2025-09-13 12:57:39
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Interlude: The Bow
There was no wind in the void, only a pressure—a psychic tide that whispered of endings. At the very bow of the Whisper of Oblivion, where reality itself was stretched and sculpted by the ship’s passage, Da’Kar stood as its master and focal point. This was not a place of steel and rivets, but a conceptual edge, a blade of will cutting through the formless dark matter that churned around them like a silent, starless sea. The only light was a sickly, self-generated luminescence from the ship’s alien hull, casting long, twisted shadows that seemed to writhe in anticipation.Da’Kar’s hands were clasped behind his back, his posture one of absolute, predatory patience. He did not need eyes to navigate this non-space; he felt its currents, its tremors, the distant, fading echoes of screams from a million miles away. He was tasting the ebb tide of hope across the system, and he found the flavor exquisite.A presence, cold and immense, coalesced beside him. It drew substance from the shadows,
Chapter 114: Forlorn Hope
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. “Tr
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
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