The Vigilant, my flagship and my prison, groaned as it knifed through the Martian sky. The hull’s scream wasn’t just in my ears — it pressed into my bones, a deep metallic vibration I’d grown used to, the sound of every descent into war. Outside, the storms of Tharsis boiled like a living thing, dust and lightning woven into one red ocean of violence. At the horizon, the caldera yawned, a wound in the planet’s skin, a grave for whatever marched inside.The bridge was a storm of its own — holo-maps strobing, crew barking vectors, the pulse of combat data streaming in from Olympus Command. A forward operating base, already half-chewed by the enemy, was still burning down there. Hunters. That’s what they called the new Rake strain. “Hunter” didn’t do them justice. These weren’t wild predators. They were coordinated. Intelligent. The hive had learned.Our orders: strike the hive node at the caldera’s rim, break the command link, and kill the siege. A spearpoint mission. Which meant someone

The med-bay was quiet, the only sounds the soft hum of the life support systems and the rhythmic beep of !Gareseb’s heart monitor. I stood at the foot of his cot, watching the even rise and fall of his chest. He would live, the medics assured me, and that was all that mattered.A quiet footstep behind me broke the stillness. I turned to see Rachel standing in the doorway. Her face was drawn, pale with fatigue. She was a political figure, a diplomat’s wife, but she had the eyes of a woman who had seen too many ghosts.“He’s stable,” I said, my voice a low rasp.“I know,” she said, her voice a whisper. “I just… had to see for myself.”She walked toward me, her hands clasped nervously in front of her. She looked at me, her eyes filled with an unspoken question. I knew what she wanted to ask. She had seen the way I looked at him, the way I had fought for him. She had seen the ghost of Jarek in my eyes.“Are you worried?” she asked, her voice soft.“About what?” I asked, my voice a low rasp

The Rim at night was a carcass picked clean by time. By day it buzzed with scavengers and desperate barter, but by night it lay still and cold — a graveyard of rusted metal and broken dreams. Dust swirled like pale spirits through collapsed corridors, and the silence pressed on the eardrum like a thin, high whine.It was that silence that woke Ta’klan. Not the absence of sound, but a change in its pitch.He lay still, feigning the steady rhythm of sleep. The space beside him was warm but empty. A flicker at the doorway betrayed her — the widow, moving like a phantom in the fractured moonlight.A shard of dread slid beneath his ribs. She had been careful. Too careful.Slowly, Ta’klan slid from the cot, bare feet finding the chill of the floor. The night-camo suit clung to him like a second skin, shadows stitched into cloth. Last came the sniper rifle — cold, heavy, and familiar as an oath.He tracked her through the Rim’s labyrinth. She walked like one who knew the path well, passing l

The ground still smelled of ash and ozone when Rachel’s team moved out. The Firebase’s ember-light stained the clouds a bruised orange. Beyond the walls, the Rim was nothing but soot and broken metal.We had turned thousands of Rakes into fireworks and watched their corpses fall back from the stratosphere like glowing confetti. That was the spectacle. What came after was quieter, uglier work.Special Reconnaissance was never about glory. It was about inventory and interrogation. It was about sifting through a battlefield where the fire still smoldered and asking the wreckage what it remembered.Rachel slung her recon pack and gave the order.“Keep it tight. Two-meter slices first. Ghost readings from the Pod will throw off patterns. Call anything strange.”Her team moved like shadows. Three Recces, a medic, a bio-sampler, and the comms tech whose HUD glow cast their faces in ghostlight. They trusted her, and she trusted them. Out here, that was the only currency that meant anything.Th

The Martian plain stretched before us like a wound that would never heal — flat, rust-red, endless. No mountains, no ridges, just sand and rock that rippled with heat ghosts. On the horizon, the drone station glittered against the sun, its antennae stabbing the sky like spears. It looked close enough to touch, but distance on Mars lies. You walk an hour and it barely grows. The convoy hadn’t made it. Our UGVs sat in the sand like carcasses, half-buried and abandoned. Their wheels were caked in grit, their sensor masts sagged like broken necks. Engines were intact. Powerpacks still hummed faintly. But no crew. No escorts. Just silence. Too silent. I stood beside the lead vehicle, boots crunching the fine red dust. Rachel crouched at the side panel, scanner whirring in her hands, her bioluminescent veins pulsing faintly under her skin. “They didn’t shut down,” she said. “They were stopped. Deliberately.” Ka!ri knelt nearby, pressing her fingers into the sand. Her dark eyes narrowed