better. At least until they could find more robust cover or backup arrived.

Aru clambered over the centre console, cursing to himself. Cap wasn’t going to be pleased when he saw the bodycam of that, but that old stick in the mud was never happy about anything. Kuuyyin activated the remote wicomm chip implanted behind his ear.

“Dispatch, this is Sergeant Cham, Unit India-432,” Kuuyyin relayed, trying to suppress the panic creeping into his voice, “reporting mass casualty incident! Multiple active shooters and heavy combat! We are taking fire and—”

Another explosion erupted from the building.

“Shit! We’re pinned down! Send HTac or RRGs now, dammit!”

The sound of shattering glass broke Kuuyin’s focus. Looking back, he saw Aru slumped halfway out of the driver’s side, his head split and spilled out on the floor.

“Fuck!” he swore, reaching for Aru’s tactical vest. “Gods dammit! Shots fired! Shots fired! Officer down!” Kuuyin shouted into his comms device. “Repeat—

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🔻

Yoti

Yoti loved his job. One had to in this line of work. Living out of a hangar, answering calls at two in the morning, downing cold coffee and running for a gravskimmer to chase the juiciest aerial footage, it wasn’t for posers and limpets. It was a labour of love reserved for special breeds; adrenaline junkies, thrillseekers, and other sorts of bachelors with questionable degrees of mental stability.

When Yoti’s ex unceremoniously dumped him, the quivering manlet’s parting words were something like ‘this job will be the death of you, Yoyo!’ Yoti disagreed. Nothing made him feel quite so alive as the sound of engines roaring in his ears and the rattling in his bones as his gravskimmer shot across Odaatso’s midnight skies chasing thrills and that first scoop of serious action. Better dead than grounded.

His ex was right about one thing. Flying skimmers was his first love. Everyone else was just a side piece or a booty call.

Uumak, his ground coordinator that evening, caught him catching zeds in the cockpit when the activity kicked off. Some kind of shootout was going down in Underwood Industrial and Local 38 wanted to break first. Yoti was airborne in under three.

He knew he’d be the first skimmer on scene. The docades he’d been at this had gifted him with a sense of dead reckoning about it. Five minutes and he’d be on scene, a full fifteen ahead of whoever Channel 7 had flying their skimmers, and at least six ahead of his archnemesis Kija Tok from Tuuai Prime Central Broadcasting.

TPCB… even the channel made Yoti want to punch something. What a bunch of posers, pussies, and lightweights. Their pilots weren’t half as dedicated and a hundredth as hard for the action as he was. Always second to the headlines, but claimed they were first to break them. Liars and thieves plundering his thunder. Local Channel 38, your TCN Network Station, would be first to break. Always was, thanks to Yoti. That’s what they cut him the big cheques for.

Pushing a nudge through his neural implant, a comms line opened to Uumak.

“So, what kind of throwdown are we looking at?” Yoti asked, approaching downtown.

“Some kind of shootout in the industrial district,” Uumak responded.

“I know that much,” Yoti quipped, activating his skimmer’s camera arrays.

“It’s a big one,” Uumak added, “radio chatter says HTac’s been dispatched. Mayor Rei just got pulled in. A Rapid-Response Battalion from the Guard might be activated.”

“No shit?” Yoti grinned, weaving through downtown starscrapers at dangerous speeds.

Uumak sighed exasperatedly. With cameras rolling, she could see the stunts he was pulling. He could almost see her rubbing her brow with frustration.

If Yoti had a conscience, he might have felt bad about the paperwork he was causing her. Then again, if he had something so useless as that, he’d be lagging seven and twenty behind like Kija.

Pound ground, Kija!

Covering Yoti’s ass and paying off the Aerospace Safety Commission was part of her job anyhow. Just as flying like an absolute lunatic to get the freshest footage was his. It was a symbiotic relationship, one sure to keep her job secure if nothing else.

Besides, aerospace safety regulations were for povos. Corporate skimmers could wreck the space elevator and only pay a fine and a tidy deposit into the local ASC Commissioner’s Proximan bank account. If the Aerospace Safety Commission even bothered to cite him at all, the news station would take care of it. They always did.

“Radio chatter is on fire,” Uumak said, as he rounded the downtown space elevator, “five alarm. Half of Odaatso PD is on their way to this mess.”

“Well, let the station know,” Yoti replied, the Downtown South flying by, “Your Man in the Sky is about to…”

“Hold up!” Uumak interrupted.

“What?” Yoti responded, a flash of light flickering in his periphery.

“Shit! Yoti! Turn back!” Uumak exclaimed. “They just shot down an OPD Skimmer!”

“What!?” Yoti reacted. “No way! Those things are flying tanks!”

Yoti broke out of the downtown skyline. In the middle distance, about twelve clicks away, he could see spotlights, skimmers, and firelight glowing up the faces of Underwood’s densely packed light-industrial facilities.

“YOTI!” Uumak shouted, panic in her voice. “Abort! Turn back! Skimmers are going down! They’re shooting them down!”

“That can’t be right,” Yoti dismissed. “I can see a half a dozen of them flying.”

He had half a mind to open a side channel to get OPD’s radio chatter direct, but decided against it. Too distracting. Especially for what he was about to do.

“Here comes Yoti!” Yoti shouted, dipping the nose of his skimmer straight down.

“YOTI!” Uumak shrieked.

Barely a couple of seconds into the dive, Yoti pulled back on his flight controls, slamming the tilt pedals fully left. Gs spiked. Adrenaline surged through his veins. Yoti’s heart rate went tachyon.

“KASAI!” Yoti exclaimed, erupting into laughter. “DID YOU SEE THAT!?”

“Yoti!” Uumak shouted. “Turn back! Abort!”

“Why I—” Yoti began, but stopped.

All the mirth of the moment evaporated. He couldn’t see lights in the sky anymore. No more spotlights. No more blinking cherries. Only flames and wreckage scattered over nearby rooftops.

“Yoti! Get out of there!” Uumak screamed.

Below him, he could see the aftermath of rapid, unplanned, vehicular deconstructions all up and down the road. Holes punched deep into buildings held the burning wreckage of what could only have been gravskimmers. A music festival’s worth of blue and amber lights illuminated a scene of absolute carnage.

“By the gods!” Uumak swore. “That’s...they’re all…”

“Dead…” Yoti said, ruefully.

A loud ping sounded beneath his feet. Then another, and another, and then a thunk.

“Oh Naagu Pia! I think I’m taking fire!” Yoti yelped, the skimmer passing by the nexus of destruction.

A loud bang erupted from his rear, and he felt the skimmer start to drop.

“YOTI!” Uumak cried.

“Fuck!” Yoti cursed, the skimmer losing power. “Fuck! Fuck! FUCK!”

Everything began to spiral, the world turning over and over. A loud whine came from the engines and then—

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🔻

Kokdomo

Imito Kokdomo had been with HTac for sixty anno. It was a good job and he got to do some good doing it. Signing bonus was great, and the benefits were even better. Twenty in the Void Marines Special Forces had been a fun ride, but when the missus gave him the ultimatum every military man knew would come, well, the choice was clear.

Trading VMSF for HTac was definitely a downgrade in terms of ops. Gang busts, hostage situations, and standoffs weren’t quite the same rush as busting terrorist cells, wrecking pirate fleets, and decommissioning smuggling rings. Running with the clunklunkers was less paperwork, fewer rules, and way fewer bosses breathing down his neck and scrutinising everything he did, but he wouldn’t go back for all the worlds in The Way. Being home for holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, and all the best moments of his son’s life, the brotherhood couldn’t compete with that.

Chief dragging him out of bed at zero dark thirty over some kind of gang war gone overboard almost brought Imito back. The look on his wife’s face as he was getting dressed dispelled that fantasy in an instant. Truly the gods had no wrath like that of a woman rudely awoken.

When Imito got to the rally point, a precinct two districts over, he began to suspect Chief Noboto hadn’t been entirely forthright. Command never was, and at least two full HTac teams were kitting up at the precinct. Chatter on comms made it clear all hands were on deck for this one.

When it came to gang wars, Imito had seen a few. He thought he knew what that meant. Mass casualties, lots of innocents caught in the crossfire, a real mell of a hess, and that was before the nightmare he and his team would have to wade through once they got there. Cleaning the crimson out of his boots after wasn’t going to be an option, but the hazard pay would cover the cost of freshies.

HTac APCs carrying Imito and his team were halfway to the scene when word came in that skimmers were dropping out of the sky. Haaken Musachi, their Operations Command Facilitator back at base, insisted it was jammers. Nobody was buying that story.

OPD Skimmers were milspec. Unless this gang had stolen a front-line EJAM System and somehow gotten twelve tonnes of fuck you onto the roof, there was no way they were knocking birds out of the sky like that. When they rolled up to the warzone and saw the wreckage blazing in the streets, they knew command was lying to them.

Business as fucking usual, Imito thought, as the APCs navigated around abandoned fire engines surrounded by dead firefighters.

Musachi was lying to them. Command always lied. Civi or mili, command never levelled with the grunts they sent in to mop up the mess. It was one of many things he didn’t miss from VMSF. Business as usual stopped there.

Cruisers, riot response vehicles, dead uniforms scattered in multiple pieces on the pavement were self-evidently not the work of jammers. Hells, they weren’t even the work of gangsters. Imito knew of some crime syndicates with access to some serious heat. He’d seen them field it a few times before too, but a twelve-seven antimateriel rifle was a far cry from the firepower required to cut a man wearing level 4 body armour in half.

After his team had unloaded and breached into the facility’s loading dock, it became undeniable they weren’t dealing with any kind of gang war. Gangs in the No-Gos could turn up the temps, but not like what he was seeing. This was just war war, military-grade get-fucked. There weren’t even bodies, only pieces of vaguely recognisable chunks of human flesh like someone had sicced some unit of elite combat operators on this factory to deliver a bloodbath of apocalyptic proportions.

Imito had only seen this kind of carnage one time. Broke a dozen of his men. The gods must have been watching over them because Rill’s death priests had left them a decommed pirate bay gift-wrapped in the bloodiest of all possible bows and fucked off before they’d arrived.

“Command, you seeing this?” Imito said into his wicomm implant.

“Wish I wasn’t,” OpsComm Musachi responded.

“What do you think? Rogue FMC?” Imito asked.

“No,” Musachi answered, “doesn’t fit the profile.”

“Who else could dish out pain like this?”

“Don’t know,” Musachi said, “but this isn’t FMC. They don’t target police and noncoms like this crew. Whoever this is, they’re cleaning house. Keep your heads on a swivel. Whoever these fuckers are, they’re serious business.”

“Roger that,” Imito concluded, signalling his team to advance.

Cautiously, they moved deeper into the vertical factory complex. Sweeping the ground floor turned up more of the same. Every room looked like the garage. Blood everywhere, chunks and pieces of people splattered over everything, and there were bodies, so many bodies, all of them in so many pieces it was impossible to tell how many there were. It wasn’t just people either. Machines, furniture, even the walls had been blown to bits. Anything used as cover had been shot clean through. Hapless victims, armed or not, had been pulped and smeared over the floor on the other side like abstract art.

Musachi wasn’t wrong about the house cleaning. Half the hammer jobs on the walls didn’t even have identifiable targets on the other side. A lot of wet work operations with the VMSF ended up looking like this. Any bulkhead, deck, hatch, compartment or otherwise could and would be concealing something. Wreck and check it all.

Stomachs emptied and knees jellied for half of Imito’s team before they even got to the back of the building. Imito could barely stomach the scene himself. Between the stress of the silence and the scale of the violence, only the combat vets could hold themselves together as they cleared the ground floor. Piece by piece, Imito had to send units back to the APC until he was left with only the five battle-hardened war dogs who’d seen enough blood and guts to have become numbed to it.

Hiyyo, their medic, one of only three women in the entire Odaatso HTac Division, was obviously struggling with the carnage, but was putting on a brave face. Imito should have sent her back, but he needed her. He needed everyone he had left. Jeuk, Rei-Ka, Lonta, and Hiyyo were the core of his unit, the only soldiers grizzled enough to handle a situation like this.

But the whole scene was one beyond unreasonable. It was something straight from a horror film. If proportionate response was a person, and it had been here, even the gods wouldn’t have been able to identify its body.

Inside the last room, Imito saw something highly unusual, something that made no sense at all. A large battle axe had been embedded in the middle of the floor. So large, in fact, Imito couldn’t think of a single person who could have swung it, let alone buried its blade as deep as it was in industry-grade structural concrete.

What confused him even more was what was at the end of a chain attached to its pommel. The head of Gikcho Nakima, a Rakutsai Crime Syndicate viceroy, had been surgically attached to a steel plate on the end of the chain. By the looks of the wound, whoever had done the deed hadn’t ripped his head off until after they’d attached it to the battle axe like some kind of macabre keychain ornament.

“The fuck…?” Imito reacted, approaching the axe.

Gikcho, a greasy dirtbag among greasy dirtbags, had been on Odaatso Police’s radar for years now. Underboss of the South Odaatso Nakima Clan, he was a real piece of work. There wasn’t a pie he didn’t have his fingers in, with the plum on his thumb being human trafficking.

A cold pit formed in Imito’s stomach as he realised the axe and head weren’t left here for the Nakimas. It had been left for them, for HTac. It was there to let the police know why.

“Good riddance,” Musachi said over the line.

Fresh gunfire in the distance sent Imito and his team leaping for cover. Peering through a hole in the wall to his left, Imito tried to swallow the fear rising in his throat. Every instinct he and his team had honed to a razors edge was beginning to look like exactly what might get them all killed.

Looking back at the axe, Imito saw it in a new light. It wasn’t an answer to why, not for them. For he and his team, it was a warning. It was a warning to back off. He and his didn’t want any part of this.

Fuck! Get yourself together, Imito!

Imito thumped his fist against the wall, grabbed his shotgun, and forced himself back to his feet.

“Musachi!? Do you have a lead on that signal!?” Imito asked, retrieving his ballistic shield.

“Signal is coming from the fifth floor,” Musachi answered. “Perimeter is secured and additional HTac units have just arrived. You are clear to ascend.”

“Beginning to think this might be a job for the military,” Imito responded, looking dejectedly at his shotgun.

Thirteen and a half mills, eight shells of quarter-dime musket shot, it was a big gun. More than enough heat was in his hands to shred a man’s guts or burst his brain pan like a piñata. Looking back to the axe, he got a bad feeling that even an 18-3 Pachy-Tac stopping rifle wouldn’t be enough to bring these boys down.

“RRG is on their way,” Musachi confirmed.

“We can’t wait until they get here?” Imito asked, half-jokingly.

“Negative. Governor’s orders.”

“Fuck,” Imito swore, the gunfire upstairs going silent again.

“Use the Northeast Stairs,” Musachi directed. “Team Gamma says Southwest is no-go.”

“Copy that boss,” Imito responded, rising back to his feet.

He signalled to his team and they moved quickly, but cautiously through a ground-floor gym toward the northeast corner of the building. Additional Htac teams pinged their entry points and their positions began appearing on Imito’s helmet HUD.

For the first time, Imito felt no sense of relief seeing backup arrive. HTac wasn’t equipped for this. He knew it. His team knew it. Musachi knew it. Everyone knew it. They were walking into a slaughter.

The ballistic shield in his left hand felt a lot heavier than when he walked in. Imito was his team’s breacher. If anyone was going home in a body bag tonight, it was most likely to be him. This was the job, though, the one he’d signed up for.

Gods save us, Imito prayed silently, leading his team out of the gym and into the north corridor. Turning right, he continued toward the northeast stairs, the torch mounted to his shotgun illuminating a heavily damaged doorway.

Exosuits, power armour, or some kind of pulse gun had buckled two centimetres of solid, steel. No other explanation. A narrow, slit window of wire-reinforced bulletproof glass had been punched clean through and blood was dripping from the hole.

As Imito approached, he saw chunks of scalp clinging to the window’s broken teeth. A bloody red streak had painted the door and beside it a body missing a head and an arm lay slumped over like it had been shoved out of the way by an indifferent boot.

Imito pushed into the stairwell, clearing his corners. Every where his torch panned, he found more carnage. Another body lay just inside, folded over, a giant hole punched through the torso, guts spilled out on the floor. Imito stepped around it, boots squelching as he checked angles. Up and down the stairs, hanging over the railings, pinned to every surface by the biggest flechettes he’d ever seen, were more and more corpses. Bullet holes pock marked every surface, and there were more than a few holes punched clean through concrete-encased steel-frame stairs. Imito didn’t want to think about what could have done that.

“By Sinno,” Imito whispered, stepping over bodies as best he could while starting his ascent.

Above, fresh gunfire erupted from the fifth floor. Every instinct in him screamed to increase his pace, to double time it, to stop the carnage before it went any farther. Even if this was a stronghold for local drug runners, there were plenty of innocents trapped in here with them. Gangsters meeting the bloody end they deserved was one thing, but most of the people here weren’t by choice.

The only thing keeping him slow and steady were the bodies scattered all over the staircase and Rei-Ka’s hand gripping the back of his vest. HTac was more than capable of taking the gang here, but the wrath of hell indiscriminately unleashed as it was warned him off taking any kind of chances.

After he’d ascended past the second floor, Imito noticed something missing.

“Musachi, am I seeing things right here?” he asked, panning over the carnage a second time.

“Seeing what right?”

“Fuck me,” Imito swore.

There were no weapons. All through the ground floor, and up the stairs, there were at least a few bodies in the mix with weapons on or near them. Now, nothing. These were civilians. Unarmed civilians, fleeing the madness.

Armed, unarmed, it didn’t matter to this crew. These weren’t terrorists, mass shooters, or a mercenary kill squad. They were something far, far worse. Something Imito didn’t have a name for.

“Who the hell are these guys?” Imito whispered, climbing up to the third floor landing.

A series of explosions rang out, rocking the stairwell. Rei-Ka lost his grip as Imito stumbled to the left. Imito slammed into a wall and he heard Rei-Ka tumble down the stairs behind him, taking Jeuk and Lonta with him. Another explosion, this time directly overhead, nearly sent Imito to the floor.

“INCOMING!” Imito shouted, instinctively leaping toward the walls of at the back of the corner landing.

Vibrations rattled the concrete beneath him. The building groaned, and then came the sounds of heavy debris falling. Raising his shield arm overhead, a cascade of debris poured through a hole in the corner landing above him. Chunks of concrete small and large pelted his shield as they tumbled through the hole. Imito pulled his legs in just in time to see a massive block of concrete break off from the landing above, smashing into the place his right ankle was a moment before. From the gap between his shield and the floor, Imito watched a cascade of debris plummet down the central gap, most falling straight down to the bottom.

A long, loud groan came from above, and then the ominous sound of concrete cracking, followed by an enormous crash, like an entire wall had come down. Pushing air around it in great whooshing sounds, a titanic slab of concrete came tumbling down the vertical shaft, clipping with the landing in front of Imito. This minor impact sent the gigantic slab rebounding across the shaft. Imito could hear his team screaming in panic as it came their way. He watched the chunk crash into the flight opposite him, spraying a cloud of debris into the three who had fallen backward, before it tipped backwards and continued its descent, smashing through the weakened south wall stairs between the second and third floors.

Imito lost sight of it after that, but the sounds of steel breaking and concrete crushing continued until the slab finally came to rest at the base of the stairwell. The impact sent a shudder through the walls and floors, which turned into a low rumbling, like another wall had given out. Steel twisted and broke in earsplitting shrieks below him, accompanied by the sound of more collapsing concrete. Imito heard Hiyyo scream out, and he scrabbled to the edge of the landing.

To his horror, he saw everything from the second floor down had collapsed. Where the base of the stairs were, now only piles of concrete and twisted chunks of steel remained. A large chunk of the exterior corner had collapsed outward, bathing the entire stairwell in hellish amber light.

Tangled and partially buried in the wreckage, forty metres down, Imito could see Hiyyo, his team’s medic.

“Hiyyo!” Imito shouted.

“All units, medic to ground!” Musachi called out. “Medic to ground! Officer down! Northeast stairs! Repeat, medic to northeast stairs! Officer Hiyyo is down!”

“Fuck!” Imito swore, retreating from the edge of the landing. “Fuck, fuck fuck! Musachi! Who the hell are these people!?”

“Unknown, Kokdomo! But you need to double-time it to the fifth floor! If this keeps up, they’ll bring the whole building down!”

“Are you fucking kidding me!?” Imito shouted back.

“Negative, Kokdomo! That was our only path upward! If you want out, you’ll have to fight for it!”

“What about the elevators!?” Imito shouted.

“Fragged.”

“The southwest stairs?”

“Same situation! The only way out is the roof!”

“FUCK!” Imito shrieked, smashing his fist into the floor.

“Good luck and godspeed,” Musachi said.

“FUCK YOU, MUSACHI!” Imito roared, grabbing his shotgun again.

Imito got back to his feet. Looking down into the wrecked stairs, it was clear they couldn’t go back that way. They were forty metres up a shaft about ready to fall apart and if they didn’t get out of it, they were all dead.

“Shit,” Imito swore, retrieving his shield.

There really wasn’t any other option. They were going to have to neutralise the shooters to get out of here.

Imito adjusted his grip on his shield and shotgun and signalled his team to continue upwards. Keeping sights on the breach that had just opened in the fifth-floor wall, he made his way carefully up the stairs. Sweat poured off his forehead and he felt his heart beating faster than a pulsar as he rounded the second four-five corner landing.

Two steps up the last length, facing the breach, Musachi felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. He signalled a halt. Dropping to a kneeling position, he killed the torch mounted to his weapon. Locking the shotgun into the gunmount on his shield, he trained sights on the hole where the door to the fifth floor used to be, his team assembling behind him for cover.

Breathing deeply, he prepared himself for whatever inhuman creatures were about to come through that opening. A shrill scream erupted from deep inside the fifth floor. Spikes of adrenaline arced through his guts like cold lightning.

Here it comes.

Imito saw a bright, white light illuminate dark walls, a demonic scream rushing closer and closer. His pulse crescendoed and his focus locked in. Musachi screamed something in his ears, but Imito couldn’t hear it. The screaming and the light was too close. He squeezed his eyes shut—

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🔻

Aido

Colonel Aido squatted down. Taking a pen from her vest pocket. She slipped the tip inside a spent casing, lifting it up for closer inspection. Amidst the mess of dead bodies, debris, wrecked armour, and spent cartridges, this was her diamond in the rough.

The calibre was off, a 15x81mm casing necked down to 12.2. It was not something you could get on Tuuai. This was a rare casing in general, used by only a handful of outfits. The colour of the brass was slightly off too. The yellow was a shade too dark and little too rich.

Aido dropped the bullet casing into her palm and closed her fist. After a few seconds, she knew.

“By Daaina’s might,” she whispered, turning the casing over in her palm.

She didn’t want to believe it, but there was no denying facts. The perfection in craft the armsmasters responsible for these casing aspired to, it was obvious to anyone who knew what to look for. Plain brass from first glance, but to a trained eye, the signature of Athenian crafstmanship was obvious.

Clean mouth and interior, powder residue almost entirely absent, no scorching, no soot, a complete burn to precise pressure outputs, the chemistry of its contents were a work of literal magic. Off-colour lustre to the metal was indicative of a special post-manufacture process to prevent jamming. Most obvious was the cold. The casing was as cold as arctic ice. The bullet would be too.

Aido knew the bite of this brass well. Every waking moment she could feel fragments tickling her innards. Too small to remove, too close to too many important things, but always biting with the frosted fangs of a Jotunn.

Rising to her feet, Aido returned the pen to her vest and walked out of the ruined garage. She’d seen all she needed to. The only questions left to ask weren’t going to be answered here.

Outside, behind a line of soldiers blocking their path, were a line of city officials. Police chief, city councilmembers, local agency heads, and, of course, the big britches herself, Mayor Asakto Rei. Aido sighed heavily. None of them were going to want to hear what she had to say, and, judging by her expression, Mayor Rei was going to be the least pleased of the bunch.

At least The Lexenon was in session. No one wanted to deliver bad news to an angry Lexarchon on any day, especially not the day when half the local law enforcement of the largest city in his legislative district had been KIA’d.

Aido approached the line of city officials, making it no closer than earshot before the interrogation began.

“Well?” Mayor Asakto Rei said, expectantly.

The line of soldiers between them parted enough to let Aido through.

“Here,” Aido said, offering the shell casing to the Mayor.

Rei took the casing, looking at her quizzically.

“What’s this supposed to mean?”

“Notice anything strange about that?” Aido answered.

“Do I look like a gun nut to you?” Rei snapped.

“It’s cold,” Aido explained, “hold it as long as you like, it’s not going to heat up.”

Mayor Rei handed the shell casing back. Aido slipped it into a vest pocket.

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Skadian rounds,” Aido answered, “only one military outfit fields those and you’re not going to like who they are.”

“Quit pussyfooting around and tell me who the fuck did this,” Rei snapped back.

“Valkyries,” Aido said.

“The who?”

“Valkyries,” repeated Aido, shaking her head in dismay, “which means there’s jack shit we can do.”

“What!?” Rei reacted. “What do you mean there’s jack shit we can do!?”

“What do you think I meant?” Aido returned.

“That can’t be the answer!” roared Rei, her face contorting with rage. “You are not telling me that all these good men died for nothing!”

“Listen here, big shot!” Aido snapped back, losing her patience. “You’re not the only one who lost people in this clusterfuck! I’ve got good men and women laying dead in there too! Think I’m happy about it!? Think I don’t want some justice for them!? Think their families don’t!?”

“This ain’t fucking right!” the Mayor exclaimed. “They, whoever they are, can’t just do this!”

“No, it’s not right,” Aido agreed, “but, yes, they can do this.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Rei growled.

“You do not want to go down that road, Mayor,” Aido warned.

“What road? The road to justice? Yes I bloody well do!”

Aido sighed, tiredly. Untucking her shirt, she lifted the hem up to show the ugly scar under her ribs.

“See that?” she said. “Not my first run-in with a Valkyrie!”

Lowering her shirt, Aido continued, “This is not what you want to hear, but you need to hear it anyway. You do not cross them! When Valkyries bust you down, you take your licks and pray they don’t come back to reinforce the message!”

“And what if I don’t!?” Rei fired back.

Rei was testing the limits of Aido’s composure. She couldn’t let the Mayor go after the Valkyries. If she did, Aido’s ass would be on the line for it too, and not just to her superiors either. Mythic Treaty was pretty clear on what any of them, civilian or military, could or could not do in this situation.

Looking at all the wreckage and carnage, the creeping reality of the mess finally crystalised in her mind. This catastrophe should never have happened in the first place.

Valkyries were sticklers for their protocols and procedures. Notifying local authorities prior to engaging in enforcement actions was high up on the list if for no other reason than their own safety and ability to efficiently conduct their operation. This amount of collateral damage wasn’t an accident. It was intentional.

Aido knew from past experience how a coordinated enforcement action went down. The call came in on a priority 1 channel with enough headway for the warning to work its way through the chain of command. Once a Flight had been assembled, the only thing to be done was to order units to keep away from the area.

Half of Odaatso’s police laying dead in the street was one of two things. Either a complete breakdown in the chain of communications had occurred, or the Valkyries were aware of corruption at such an elevated level that notifying local authorities prior to engaging their target would have jeopardised their mission. Knowing Odaatso, Aido wasn’t convinced that a third option wasn’t at play; that the Valkyries had intentionally brought in half of Odaatso’s first responders just to slaughter them.

The city was notoriously corrupt, and a Valkyrie deathsong was a surgical instrument. Precision, speed, and brutal efficiency were their hallmarks—everything this operation was not. They dragged this one out long enough for a few battalions of RRG to show up for an ass-kicking.

Nothing about this was right. Nothing. Those whiffs of something not quite right she’d had about Northwest High Command since her transfer from Chahachi-4 were now a full-blown foul strength.

It dawned on Aido that she was well and royally fucked. Rei wasn’t going to let this go. The mayor was furious, as well she should be. Half her police department was dead and Aido probably would have pissed the mayor off less if she had just dropped her drawers and defecated on their corpses. A battalion of RRG troopers KIA’d on top was the kind of military shitshow her superiors would be looking for someone to pin the blame on. Someone’s head had to roll for it, and it didn’t take an idiot to know it wasn’t going to be High Command’s.

Even if Aido opened an investigation into how everything went so awry, and even if it didn’t implicate her superiors, it would only placate Rei for so long. Threats of retaliation were enough to detain Rei, but arresting the mayor of Tuuai Prime’s second largest city after a tragedy of this scale on those charges would only make everything worse. Rei would be out before MPs had her fingerprinted, there would be a media frenzy, and Aido would be on ice before midnight.

Something had to be done, but what?

“You can’t be persuaded, can you?” Aido questioned.

“Not by the likes of you,” Rei rebuffed.

“Alrighty then,” Aido said, signalling to her subordinates, “This one’s all yours. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“What do you mean by that, Aido!” Rei barked.

Ignoring the mayor, Aido, flanked by the acting situation commander, 1st Sentinel Chuni, marched back to the police line where her MAV was waiting.

“Chuni,” Aido addressed, once out of earshot of the Mayor.

“Ma’am,” he responded.

“Have your troops return to garrison,” she ordered, “if Major Atukshe objects, tell him the incident was a Valkyrie enforcement action. Type K1. Local conditions untenable for disaster response operations.”

“Understood, ma’am,” Chuni confirmed.

“Tell Atukshe I’ll have my report to his desk by twenty-two hundred hours,” Aido added, passing around the barricades at the end of the block.

“Copy that, twenty-two hundred hours.”

“Everyone out by seventeen hundred,” Aido said, sternly, “do not get any more of our soldiers caught in the crossfire until we understand what the Valkyries were here for and why they were operating incommunicado. Do you understand me?”

“Yes ma’am,” Chuni responded.

“No excuses, no delays, no more KIAs,” Aido reinforced.

“Understood,” Chuni affirmed.

“Good, dismissed,” Aido said.

Chuni snapped a salute. Aido returned it. Her assistant opened the door of her MAV and she stepped up and inside. The line of soldiers remained at attention as she took her seat inside the vehicle

“Godspeed Commander,” Aido farewelled, before shutting the door.

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🔻

Rei

Rei woke with a start, heart racing, covered in a cold sweat. Reaching out a hand, she patted around her bedside table for the lamp. Her hand hit the switch, the lamp flicked on, and she froze, blood gone cold as the heart of that bitch Aido.

Sitting in an armchair in the corner of her room was a hulking giant of a man. Cyberjacked down to his balls, Rei could tell he wasn’t here for a social visit. From from how he was sitting this lean machine was at least a head and shoulders taller than her. In his left hand the hulking giant held a pistol the size of which could have been something akin to a shotgun to any ordinary person.

Despite his plainclothes appearance, Rei knew exactly what kind of monster this was. One of those hunter-killer units from the Rimworlds come at last, like she knew they would. The story Aido would squeal on that when Rei finally brought her in to answer for this…

Subtly, Rei reached for the panic button she kept under her pillow.

“Don’t bother,” the assassin said, eyes locked on her.

The Mayor hit the button. Then again. And again. Nothing happened. No lights. No alarms. Nothing. Across the room, the assassin sighed in that way Rei’s father used to. Resigned disappointment flowing over with ‘I told you so’.

“That bitch send you?” the Mayor seethed, letting go of the panic button.

“Colonel Aido?” the man queried.

“That whore!” the Mayor hissed.

The man leaned forward, draping his massive firearm over one knee. As he did, the light of the lamp beside him shaded his face like he was Eyyosk—the harbinger of death.

“No,” he answered. “The ArQive did.”

“The what?”

Like Va-kee-rees, Rei had never heard of this organisation before either. It must have been some other secret squirrel goon squad from The Lexenon. The big wigs on Aiu 6 sending a wet team of special operators to fuck up her city made a lot of sense, but this didn’t. What was The Lexenon doing with one of the Rimworlds’ Death Heralds? More importantly, how did they convince Rill to lend them one in the first place?

“The grand galactic janitorial squad,” the man elaborated. “Cleaning up the messes made by perennial fuck-ups like you.”

An NGO? No...that couldn’t be right. Transnational NGOs didn’t have that kind of authority or power.

“You here to kill me?”

The man curled his wrist, lifting his giant gun as if to ask if she was referring to it.

“A twenty mill to the face leaves a big mess,” the man said.

“You got that right.”

“The ArQive prefers a more…subtle approach,” the man said, lowering the gun.

“If you’re not here to kill me then why are you here?”

“Two and two, Mayor,” the man answered.

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Put it together,” he quipped.

“Put what together?”

“How the hell did you even get in here?”

“We know everything,” the man answered, rising ominously from the seat, “our eyes, our ears, and our agents are everywhere.”

“Just who the fuck are you!?” Rei shouted.

“Ssshhh!” the man said, placing the tip of his gun’s barrel to his lips. “The baby is sleeping.”

The man snapped his fingers and disappeared. For a moment, Rei sat there, stunned. Then the gears clicked into place.

“Shit!” Rei swore, leaping out of bed.

Without even donning her robe, she burst out of the room and into the hall, startling one of her bodyguards. Racing down the hall, she burst into her son’s room.

“No, no, no!” she shouted, rushing to the crib.

begin record

🔻

Ekke

Ekke took a sip of her coffee as she watched the news feeds. It was good to be Operations Lead, she thought. Field work was fun, but she was all about that analyst life. Watching the action happen from afar was so much better than being shot at on a regular basis. All that noise and mess was for the birds. She could get her hands just as dirty as a desk jockey as she could a wet worker. Plus the new dental plan was a major upgrade.

A faint flicker in the corner of her eye drew her attention from the wall of screens. It was only the subtlest shift in the light reflecting off the walls behind her, but that was all the announcement of a certain someone’s presence most would get. Ekke swivelled her chair around, mug of coffee raised mid sip. Sure enough, there he was, all four hundred kilos of wetwork incarnate. Jjavìk, Dire Wolf Third Class, First Marine Corps Elites Division, her assay from six different departments for this operation. He was a hulking mass of man and machine and yet somehow could enter a room quietly enough to sneak up on a ninja.

“Don’t think I’ll ever understand how you guys manage to sneak around better than Eyyosk himself,” Ekke commented.

“Interpretive dance,” Jjavìk said, flatly.

“Whatever you say, boss,” Ekke responded, turning back to her screens. “Ballet, butt sex, or billiards, I don’t give a shit. I’m just thrilled your plan is working out as well as it is.”

Jjavìk grunted in response.

“She’s falling apart,” Ekke continued. “City Council has scheduled a confidence vote for next Europasday. Apparently she was always a little kooky for conspiracy theories, but since you started fucking with her, she’s really gone off the deep end.”

“Uh-huh,” Jjavìk said, grabbing one of Ekke’s protein bars.

“Guessing CC isn’t too happy about all that racist shit she was saying on Kon Ai-Rouam’s podcast the other day,” Ekke added, “it always goes back to the Herbalists doesn’t it? What’s up with that anyhow? Why’s everyone got such a hate boner for them anyhow?”

“Ignorance and stupidity,” Jjavìk answered, shoving the protein bar into his mouth whole.

“Sinno’s Balls, Jjavìk, don’t choke on that, alright?” Ekke commented. “Not sure I could hit you hard enough in the plexus to dislodge it if you did.”

Jjavìk stopped chewing and shot her an annoyed glare.

“Copy that, boss,” she responded, “Whispers from our contacts with the Kitsune are saying the vote is all but confirmed. CC is under a lot of pressure from the public to put an end to the public embarrassment. Ranting about the Herbalists conspiring with the National Monitoring Assay and the Politbellum at the behest of a Lexenon paedo ring to murder the police and kidnap her son because reasons, well..that did not help her case. Another week or two and she’ll be just another conspiracy crank raving on the El. Bonus is looking juicy on this one. Mighty pleased with the work. You?”

“Thrilled,” Jjavìk sighed, heavily.

“You don’t sound like it,” Ekke replied.

Jjavìk’s expression was typically disappointed. Beyond that, she couldn’t parse what he was trying to tell her. She rarely could. Jjavìk was as incomprehensible as arcane gibberish pulled out of some compacted ruins buried in the bedrock of old Terra. A perfect conundrum. Utterly indecipherable.

“Is all this bad thing?” Ekke questioned.

“It is what it is,” Jjavìk said, taking a seat next to her.

Typical non-answer.

Why she kept asking him anything was perhaps the better conundrum. Much as Jjavìk was the biggest beefcake bodybuilding billy badass Ekke had ever seen, he was surprisingly thoughtful. The longer she worked with him, the more it seemed like the First Marine Corps was about as far from a bunch of unsophisticated, cyberjacked gorillas with guns as Rill was from the rest of civilisation.

Sharing his thoughts, on the other hand, seemed to be a severely underdeveloped skillset for Jjavìk. It was all riddles and ambiguity with him. Everything had to be interpreted like she was interrogating data for obscure connections and hidden patterns.

Sumbitch…

If it wasn’t the answer to her own bloody conundrum.

“You sound...dismayed,” Ekke observed.

Unholstering his massive sidearm, Javíc set it on the desk between them. Ekke felt a chill go down her spine. In all the times they’d worked together she had never seen him do this. If memory served, she’d never seen any First Marine let their precious pistols leave their immediate control. Firsties never said it, but everyone who’d worked with one figured out that these sidearms were a kind of sacred emblem, oriflamme, or symbol to them. They had a lot of identity wrapped up in those guns.

If Jjavìk was setting twenty-five kilos of iron more precious than life itself on her desk, there was something he was trying to say.

Had management decided to liquidate her?

When he leaned back in the office chair—specially-designed to accommodate his size and mass—Ekke didn’t know what to make of the situation. She had somewhat expected he would give some kind of final soliloquy before shooting her in the face, a sort of pointless object lesson delivered with all the smugness of someone who just liked to hear themselves talk.

He didn’t do that.

Talking was not his favourite thing, so she supposed her expectations there might have been a little unrealistic. It wasn’t that he didn’t have all the considered principles of the usual villain types Ekke interrogated on a regular basis, Jjavìk was just the exception to the standard mean. Belabouring someone with his point of view must have been a waste of breath to him.

Ekke often wondered if he hated the sound of her voice more than his own. It was a toss-up, really.

The grizzled old war dog interlinked his fingers behind his head, propped his feet up on the desk, and watched the newscasts with an inscrutable, but borderline sad look on his face.

Silence, Ekke soon realised, was so much worse than villainous monologuing. Reading Jjavìk’s intentions was nigh impossible in the best of circumstances, and this situation was shaping up to be the opposite of those.

“Look, she’s not dead,” Ekke argued, nervously, when the tension of his silence became unbearable, “so why the long face?”

Jjavìk said nothing, just continued staring at the screens. Ekke’s eyes danced between the two of them, feeling even more tense than she did before. Maybe he would kill her after all.

“You’re religious, aren’t you?” Jjavìk asked, after another, uncomfortably long silence.

“Yeah. What’s that got to do with anything?”

He’d never asked her about that before. Wait a minute… She knew that question. He was here to liquidate her.

Bastard!

Another long silence.

Say something dammit!

Jjavìk shifted in his seat, leaning forward slightly.

“When you’re nothing but worm food and molars decaying in the dirt,” he elaborated, “the best of you go off to dance in the inner heart of the maiden. That right?”

Rubbing salt in it now? Little shit!

“Close enough.”

The First Marine nodded, silently.

Don’t you dare, Jjavìk! Don’t you fucking dare!

“Singing and dancing in eternal spring,” he continued, his voice soft and unreadable, “a bunch of naked tree huggers in a paradise garden partying and fucking for the rest of forever. Glorious isn’t it? A real slice of heaven.”

Ekke bristled at the blasphemy.

“What are you getting at?” the words said through gritted teeth.

“Go ask a Devotee of Synthon what hell is,” Jjavìk replied, “and they’ll describe your heaven.”

Ekke huffed angrily. Cybrosians didn’t know a damned thing. Cultists and extremists to the core, the whole bloody group. Obsessed with blood rituals and self-mutilation for their machine god. Heretics and blasphemers the lot of them.

“You see,” Jjavìk said, the words more statement than rhetoric, “The ArQive didn’t hire you to think about what it is that you do. Do too much of that, you’re liable to become ineffective. Ineffective is another word for defective. Defective parts get replaced. The machine must continue running, after all.”

The pivot took Ekke by complete surprise. This was not where she was expecting this conversation to go.

“Are you high?” Ekke asked, growing increasingly impatient.

This wasn’t like Jjavìk at all. That one monologue, if she could even call it that, was probably the longest he’d spoken for in the entirety of the time they’d worked together. And this was his pivot. It had to be. He was going somewhere. But what was he waiting for? And why? If he was going to kill her, why all the lead-up?

She’d seen him decomm defects before. There wasn’t any talking, any camaraderie, anything. They were nothing to him. He just pulled iron and blew them off payroll.

“What if the dead are actually the lucky ones?” Jjavìk asked, standing up.

A cold pit formed in Ekke’s stomach.

“Can you even get high?” she quipped.

Her heart wasn’t in it. He knew. She knew he knew. And he knew that too.

Picking up his piece, Jjavìk returned it to its holster.

“Your mistake was assuming I didn’t kill the Mayor,” Jjavìk said, patting Ekke on the shoulder.

“What?” Ekke reacted, bewildered.

“Two and two, Ekke,” Jjavìk said, opening the door behind her.

What was he on about? What was this conversation?

“Don’t think about it,” Jjavìk said darkly, before exiting the room.

The door slid shut behind him, and Ekke sighed with relief. That big gun of his could still blow her into raspberry jam through the wall between them, but she’d never seen him decomm a defect like that before. He wasn’t a coward like that. If Jjavìk was going to blow someone off payroll, he at least did them the honours of looking them in the eyes when he did it.

A real stickler for things like that, Jjavìk was. Still, Ekke had seen him do things completely out of character in service of a mission. Predicting what that hulking hairless bastard might or might not do at any given moment was practically impossible. If he had orders and mission parameters, anything was possible.

Ekke waited for Jjavìk to come back, to shoot her through the wall, to say something more, to give her any kind of clue what he was planning, but he didn’t. As the minutes dragged on, and nothing happened, Ekke felt the tension slowly begin to unwind, but not completely. Muscles she didn’t even know she’d tightened unclenched. Knuckles, reflexively gripping the arms of her chair, relaxed. It seemed she wasn’t being decommed after all.

“What the fuck,” she exhaled.

Chuckling nervously to herself she turned back toward the screens mounted all over the wall. Newscasts blasted over a collection in one corner, but one in the middle caught Ekke’s attention.

A bug in the Mayoral Mansion’s master bedroom showed Asakto Rei sitting in the chair where Ekke had planted Jjavìk’s decoy projector. The mayor looked up, without even knowing there was a microscopic camera there, and gazed directly into the lens. Ekke looked into Rei’s eyes, her own reflection just visible from the glare on the screen.

Then it hit her.