2025-09-09 21:20:03
Neo MoroengThis chapter explores the brutal calculus of command and the psychological toll of impossible choices. The General's decisive, merciless action stands in stark contrast to Ta'klan's paralyzing humanity, highlighting the different weights of conscience and duty. //Xóre’s poisonous counsel twists this trauma, seeking to exploit Ta'klan's shaken faith to serve her own ends. Her comparison of the General to figures like Da'kar and !Xam isn't just manipulation—it's a dark reflection on the nature of power and the sacrifices required to wield it. This moment fractures the crew's unity, setting the stage for internal conflict that may prove as dangerous as any external threat. -N.M
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Chapter 111 — Fireworks Over the Rim
The Firebase was a lie built to save us.On paper it read like a fortress; in practice it was a modular machine — a ring of defensive petals around a central pod that could detach, ignite, and vanish. Engineers called it redundancy. Poets would have called it grim genius. To me it was a last-chance device, a way to turn our enemy’s appetite into its own burial.They came for the powerpack.The holotable ahead of me thrummed in green and red. The sensors painted the outer perimeter in a living heat-map: thousands of signatures converging, coalescing into one obscene mass. The Rakes had learned the one vulnerability we had feared most — their hive intelligence had found the heart. They were piling onto it, clawing metal into a living furnace. The “bee ball” was a species of suicide, an engineered crowd whose combined thermal footprint would force our reactor into runaway. It was both strategy and ritual: bodies stacked like kindling until something gave.“Clamp seals at eighty-three per
Chapter 110: The Widow’s Smile
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
Chapter 109: Between the War
The air in the ready-room was still and cold, smelling of ozone and recycled sweat. Rachel found Nancy there, not at a command console, but in a dimly lit corner near the armor racks, methodically checking the charge on a plasma rifle’s power cell. Her movements were efficient, practiced, a ritual of preparation that seemed to be the only thing holding her together.Rachel leaned against the bulkhead, her arms crossed. The faint, greenish glow of the bioluminescent veins in her skin pulsed softly in the low light.“He’s taking Ka!ri on the deep recon,” Rachel said, her voice quiet but cutting through the silence. It wasn’t a question. It was a confirmation of the dread that had driven her from the med-bay.Nancy didn’t look up, her focus on the rifle’s calibration display. “She’s the best scout we have. She knows the territory better than any of us. It’s the right call.”“It’s the logical call,” Rachel countered, her tone careful. She was navigating a minefield, and they both knew it.
Chapter 108: The Pragmatist
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 ras
Chapter 107: Lighting Doesn’t Strike Twice
They say thunder doesn’t strike twice in the same place. It’s the kind of lie you feed children to make them sleep easier at night. I’d watched lightning carve the same basalt tower in the Valles Marineris every summer, leaving blackened glass scars like tally marks. And I’d watched death find me again and again, always in the same wound: right here, in the hollow of my chest.Jarek was proof. Gerry, Vanessa, Tyron—their names were a litany of strikes.And now there was !Gareseb.Outlands ReconThe Outlands were a cruel grave. The kind of place you endured, not conquered. The wind never stopped its metallic moan, and the dust caked itself into your skin, turning sweat to mud.We were three days out from the firebase, chasing whispers—Rake signatures flickering on long-range scans. Once they’d been rare encounters. Now they were a plague. A living infestation spreading through the crust of Mars.Beside me, !Gareseb stood like a carved pillar, posture ramrod straight, visor tilted to
Chapter 106: The Architect’s Design
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
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