A message sent in blood rarely gets a diplomatic response.I'd said to the Rust King that he should fear the shadows, that he should go deep into the Fringe to heal his wounds. Rather, he would take the innocent down with him.Just before dawn, the analog radio in our cabin came to life. It wasn't a transmission from Citadel Command. This was an open frequency loop, with civilians screaming and scavengers barking in the background.The Iron Barons hadn't attacked the Citadel. They had come to a neutral unarmed trading post known as Outpost Station Four, constructed across a pre-Omniversal railway junction. The cartel had killed the few perimeter guards and captured more than 40 civilian farmers, merchants and mechanics.“They're not keeping them at the station,” Maya whispered, her voice as sharp as a knife. The signal is in motion. Fast. It is coming straight through into the deepest of the unexplored regions.I muttered to myself as I strapped on my heavy ballistic armor over my che

Treason is a quiet disease. It doesn't roar like a tectonic quake, and it doesn't fall from the sky like a harpoon-ship.It is hatched in the whispers of desperate men, who see a fragile paradise and choose to rule in hell rather than share the light.It was just as the evening sun had set over the final horizon that we marched the forty hostages back to the Aegis Citadel. Chimera medics swarmed them treating their burns and exhaustion, while Maya and I walked right into the grand obsidian chambers of the newly formed democratic Council.I didn't knock, I just walked in. I dropped the heavy, bone-white biological beacon to the middle of the polished map table.“It wasn't only a cartel, The Iron Barons,” I said, my voice rolling off the vaulted ceiling. I looked at the twelve elected representatives of the Genesis Grid, my dark-forged machete still dripping with the Rust King’s blood. It was a "welcoming committee".There was a loud rumble of voices from the Council. Former Vanguard Ki

Survival in the dark is an exercise in bargaining with your own lungs. You learn to take shallow, measured breaths, rationing the stale oxygen like drops of water in a desert.The uncharted tunnel under the wreckage of Sector 4 was a rough, sloping tunnel of completed rock. My chemical glow-stick emitted a sickly dying green radius that barely pierced the absolute suffocating gloom. The sickly green chemical light was flashing wildly over my face, trying to change my facial shape in the suffocating darkness, but my face's basic shape was rigid and untouchable. My identity was finalized, absolute truth, and the crushing weight of the Hollow Earth could try to bury my history in the dark. I was Kaelen Vance and I didn't want to die in a cage.I had been walking for several hours. The collapse of the transit gate had torn up my heavy ballistic armor. I'd only got my dark-forged steel machete with me, and an empty kinetic sidearm, and a body that felt like it'd been hit by a falling dread

The body is a liar, there is a limit to human endurance. It will let you know that your muscles are going out of breath and your lungs are running out of air well before you reach the end of the tank. When it is dark, you don't listen to your body. You hear the blade.The platform of the Tectonic Drill was a strobe-lit slaughterhouse. The bright blue plasma-welder arcs of Unit 7-Echo blazed like lightning in the sky, lighting up the mass of pale, eyes-less crawlers that were coming down through the rusted grating.I used my dark-forged steel machete to make a vicious, side to side swing and cut the foreleg off a lunging crawler. When the monster shrieked and fell, I changed my hand, thrusting the blade down through its clear brain. The blood was thick and acidic and splashed my boots as it hissed against the metal floor.I tore off the steel as two other predators jumped over the dead body of one of their own.The deafening 140 decibel scream of the Caretaker drill, grinding the fini

It's hard to feel like you're betraying your own survival when you've been working your whole life to get out of the dirt and then you jump back in. The finished world was a frail house, though, standing on a snoring sleep, and should the fire be not thorough, the roof was to fall on all the people we loved.The main square of the Aegis Citadel was a frenzied scene of industrial panic.A fleet of heavy transport skiffs had carefully extricated my Titan Engine from the debris after it had fallen from the stratosphere during the orbital dog fight with the World-Eater. Its bones were dark and porous, and its chest contained a huge, open-air turbine, which was still in good working order. Jax was knee-deep in his own wrecked Titan's exposed chest cavity, his titanium hands furiously connecting heavy analog power cables a hundred yards away.Kaelen, the tectonic cores are bone dry," he said. The Citadel's generators roared and Jax called out, wiping the hydraulic fluid off his faceplate.