Seven days...
The world had been ground down to a fine, grey paste. The swamp was a photograph left out in the rain, all detail bleached away by a fog that clung to everything. It didn’t move. It just was, a wet, silent shroud over still black water and the bones of dead trees.
Five military trucks, their green paint scoured down to bare, scarred metal, formed a slow-moving caravan through the murk. They were the last clenched fist of an army that no longer existed, now just a shell protecting the soft, breathing things inside.
In the back of the third truck, under stained canvas, the survivors sat in silence. Everyone wore a mask. The adults had the blank, round eyepieces of standard-issue respirators. The children wore pathetic, handmade things. Scarves and cloth fitted over scavenged filter canisters. The little girl slept against Gora’s side, her breath rattling softly. Kalene was a ball of silent shivers in Lalene’s lap, his eyes too wide, seeing nothing.
Lalene’s other arm held nothing. The space where Favo should have been was a cold, aching void.
Beside her, Chase sat with his back rod-straight, a monument to duty in a world that had forgotten the word. His chassis was a log of fresh damage: black burns across his chest plate, a deep dent in one shoulder that made his arm hang at a wrong angle. In one hand, he turned the steelglass data chip over and over. His glowing eyes were dim, fixed on the middle distance, processing nothing.
The air bit with a cold that seeped into the bones. From the uniform grey above, a thin, silent snow fell. It wasn’t snow. It was ash. The powdered remains of cities and forests and lives, falling in a gentle, perpetual funeral. It was already inches deep, softening the outlines of the wreckage that littered the swamp: the hulk of a main battle tank sat half-sunk beside the colossal, segmented leg of a fallen Strider, both just strange, grey shapes under the same blanket.
The lead truck’s brakes groaned. The convoy shuddered to a halt.
A figure climbed onto its hood, movements stiff with a tiredness deeper than muscle. His gray uniform was a Vice-Admiral’s, or it had been. Now it was torn and stained, the gold thread tarnished black. A battered greatcoat was draped over his shoulders. He raised a pair of thermal binoculars, scanning the solid wall of fog ahead.
The ash settled on his greasy hair, swept back from a face of sharp angles and deeper shadows. A old, y-shaped scar ran from his left temple down to his jaw, pale against the grime.
Vice-Admiral Tityus Kyte.
One week ago, his voice had moved fleets from the bridge of the *HNS Resolute*. Now he was squinting into a poisoned mist, pathfinding for a convoy of ghosts.
He lowered the binoculars. His breath fogged the inside of his mask. He didn’t speak.
— Sir? — Captain Alira Vos climbed up beside him, her own uniform hanging loose.
— One-five. Three-fifteen. And nine hours... — Kyte didn’t look at her. His voice was a dry rasp.
Vos nodded. The last echoes of a broken command.
Kyte finally turned his head. His eyes, dark and sunk deep, met hers through their lenses.
— Tell everybody to keep their heads down. Fire on my sign.
Vos gave a ghost of a salute and dropped down, moving between the trucks, whispering the order to the haggard marines and specters.
A minute bled into the silence. Just the idle rumble of engines.
Then, from the heart of the fog, a shape. A rocket, trailing fire. It screamed out of the grey, missing the hood by less than a meter, searing the air past Kyte’s head. It struck the drowned tank behind them. Mud and metal fragments rained down. Kyte didn’t flinch.
— FIRE!
His own voice was a raw tear in the quiet. He drew his sidearm, a heavy, six-chambered silvery revolver, and fired into the fog.
BOOM
Muzzle flashes answered from the whiteness. Not the red screech of alien plasma. The sharp, familiar crack of Hoku rifles. Figures in rags and scavenged armor advanced from behind the bone-trees. Desperate, sunken faces. They fired at the trucks, at the marines who returned fire from behind wheels and fenders.
The fight was short, brutal, and almost silent. No screams, no shouts. Just the mechanical trade of death.
It was over in less than a minute. The ambushers fell, or bled back into the fog. Silence returned, now heavy with the stink of cordite and opened bodies. Kyte stood on the hood, his revolver still extended. He pulled the trigger.
*Click.*
He cycled the drum.
*Click.*
He pulled again.
*Click.*
The gun was empty. His bandaged hands trembled violently, working the mechanism over and over, the dry *clicks* sounding like a broken clock. His shoulders began to shake.
A sound escaped his mask, distorted. A wet choke. Then a ragged, heaving sob that twisted in his throat into a sharp, broken laugh. Another sob, another laugh, tangling together into a manic, shuddering crescendo. He threw his head back and yelled at the shrouded, ashen sky. A raw, wordless howl of grief, rage, and absolute defeat.
Tears cut clean tracks through the filth on his scarred face behind the mask.
Vos watched her commander come apart. She gave him ten seconds of the awful sound. Then she turned away, her face set like stone.
— Search the bodies. — her voice was flat, final. — All ammunition. All weapons. Any food, any medicine. Leave nothing useful.
The marines moved out, grimly efficient. They rolled over the dead, men and women in militia rags and tattered army gear. Starving faces, cheeks hollowed, eyes wide even in death. They had died for a few cans of rations and half-spent power cells.
Gora watched from the truck bed, her arm tightening around the little girl. Lalene pulled Kalene’s face into her chest, shielding him. She didn’t need to see. She understood. This was the market now. This was the economy. Chase’s head turned, his head tracking a marine picking up a dropped rifle. His hand closed into a fist around the data chip, its edges biting into his synthetic palm. The chip held the blueprint of the enemy, their purpose, their flaws. The most vital intelligence of the age. It was worth less than the half-eaten nutrient bar being pulled from a dead man’s pocket.
Kyte’s laughter died, guttering out into shuddering silence. He lowered the empty revolver, his whole body sagging. He wiped his face with a bandaged hand, smearing ash and tears. He took a long, ragged breath that fogged his mask, then another, forcing air in and out until the tremors stilled.
He looked at his marines looting the dead, the swallowing fog, the gentle, cursed ashfall. He looked back at the trucks, at the masked, silent faces in the gloom. Vos climbed back up, handed him a canteen. Kyte took it, swished the water in his mouth, spat a dark stream into the grey at his feet.
— Mount up, — Kyte said, his voice a hollow scrape once more, all feeling burned out. — We’re burning daylight.
The engines revved. The convoy lurched forward, leaving the fresh dead to the quiet swamp and the soft, ceaseless ash. It fell on the coastal cities turned to fused glass a thousand kilometers away. It fell on the gutted hulls of starships in silent orbit. It fell on the massive, indifferent ships that still drank the seas, their work uninterrupted.
In 02.35/3504 AdF, Hokushoku and its planet-wide security forces fell after twenty seven hours of resistance against the Unrelenting Force.
But in the silent, grey twilight of the world that was left behind, the true battle for the surface had just begun.
— M.O. Valent, 01/12/2025
