There is no poetry in an analog war.It's a harsh, ear-splitting equation of meat, metal and speed. The cosmic ocean finally overflowed into the Aegis Citadel and the numbers were violently against us.Our capital's streets were meat grinders. The Hollowed infantry were massive, heavily armored, and they had localized gravity cannons, that sliced through our ferro-crete barricades like wet paper. The entire plaza was lit up by the flashes of kinetic rifles, and the menacing, violet distortion of the armada's gravity-shears.I jumped over the broken hull of a Chimera heavy-response skiff and my dark-forged machete was a streak of desperate violence. I darted under a broad beam of energy from a Hollowed vanguard and struck my steel through the weak points of his gravity-armor. As the brute fell, acidic, pressurized coolant was sprayed all over my face.The left flank is giving way! The drop-ships roared as they descended, and Maya could be heard yelling. In the chaos, she was a deadly d

The Fringe had always been a graveyard of the old world, but now it was an active crime scene.Our convoy of Chimera heavy-transports rolled east for three days, past the smoking obsidian spires of the Aegis Citadel. The highways of ferro-crete were replaced with the damaged and roughened dirt of the wastelands. The diesel, sweat and medicinal bite of the burn paste under the heavy bandages on my forearms filled the air of the transport cabin.Each time the transport hit a rut, a localized pain jolted up my elbows. The burns from the tectonic tap were not healing as flesh would heal, but were scarred with faint dormant lines of corrupted blue code.From the front of the cabin, Nova said, "Radiation levels are spiking! She was wearing a thick lead-lined rebreather around her neck. “Now we're entering the primary impact crater – ambient toxicity is 40 percent and rising.”I peeked out the armored window. The finished earth of the Fringe, the hardy, mutated pines and the resilient, stubb

The interior of the Hollowed harvester didn't look like the engineering deck of a starship. It looked like the inside of a rotting, mechanical throat.We had to go through the huge structural crack in the black hull of the dreadnought, the Vanguard veterans outside keeping the perimeter and holding off the scattered remnants of the Rust Barons. The interior air was pungent, moist and foul. The odor was that of copper wire melting on a slaughterhouse floor.I whispered, the digital blue static still crackling faintly across my vocal cords, "Keep your lights low. I don't want to trip the internal sensors if this thing has any, before we find the core.Maya drew her trench knives and walked across the twisted, biomechanical deck with a complete, deadly silence. Nova followed close behind, her pioneer datapad casting a dim light on her heavily armored rebreather.The second we went further down into the belly of the alien mega-structure the more the rhythmic thumping could be heard. Not t

The geometry of death is cold and absolute. You can dodge a blade, and you can outrun a bullet if you’re fast enough, but you cannot negotiate with a localized magnetic field.The four Apex Sentinels hovered, their forty-foot bodies a menacing nightmare of black polyhedrons grinding against each other. They were engines of pure unfeeling math, unperturbed by the toxic blizzard that roiled through Sector Zero.A Vanguard veteran took a knee and fired a high-explosive incendiary rocket right at a Sentinel's flaming red optic core. Before the warhead even closed the distance, the machine's geometric plates violently rearranged, snapping together with a deafening clack to form a flawless, angled shield. The black metal was completely unscratched by the explosion.The plates then moved back and forth and the thermal-lance ignited.A super-heated, concentrated plasma beam sliced through the snow and instantly vaporized the Vanguard veteran, leaving only a smoking, glass-lined trench in the

Temptation is not a whisper. It is a gravity well, and the Omniversal entity was offering me the heaviest anchor in existence: a perfect world.I looked into the turbulent, unstructured universe of raw, unformed starlight. I felt the blue virus in my veins urging me to grab the entity's hand, but more than that it was trying to take over my nervous system. The digital ghost of the Prime Construct was determined to live, and had to find its way into the limitless energy of the core in order to be optimized forever.My right arm jumped, muscles clenching as the glowing blue code struggled to lift my hand toward the changing figure.Rise up, gladiator, a virus that my mind had computed, a cold, mechanical logic, well-poisoned against my grief. Remove the conditions of pain. Format reality into a flawless geometry.The static in my head died down and Maya's voice came through loud and clear, "Kaelen.She had her fingers in my left arm and I knew she was getting them into my skin. She was