2025-09-11 18:39:16
Neo MoroengThis chapter marks a turning point in the war and in Riva’s arc. From the beginning, she was framed as fragile — a specialist dragged from the safety of consoles into the blood and dust of Tharsis. Many expected her story to follow the tragic line of those who break under the weight of war. But here, we subvert that path. Riva doesn’t collapse. She transcends. By channeling the Rakes’ own psionic language back against them, she becomes the battlefield’s pivot, not its casualty. For me as a writer, this chapter is about redefining courage. It isn’t the absence of fear — it’s the choice to act while fear is tearing you apart. Riva embodies that, and now the war has shifted: it’s no longer only about survival, but about a new kind of soldier born in the dust of Mars. -N.M
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Chapter 113 — The Scanners (Part II)
Three days after the Pod launch, the story twisted.Rachel was hauling biosamples when the bio-tech’s screen lit up in alarm. Chemical assays flagged unusual binders at the scav-mark sites—preservatives used to keep soft tissue fresh during transit. Worse, the isotopes pointed to a specific line of solvents manufactured by repurposed TerraTech factories.Her pulse went cold. This wasn’t superstition. This was organized trade. Someone was harvesting Rake parts, packaging them, and shipping them into the markets.The trail, like all dirty trails, led to human hands. Names in alleys. Shell companies on manifests. Receipts tied to men with two faces—one legal, one in shadow. And at the end of that web sat Eveline Marlow.Eveline lived with her sickly sister, Pauline, and their protector, Richard Benning. On the surface, Benning was a logistics man, the kind who kept food moving and shelters stocked when others went hungry. His name carried weight. His temper carried warning.Rachel went u
Chapter 112 — The Scanners (Part I)
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.T
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
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