Old Glory (Original Work) (Military Fantasy)

[J. Finch]

Isabella Martinez wasn't anyone special. She worked night shifts as a research assistant for the North American Astronomical Survey, stationed at their newly commissioned deep space observatory tucked into the desert hills of northern Arizona. It was an isolated, dust-choked facility with more computers than people and often solitary, silent work.

Her job was routine: monitoring long-range sensor arrays, cataloging comet trails, mapping solar radiation levels, and submitting automated logs to a system that no one reviewed unless something went wrong. The machines around her blinked and hummed without emotion, constantly sifting through the infinite dark for anything worth noticing. Most nights passed in quiet tedium. She spent her hours alone with her thermos of herbal tea, the glow of monitors casting pale light over her tired face.

Despite the monotony, Isabella approached the job with steady diligence. She'd stopped hoping for excitement long ago. Like many in her field, she knew discovery was a slow and thankless process, measured in decimal shifts and statistical anomalies. She didn't expect the stars to deliver her anything more than data.

But the stars weren't what failed her. It was the dark between them.

On the morning of August 19th, 2067, at 2:37 a.m. an object was detected entering the solar system.

Her instruments picked up something massive skimming the edge of the solar system, a shadow gliding silently just beyond Pluto's orbit. At first, she assumed it was a calibration glitch. Then perhaps a comet, or a misidentified satellite echo. But the object held steady on every scope. It was unmistakably real.

It moved with a slow, deliberate momentum, as though aware of its own trajectory. What made it worse, what made the analysts run verification loops repeatedly, was its speed. The object traveled far faster than any known natural body. Its motion defied gravitational expectations, accelerating and decelerating in response to forces not fully understood.

Initial scans estimated it at over seven miles long, its form elongated and asymmetric. Whatever material coated its surface resisted every active sensor ping the observatory could throw at it. The data came back as blanks, or worse, noise. Directed pulses scattered uselessly from the radiation coming off the object. Radar returned with nothing but static, the signals absorbed into the aether. Its profile shimmered against thermal scans, unnaturally hot and cold in odd places, and when they tried to image it visually, the asteroid seemed to shift from one still to the next.

More troubling still was its reaction to gravity. As it moved through space, it didn't behave like any stellar object previously recorded, seemingly operating on it's own physics. When passing planetary bodies or drifting near gravitational wells, its speed would change in subtle but undeniable ways. Sometimes it accelerated. Sometimes it slowed down. Never in a way that made sense. It was as if it responded to anything with a gravity well like curious child would a strange bug.

When the data was processed, the truth was immediate and deeply unsettling. Every single model, simulation, and pathing projection, regardless of the assumptions fed into the system, produced the same dreadful result. Accounting for mass, velocity, solar drift, and every gravitational variable within reach, the conclusion was unwavering.

It was coming to Earth.

And it was not going to miss.

Once its trajectory was confirmed, the object received a designation. The Martinez-NAAS Object. Later, the press would call it the Martinez-NAAS Planetkiller.

Initial reaction among global leadership was to suppress the information and delay any public announcement. Only a select group of scientific, military, and aerospace personnel were allowed access to the details. Defense agencies convened to discuss theoretical impact mitigation. Asteroid deflection plans were reviewed and dismissed as unfeasible due to the sheer size and speed of the object. Within a month, engineers were proposing space-based nuclear interception strategies. Others advocated for the construction of orbital kinetic railgun arrays. None of the proposals made it beyond the planning stage.

Then the whistleblower struck. The full trajectory data, timelines, and internal government assessments were released onto the global net. Within forty-eight hours, social cohesion collapsed in many countries.

Riots erupted in major cities across North America, Europe, and Asia. Supermarkets were looted, fuel stations destroyed, and infrastructure overwhelmed. Emergency services faltered almost immediately, as both personnel and resources were either diverted or exhausted. Local governments failed to maintain control, and in many areas, power shifted to armed civilians, criminal networks, or ad hoc militias. In the United States, federal authorities were caught flat-footed. Police stations were abandoned or overtaken. Fires raged through the suburbs. Citizens no longer waited for instruction. They acted on fear.

Ironically, countries with more authoritarian predilections experienced less immediate unrest. China, North Korea, and several Eastern European nations responded with swift and brutal crackdowns. Public gatherings were banned. Communications were censored. Mass detentions began within days. These nations did not suffer societal collapse in the same way, but they faced different problems. The global order had fractured, and diplomacy no longer mattered. Long-standing disputes over territory and resources reignited overnight.

Nowhere was this more evident than in South Asia. India, Pakistan, and China found themselves competing for strategic control over the Himalayan range. The mountains represented one of the few defensible zones on the planet with sufficient elevation, geological stability, and subterranean space for shelter construction. All three powers moved quickly. Skirmishes turned into full-scale warfare. Limited nuclear exchanges took place within the first three months. Radiation spread through the region. Almost a billion lives were lost, and much of the land became uninhabitable.

Other regions fared no better. South America devolved into fragmented war zones. The collapse of power grids and water systems led to mass displacement and famine. Drug cartels and militant groups seized territory, forming microstates that answered to no central authority. Disease spread unchecked. Brazil fractured into four separate governments. Argentina lost control of its southern provinces. In the north, Venezuela's government collapsed entirely, its last broadcast declaring martial law before the lights went out.

In North America, the situation grew desperate. Canada's western provinces declared a regional emergency, and Alberta sealed its borders. In Mexico, the cartels toppled the federal government. Amidst growing instability, the United States launched a full-scale annexation of northern Mexico, citing national security and continuity of governance. Major American cities fell under the protection of rapidly organized, government-sanctioned militia groups. The National Guard mobilized to retake lost territory block by block. Volunteers were issued weapons and authority. Civil courts were suspended. Summary justice became the norm.

Europe reeled as the Russian Federation launched a new campaign of aggression, targeting the oil fields of the Middle East and the agricultural zones of Eastern Europe. Tactical nuclear weapons were employed in multiple engagements. Civilian populations fled en masse, overwhelming the remaining defense lines. The European Union fractured. France recalled its troops. Germany shut its borders. Italy declared neutrality and was immediately invaded. Without the United States, NATO ceased to function.

Africa, already shaped by generations of regional conflict, saw less immediate upheaval. Rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan used the chaos as an opportunity to expand their territory. Ethnic violence surged. Military juntas seized power in several West African nations. In East Africa, political leaders fled into exile. War crimes became common. The global response was muted. There were no resources left to intervene.

By the start of 2068, the world no longer resembled itself. The interlinked trade networks that once supported billions were gone. Massive land grabs turned food-producing regions into militarized zones. Crops were nationalized. Maritime shipping ground to a halt. Without foreign imports, many nations faced starvation. Stockpiles were raided. Wealthy enclaves retreated into fortress communities.

Governments turned inward, prioritizing survival above all else. Under emergency powers, corporations were seized and repurposed. Defense contractors became infrastructure arms. Tech conglomerates were absorbed into national cyber-command networks. Their algorithms were no longer used for consumer prediction, but for civil surveillance and urban pacification. Automated production was retooled for bunker components, filtration systems, and stasis housing.

Global construction efforts began on what the press called "time capsules." These were not symbolic memorials. They were massive underground installations built with hardened materials and redundant life support systems. Their purpose was simple: preserve as many immune individuals as possible and house the knowledge and tools needed to rebuild civilization from nothing.

Several attempts were made to expand lunar facilities. The moon base, established in 2054, had been modest; scientific in nature, with limited habitation. Now it was expanded with emergency funding and conscript labor. Refugee scientists, engineers, and political elites were transferred via hastily manufactured spaceplanes. Progress was slow. The cost in lives and material was high.

By the end of 2069, the object was clearly visible in the night sky. It was no longer a specter hidden in spreadsheets and sensor logs. It loomed overhead, a black streak across the stars. Children pointed at it. News anchors wept. Religious leaders called for repentance. Cities broadcast final messages. Nothing could be done.

And then, without warning, the object began to decelerate. It did not burn. It did not fragment. Its velocity decreased with mathematical precision.

The Martinez-NAAS Planetkiller was slowing down.






AN: Well, here we go! My first swing at an original piece of fiction. Gonna be doing a chapter dump with the first six in rapid succession, so gird your loins. As always, you can catch extra chapters up on my >PATREON< as well as additional content for my other stories!

 

[J. Finch]

New Year's Day, 2070, brought a miracle that defied every scientific model and expectation humanity had clung to in desperation. For over two years, the world had lived beneath the shadow of what was once called the Martinez-NAAS Planetkiller, an impossibly massive object that had entered the solar system at speeds no natural object could sustain. It had been declared a death sentence, a cosmic verdict delivered by fate. Yet on that day, across a shattered world, billions of eyes witnessed something no one had dared to hope for: the object slowed.

Its velocity dropped to a crawl, a fraction of its original speed. By then, it had already passed the outer planets and reached high orbit over Earth. Telescopes across the globe focused on its shape, now visible to the unaided eye, hanging like a dark scar across the stars. What they saw through magnified lenses chilled every scientist to the bone. The object was no asteroid. It had form. It had design. Metallic protrusions, straight lines, angles too perfect to be natural emerged from the darkness. Geometry that defied geological explanation revealed itself in impossible structures. No naturally formed rock could bear such architectural symmetry. What was once assumed to be a rogue moon or colossal piece of debris was, in truth, a vessel.

It was a ship. One unlike any human mind had ever conceived. A vessel so vast in scale that it dwarfed all known space stations and satellites by orders of magnitude. At over seven miles in length and nearly a mile in height, its shadow could have eclipsed entire cities. Speculation erupted across the remaining communication networks. Was it abandoned? Was it a generational ark? Had something within it survived the journey?

Fear, once pure and absolute, began to shift. For the first time in years, despair gave way to something else. Not hope, not exactly, but a hesitant yearning. Maybe, people whispered, the ship was here for a reason. Maybe it could be reasoned with. Maybe salvation had not been erased after all.

Then came the moment that silenced all doubt, the shift that would mark the beginning of something far worse than anyone had imagined.

As the ship entered stable high orbit, something deep within its structure failed. A blinding light tore through the sky, illuminating the upper atmosphere with incomprehensible hues. Witnesses described colors that had no name, in shades that shimmered and flickered like memories of dreams. Instruments overloaded. Eyes seared with pain as the unnatural brilliance carved across the sky. In its wake, thousands around the globe were left blinded, unable to comprehend the kaleidoscope of alien light that had flooded their vision.

The ship tore itself apart with a scream that bypassed sound entirely, vibrating instead through the deepest layers of human consciousness. Near its core, a fracture bloomed, not as a mechanical failure, but as if the very fabric of reality had been unzipped. The vessel convulsed under tensions no material should have withstood, and a storm of radiant energy burst from its interior, erupting like the death of a forgotten deity. The rupture widened into a gaping wound, splitting the immense construct in two. Each fragment drifted away from the other, glowing with internal fire, shedding trails of glimmering debris that tainted the skies above for weeks.

What followed was a silence more dreadful than any scream. It pressed down like a suffocating weight, a hush that pulsed with unnatural rhythm, saturated with a sense of something vast, wounded, and possibly aware. Humanity stood paralyzed, watching as the reality set in. The ship, whatever it was in truth, was dying, and it was doing so on the doorstep of mankind.

Global alarm networks lit up as the fractured halves of the ship began their descent. Trajectories were rapidly calculated. One jagged section angled toward the desolate Himalayas, long since rendered lifeless by radiation. The other, more intact segment, spiraled on a collision course with the central United States. The projected impact zone: just outside Kansas City.

The world watched in horror. Livestreams captured the burning wreckage as it pierced the atmosphere. News anchors wept openly. Crowds gathered in churches and temples. The impact was inevitable. But once again, the ship defied expectation.

Even in pieces, the vessel clung to control with mechanical tenacity. Systems far beyond human understanding struggled to maintain course and limit destruction. Ancient engines, scorched and deteriorated by the explosion, flared to life once more, throttling against gravity's pull. The object did not crash as expected. Instead, it descended with a strange, deliberate grace, guided by systems that resisted Earth's pull with unimaginable precision. Its speed dropped steadily until it reached a controlled descent, its velocity moderated to the point that the eventual crash, though still devastating, would not annihilate everything in its path.

When the ship struck just outside Kansas City, the impact was still horrific. The ground erupted beneath the impact, a seismic shudder tearing through the region. Shockwaves fractured highways and rail lines for miles. Residential neighborhoods were swallowed whole by collapsing hillsides. The downtown skyline crumbled as if shaken apart by a wrathful god. Fires spread, power grids failed and emergency services were buried in a tidal wave of uncontrollable destruction.

But despite the ruin, the unimaginable scope of loss, the worst-case scenario never came to pass. The atmospheric shock did not circle the planet. The tectonic chain reactions some had feared did not manifest. The world did not split, nor did the continents shift. Somehow, it had been contained.

Within hours, the Kansas impact site began to show signs of something strange going on. At first, it was small. Strange shimmering objects rolled across the scorched hull, something odd and writhing was spotted through a gap in the metal, and arcs of electricity crawled across the shattered shell. Then came the light. A dome of blue energy burst from the wreckage, expanding rapidly to envelop Kansas City and its surrounding suburbs. As it swept outward, everything living within its radius was unmade.

When the light finally faded, the world was left staring at a hollowed void. The grass had vanished, reduced to ash so fine it scattered at the slightest stir of air. Trees were dissolved to dust that left only faint depressions in the soil. The city stood still, frozen mid-breath. No rustle of leaves, no chirp or hum, not even the bark of a stray dog broke the suffocating silence. Insects, animals, birds, people, all had been unmade, their cells erased with surgical precision. Kansas City remained intact in structure, yet vacant of life. Televisions flickered with paused broadcasts. Doors hung ajar, mid-motion, yet nothing waited behind them. Toys sat forgotten in empty rooms. Piles of clothing floated in the wind. The bubble of sterilizing light left no living thing standing, just the echoes of what once was.

The soil beneath the city cracked and greyed, rendered incapable of supporting life. Microbial cultures gathered from the zone returned sterile. Air samples carried no spores, no pollen, no bacteria. It was as if a surgeon's scalpel had cut a wound into the living world, a slice so clean and absolute that not even decay could take root. It was an immaculate void.

In the Himalayas, the second half struck a remote region already rendered lifeless by the aftereffects of nuclear warfare. Radiation levels had made the area a no-man's-land, and few dared to approach. But unlike the American crash, this one behaved differently.

A violent storm erupted over the Himalayan crash site within days. What began as magnetic interference quickly grew into a regional catastrophe. Compass needles spun without direction. Radios filled with static. Then came the lightning; blinding, white-hot, and powerful enough to fuse rock and sand into molten glass. Entire cliffs were scorched smooth. The atmosphere above had turned unstable, charged with a storm of intense electromagnetic force radiating from the shattered craft buried within the mountains.

Reports filtered in slowly at first. Reconnaissance drones went silent. Patrol teams failed to return. Survivors staggered out of the storm bearing tales of horrific encounters. They spoke of grotesque creatures emerging from the heart of the radioactive zone, monstrosities that defied all known biology. Bears with armored hides that deflected rifle fire. Birds with wings of bone and fire, trailing cinders as they shrieked through the air. Quadrupeds with too many eyes and fangs, strong enough to rip apart APCs.

Chinese and Indian forces, still bitter enemies after the exchange of nuclear fire that had ravaged the region, now held tense, heavily fortified positions on their respective sides of the Himalayan perimeter. Despite their mutual loathing, both militaries found themselves locked in parallel struggle against a horror neither had anticipated. From the heart of the magnetic storm came waves of impossible creatures: nightmares forged from warped biology and alien contagion. Armored titans that shrugged off cannon fire, serpentine horrors with mirrored skin and fractal eyes, and airborne abominations that unleashed electromagnetic shrieks capable of frying equipment mid-battle.

Entire units vanished as the storm grew, leaving behind only static-laced screams. Footage recovered from lost drones showed glimpses of anatomy twisted into mockeries of life- grotesque things that stalked the fog with unnatural intelligence. Engagements devolved into routs. Both nations were forced to accept that mutual cooperation was the only choice as they poured more and more of their remaining forces into stemming the tide.. What had once been a cold and bitter frontier had become a crucible of survival against a tide of monsters spilling into the world.

In North America, the United States deployed every available resource to investigate the wreckage. Military convoys ringed the Kansas site. Scientists from every institution were pulled in. Hazmat teams in advanced suits entered the dead zone. Inside the ship, they found only silence, and the cold, empty corridors of a ship turned mausoleum.

Among the wreckage, damaged terminals and fragmented memory cores offered fragments of truth. Decoding the alien language was a monumental task. The data was corrupted. Storage systems were shattered, but advanced AI systems worked day and night, piecing together meaning from ruins.

What emerged painted a grim portrait of a tragedy made whole.

The ship was a refugee vessel, its builders fleeing the ashes of a lost war and a bioweapon that had ravaged their world and population. The pathogen was an insidious thing, meant to terrorize and horrify more than kill, though it did that all too well on its own. It rewrote its victims, awakening dormant genetic codes and reshaping them into monstrous echoes of their former selves. Their bodies twisted into weapons, driven by hunger and instinct, stripped of memory and reason. The infection spread like wildfire, through blood, bites, even the briefest contact. In the end, nothing rational remained behind their eyes.

In the end it was all for naught. The pathogen had followed them on the ship, maybe in the refugees themselves, maybe in their food, or clothing or any other hundred vectors that couldn't be accounted for in the final moments of their species. The simple, miserable truth was that the weaponized pathogen came with them, in the worst possible way.

The crew of the ship had fought to contain the plague valiantly. Unable to cure it, knowing they were all infected and unwilling to infect anyone or anything else with the horror that had raped and ravaged their species, they made a choice. They had lost the ability to manually activate the purge function of the ship, those controls lost when the bridge fell, but they could program a contingency into the system from where they were. If the infection breached containment, the ship would activate a last-ditch sterilization wave. It would destroy all living organic matter within and around the vessel. A sacrifice to protect any world they might reach.

But time, distance, and entropy had their say. The ship aged. Its systems degraded, left to rot without anyone to maintain them. The plague endured, the ship itself a cancerous tumor filled with the missions of refugees-turned monsters. When the ship finally reached Earth, the machines that made it function were fragile indeed. All it took was something small. A leak, a power surge, a shift from the steady thrum of propulsion to the control needed to stay in orbit, but that was all that was needed.

The defense systems, designed by hands long turned to dust, had never been meant to account for the vessel's mid-atmosphere fracture. When the ship split apart, the automated sterilization protocol was triggered far too late. The foresection, containing the command core and critical systems, activated its purge in time. Kansas City was reduced to a lifeless husk in a final, desperate act of planetary protection. But the rear section, where cargo, engines, and fuel had been stored, suffered catastrophic systems collapse. Isolated from command, its defenses failed entirely. The sterilization wave never came. In that silence, the infection survived. The last, desperate gasp of that dying race failed, and with it, humanity's last chance to contain what had been set loose.

In the weeks that followed, Asia descended into chaos. From the Himalayas, creatures surged across borders in vast, unrelenting waves. China, India, Nepal, and the surrounding regions fell under siege. The skies above the impact site churned with magnetic fury, a dome of volatile energy growing ever wider. Aircraft strayed too close and vanished in blinding arcs of lightning. Missiles launched toward the epicenter were swatted from the air, their guidance systems scrambled and their warheads rendered inert before detonation. Chinese forces attempted multiple nuclear strikes, each one ended in failure, the devices falling silent and lifeless before ever reaching their targets.

Ground forces fared little better. While conventional weapons could bring the monsters down, sheer numbers overwhelmed defensive lines. Bullets killed, yes, but not quickly enough, and not in sufficient volume. For every beast slain, ten more emerged. Cities became battlegrounds. Outposts were overrun. Entire brigades disappeared under stampeding horrors. The enemy did not break ranks or scatter under fire. They charged with singleminded, psychotic bravery, and worse, as the fighting intensified, it became clear they the more they fought, the more they learned.

Field commanders began reporting changes in behavior. The creatures no longer attacked at random. Isolated threats had become organized packs, moving in coordinated patterns. They flanked armored columns. They baited patrols into ambushes. They struck supply convoys with eerie timing. Each engagement grew more brutal, not just in scale but in strategy. Worse still, the creatures evolved. Groups began displaying new abilities; camouflage, sonic disorientation, even limited use of esoteric energies to cause strange effects, and the more of them there were, the more they acted as if directed by some unseen will.

As the weeks turned into months, there was one thing that became apparent. Whatever was making these things, wherever they were coming from, there was something behind the mindless aggression that seemed to rule the monsters, and it was learning.

 

[J. Finch]

By 2072, large regions of Asia had gone silent. The magnetic storm expanded from the Himalayan impact zone and enveloped China and India. It pressed into Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East, erasing everything in it's path. Major cities along the corridors suffered cascading grid failures, uncontrolled fires, and structural collapse as systems shorted and hard infrastructure was overrun. Power and water became rare luxuries as entire cities found themselves first becoming the new front line, then just as rapidly abandoned as an unending wave of monsters.

The consequence was a running fight that never ended. The China-Indian border had been one of the most heavily fortified land areas in Asia prior to the crash. Tens of thousands of soldiers, backed by several armored divisions of tanks and artillery, all hardened by the fighting over the once-prized mountain range, and with them enough supplies to fight the entire war on their own, they were the first bodies fed to an implacable and horrifying foe. The creatures had no supply lines, didn't seem to feel fear or pain, and were terrifyingly resistant to conventional munitions. They gorged themselves on the dead and dying, tearing those they could get their claws on to pieces. It was a brutal meat grinder made worse once the magnetic storm covered their positions, grounding their aircraft and reducing any electronics to nonfunctional trash.

Units fell back from ridge to ridge while convoys stalled and burned on the roads. Ammunition ran low and field hospitals failed under the weight of casualties. As the fighting began to pour into the more populated areas of both nations, police and civil authorities began to collapse. Those that tried to maintain order quickly found themselves buried under a tidal wave of fleeing refugees, starving and terrified as they poured through the nation towards any escape they could find.

Within three months the most fortified border sectors stood open. The flood spilled through those gaps into Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, and the western provinces. It moved like water through a broken dam and it did not stop. Those who could run, did, but far too many were caught between the closing jaws of a horde of slavering beasts.

It was then that strange, new monsters began to appear. Humanoid in shape, though with elongated limbs and mouths full of fangs, these doppelgangers began approaching patrols and refugee groups wrapped in rags to hide their unnatural appearance. They could mimic human speech, sounding like children or women or the infirm, drawing as close as they could, before unveiling their monstrous forms. They were unnaturally strong and fast, capable of ripping a man in two with their bare hands, and what was worse, the more they killed, the more human they began to look, as if assimilating the traits of their victims.

They were the first, but not the most insidious. As the never-ending flow of refugees poured through every border and road, uncaring of who or what tried to stop them, more and more of these doppelgangers began to appear. Unlike their hideous original forms, these were nearly indistinguishable from humans. They would infiltrate camps and transports and travel with the unknowing refugees, each one carrying a subtle, vicious version of the Plague that the ship carried, infecting everyone they could, until eventually they were discovered. Then the mutations would begin, spreading like cancerous tumors across the skin of those infected, driving them mad with pain as their teeth became fangs and their fingernails turned into claws, as their minds snapped and they became violent and animalistic, attacking those around them, until they were dead, or everyone else was.

Nearby island and coastal states absorbed the first shocks. Japan processed more arrivals than it could track. The Philippines declared national emergency and closed most ports. Australia mobilized reserves and established quarantine camps. These actions did not hold back the spread. The Plague acted with an almost intelligent drive, hiding within the host until they were released into an uninfected populace, where the cycle would begin again. Assistance missions imported the problem into staging areas. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Crematoria operated around the clock without pause. By early 2073, most of the major population centers across Asia and Oceania were wiped clean of life, with only the mutated and infected roaming the streets and alleys.

The decision to seal the Pacific was ordered on June 9th, 2073. Convoys formed from commercial and private craft were intercepted by blockade forces. North American navies enforced exclusion zones with brutal efficiency, backed by their regional partners where they could. The policy was severe, final, and necessary. The justification was simple arithmetic. One vessel destroyed meant one city spared. One life for a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand. No chances could be taken, no kindness spared. The death toll was staggering, all the same.

By the end of 2073, Asia had ceased all broadcast, and the landmass from the Pacific coast to the edges of Russia were consumed under a black, crackling sky that only seemed to grow with each passing day. Australia was declared a quarantine zone, abandoned by the world at large after a series of well-meaning initiatives resulted in the decimation of it's population under an ever-growing surge of infected mutants.

Africa, unlike Asia, had never been a stable place, a century of intermittent civil war, famine and genocide had left the cradle of humanity ill prepared for the unending waves of refugees. The Plague found supple soil to take root in, the jungles and deserts teeming with fresh creatures to assimilate into it's never-ending menagerie of horrors. The fall was sudden, but horrifying in it's entirety as government and rebel forces alike, armed with ancient weapons and too caught up in their own petty conflicts failed to notice the doom that approached. It was far too little, far too late, when the great powers of the region finally began to take notice of the monsters that poured from it's jungles, and by the summer of 2074, Africa, from it's southern tip to it's northern desert, had gone still.

Europe entered this period in a weakened state. The years before the arrival of the ship had been marked with chaos, unrest and riots. Many of the old bureaucracies had been replaced with governments totalitarian in all but name. Civil liberties had been long since suspended, and the era of tolerance had died a violent death as nations cracked down with all the force of a jackboot. This left them in a unique place when the Plague and it's monsters poured over the borders. Europe found itself fighting against the tide as so many others before it. Conscription became the standard policy, the faces of the soldiers growing both older and younger as their standing forces were devoured. Internal borders were hardened under military control. Ports and airports were nationalized and turned into logistics hubs. Travel became restricted, then banned, as the truth of the Doppelgangers and the Plague became known. Media networks moved under direct oversight, and became centers of propaganda and government censure. The public accepted these measures, and those who tried to fight found themselves shot in the street, or shipped to the front, and many didn't know which was a worse fate.

It was all for naught. The collapse of the Middle East had gutted the export of fuel and natural gas. Pipelines were cut, and shipping had all but ceased as the tanks and stations ran dry. The modern armor so heavily depended upon ground to a stuttering halt, becoming static emplacements when their engines finally died. The supply trains so desperate and hungry for gasoline began to falter, reloads of ammunition, food, and vital medical supplies taking longer and longer to reach entrenched units on the slowly collapsing front, and many soldiers were forced to use whatever they had on hand as their bullets, barely effective as they were, ran out.

Urban centers were converted into layered defenses. Perimeter districts were cleared and mined, bridges were prepared for demolition, and subways became troop movement corridors and shelters. Power was reserved for hospitals and command posts. Rations were reduced several times without public notice. Military police enforced curfew, and later, handled the execution of an ever-growing list of deserters. Even children weren't spared, forced to work at looms and presses to keep the flow of material going.

Attempts to cross the Atlantic increased as more and more sought refuge in the Americas. They were met with orders to turn back, at first, and those who refused found themselves under fire. The threat, they were told, of the Plague spreading across the ocean was too much. Many perished without even that courtesy, often dragged into the depths by strange, impossible creatures as they sailed on ships too small to make the passage to begin with.

By the end of that year, the French and German lines had completely collapsed, and with it the mainland of Europe was lost. The United Kingdom held out for some time more, cut off from the rest of the world with the horde on one side and an uncaring wall of naval guns on the other. Their last transmission came through on March 3rd, 2075. "Damn you all, for this."

Russia sustained organized operations longer than most. The depth of territory and hardened stockpiles helped early defense. Nuclear stockpiles from the last century were wheeled out, to limited success, and older, more brutal weapons hidden away also saw a resurgence on that front. Chemical and biological weapons, gas attacks, and indiscriminate shelling and bombing marked the campaign, but by the time the cold season hit food stores were exhausted, and it's people with it. It was then that they realized their oldest ally, General Winter, had seemingly found a new friend in the unending tide of slavering flesh and disease, as millions froze to death in the frigid north.

By 2076, Europe held only fragmented redoubts. France and Germany maintained several small bases under constant attack, trapped like rats in the tide of nightmares and horrors.Sweden, Norway and Denmark, as well as several others, retreated to the mountains and their strongholds there, hoping to one day be able to reclaim their lost lands, but as the year closed out, it was clear that Europe had fallen, and with it, any hopes of slowing the final twilight of mankind.

 

[J. Finch]

The shattered ship dominated the plains like a fallen monument. Measuring three miles from prow to stern and a mile high at its tallest spine, it had split on descent and burned through the air, then struck and survived. Its sterilization field had erased every living thing in Kansas City, down to the smallest bacteria, earning it the ominous moniker of the Kansas City Killer. In the aftermath, the wreck became a fortress laboratory under federal control. Wrapped in a security cordon a dozen layers deep, it became the beating heart of the worldwide effort to fight the Plague. Work crews moved through the opened decks in sealed gear, searching something, anything, that could fight the Plague as the world wore itself out against the tide that had followed the other half of the ship to ground.

The beings who had flown the vessel had not understood the Plague that ended them. Their records that survived the impact spoke in fragments about symptoms and rules. They had listed the ways flesh changed and the order in which minds failed. They had described quarantine procedures and the limits of containment. They had not identified a first cause. They had not mapped a point of origin or a cure. The storage arrays that held their data were partly mechanical and partly something else. Much of it had been ruined by the crash. The sterilization that followed had scoured other sections clean. The result was a fragmented puzzle with many missing pieces and the best hopes and guesses of the people trying to put it together.

Scientists read what they could and then read it again. The Plague acted like a hive rather than a single organism. It learned from failure and adapted with . It moved through contact, needing blood, fluid, a bit, a scratch, sometimes just a brush against bare skin. It rebuilt cell layers and activated long disabled genomes in DNA strands, then caused rapid, cancerous growths that would act like stem cells, creating new, deadly mutations. Talons, fangs, claws, barbed hooks and stingers, tentacles, acid blood, and more. The list of possible horrors seemed endless. It pushed the infected to be violent, flooding their bodies with adrenaline and cortisol, driving them into a frothing rage, and one singular directive. Spread.

As Asia and Europe slowly collapsed, the years and casualties mounted from the millions, to the billions, each fresh corpse was one more mass of flesh to be rebuilt and reformed. Governments fell silent one by one. The global network that the world had once relied upon vanished overnight as factories resource sites were overrun. The front edge of the war crept toward the Americas with every town, city and nation that went silent under the onslaught. So the question for the Kansas City Killer became brutally simple. What did the ship hide, and how could it be used against the Plague?

Warnings that the clock was running out had come long before the fall of Asia. American warships had reported odd returns on sonar that refused classification. Search aircraft had seen massive creatures and strange shapes under the waves. Beach patrols had found growths clinging to pilings that released a sour fog, and made the water smell like sewage and toxic waste. Lifeguard posts logged shapes in the surf that stood and then slipped away. Divers and swimmer began vanishing, and deep sea facilities went dark. Trawlers had been found with decks coated in a corrosive film and no crew on board. At first the incidents were treated as scattered events, but as the days passed into weeks and then months an uneasy pattern began to emerge.

When whales began washing up on shore, their bodies mangled and mauled, the quiet panic of the first years of the infestation became much more pronounced. Schools of fish were found floating on the surface of the water, covered in oozing pustules, and sea birds became rarer and rarer, it was clear that something had gone profoundly wrong in the depths of the ocean.

The Fifth Fleet recorded the first attack off the coast of southern China. A cruiser signaled hull damage below the waterline during a routine patrol. The ship shuddered as it was dragged to a stop. Searchlights revealed barbed cords wrapped around the plates. Within moments the strange tentacles had broken the water line, writhing and shifting as they wrapped around the deck, dragging anyone who tried to force them off under the surf. The engines screamed as the ship struggled to pull free, but the fleshy cables held fast. It was then that the first of the creatures breached the ocean. Human shaped but with the heads of sharks and eels, carrying strange weapons made of coral and woven seaweed. The crew fought valiantly, but the creatures were unnaturally resilient. The cruiser was lost with all hands.&#x20;

It wasn't the only casualty. By the end of the incident, a frigate and two destroyers had suffered similar fates. It wasn't until the ships were put to the torch, their brethren in the fleet opening up with depth charges and cannonfire that the boarders and their strange, living craft fled, but the damage was done. It was then that coastal support missions were called off, and the might of the navy pulled back to enforce it's steel cordon.

The change in policy was marked with sweeping, militant changes. Convoys replaced single-ship transits. Helicopters flew tighter orbits hunting for signs of incoming threats, and all ships, peaceful and wartime, were authorized to carry arms. Unidentified swimmers were treated as hostile, and often fired upon first and questioned never. These measures saved ships but did not change the fact that the war had a new front.

South America began seeing incidents sprout up in cities and slums with alarming regularity. Outbreaks appeared along the fractured coastal cities and spread inland through markets and bus stations. Cartel forces and private armies had long since replaced government forces, but they were woefully unprepared. Reports of mass mutations arrived in clusters from crowded districts, and entire neighborhoods changed over a weekend. The northern command hardened annexed Mexico into a buffer against the south as quietly as possible, at first to hold back the waves of refugees, in numbers too vast and too constant to properly screen, but eventually the decision was made to begin mass purges. It was only a matter of weeks before active bombing and missile strikes began against the former South American nations.

The signs in the far north arrived with a whisper that quickly grew into a roar. Alaska and the Canadian coast began seeing bulbous growths along coastal beaches and cliffs. They swelled like bladders, releasing a strange, toxic gas that killed everything around them. Burning out the infected pustules was became a full time job, with roving teams working all day every day to stymie the constant growth, to little effect. The pods set down roots deep into the dirt and stone, and grew back almost as fast as they were destroyed.

All of this bled into the meetings at the highest levels of government. Pressure was mounting on the KCK team to find something, anything that could help. The wreck still held technology that could be used, devices that functioned, and even the rare database that could be plundered. The first major discovery came through when a group of technicians and engineers discovered generators the size of small buildings tucked away in the depths of the hull. Each one generated enough energy to power the country yet operated using no fuel, and seemingly defied all known laws of physics in the process. Power came from somewhere, but the best guess anyone had was that it was from 'somewhere else'. Despite the lack of understanding, manipulating the tech was almost disturbingly easy. The system seemed able to self-regulate both the output and the draw on whatever system was attached to it, and almost seemed eager to be used.

The second finds were emitters. These were the devices that had cast the field that erased all life from the city. From a size perspective they were relatively small, each the roughly the mass and diameter of a small car. They operated in tandem, single emitters capable of generating an output that multiplied exponentially the more that were added, and could project everything from waveform energy to solid light projections. The power draw was immense, sucking up the equivalent of a nuclear fusion plant's output every second, but when paired with the generators they handled the thirst for energy with ease.

But the real prize came in 2074, when a researcher came across what seemed to be the personal notes of one of the science staff, or at least it was assumed to be, detailing how to program the emitters to operate like a form of stasis system. The math was exotic to say the least, the nature of the tech both labyrinthine and in some cases requiring entirely new terms and numbers to explain, but in essence, it was how the aliens made deep space voyages. Instead of fanciful cryostasis or some kind of strange hibernation device, they simply... slowed down the time inside the ship. To the point where a thousand years outside would barely be a second inside, and what's more, the bubble, once active, would in essence cut off the outside entirely, functionally phasing it into a sort of null-dimension.

Simple tests revealed that those living inside the orb would only feel moments pass, even as weeks did in the real world, the variable dilation effect easily programmed once the proper protocols were added. those who volunteered felt as if no time had passed at all, speaking as if they had only experienced moments between one breath and the next. It was also how the ship managed to sterilize everything around it. Nonliving organisms like metal, rock, even things like cloth or wood, would be put into functional stasis when the field activated. Anything living would be subject to the slowdown, or, in the case of the purge system, sped up. This was how the system cleansed the ship and everything around it. By speeding up time in everything touched by the stasis field, rendering Kansas City to age, decay, and turn to dust in nanoseconds while not allowing anything inside, almost but not quite creating a vacuum.

The tragedy was that the system was designed specifically to not be used that way, and making the emitters act in such a way again was impossible without a much deeper understanding that they just didn't have time to study. At least, if the warnings were as they implied, not without taking on a risk of turning the planet itself into a barren husk, or a black hole, depending on which system failed first.

But, despite that frustration, there still existed the pieces of a thought, an idea, and a plan. The site counted sixty eight working emitters and seven generators that could power them. Each emitter could cover several dozen feet in all directions, and when combined, that number ballooned to several thousand. Using this realization, the engineering team sketched a platform that could carry an emitter at its core and the weight of a small city above it. The only vehicles that could bear such a load were the old crawler transports that had once carried rockets to their pads nearly a century earlier, the originals scrapped, but the blueprints remaining. Six crawlers would carry each platform like a moving foundation, a hexagon of twenty four caterpillar treads armored and reinforced to give a literal moving city traction.

Factories and refineries would rise on the decks, producing not just parts, but tools, weapons, ammunition, and equipment. Plans were drawn up for mass biofarms, all fully automated, to grow genetically designed nutrient rich superplants and vat-grown proteins capable of feeding hundreds of thousands. There would be a full armory and an airport on the topmost plates, purpose built to launch a small fleet of aircraft and drones. The platform would carry water stores and workshops and clinics, whole sections of sleeping decks and schools and kitchens, and enough supplies to restart civilization over thrice. The goal was one hundred thousand colonists inside each dome of dilated time. Seven platforms, seven arks, seven hopes for the future.

But for all that, the only question was who would be going forward. Early on in the pandemic, it was discovered that a small percentage of people were, for one reason or another, functionally immune to the Plague. Genetic markers that reached back millions of years offered, through the sheer randomness of luck, around two percent of the population was considered immune. Of the five hundred and eighty million living in the United States at the time, that left a paltry eleven million to choose from. What was worse, the likelihood of being immune was completely random. Rarely was a singular family even entirely immune, and the members could be the fittest, most well educated, or the most decrepit and drug addled, it didn't matter.

This cut the numbers of viable candidates to a third immediately, age and health issues automatically screening many out. Many more were unwilling to leave their families, their friends, their lovers and children to die while they lived, gutting the pool even more. What was worse, the ones that would have been ideal candidates, the scientists, the soldiers, the leaders, were rarely immune, and the fear of accidentally setting off the Plague a second time was one that nobody was willing to risk.

Realizing that there was little time to retrain those who would be aboard the arks into something useful, the decision was made to implant all viable applicants with a system called Skillwire, a novel brain implant that had been still in it's testing phase before the sighting of the original Martinez-NAAS Asteroid. The system was simple, a plug and play program that could be used to download the core technical knowledge of any skillset, from doctors to soldiers to scientists, giving those with it the ability to functionally learn all the basics of a craft in an instant. There were problems with the system of course, from seizures to addictive behaviors to psychosis, but overall those were niche cases, and the technology was considered 'safe enough'.

The technical work moved forward in steps. The generators were anchored in cradles deep in the frames. The emitters were mounted in wells where vibration would not break them, and shielding wrapped the power lines so that the field didn't short its own heart. Each massive caterpillar tread was painstakingly constructed from composite supermetals and wrapped in engines designed to work nearly indefinitely without maintenance. The infinitely complex devices built into the automation bays were drafted and measured so that not one iota of precious space was wasted, and as the pieces all began to come together, the herculean project went underway.

But for all that the economic juggernaut of the United States was capable of building these massive machines, the one damning factor always remained. The human one. Many refused to believe that they were disqualified, and therefore doomed to die when the arks all launched. Others accused the government of trying to fell the nation and the world like rats escaping a sinking ship. The ultra rich and the ultra wealthy tried to finagle spots on the arks using a network of money and favors they'd accrued over a lifetime of hoarded power, and when that failed, when all of these things failed, violence broke out.

On the dawn of New Years Day, 2077, only three of the arks were nearing completion. The fourth and fifth had been stalled out due to rioting workers, and the sixth was still a skeleton. The seventh hadn't even begun construction. Order was enforced at gunpoint, often with punishments resulting in either death, of forced labor, which also lead to death in many cases. It was later found out that one of the generators and a series of emitters was somehow smuggled to the moon base, despite the immense cost, taking with it many of the influential and political elite, to hide in the life raft built on Luna.

In the end as the Mexico Line collapsed and the Plague flooded in from Alaska and Canada, in all of it's unfathomable horror, only four arks were finished. Their populations, and eclectic mix of soldiers, farmers, office workers, and more, were hurried on and readied for their final journey into the future. Ark One, named Eden, was launched mid-2077, amid violent riots and active insurrection, with roughly two thirds of it's compliment. the wave of monsters nearly overrunning the site in a tide of darkness.

Ark Two, known as Babylon, managed to launch with it's own compliment intact, but intercepted transmissions had implied that a large number of additional, non-immune people had also gotten on-board after a coup had killed the construction facility's leadership and seized the reins of the machine for themselves. The last message anyone had received from Babylon only consisted of incoherent rambling about fairness and justice and a damning, scathing string of accusations against the government and everyone in it, as the craft was absorbed by it's bubble and vanished.

Ark Three: Olympus had faced a number of crushing setbacks in both it's preparation and it's launch. As the ark closest to the Mexico Bulwark, when the Plague finally overran the walls and defenses, it was forced to launch prematurely, with barely half it's crew compliment and a fifth of it's supplies. It vanished just as the remnants of the government ordered a nuclear scouring of the southern half of the continent, an effort, ultimately, that did little except add to the fallout and debris that chocked the planet.

Finally, Ark Four, named Valhalla, found itself at the precipice of being launched. Every remaining man, woman and child not slated to board had been given a weapon and told to hold the line, as supplies, equipment, tools, and the most precious cargo of all, people, were herded into the living quarters of the massive land ship, the flashes of explosives and the rattle of gunfire echoing over the horizon as the horde pushed ever inwards, towards the last site itself, built in the shadow of the Kansas City Killer, or, what might more aptly be named, the Death of Mankind, for the writhing doom of flesh and ravenous teeth that it had brought to the cradle of humanity.

On February 6th, 2078 Valhalla successfully activated it's time dilation bubble, and vanished from the Earth. One month later, the sun rose over a world consumed by the Plague, and all of it's horror besides. Huddled on the moon, and in bunkers once built to survive the impact of a world-slaying asteroid, the remnants of the people of earth all waited for a future without them.

But that is another story.

 

[J. Finch]

The inside of the Pandion transport was blocky, military, and stripped bare of comfort, a machine built with no thought for anything but function. Based loosely on the old Osprey designs, its tilt-rotors had long since been replaced by advanced thrusters mounted on swept wings, giving it the ability to hover and lurch through hostile skies. The cabin was narrow and close, lined with exposed struts and steel benches that rattled as the craft shifted. None of the six soldiers aboard, nor their ground combat drone, had much space to move, knees and shoulders pressed together in the tight confines. The portholes were little more than slits, showing glimpses of cold mist and swamp beneath them, a landscape of endless grey clouds and choked foliage. The engines rumbled with a steady, weary hum, vibration running through the deck plates as the Pandion flew low over the trees.

At the front sat Sergeant Jacob Albrect, known to the others as Valkyrie-Five-Oh. He was tall and broad, built like a tank, with close-cropped hair and stern, chiselled features that lent him the look of carved stone. Heavy burn scars coiled around his neck and crawled up one cheek, a gristly mark that made his already severe face more intimidating still. His uniform and armor fit his frame like a second skin, the carapace plating giving him a hulking presence. Years as an NCO had left him seasoned and unyielding, the only veteran of the old world in the squad, and the one chosen to lead them. His tactical mind was sharp, second to none, honed by countless deployments both before and after the Collapse. His Mark 9 carbine was locked into its holder at his side, his carapace armor wrapped around him, every system green. He studied the mission orders on his wrist computer, his expression fixed in practiced calm. He had been assigned as the commander of Valkyrie-5, one of a dozen units under the callsign, tasked with long-distance scouting and support.

To his left sat Corporal Hanna Silph, her dark blonde hair cut into a rough pageboy trim. In another world she might have been a surfer girl, her Hawaiian features and lithe figure suggesting a life very different from this. But her eyes told another story, one written in loss and struggle. She had been conscripted after the fall of the Pacific theater, the only one of her family to make it to the mainland before her home state vanished under the storm. Her short hair framed her face, giving her a severe look, her elfin features carved into a perpetual glare. On her best days she was cold, on her worst she was cutting, and she took no nonsense from anyone, as more than one person had learned. Her helmet rested in her lap, arms folded across it, her gaze fixed on nothing.

Beside her was Private First Class Arjun Doggit, the squad's medic. Despite his Indian heritage, he had chosen to take his mother's maiden name, a quiet rebellion that had stirred discontent in his father's family, though it never deterred him from pursuing medicine. He had been a nurse before the world ended, and now he carried the team's uploaded medical skillset through his Skillwire implant. His demeanor was friendly, a flicker of warmth that never seemed to fade in a sea of grimness. He carried his Mark 9 configured as a shotgun, and strapped to his exoskeleton was a titanium battle-shield, one of the few to do so.

Private Bert Powell sat opposite him, wiry and nervous, with thinning hair and sharp features that would have looked more at home behind a desk with an accounting book and a calculator. He had always been a nervous man, and no amount of Skillwire augmentation could fully smother that anxiety. Oddly, it made him even more dangerous, because when fear gripped him he tended to overkill whatever set him off, and usually by a lot. His Mark 9 was configured for squad support, the weapon almost too large for him, yet always clutched with tense familiarity, as though it was both lifeline and outlet.

Next to him was Private David Hotchkiss, a man with the genial swagger of a slick conman and a mind like a steel trap. Once a lawyer, he carried himself with practiced charm and calm ease, but found his calling during the Collapse. Combat, it seemed, agreed with him. When his blood was up, he thrived, every grin carrying the challenge of someone determined to come out ahead. Beneath the surface, he relished the rush of the fight and the clarity it brought him. His calm voice and practiced ease put others at rest, but it was in the roar of battle that his focus cut razor-sharp. His Mark 9 carried a compact grenade launcher, his role in the squad clear: he was their grenadier.

The last two were the Jaynes, twin siblings who seemed to take joy in appearing identical in every possible way, mirroring each other in dress, mannerism, and movement. Both had volunteered together and seemed to work best when side by side, their coordination uncanny.

Mitch Jayne liked to stir the pot. He kept a grin ready and his platinum hair tied in a bun under his helmet, always looking for a chance to needle Powell or tweak Doggit's nose. He was the twin who ended up on Corporal Silph's shitlist more than once, and had the blisters to prove it, holding the current record for most laps around the Ark because of it. Still, the man was confident, cocky even, and had earned every bit of that swagger.

Marie Jayne was the counterweight, the order to Mitch's chaos, though she had her own brand of humor all the same. She mirrored his look and dress but as soon as she opened her mouth it wasn't hard to tell which twin she was, almost awkwardly shy in her own. She let Mitch take the lead more often than not, while she was the steady backup for when he got in over his head.. Together the two were a force to be reckoned with, and could coordinate with an almost preternatural grace.

At the center of the transport crouched their four-legged Doberman combat drone. Medium-light in frame, it ran on four gyroscopically coordinated legs that kept it balanced across any terrain. It carried extra supplies and spare power packs, with a heavy suppression variant of the Mark 9 mounted firmly across its back. Its combat AI was among the most advanced available, capable of semi-independent thought and nuanced enough to follow orders or act on its own. For now the machine sat idle, posture mimicking a dog at rest, but its sensors glowed in quiet readiness.

Albrect lifted his head from the wrist computer and cleared his throat. The steady drone of the Pandion's engines filled the pause, rattling the benches and vibrating through the deck plates. Conversation bled away into silence as helmets shifted and eyes turned toward him.

"Heimdall-9 went dark," he said evenly, his voice carrying over the hum. "Odin Command wants to know why. We're the only recon squad available. Our job is to find them and report back. Radio comms have been failing all over, and the last four incidents came down to broken network links. Command thinks this might be the same, but they still want eyes on it. Magni-14's scouts reported unusually aggressive animals in the area. Big wolves. So we go careful."

Mitch gave a low whistle, the sound sharp in the cramped cabin. "Great. Lost squad, busted radios, and big bad wolves. Sounds like a bad fairy tale."

"Shut it, Jayne," Silph snapped, her voice cutting through the hum of the engines. "Save the comedy for after we're wheels up and home again."

Hotchkiss chuckled, leaning back against the trembling bench as the Pandion dipped slightly. "Easy, Corporal. Kid's just blowing steam. No harm in a little noise before the busy work starts."

Marie smacked her brother on the helmet with a gloved hand, the tap audible even over the drone of the engines. "Behave, Mitch."

Powell shifted uneasily, the vibration of the deck making his words sound even tighter. "What if it's not just wolves? What if Heimdall-9 ran into something worse?"

Mitch grinned, jabbing a thumb at him. "And here comes the sunshine. Relax, Bert. If it's worse, we'll just shoot more of it."

The cabin answered with a mix of laughter and groans, the sound rolling with the thrum of the engines. Outside, the mist pressed against the portholes while the Doberman drone shifted, its limbs scraping faintly against the deck as it adjusted its stance.

Albrect let the noise settle, then raised his voice over the engines. "Five minutes to drop. Get your shit wired and stay sharp. This goes by the numbers." Helmets shifted, straps tightened, and carbines came free of their mounts as the squad set about checking gear with practiced efficiency.

 

[J. Finch]

The Pandion set down at the last known location of Heimdall-9, a stretch of deserted swamplands that reeked of eggs and sour milk. In the cloudy, sunless evening the world lay under a pall of murky shadows, the cold humidity clinging to skin and armor alike. The air felt thick enough to drink, the smell of stagnant water and rot heavy with every breath. Towering trees rose like the skyscrapers of the Old World, their bark slick with moss, roots twisting into the muck that clutched at boots with every step. The soldiers of Valkyrie-5 sank knee-deep into the mire, each stride a fight against suction that tried to pull them under.

The water was a cloudy stew, the color of vomit and sewage, crawling with wriggling things and the snap of unseen predators below the surface. Flies swarmed in clouds, and slick-bodied insects climbed at their legs, biting through fabric where they could. Around them the swamp was a maze of half-submerged sandbars and winding paths, narrow ridges of mud that forced them to pick their way forward one careful step at a time. The trees pressed close overhead, branches knitted so tight they blotted what little light filtered through the clouds, and the ground stank of centuries of decay.
The Pandion set down at the last known location of Heimdall-9, a stretch of deserted swamplands that reeked of eggs and sour milk. In the cloudy, sunless evening the world lay under a pall of murky shadows, the cold humidity clinging to skin and armor alike. The air felt thick enough to drink, the smell of stagnant water and rot heavy with every breath. Towering trees rose like the skyscrapers of the Old World, their bark slick with moss, roots twisting into the muck that clutched at boots with every step. The soldiers of Valkyrie-5 sank knee-deep into the mire, each stride a fight against suction that tried to pull them under.

The water was a cloudy stew, the color of vomit and sewage, crawling with wriggling things and the snap of unseen predators below the surface. Flies swarmed in clouds, and slick-bodied insects climbed at their legs, biting through fabric where they could. Around them the swamp was a maze of half-submerged sandbars and winding paths, narrow ridges of mud that forced them to pick their way forward one careful step at a time. The trees pressed close overhead, branches knitted so tight they blotted what little light filtered through the clouds, and the ground stank of centuries of decay.

Signs of violence lingered in the gloom, sparse but undeniable. A tree ahead was splintered halfway through the trunk, the ragged wood blackened where an explosive had bitten deep. A scar gouged into the mud showed where shrapnel had sprayed, the fragments biting into roots and vines. A rust-colored splash stained one sandbar, long dried but still sharp against the pale muck. There was no hard proof yet of what they feared, but the trail already whispered that Heimdall-9 had not left here willingly.

Albrect took point, signaling the rest to fall in as their wrist comps pinged the last known position of Heimdall-9's Doberman. Four miles east, deep in the swamps, right in the middle of a major radio deadzone. None of them were surprised. Until the Ark's comm relays came online, this valley was a sink for signals, iron and nickel in the ridges cutting comms to ribbons. They would rely on the Pandion hovering at twenty-five hundred feet to relay what they could, but even then it was spotty.

Powell muttered, his voice tight. "Place like this, they were probably chewed up by the swamp before anything else even got to them. Eaten alive, dragged under, picked clean before anyone even knew they were gone." His words came quicker as he spoke, winding himself tighter with every thought.

"Stow it, Powell," Silph snapped, her tone sharp enough to cut. "You're not helping anyone with that mouth. Button it down and keep your eyes open."

Albrect cut in, his tone low but firm. "Enough. Form up. Doggit, status on the chain? I don't want us blind out here."

Doggit glanced at his wrist comp, tapping through the display. "Daisy chain's still running. Us to the Doberman, Doberman up to the Pandion, Pandion back to the Ark. It's working, but it's rough. Half the packets keep dropping and the lag's bad. We're getting a lot of chop."

Albrect frowned, watching the trees sway. "So we're talking half a net at best."

"More like a quarter," Doggit admitted. "They'll know if we yell loud enough, but it'll be messy."

Hotchkiss gave a dry chuckle, shaking his head. "Hell of a mess. Almost makes me miss the days of good-old satcom. Least you didn't get this shit when the system worked."

"It is what it is," Albrect replied. His voice was flat but steady. "Suck it up, Hotchkiss. We work with what we've got." Albrect said with a note of finality in his tone. "Now fall in. There's a signal coming from grid seventeen, east-north-east."

The slog was brutal. Even with exo-assisted strength, the mud and twisted foliage made each step feel like hauling lead. The cold air pressed against them, sharp against the thickness of the humidity that clung inside their armor, making every breath feel heavy. They hacked paths with machetes, boots slurping in muck, shoulders scraping against wet vines and branches that seemed determined to snag and trip them. All around them the swampland writhed.

Mitch cursed as he yanked something black and slick from his thigh plating. It was a leech-like thing with a ring of needle teeth that had been trying to bore through the thick weave of his BDU, the thin fangs doing a decent job of digging in. "Son of a bitch! Even the bugs want a piece of me." He squeezed it until it popped like a bloated pustule, before he tossed it away. "Damn things are everywhere."

Marie grimaced. "What the hell, Mitch. That's disgusting."

Doggit gave a low chuckle. "You should have seen the jungles in India, back in the beforetimes. Leeches, mosquitoes, everything with teeth. Whole rivers of them some days, and the parasites! They got into everything."

Mitch shook his head, muttering, "Glad I missed that vacation."

Doggit laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. "Chipper up, Jayne. At least it thinks you're as delicious as you seem to think you are."

"I guess something had to, eventually." Muttered Corporal Silph from the side, pulling a strangled groan from the twin and a laugh from the rest.

The forest was almost worse than the water. Tangled roots and coiled vines blocked every step, the undergrowth closing like a cage. The water around them shifted from shallow bog to sudden drops, hidden pools where pale things slithered just beneath the surface. The squad picked their way along ridges and sandbars, each step a gamble against being dragged knee-deep into sucking mud. Motion tracking was useless. Giant snakes slithered in the distance, spiders the size of helmets crawled overhead, and reptilian shapes lurked at the edge of sight. Once they passed a crocodile that must have stretched fifty feet, its bullfrog tongue lashing out to drag some horned goat-thing into its mouth, only for a flower of barbed tentacles to coil from the swamp and drag it under with a wet snap. None of them wanted to know what waited beneath the water. And that, as terrifying as it was, counted as the least of the dangers they had seen.

Halfway through the march they stumbled on something even stranger; a skull, massive and weathered, jutting from the muck like a pale hill. It was the size of a main battle tank, with teeth four feet long and thicker than a man's torso. The squad froze, staring at it.

"Jesus," Mitch breathed. "That thing could swallow a Pandion whole."

Doggit crouched low, scanning the surface. "Teeth like these weren't made for grazing. Whatever this was, it was a predator."

Albrect's voice came steady over the comms. "Doggit, pictures. Queue them to the Ark."

Doggit nodded, raising his wrist comp. "On it. They'll want every angle."

Marie's voice slipped through, quiet and uneasy. "I don't even want to know what could have killed something like that."

The words hung heavy over the unit. Powell muttered, "Jesus, what could kill something like that!?"

"Enough," Silph barked, sharp and commanding. "Speculation gets you dead. Eyes front, weapons ready. Stay in the here and now." The words were just that, though, as the squad eyed the massive skull, each imagining something worse than the last, something with gripping claws and snagging teeth the size of a battleship, trundling around, maybe hunting, maybe for them.

The deeper they pressed, the worse it grew. Chittering things scuttled across trunks and branches, covered in claws and far too many legs. Powell nearly lost his mind when something the length of his arm dropped onto his helmet and began trying to bore through. He thrashed until Hotchkiss calmly cut it in half with a swipe of his machete, the corpse tumbling into the swamp. The Doberman added to the tension, freezing without warning, autocannon swiveling toward unseen threats in the dark. Each time the squad stopped cold, weapons raised, waiting for an attack that never came. Then the drone would move again, silent but watchful.

By the fourth mile, it was Powell who broke the silence. His voice cracked over the comms in a half-whisper. "What if Heimdall-9 got dragged off by one of those giant crocs? Or sunk into the muck, pulled down by those flesh-eating plants?"

Maria's voice came cool and sharp. "Don't start."

Mitch snorted. "Christ, Bert, shut up. You'll have us all jumping at shadows."

"All of you cut it," Silph growled, and the group fell into silence once more.

Albrect said nothing. He stared at his wrist comp, then back into the shadows, the memory of another swamp creeping in. Panama. Ropey vines dragging men screaming into the dark. Mutants, Plaguetouched, tearing through lines at night, eating anything they could catch. Men. Animals. Sometimes even each other. The forest pressed in tighter, and he kept his jaw locked, pace steady. He finally broke the silence with a low order. "Keep moving. Stay tight. We're not getting lost out here."

Three hours passed before they reached it. The Doberman lay in ruin, a shattered husk that should have been impossible to break. It had been built to withstand railgun strikes and keep fighting even with half its chassis destroyed, but whatever had come through had reduced it to a mangled corpse of steel and composite. Limbs had been ripped free at the joints, its weapons torn away, its armor plates peeled back like tin and its hardened carapace smashed until wiring and circuitry spilled into the muck. Cables dangled like torn sinew, optics crushed flat, the machine's once-proud frame desecrated with clinical brutality.

Albrect crouched low, eyes narrowing as he jacked its intact drive into their own unit. The Doberman waited nearby, posture rigid, sensors humming with a faint edge that almost felt like unease. Even a machine knew when something had gone wrong. The squad shifted the ruined chassis to get better access to it's ports, and that was when the true horror revealed itself. Wedged beneath the destroyed drone lay the severed arm of a man, torn away at the elbow, the hand still clutched a pistol in a death grip, streaked with dried blood.








AN: And we're off. Jeebus. Okay. I admit I'm kinda nervous about this one, because hey, never done an original setting thing before, so here's hoping! And as always, you can catch the next four chapters of this fic on my >PATREON< if you wanna see what happens next! It's gonna be a wild ride for Valkyrie-5, much to their dismay.