If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

—Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est"

I heard her sigh on the other end of the chatter, filling me with dread. Dead air crackled through the speaker as I held on tight, wishing it was her hand, wishing I could be right there for her. Her voice, tired and young, almost as young as me by a few months, almost whistled. I almost felt the breeze that blew by her, sitting on her rocking chair, talking to me thirty miles away. I thought about the last time I saw her, the mid-spring afternoon she was called out of a history class—and then removed from the school.

Then she told me about her attempt.

I didn't have access to any contraceptives—I didn't want to give birth, she said. In my head, in the moment, there was only one way to be sure. It wasn't my child.

Wouldn't, I said gently, reminding her what never was.

Right, she whispered, a hiss of relief leaving it off. She said, It wouldn't have been my child.

I nodded slightly, although with the camera turned off, she couldn't have picked that up. I stared at my ceiling from the middle of my bed, my body lay flat and in a T-shape like a crucifix. I listened to her talk all night. I listened to her tell me she was used and hurt and that she wished that boy killed her instead. I absorbed her anguish, and I held that for a little while.

Two weeks later, in the sticky, hot, Piedmont June, in her liminal backyard off the beaten interstate between Hickory and Statesville, a quiet solace under the cover of mosquito bites, a Glen Campbell playlist—a trinket of obsession of hers with Old American culture—cicada roars, and a sunset dew, Eliška Novak gently tugged my dress shirt, draped my arms around her faux-silk satin prom dress, and kissed me.

Are you OK? I asked.

She nodded, almost pensively, almost sadly.

Are you sure you want this? I asked.

She nodded, signing a promise she could not keep.

Two months passed. Two months of nightly phone calls; aimless road trips; picnic dates on the patchy hill of Martin Luther King Jr. Park by the playground, between the highway and the lake; watching monster movies in the dying theater east of I-77, holding hands and kissing voraciously; fooling around in the dim air conditioning of my car in suburban Kimbrough Park, far from civilization—far from the college and Statesville High and Mac Anderson Park, her little ground zero; exploring each other's bodies, laid out on my dry linen sheets, or on hers.

Every color was her color. Every sunbeam was hers—every sunrise, noon downtown walk, gray sky, sunset, and twilight glows glistening from hickory trees and golden chaff fields, corn, and tall grass. Every soundbite of New American and old folk punk music would reach out and pull me back to these two months, a memory I knew I would like to last forever, a memory I somehow knew might not—a situation, somehow, I intuited was ephemeral. Even the frail warmth of the end of spring and the blistering sunrays, drenching humidity—the very feeling and taste in my pores of summer—would entrap me in these two months, a loop I could not escape, could not want to escape.

At the end of July, Eliška told me that she realized something, knees cradling her chin as she loomed over me on her bed.

I have been fooling myself, she said.

What do you mean?

I don't think I actually like you or want you, she said. But you've been here, and we've been so close, and you were the only one.

Oh.

I'm sorry, Anto, she said:

I'm sorry for using you.

As the first days of August passed and nothing changed in the boiling summer, I went home, organized my things, settled my affairs, and finished high school.

What I did not do was blame her.

"We've got a job to do" has got to be the most spoken phrase in human history. The second might be "I love you." And the third is most definitely "Go to hell"—but from Statesville High to Anaxes, the latter was the one I heard the most, with the second succeeding that, and the first succeeding that. Paradoxically, in my hometown, I had been living in a mirror world where things always go wrong, and nothing seems right; and yet nothing has gone too wrong, and nothing has broken me in half on its knees and let me writhe—not yet.

So as someone with a reportedly uneventful, depressed life, I felt torn between two worlds in the Mac Gray auditorium, gripping the podium. On this stage, there had been dozens of student-led Broadway plays, debates, dance shows, vigils and parades, quiet piano solos, and of course, graduation speeches. Some of those events were spearheaded by me in my spare, extracurricular hours—for all the good it did. Where did I exist in the long legacy of bright children who would change the world? It used to be just a world—then a solar system—then a galaxy. Now, they're calling it a universe. A universe! We haven't even left the Milky Way. We haven't even met the other inhabitants, shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye!

And what's the significance of a summa cum laude nobody from a rural town in North Carolina, destined for a massive trade school like MIT, or Shanghai Tech, or UVNA, or Troy Tech? Yesterday, everyone was getting their Master's. Now everyone's putting together a doctorate dissertation just to get a job, just to stay competitive. Competitive. Competitive.

Yesterday, people were meeting on the trains, in coffee shops, and at paintball games—sometimes even taking a conversation offline and meeting for the first time from halfway around the world, as travel over such distances is no object. But today, in a post-Waypoint world, it's done on some interstellar matchmaking app of some sort—and boy, the women have high standards. They always had some variation of the same stipulations: Be smart. Be funny. Be different. Be competitive. However, even if you fit all of those criteria, your best bet is to be from a distant colony—or an unlucky host on said colony, feeding a bizarre, head-in-the-clouds market of exotic fetishism and sex tourism.

It was like the idea of competition was in our blood: it existed in sports, in markets, in hiring, in love. Everything was competitive, just as they made them to be—as we made them to be. Gameified, just as we demanded it to be, because nothing mattered anyway.

The little diva I was, I left the teachers and parents and fellow students and alumni of Statesville High with a philosophical dilemma. I asked them what the meaning of life was—or rather, implored them to ask themselves—and further in my speech, I named several thoughts given by other students and teachers I'd interviewed in my senior year. They were disparate: some lofty, some small. Anything from Make the world a better place in that little way you can; To live, laugh, and enjoy life; To make memories, good and bad, lavish and languish; or To simply multiply, and have fun while you do it.

"Hedonism?" I said. "Is that our generation? Looking down at what's in front of us, forgetting to change what's wrong, and learning all the wrong lessons? To accept what's there, not fear what's coming until it's right on top of us? There's a sort of beauty to that. A sort of gentle way of living built on new experiences, trying everything, before it's all over.

"There's a sort of terror that awaits us, then, in the unknowable things beyond us—in a world, solar system, galaxy, universe turning asunder, a fearsome thing with wars beyond our eyes and terrorism creeping into our lives, rampant commoditization of young labor, and the way we don't even look at each other anymore, our eyes fixated on our chatters."

This much was true, as the words hung in the dust and darkness behind the spotlights of the ancient, creaky auditorium. We were afraid, and we knew it.

"We only have our resolve, and we only have each other. So take care of each other, and believe in yourselves. And show your work."

The last line, a hollow appeasement for my math teachers and the people who let me stand on a podium and speak to my fellow students, was equally humorous and equally empty. My soul felt like it was somewhere else when I said it, like going through the motions, like a pantomime.

It is a pantomime: growing up, going to college, getting a job, marrying a nice woman in a big city, ejaculating out one or two kids beneath the roars of subway trains and bleats of fire trucks, working 9-5 for a salary uptown or downtown (pick your poison), reconnecting with your old college buddies and seeing how much older, fatter, and perhaps even more successful than you they've become, getting a two-to-three acre lot with a two-story house and a garage and a mowed lawn and a white picket fence, and dying in some nursing home? If you don't inherit a farm or restaurant, or go to a trade school; that's Earth life. That's us. That's how we do it; that's how we've always done it.

It's dizzying! The world, spinning! The world, crying! Our brothers, sisters, dying! By the gods—what the hell is waiting for us once we graduate? I felt so small, so insignificant, so useless, that my nose would bleed just from the scent of fresh, perfectly creased, ivory paper mailed from the Boston campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I didn't know how to explain it. Being used as a graduation statistic, a body to knock, a soul from which to eject love, a brain to pick, and now a vessel to hold a diploma and work into dust?

Long ago, a man gave me his instruction to find meaning in life—and I wrote it in a Jesus Fish book and kept it with me forever, the only inscription in my journal:

Find a burden. One worth laying down your life for, small or big. And finish it.

I'm sorry, I said to Mom, but no. That's never been my style. I can't let this start—or I won't be able to stop it.

So what will you do? she asked, gripping the MIT acceptance letter like a prayer book. Where will you go?

I looked around, as if watching the gazes of my parents and my sister for the last time, freezing the moment in place forever so it might haunt me in my days coming: Mom's shocked, confused irritable squint; Dad's tie gingerly draped over one hand, his suit jacket over the other arm; our gray tabby Cozy sitting on the marble counter, licking herself and purring out the stress; the smell of beautiful, authentic mahogany in the floor and cabinets; the idyllic glows of sky flushing our kitchen and the contours of my younger sister, already changed out of her dress and draping a hoodie over her. I took a deep breath of this ancient, sterile air, and said:

The Marines.

It was answered to me by my father, a veteran who served in the waning peace of the 25th century, and was there for the Calypso Incident, the question of why people are so insistent on thanking the troops for their "service." It wasn't because we make them feel safe, or because we defend their freedoms—it is because their government demands soldiers to kill and die, and as tragic as death is, those who survive—and those who survive by killing—have to come home.

"It's hard to kill someone," Dad said. "I mean it like this: the body is a resilient thing. Sure, one wrong fall from a height of ten feet or shorter could break your neck. But I've seen someone crawl away from 47 stab wounds. I've seen soldiers blown up and shot come home. I've seen men survive being shot into space with the help of an iron lung. To kill takes considerable effort.

"But beyond that, it's mental. To be an affiliate of death takes a toll."

By the time he'd said this, in the car on the way out of Charlotte-Douglas Airport, as I was visiting home on the second year of my tour, I had already killed.

Snow seldom comes in North Carolina, but this was one of those rare years. While the temperature reached barely freezing, I decided to take a homecoming trip. I crawled up the icy, winding, snow-dusted Perth road into Historic Downtown, took the free parking in the snowed-over lot away from Main Street, and took a walk around. Statesville is small—even with the odd skyscraper, it's a far cry from supercities like Charlotte or Greensboro; and the majority of its geographic territory was rural.

It was an extreme blend of old world and new—and by old world, I mean very old. There were industrial plants from the 2300s, still abandoned, or condemned, or barely in operation by an heirloom skeleton crew. An old hospital built in the 1900s up the street and into the deeply green, lush, forested residential area had been turned into a ruin. Yet it wasn't the oldest legacy in this state. Racial communities were separated by train tracks and I-77—stowaways from Old American demographics from the days of cotton and tobacco "plantations" and unhealed, blood-soaked lands wracked by civil war.

I did not visit these places, however. I walked around Downtown, consisting of an uncharacteristically urban half-mile stretch of Main Street and the intersecting half-mile patch of Center Street—curious, of all things, to see how much had changed of this little world in my absence. For one, I recognized no one. In a few years, the pace of gentrification had outdone itself, full of lawyers and judges at the Iredell County circuits and small business owners trying to make it big in Winston-Salem or Charlotte, commuting 50 miles a day just to get to work. This place, the beating heart of two major interstate highways connecting Charlotte, Greensboro, and Hickory, had not just become a nexus, but a sort of "start-up" town. Like a college town, or a beach town, its industry was "planting roots"—and then tearing them back up, leaving a wake in the asphalt. The people on the east side of the tracks, unable to benefit from the emergence of "new money" in their old town, only got poorer as a result.

In my senior year of high school, I used to convene with my friends at a coffee shop, which had now become a hookah bar, and would later become a record store. The official Statesville coffee shop had instead moved a few blocks down the same street—and, worse still, it wasn't the same owner.

So I walked over, seeking to purchase a 5.00cR cup of coffee and lament the new city prices—a pastime of many in my cohort; we enjoyed it more than we'd like to admit. I wondered how much of this was just nostalgia for what felt like ten years ago, but was only two. Perhaps I had been late to the party in observing these effects of gentrification. Perhaps it had been happening for a dozen years already. Or a hundred, or five hundred. But godsdamn it, it was 2525, and after twenty years in this galaxy, it was time to complain.

To my shock, Eliška sat at the bar at the new coffee shop, invested in something on her laptop chatter. I stood in the doorframe, paralyzed, watching her. I felt like an intruder—like I had broken into the building and was about to be shooed out.

Instead, the barista turned her head and welcomed me in.

"Hi," I said, to the barista, while my eyes remained on Eliška—my hair standing up, my stomach forming a pit of regret.

Eliška, as anyone would have, suddenly looked up to the commotion and locked eyes with me. She turned, looking back at her chatter again. I couldn't tell what she was feeling.

I couldn't tell what I was feeling.

I got my coffee, stumbling through my words, my heart pounding, and then walked over to her, offering a sheepish greeting.

She reciprocated.

"Sit if you like," she said, a modicum of concern bleeding into her voice. Her glassy blue eyes seemed to cut into me. Then, she seemed to think better of it and folded up her laptop. She guided me to a table further away from the fairly busy bar.

"How have you been?" she asked. Eliška never spoke as though she was making small talk; when she asked, How are you? she always seemed to have intent behind it. Like she wanted to know, very badly, if you are well.

"Fine, you?" I said.

Eliška nodded. "I'm good," she said. We caught up, slowly, painfully—each tiptoeing through a minefield of our own creation. We didn't have mine detectors; only the memory of where each little bomblet had been left.

"Aren't you warm?" she asked. I hadn't taken off any of my layers. I stood up, chuckling for the first time, realizing that I indeed was feeling very warm.

She smiled weakly, almost sadly, as if knowing something.

But when I sat down again, she looked at me.

"Am I a bad person?" she asked. "I want you to be honest."

My eyes shot back up to her. The small talk, as much as it possibly could have been with someone as genuine and loving as Eliška, had fully ended.

I shook my head. "How could you be?"

She recited the events of how we broke up that summer two years ago—down to the most specific detail—exactly as I remember it. When couples break up, it's usually ugly. It's usually a fight. It's usually remembered differently, with each side twisting the narrative to the other way. But today, she portrayed our falling out as entirely her fault—she said, to me, that she knew she used me, and she was still sorry.

I just stared at her, as if unable to process the words she was saying—almost as if I simply didn't hear her.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't believe it makes you a bad person."

"You aren't even a little mad?" she asked. I expected, when she said these words, for there to be some relief in her voice. There was not any. She sounded disturbed. Scared.

I shook my head. "I don't know," I said. "I can't be mad at you."

I didn't tell her that I loved her too much. I didn't tell her that I thought she was too much of a victim to be a perpetrator; that she was going through too much, and that I idolized her.

"Who are you mad at?" she asked.

Operation: SIEGE ENGINE was a huge undertaking. Aboard UNSC Spirit of Fire, my division spent most of its time training. We trained for the original mission of the Helljumper, before the more "surgical" doctrine in late-Op Trebuchet overtook almost all UNSC Special Forces: intense, unsupported, vanguard assaults; forced, orbital entry; the feral dogs that open a whole new theater of the war for everyone else.

At the same time, Op Cataphract—the ground force portion of Op Siege Engine—was a bit of a hail mary. Our forces had been throwing everything at the wall over Anaxes and waiting to see what might stick. But between the planet being a Venator factory and the recent employment of Victory-class ships which matched up better to our nearly-indestructible Halcyons, apparently, I spent a lot of the first two months of the "Battle of Anaxes" waiting in a transport ship, pushing myself to my limits training, while my squad leader did the same for us, while our commanders did the same in Warzone simulations, a computer game that enabled us to practice tactics and doctrines on a digital battlespace. We started calling Warzone, in respect to Operation: CATAPHRACT, "mouse-and-keyboard rehearsals."

It was nothing like the surgical counter-insurgency missions I'd embarked on. It was straight out of the playbook of the first year of Operation: TREBUCHET, or Chi Ceti Secundus, or Inchon, or Rijksweg 50. The preparation phase involved every person involved. Pilots trained under extreme conditions—not just simulated combat, but high-Gs, and higher-than-expected turbulence for the Anaxes mission, BVR combat, and honest-to-God dogfighting. Marines trained for just about every phase. Squads cross-trained each role so that a private could pick up a mortar, a SAW, and the charge of a fireteam all at once, if need be. Tankers trained for extreme conditions, including infantry combat and combat repairs. Gunners practiced their ready stations and attempted round-the-clock, live-fire drills. Any deck with a window would experience rattling like knocking on glass as the cannons fired, testing the capability of both practicing gunners and close-in weapon systems.

A week before the mission, and only then, we received our briefings—exactly what we were planning to do with all this training on Anaxes. The briefings themselves were very straightforward. They introduced us, chiefly, to the Mammoth unit we would be attached to, and the two most important officers to the Bullfrog platoon's mission: the eclectic Alabaman commander of Ultra-Heavy 211 Mercury Ice Breaker, Captain Ridgebank, a tall, stocky man with graying blonde hair, thick, blue eyes, and a booming voice; and the no-nonsense company commander Major Sumner, an unassuming, neat, dark-haired Arcadian gentleman of average stature, with a gentle but well-punctuated tone of voice, whose organizational skills and tactical repertoire garnered respect from his peers and subordinates during the Insurrection. Supposedly, they were polar opposites. But they had fought well together in armored units from Troy to Meridian, and they were a well-adored and lethal pair.

The captain went around the horn, checking with each compartment of the operation for their readiness. It was an almost ceremonial final check, but a reminder of the urgency of this operation: all our forces would have a total of five minutes to launch when it was our time—if that. Perhaps the window was even shorter. For us Helljumpers, it was seconds. We were to be the first ones out of the ship and the first boots on the ground.

After we had sounded off our goes, the Spirit of Fire shuddered, her engines leaving a wake of protons and burnt hydrogen particulates in the space above the dark side of Anaxes' only moon. The fleet was moving. The whole fleet. This time, the Iroquois Group burned hard after Anaxes, determined to break through—although, we were ultimately banking on the success of one ship. This mission had moving parts, with every person aboard holding some task that was reliant on timing. For us, however, we were somewhat lucky—our job was to sit in our pods until they dropped. No extra work needed. We didn't even launch ourselves.

While we sat in our pods, and the shipwide check went off, the Shock Brigade commander Colonel Baker called that Assault 1 was ready.

We would be reinforced by Assault 2, a cross-branch combined team. It was a whole division of troops rolling out right behind us on Herons and about a hundred Pelicans. The Herons contained materials and prefabs for rapidly deploying forward-operating-base pods—a military application of the original colony starter pods compatible with old Phoenix-class support ships—a battalion of Seabees, and the required automatons to expedite their work, including Argus minesweepers, Microcranes, and a thousand or so battle droids.

Only half of the Herons were outfitted with pod materials. The plan being to launch a three-pronged "lightning strike" across the northern hemisphere of Anaxes, the primary objective of Assault 2 was to deploy armor as quickly as possible. The 1st Armored Regiment would dismount first with over a hundred Scorpions; behind them, the 2nd MEU was slated to follow with support vehicles—scores of Hornets, Cougar and Kodiak IFVs and their dismounts, Gauss Wolverines, and Viper tank destroyers on loan from the 19th Tank Battalion. Supposedly, the Army's new tank fighting doctrine was specially designed to counter the hovertanks and AT-TE walkers used by the Republic in excess.

But this was a mobile fight—even the command centers, once they had been established, would eventually uproot themselves and set up shop at a more permanent target, the largest airbase on the eastern hemisphere of Anaxes. That was our target. It was reinforced by AT-TEs of multiple configurations, laser artillery, and something called "Juggernauts." The Corps had rapidly developed a new toy to counter the Juggernauts, a project fast-tracked thanks to new budgeting from the UNE's aggressive new policies.

Behind the 1st Armored Regiment and 2nd MEU were our rides into battle after we secured the first landing zones—of course, the first twelve hours: columns of Mammoth super-heavy tanks. While Scorpions and Vipers could contend with AT-TEs, the Mammoths provided the extra firepower and heat to counter the Juggernauts, which would otherwise roll over our tankers.

My unit, a Bullfrog squadron, was attached to one of these Mammoths. Once she was rolled out and ready to go, we would become a mechanized, air-assault Helljumper unit: the very first of our kind.

Beyond that, we had everything we needed. The Spirit of Fire was going to take us into Anaxes' atmosphere, bypassing the enemy's orbital defenses entirely, launch fighters, launch Assault 1 and 2, and leave. We would have to fight for three days without resupply, reinforcement, or any hope for air superiority.

So while the ship shook and shuddered, we simply crossed our fingers and bided our time. It was a rough ride, like an early morning, cross-country bus ride over a highway full of potholes on a poor engine. The ship shuddered and creaked, screaming with every impact—large as this ship was, every torpedo and turbolaser hit scared me with how it stressed the aging hull. Lights flickered with each shudder.

Then, I heard Captain Cutter's voice over the public announcement:

"All hands, prepare for slipspace jump," he called. My hands began to tremble as the first phase of the battle—the easiest part for us—ended.

He counted down from ten as the explosions grew louder and more intense—or, at least, they felt to be that way. I couldn't turn to see my comrades' reactions, if they were having anything similar to my own in this metal coffin.

"Jump!"

And then the shaking stopped.

Peace. Silence. Anticipation.

We were ready. We told ourselves we were.

The ship rattled violently, more so than I had ever experienced in a slipspace jump—the burning, shrieking sounds of air friction and plasma leaked into the hull, until it barely subsided, and the rumbling of turbulence shook the entire hulking beast and gave me vertigo.

The junior bridge officer on the PA reported all systems nominal as the blast doors below our hundreds of pods slid open, flooding the compartment with daylight and fogging up my pod.

In the fog stained all over the viewscreen, I saw something like a reflection, a ghostly visage: a vignette of a memory. The morning I left my family for the Jupiter-Troia staging, knowing we were headed to Anaxes, my mother hugged me tight and cried. My father stood ten paces behind her, watching me with a cold look—no, that wasn't it. It was a poker face. His eyes were haunted. Something blurry lurked in the back of his mind. Mom was worried she might lose me.

Dad knew he already had.

Yes. Yes, I knew that look. It was the same horror that flickered across Eliška's eyes.

"All fighters, launch," Cutter called. "All escorts, launch."

"Assault 1, launch," he said. "Assault 2—"

And we released, dropping through the clouds and into the abyss. I felt myself float as I whipped through nimbus after nimbus.

I controlled my breathing as the wisps of white and black streaked by my pod. Outside, the sky over Anaxes was chaos. Spirit of Fire and six destroyers were already engaged, launching a mob of Sabres. Every single launch bay spewed out Pelicans, Herons, Hornets, and Sparrowhawks, taking advantage of the crucial few minutes before the Republic forces could reach us and take out Assault 1 and 2. They beelined for the surface, their jets spraying outward as they matched speed with us for just a second, passing us, and then climbing to decelerate while we sped toward the nearing ground.

Stray turbolaser shots, torpedo defenses, interceptors, or one good hit from a flak shell could kill. All it would take was one hit.

But before I knew it, the boosters ignited, pulling me down hard into my seat, and the parachutes opened above the pod. I landed gently in the field among a fleet of other pods—squadron after squadron—without a hitch. The large chutes coated the field like olive-green blankets as our pods opened and we quickly dismounted, already under fire. I heard blaster fire, suppressed weapon reports, supersonic bullet cracks, and shouting—orders, callouts, cries for help.

Gentle, cool, dry breezes rolled over me, as though a battle had not been summoned out of the depths of hell, as though we Helljumpers had not conjured blood for our blood gods, in the name of victory and defending our way of life. Fresh autumn air, yet untainted by scorching death and cordite, refreshed my lungs. The cracks of bullets, for just a second, sounded like the snaps of dried branches. Ripping armor and shrapnel, for just a second, felt like leaves crunching under my boots. And beyond those black-streaked cirruses tainted by war, the sky was the healthiest shade of blue I had seen in years.

I was stopped by all this we would trample on: a fragile world, tight with fragile beauty.

Bright blue bolts zipped by, splashing and scorching the ground around me. The roar of fighter jets, dropships, and the unique howl of naval vessels fighting gravity steadily thundered in the distance. I could barely hear the explosions from the air war over them. I took cover.

We used the pods, craters, and rugged terrain to our advantage, making for quick cover while the clones, their positions still unknown, peppered the ground with fire and turned our air strobe. Soon enough, they would have artillery on us—and, if we couldn't knock out their spotters, this would be a short landing.

Hundreds of Helljumpers lay prone in the dirt and shattered crystalline flora.

Blue-hot bolts ripped overhead and kicked up dirt around us, raining scorched embers of soil over our armor. E-Webs sprayed like water hoses against our pods and the foxholes.

Then the ground shuddered from impacts all around us.

"What's happening?" I asked on First Platoon's TEAMCOM.

"Spotters have deployed sooner than expected," the lieutenant answered. "Have to find them, fast."

I unclipped my suppressed XBR55, lying as flat as I can and perching the weapon over the cover. I used the Smartlink scope to feed the 4x magnification scope to my HUD, scanning the horizon for anything aside from pillboxes and gun positions—scope glints, antennas, and camouflage netting. Spotters would have been separated from the machine gun nests—smaller, more difficult to spot, and away from the hardpoints that we targeted first.

I found nothing. The ridges were nothing more than jagged rock and blood-red flora. The hills were empty and rough. The only structures were hastily built fortifications by the clones' mobile units that had assembled there.

The other Helljumpers reported, as well, no spotters. Only clones advancing toward us in rapidly maneuvering, mechanized squads.

What was I missing?

If the enemy had responded to our jump quickly enough with air and ground assets, they must have had spotters embedded somewhere. I tried to think back to the briefings. ONI Section One had told us it was a safe assumption that they were using spotters at vantage points, even when on the offensive—but, they cautioned us, the Marines had never reported finding them on Mygeeto.

The best guess they came up with was, effectively, selection bias or spotting bias—only the survivors, few and far between from a battle as brutal as the defense of Myga City, reported difficulty finding spotters. However…

I looked up, scanning the cloudy, tracer-lit sky with my binoculars.

I heard my platoon sergeant's voice crackling over TEAMCOM after half a minute.

"Silva, what are you doing?" he asked. He crawled over and pushed my binoculars down, lowering my silhouette below the foxhole.

"I think they got drones, Big Sarge," I said. "I think they're our spotters."

Another barrage rained down, this time more accurate, this time engulfing more Helljumpers in dirt-stained blasts. Debris, dirt, and blood drizzled onto my armor and weapon like fine rain.

"Maybe," the sergeant answered. "I want a DM from each squad looking high in thirty-second intervals. You see something, you shoot it. If you got nothing for thirty seconds, get back to covering us."

A few acknowledgment lights lit up on my HUD as the squads complied.

While bursts of mounted laser fire pinned us down, I lay back in my foxhole and pivoted my rifle up, watching the sky. Only the barrel of my weapon peeked over the concave three hundred and sixty degrees of concealment.

I switched the weapon to thermals. Bright blobs of heat backlit the image as the battle in the sky raged on. Within a minute, I thought I'd found it: a balloon-like, matte black probe droid hanging in the air, invisible without a magnified optic. I tagged it on my HUD on a company-wide channel.

"Gotcha," I whispered.

"Silva found something!" Excited by the recognition, hearing my own name on the battlenet, I trembled slightly. I thought it was the adrenaline.

One of the armored units attached to our battalion, an M650-AD, craned its dual autocannons back and fired off a burst.

A flurry of tracers saturated the sky until flickers of explosions clicked off in the distance, hitting their mark. Black smoke trailed down as the probe droid crashed into the surface.

"OK," the company commander called. "We've just got to clear out those bunkers. Call Skyshock and mark some targets."

Within minutes, we had a Hornet squadron on-station for close air support. They roared overhead, flying low and fast. Missiles cruised over our heads from their weapon ports, tracking laser-painted pillboxes and tanks. They crested the hills past our line as fireballs and thick, oily smoke plumed outward, using their look-down/shoot-down radars to nail hovertanks and gunships deploying from the enemy base, two kilometers away.

The heavy blaster fire—while enemy artillery continued to fire at our current coordinates—let up just enough.

"Now's our chance!" the battalion commander barked. "Let's go, Helljumpers! Oscar mike!"

Hooting and barking orders, squads jumped to their feet and all but charged through a hailstorm of plasma artillery. Forward was the only way out—to get out of the last grid square the enemy artillery could target, and take some breathing room for ourselves, before we'd have to take the enemy base within the hour.

"Glory, glory, hallelujah," I whispered, remembering an old battle hymn for a dead republic, and pushed myself off the blackened soil.

Helljumpers crossed the hill like fire ants through the flames and wrecks, crossing off wounded and fleeing clones with quick bursts from MA5Bs and XBR55s. Heat and dirt stained my armor from the surrounding artillery blasts. Shockwaves rattled me, like a wall slamming into me and leaving my body in aching stings.

When we reached the first rally point—the crest of the hill overlooking the walled Republic base—the rest of the armored division was right on schedule. Our Scorpion and Viper complement was here, along with the Army contingent. Lastly, the Marine mechanized infantry unit—the Mammoths—had finally been assembled at the Herons and caught up with our assault. We had only five minutes to mount up, while the Republic forces tracked us from range. The Hornets, Sparrowhawks, and Longswords would keep enemy air at bay until we had operational railguns.

We boarded with Marauder Company, the Marines operating Mercury Ice Breaker. Mercury Ice Breaker rolled up to my platoon, shaking the ground with her immense chassis. With wheels larger than our APCs and a maximum clearance of a five-story building, we worried the thing would sink into the dirt and never move again if she sat still long enough. She was a behemoth like no other.

Marines pulled us aboard at the top of the ramps, taking our backpacks and rucks and installing our Series 8 Single Operator Lift Apparatuses—our jetpacks, or SOLAs as we called them.

Captain Ridgebank, the commander of the Mammoth, greeted us over the COM. "Welcome aboard Mercury Ice Breaker, Bullfrogs!" he called. "The biggest and loudest battering ram ever built. You're just in time for lunch service. Today we're serving up an antipasto of thirty-five centimeter ferro-tungsten sheathed violence and various accompaniments of whoopass."

"Oorah!" my platoon called.

"Let's not disappoint our guests," he said. "Driver: ahead, full!"

Some of us suspected Captain Ridgebank was a Helljumper masquerading as a tanker—he had a few screws loose, and that was why we loved him.

Our landship rumbled forward, grinding through crystalline foliage and dirt. The inside of the Mammoth, for all the size of the mobile command center, felt cramped. Marines scrambled to their positions, manning CROWS turrets and missile platforms, gun ports, and engineering stations. Expecting to make good use of our SOLAs, my Helljumper platoon went topside. I could feel the pressure they felt as I scrambled my way through the cramped catwalks and halls to the top deck, illuminated only by dim red and gold klaxons in the lowest decks, and bathed in daylight through viewports and blue-light screens on the upper levels. Some of the boys in my platoon took their opportunities to swap out magazines with the armory's stock. Others stashed their duffels and ALICE packs on the quartermaster's corner as they finished calibrating their SOLA link-to-VISR interfaces.

For increased situational awareness, the Bullfrogs in Assault 1 had listening privileges to the command channel, because we were expected to act quickly—we were, after all, the most agile in an already highly mobile maneuver warfare unit. The command & control station, Viking, gave orders out to each Mammoth company.

"Ultra-heavy 211," Viking called, "head bearing 214, fast about half a kilometer, then turn right. Enemy has a firm line on the west flank. Scorpions are holding position on the ridge. They can't cross the ravine."

"Fire's that heavy?" Major Sumner, the commander of Marauder Company, asked.

"Water's too deep," Viking said. "STARS intel was a little off."

I turned to my battle buddy, who gave me an emphatic shrug.

"Ultra-heavy 211 diverting," Sumner called. "If we can clear that ridge, can you airlift in a bridge?"

"Yeah," Viking said. "That's the plan. I've got Mike 26 on standby. Patching you now."

The landship rumbled, ravenously chewing the dirt like a JOTUN harvester, accelerating to thirty miles an hour. At the top, the ride was quite bumpy. We held the railings, clinging tightly, as we approached the battle line, already drawing fire along the ravine and short ridges.

"Be advised," Sumner called to us, "Bandit and Reaver are already tied down on the east flank. We have two tank platoons pushing the south right now. Gotta catch up, or they'll be trapped in a pincer."

"Don't worry, Major," Ridgebank said. "We'll pave that road with their oil and guts."

"That's horrible, Captain," Sumner said.

"Thank you, sir!"

I could hear Ridgebank calling out targets to the various Marine gunners aboard Mercury Ice Breaker. Seconds later, rocket pods blasted flurries of arcing micro-missiles. .50 caliber turrets opened fire and gun ports sprayed large, 80mm tracers outward into the horizon.

"Not a big fan of this part," I said.

"What part?" my battle buddy asked.

"The part where we're not fighting," I said. My heart pumped itself into overdrive. Lances of fear took hold as some small part of my mind reminded itself this could be my last battle, that the accumulation of experiences and memories would amount to nothing, and that I might die gloriously in battle.

And then, it would not be nothing.

My nerves stilled, as they had while fighting the Insurrectionists. I thought it was the adrenaline again, that it was a natural reaction of focusing in the moment.

Blasts struck the Mercury Ice Breaker, shaking her hull. Missiles soared over, breaking off as smoke launchers fired in droves, clouding our own sight lines. I stood, rigid, watching with nothing but my steel and my heart. I took deep breaths of the cordite and laser-fried air. I smelled the chemicals and they soothed me. Chaos burned without as Marines took casualties to my left and right. But I was ready.

This war, it would be mine.

"OK," Sumner said. "It doesn't look too bad. Get us across the river and dismount my boys. We're going to take MANPADS and AT teams, fan out, and dig in along those hills."

Ridgebank huffed over the channel. "I thought you'd never ask, sir!" He ordered the Mammoth to cross the ravine, sinking only as far as the enormous wheels trudging through. We passed a line of twelve Scorpions, holding off behind foliage and large rock outcroppings. Without the open mobility across the ravine, they would be unable to maneuver while engaging enemy tanks at this range—so they waited.

Our Mammoth looked like a ferry for a good thirty seconds as we slowed and powered through soft sand and water.

"More power," Ridgebank ordered, "before we get bogged down in this. Ground pressure isn't too good."

The enormous engine roared up. The landship accelerated slightly, until we were clear of the ravine and on dry land again. Water sloshed off the wheels, dripping out of the bottom of the ramp as well. Fifty Marines disembarked and fanned out under turret fire, using the ridges and trees as cover—disappearing into the foliage. They had ten minutes at the most to set up before they'd have to cover us and start hunting tanks.

"Hoof it!" Sumner ordered. "That goes for you, too, Mercury Ice Breaker. Get out there and tear up their line."

Rumbling across the gap, missiles streaked into the sky and rained down, taking out hovertank after hovertank, splitting open crawler tanks while they failed to put a dent in our crawling fortress.

At this height, we could also sight our weapons to the outer perimeter of the Republic base. Some of our marksmen, despite the rocking and rumbling, took to the task, suppressing Clone rocket gunners along the heavy duracrete wall with glancing shots. It was for the best, futile as it seemed. The higher the clearance of a mobile weapons platform, the more attention it drew. Any chance to suppress anti-tank munitions was taken.

"The board is clear," Ridgebank said. "Mike 26, Ultra-heavy 211: you are clear."

Pelican Mike 26 acknowledged the request and made its way over from the rear line, cresting the hill with a large, heavy, deployable bridge slung under her chassis. Her thrusters rumbled against the surface, roaring and blowing up dust and sprays of water from the ravine. The bridge just barely covered it on solid enough sand to support the weight of the Scorpions waiting at the line.

"Radar warning!" The weapon systems officer—the copilot—of Mike 26 barked. "Incoming. SAM!"

"No," Sumner blurted. "Drop the bridge! Get out of there!"

"Detaching," the pilot said, her voice strained but steely. I saw the Pelican drop the ropes from the top, lurch upward, and swing her thrusters hard; as a flurry of missiles hit her left wing. The thunderous explosions shook my teeth. The air blasts hit us like sharp breezes. Fire and smoke sprayed out of the Pelican's wing, fuel quickly catching fire. White sprays from the extinguishers did little to mitigate it as she spun out, passing over us and crossing into the treelines ahead and to the right, her WSO chanting a distress call.

Sumner ordered the tanks across the bridge behind us, for the Helljumpers to rescue the pilots when they crashed, and for Mercury Ice Breaker to take out whatever still has effective anti-air.

"Copy," Ridgebank said solemnly. The unit sprang to action.

My platoon leader ordered us, finally, to it. We prepped our jetpacks, preparing to burn quite a bit of fuel. It looked like the Pelican had crashed at the top of a steep, jagged hill—more like a cliff.

"Silva," the lieutenant said, "take point."

"With pleasure, sir," I said, firing up my jetpack and boosting into the air. We went for the thick, black smoke outcropping from a mesa surrounded by a small forest.

Someone called out to our left. Just over the treeline, almost a kilometer away, a massive, gray vehicle plowed through the forestry effortlessly. Micro-missiles like the ones that struck Mike 26 flowed out toward us, leaving thin gray contrails. Clones using jetpacks—ARC troopers—followed in pursuit to intercept us. The tank was making fast progress, too, the trees doing nothing to stop her as she bore down on Mercury Ice Breaker.

"We've got company," the lieutenant said.

"Are those missiles targeting us?" one of the Helljumpers asked. The missiles arced toward us as we maneuvered, chasing after.

"It would appear so," I said.

"Take evasive," the sergeant called. "No heroics. Drop below the treeline."

As questionable as it was to drop into the trees with a jetpack—a burning snag point—nobody felt compelled to protest.

"This is going to suck," my battle buddy whispered.

We disengaged our SOLAs, dropping like two-hundred-pound flies. The missiles arced downward, following us—or, rather, predicting us. I slammed into the branches a few meters below, tumbling against them like a pinball. I tried to reactivate my SOLA, but the safety system disengaged me; I didn't have a stable center of gravity yet. By the time I would, though, it'd be too late.

I reached out and grabbed for branches. Some scraped my gloves. Some slipped right by. One broke, until I landed on a branch large enough to support me chest-first, wrapping myself around it and knocking the wind out of my lungs. I crawled around it tightly as the micro-missiles hit the trees and started exploding.

Fire licked my armor again. Shrapnel bounced and spalled. Fragments of jagged, hot metal bounced off the steel plates like pine needles. Dirt and bark shattered. Thunder rolled throughout the treeline.

I fell thirty feet, extremely thick bushes softening what would have been a bone-crushing blow with all my armor on into a painful crash. I thought I might have been buried alive.

When I looked up at the sky, it was still. Calm. Uncharacteristic for what this world was coming to—

What all these worlds were coming to.

"Status?" the lieutenant called.

A wave of green lights switched on—except one, an explosives specialist. Her vitals were flat.

"Jackson is dead," our machine gunner said.

"Harper," the lieutenant said. "Grab her tags and her C12."

"Yes, sir," the machine gunner said. His readiness light turned green a few seconds later, informing us he was ready for the next task.

"Crash site is about three hundred meters," the lieutenant said. "Let's get back up in the air and get there. We've still got those troopers to deal with."

We re-activated our SOLAs, climbing out of the trees and flying toward the mesa. The clones, a platoon roughly the same size as our unit, had split into two teams—one patrolling the trees near us, and one seeking the Pelican. When the ten on their orbit of the trees spotted us, they pointed themselves at us, boosting fast, and fired their blasters.

I swore, pointing my weapon up and firing back. Blaster bolts zipped by us, some connecting with their marks and injuring or knocking out my comrades. I burned my SOLA as hard as I could, gaining altitude, while using my Smartlink scope to fight.

"It's no use," the sergeant said. "Disengage and get to the mesa. We can't fight in the air like this."

The other Helljumpers turned and burned away, leaving me behind. I sighted in at the lead trooper, leading just barely, and fired before he could fire off at me. I hit him in his chest, shattering his armor and spraying out blood. He tumbled down, dead or losing control of his booster. Then I turned and followed my team toward the mesa, narrowly avoiding focused blaster fire.

Ahead of me, another Helljumper took a blaster shot to his SOLA, the plasma melting through his pack and igniting the fuel. He was consumed in a fireball, his burning body tumbling into the trees below.

We landed on the edge of the mesa, using various trees and rocks for cover. I skidded in the dry, dusty ground, knelt, and pulled my rifle up from its sling. I sighted in and fired in unison with the rest of my squad, cutting down the nine remaining clones. We lost two more.

We headed over the ridge for the Pelican—only thirty meters and change. The marksman used his SOLA to assist climbing, reaching the peak of the outcropping rock formations, and set up with a vantage point. He pinged our HUDs, calling out enemies silently—marking targets. Red diamonds appeared through the trees and rocks as we slinked through the sparse foliage and around the outcropping.

We picked our targets. They were antsy, having overheard the gunfire. A few used their jump packs to investigate, crossing over us. Our machine gunner sprayed into them, dropping them over the cliff. Then we opened fire. The marksman took out what looked to be a radio operator, holding two fingers to a button on his helmet. I shot one by the blood tray of the wrecked Pelican, a lopsided, agape mouth on the edge of the cliffs. He dropped silently under the oppressive coughs of my suppressed rifle.

Two ARC troopers came around from the cockpit of the wreckage, blasters raised. We cut them down, too, before they could find us.

We stood and dead-checked the clones at the wreckage, kicking buckets and groins.

"Clear!" the sergeant yelled.

"Clear!" I yelled.

"All clear!" the sergeant said.

I entered the crashed Pelican ahead of my platoon, stepping over the seats and their harnesses.

"Eagles coming in!" I yelled.

"Eagles, eagles, eagles!" the pilot called from the other side.

I hit the door controls to the cockpit. The pilot was there, her Sidekick in hand, low-ready in my direction.

She got up. Behind her, I noticed the WSO get up, lowering his weapon, too.

"You fellas all right?" I asked.

"I'm healthy," she said. She turned to the WSO, wrapping his arm around hers and helping him stand. "His leg's hurt. Ambulatory."

The lieutenant made a nine-line CASEVAC call on the command channel. Viking tasked a Hornet to us.

"Make sure he can stand," I said, looking him over. He nodded.

"I can stand," the copilot said with a grimace.

We heard a thunderclap in the distance, followed by several secondary explosions and crackles, and the gleeful wailing from our favorite Mammoth commander over the command channel. The team moved to the ridge, watching as the Juggernaut, cracked open like a walnut, burned. Mercury Ice Breaker rolled past the massive, scorching wreck triumphantly, her top-mounted railgun smoking in the direction of the Republic supertank.

The base, out in the clear and under attack from all three wings of Assault 1, erupted from shell and rocket artillery blasts. Hornets and Sparrowhawks strafed the base, emptying their rocket pods and cannon reserves into the enemy armor in the motor pool. From there, the clones were scattered between collapsing buildings.

Mercury Ice Breaker, Hermetic Dirt Eater, and Jericho War Elephant crushed the walls under their immense weight, crushing and plowing duracrete out of the way, living up to their descriptions as "battering rams." Then, Scorpions, IFVs, and Viper tank destroyers flooded into the base and shot high-explosive shells into the barracks, armory, and command centers, blowing them apart and—as far as I could tell—killing everyone inside.

"All concerned," Viking said, "Grid 31 airspace is clear. All CASEVAC operations out of Firebase Alpha and Firebase Charlie are a go." He repeated the message. Within five minutes, a Hornet was on its way here, landing at the ridge. The crew chief, a Marine strapped to the exposed passenger strut, helped the two pilots aboard and tapped the glass of the cockpit. They took off and headed south for the nearby prefabbed Heron base.

"Let's get back there, then," the lieutenant called. He marked a position on the southwest flank, behind the Marauder breach point. We would land there and reinforce the rest of the mechanized Helljumpers and Marine forward infantry. We powered up, took off, and soared over.

By the time we reached it, however, the Republic base was cleared out. A UN flag was raised in the center of the base's grounds, and Seabees arrived in an armored convoy. The convoy escorted two columns of dozers, a hundred Microcrane construction drones, and two dozen Cyclops construction mechs. The mechs got to work repairing the outer wall with the help of two Pelicans and two albatrosses ferrying raw materials: steel, wood, and polycrete by the short-ton.

The dozers cleared out the rubble of the buildings, and the Seabees began building new structures. The work carried into the night; but by daybreak, we had a command center, a barracks, a field hospital, and an armory—lightly furnished, too.

And by daybreak, the Republic had prepared their counterattack.

Like the rest of my platoon, I woke to a shudder that flickered the dim night lights in the enlisted barracks.

We were already scrambling when the sirens bleated across FOB Golf, three more explosions having gone off. The lieutenant and sergeant barked orders throughout the barracks. Commanders assembled the Marines, slipping on their armor and running outside with their weapons ready, in minutes. I slept in my armor. When I awoke, I slipped my helmet on, grabbed my SOLA, and my rifle, and scrambled outside with the rest of the company.

The chilly breeze was broken by massive plasma blasts raining onto the Scorpions in the motor pool, blowing up one after another with extremely precise fire. They must have had another spotting probe droid, somewhere—but, so long as our air defenses were online, that shouldn't have been possible.

Three blasts struck Jericho War Elephant in quick succession, blowing rubber chunks out of her two front wheels and rupturing their hexagonal carbon fiber skeletons. Even though her weapons were operational, lobbing volley after volley, her cannon heating up and firing in quick-charge shots, it was a mobility kill in her berth. The thunderous blast took over the sounds of our shouting. Then we heard reports of perimeter breaches on the command channel. Clones were entering from all sides already.

Fires broke out all over the base, resulting in pandemonium. We couldn't afford to lose another Mammoth. Marine crews worked quickly to start up Mercury Ice Breaker and Hermetic Dirt Eater, before they would get hit by artillery too. V-wings and ARC-170s crossed as well, bombarding Longswords on their airstrips at Firebase Alpha and roaring back toward us, dodging endless C-RAM streams and missile volleys, suffering a terrible attrition rate.

At this point in the fight, it was all hands on deck. Even the Seabees and hospital staff had picked up MA5Bs and gotten into it. They left dozers and Cyclopses unattended.

"Walkers in the perimeter!" our anti-tank rifleman called.

"Take out what you can," the lieutenant ordered. "But save a tube for potential armor."

"Copy," the AT rifleman answered. He and his buddy spread out from our team, seeking a vantage point of some kind.

AT-RTs crossed into the base, trampling Marines and cutting through rapid response teams with laser fire. Very few were shot off their walkers, given how quickly they ripped through—and out in the open approaching the base, there were few places to set up tripwires or mines for them.

We made our way toward the motor pool to Mercury Ice Breaker, as her systems were still powering up. Her engine was still winding up, too. But on the way over, a blast erupted near us. An artillery shot landed only a few meters away, instantly killing half the platoon and knocking me off my feet. When I opened my eyes again, I found I couldn't see. My helmet visor was fractured, and communications were garbled. I pulled my helmet off, only to find the rest of my platoon was gone. Mercury Ice Breaker was moving out, too. I reached up for it, watching it slip away out of the base between my fingers.

I rose and inspected myself for wounds. The base was overcome with gunfire—sharp coughs from MA5Bs fired in wild or controlled bursts, and high-pitched yelps of blaster fire alike. Smoke glowed in the fires around.

In the motor pool was a whole array of Cyclopses, still undamaged. They weren't armed, but they were armored. I knew their armor was blast-proof and somewhat resistant, and the cockpit glass was rated for rifle rounds.

I didn't have many better options. I ran for one and climbed aboard, turning the key in the ignition and sealing it up behind me.

I wasn't trained on the Cyclops, but I learned the gist very quickly. For a bipedal weapon, it was very user-friendly. The pedals controlled directional movement, and it was stabilized by a computer system, similar to fly-by-wire. Two controls moved the arms, and they had a simple grabbing and squeezing functionality. By squeezing both triggers, I could form something resembling a fist. I could also push the sticks laterally to simulate arm movement, and the Cyclops responded quite well.

So I lumbered out of the motor pool and into the fraying frontline.

I switched on the Cyclops' radio transponder and joined the command frequency. Local commanders at the FOB were giving orders and taking reports quickly and dramatically. The situation was worsening, although there was a modicum of hope in their voices with the Mammoths online again. The nearest secondary Mammoth patrol was miles away, and so were any reinforcements. The airspace was contested again, with Sabres and Longswords climbing to fight off the fighters and strike fighters over FOB Golf.

A couple of AT-RTs rounded the motor pool's chain-link fence perimeter, targeting me. They fired and closed in on me, their lasers scorching the hull of my mech suit. I charged them directly, winding up a fist and sucker-punching the first. The force ejected the clone and splattered him against the cockpit, breaking bones. Dots and smears of blood were left, just faintly, on the glass.

I picked up his wrecked walker and, with accuracy that surprised me, threw it at the other AT-RT. It crashed into the thing, knocking it over and crushing the clone driver.

Instead of dwelling on the cracked duracrete ground pasted with blood, I stepped my Cyclops over the wreck, sprinting after Mercury Ice Breaker, patching myself into and reporting my situation on my squad's TEAMCOM.

"This is Silva," I said. "I'm following you in a Cyclops."

"Shit," the sergeant called. "We thought you were dead, Silva!"

"I'm back," I said. "How many are still up? We lost a lot of guys in that blast."

"First Squad is short two," the sergeant said. "Lieutenant Nickson was killed in the blast. Second Squad only has you and Lomayer."

"Copy," I whispered, my voice low. "I'll—"

Several blasts climbed up the ground and struck me. I rounded a corner, taking cover, and forced the AT-RTs to charge it. I picked up a large slab of shredded polycrete from the rubble of the barracks. I crushed it between the two powered hands and wound back like a baseball pitch.

"Here goes nothing," I whispered.

"Silva, you good?" the sergeant asked.

"Standby, in contact," I said, my voice strained.

"Screw them up good, Corporal," the sergeant said.

They rounded the corner, firing directly at me. I threw the chunks, disorienting them as the pilots visibly ducked down, dodging hard fragments, and damaging the AT-RTs. Then I charged, shoulder-first, into the walker on point. It fell over. I grabbed the other two, flanking it behind, by their legs and yanked them, pulling them out underneath and slamming the pilots into the ground on their backs, killing—or at least mortally wounding—them on impact.

Four more came toward me, firing at the corner. I dragged the two AT-RTs by their legs and hurled them at two others, knocking them down. One fired wildly as it crashed, destroying the third, and I leaped my Cyclops for the last one standing, smashing the laser cannon between the powered hands, squeezing until the tibana gas canisters burst, blasting outward and scorching the pilot alive. Black carbon marks and fog marked the cockpit glass, hurting visibility.

I stood as the fire spread from the AT-RT, exploding and venting blazing fuel all over my Cyclops. I moved away, strafing across the base and catching up with the Mammoth as she left the perimeter.

"Silva," the sergeant said, "You can keep that thing if you think you're better off with it."

"I think I am, Big Sarge," I said. "As much as I love flying with the boys."

"OK," the sergeant said. "We're going to have you run a little long."

I squinted to try and divine what he meant by that. "Copy," I said.

I followed Mercury Ice Breaker as it left the base perimeter, pushing due north for the ridge. The enemy had another height advantage, firing laser and rocket artillery. AT-TEs crawled toward us. Without Scorpions, we couldn't do much to them. A handful of Vipers was still available, but they were still scattered, occupied by a squadron of speeder tanks. The speeder tanks glided deftly above the ground, making it hard to hit them—and chewed up some of the Vipers, turning the night fight into a game of hide and seek, an engine powered by blood and steel, oil and fire.

Artillery continued to pepper the base, covering the advance of enemy armor. It crawled from outside the perimeter, rolling over us toward the edges. Blasts crept around us, barely missing the Mammoth and distantly rattling my Cyclops.

"Where's that arty coming from?" I asked.

"It's close," the sergeant said. "We're seeing a line of chicken guns on the ridge. They're direct-firing at us."

I swore. "What the hell do we do about that?"

"Well, on that front," the sergeant said, "Ridgebank has… an idea."

"What kind of idea?"

"He was over the moon about you picking up that Cyclops. He wants you to clear out the arty. We'll draw fire."

"That sounds like a lot," I said.

"Yeah," the sergeant said. "Get going."

I pinged a green acknowledgment light and cut right as the Mammoth peeled left. I darted from cover to cover slowly at first, daunted by the task. They marked the ridge and the AT-APs, tall three-legged, sloped chassis with large guns mounted on the top. They looked unbalanced, like the front end of an AT-TE pulled off its housing and given a tripod; like a lobster with no tail.

I needed to cross a whole kilometer, partially exposed by long ridges and open dirt and craters. Patches of cobalt-blue grass offered no concealment for a Cyclops, far taller than a man. However, I had mobility. And I was just one vehicle diverting from the group.

"This is insane," I whispered, bringing my mech into a sprint. I ducked down under long jagged rocks and into ditches and deep, natural trenches coated in dead, velvet and cobalt leaves. Water sloshed between my mech's legs, dragging me down as though I were drudging through a stream.

Well, I guessed, I was drudging through a stream. I began to think of this mech as an extension of myself rather than a vehicle. The legs were my legs. The arms were mine. These hands, stained with blood and oil and soot already, were mine.

A squad of clones, guarding the rear line, took notice of my advance under the deafening thunderclaps of the cannon fire. It was too late. I plowed through and pasted them, their small arms blaster fire glancing my hull and leaving tiny black pockmarks wherever they shot. The glass, heat resistant as it was—made of the same stuff as the transparent viewports of our SOEIVs—didn't so much as crack.

And then, I had trampled the rear guard, and I found myself at the flank of the AT-APs. I walked up to one, occupied with its forward-facing screens and very juicy target in Mercury Ice Breaker, and ripped its leg out from underneath. It buckled forward, the pilot leaning back in shock as he came face-to-face, glass-to-glass with me, and I smashed the AT-AP's cockpit—and the clone—to powder and fluid with a haymaker.

I repeated this process several times, until the remaining AT-APs turned toward me, alerted by the communications—whether it was an alert from a survivor, or the final panicked screams of the artillery gunners.

They aimed toward me with surprising agility, bearing down on my chassis. I leaped to the side, knowing they couldn't turn so easily, as they fired. Hot glows rolled past me as my Cyclops rattled like the back seat of a school bus. Dirt rained down on me, smearing my hull. I leaped on top of the nearest one, digging my titanium fists into the hull and creating a rupture, which I only grabbed onto tighter, making like an ice climber until I was at the cannon. I ripped the magazine out, damaging the barrel and the shells until they leaked volatile gas. Fires broke out all over the thing, as well. I might have ruptured a fuel line.

I could die here, I thought, with clarity of mind, panic a distant memory.

I let go of the chassis and kicked off the AT-AP, falling into the dirt on my Cyclops' back as the self-propelled gun exploded viciously, propelling me even further from the blast and blazing into the night sky.

I struggled with the controls to bring my mech to move, just barely tilting myself to the side. The HUD told me the legs of the Cyclops were damaged, so I wouldn't be moving very much anymore. The last two AT-APs pivoted toward me, now with a good firing solution on my Cyclops.

Emergency lights in the Cyclops automatically turned on, recommending I hit the eject key and blow the explosive bolts on the glass cockpit to free myself. I would not have that much time to escape my fate. I saw my reflection, pupils obscured by inky shadows, dirt, and scratches marking my pale cheeks, nose, and stubbly jaw.

Both AT-APs were struck by missiles from high soaring top-attack arcs, exploding similarly to the one I boarded. They tumbled over, burning wrecks, their legs straight and unmoving.

I reported my situation to my sergeant but didn't hear a response. "Big Sarge, do you copy?" I asked. Something must have damaged the radio. I couldn't transmit.

I blew the cockpit off and climbed out of the Cyclops, standing tall over her wreck. A row of Vipers, headed by the Mammoth, swished through two dozen wrecks. Pillars of smoke marked speeder tanks and AT-TEs, unable to kill Mercury Ice Breaker with all their combined firepower.

"They might have hit our gun," Ridgebank called on the command channel, "but we routed their whole counterattack. North flank is clear!" I could still hear comms from what remained of the Cyclops' electronics suite.

"Other teams are reporting successes," Sumner said. "Enemy is retreating. Fall back and re-secure perimeter."

I reached into the Cyclops' SERE kit—which it had, for some reason—and dug out the bright orange flare gun. I launched a ruby-red flare into the sky, illuminating the ground by me in a bloody glow.

Mercury Ice Breaker rolled up to me, shaking the ground by my Cyclops, and opened her ramp. The Marines pulled me aboard.

The next two days were spent reconnoitering various sites in preparation for the assault on the assembly, another massive overture due on the third day of the invasion. With nothing but lightweight Warthogs and Wombat support, we scoped out various sites—old, well-evacuated towns, suburbs, and empty, long-abandoned factories. We checked them for mines and signs of enemy spotters but found nothing.

This was my unit's duty while other teams scoped out the enemy defenses and conducted shaping operations, probing strikes, and counter-battery missions on facilities scores of kilometers away. The Republic knew without a shadow of a doubt that our next target was the massive assembly, but it helped to keep them on edge for a few days—until our next resupply came in. But as time was running short, and it became clear the GAR's response times were faster than expected, HIGHCOM decided the attack would have to happen at the same time as Spirit of Fire's first resupply operation. It was direly needed. Replacement parts and manpower were already short on the bases, and our force was at forty percent our original combat capacity. Without more troops, ammunition, and spare parts by day three, our attrition rate would reach 90%.

We needed to go on the offensive before we reached that point. We would link up with our reinforcements on the field, not in our bases.

Similarly, Mercury Ice Breaker had developed some serious issues. She wasn't invincible. Her engines and hull had taken considerable damage, and she'd spent all of her smoke and missiles in the ambush overnight. Her cannon was blasted up and melted. The engineers said it was reparable, but when I looked at it, the barrel forever drooping and deformed like a wax candle, I couldn't help but shake my head. We were down one railgun and one siegework—with Jericho War Elephant undergoing extensive repairs for her front wheels—and two more railguns from other Mammoths at the other bases were out of commission, including Hermetic Dirt Eater. Even our orbital defense capability, which would in theory create a limited deterrent for Republic ships that would seek to solve their dilemma with an orbital bombardment, was a paper tiger.

As I drove from site to site, I chatted with the RTO, an older, recent transfer to our company. Blue and purple grass rolled by in this section of the field, relatively untouched by the battles. The line here was a gray area between attacks and pushbacks; the GAR had not established a frontline, shocked by our initiative. Sumner's best-guess analysis was that the counterattack they mounted last night was, basically, all they had on hand. They were faced with another dilemma, too: should they send troops from across the planet and create another opening the Spirit could exploit, or should they wait and see what we do, ceding ground—and potentially the assembly—in the process?

"So what are you doing here?" I asked him, myself adjusting to the acoustics of my battle buddy's helmet.

We had conversed plenty of times before the operation, and I eventually got him to admit that he joined the Helljumpers with a Master's degree of business administration—he was a trained accountant, and a pretty smart one.

He huffed, churning in his seat. His armor scratched the felt upholstery. "It's a long story."

"I got time," I said.

He shook his head. "I doubt you want to hear it."

"Try me," I said. "You joined up with an MBA under your belt and stayed enlisted. I mean—why? Something mess you up?"

He took a deep breath, still thinking it over.

I had heard many stories from my peers. I liked to ask people what they made of life—sometimes for myself, sometimes just for the sound of the tale. I learned, quickly, that almost none of their stories had happy endings. I knew his wouldn't. I just wanted to hear it; I wanted to carry their weight with them. The knowledge was a small burden, one worth lifting.

"A few years ago, I guess," he said, "I was, what, twenty-seven? Just out of grad school. Some buddies of mine and I wanted to make it big in the city. We opened a comic book store. Sold chatter games. Nerd stuff."

"Sure," I said. "I love nerd stuff."

"Yeah?" he asked, looking at me through his clear helmet visor. I saw his eyes light up when I took my eyes off the grounds, just for a moment. "Man, we had everything. Everything. And, you know, we had the store and we lived in this loft on the fourth floor, right above it. Ten of us, we all worked and lived right on it. Some of us played a lot of music, drew, painted, wrote. We all had big dreams. Pooled our stuff together, lived frugally, we made by for a few years. I mean, it was retail, but I was an accountant. I was going to balance the sheets for us. We all had skills that ran the store like clockwork."

He looked off to the distance, smiling to himself. He seemed so happy, happier than I'd seen any Marine here, just thinking about it.

"There was a bagel shop, too. Just near this girl's place. I loved going to that shop, picking up something, and bringing it upstairs to her on my day off."

"That sounds lovely," I said. "Like a dream."

"Yeah," he said, quietly, "it was."

"What kind of city were you doing that in?" I asked. I wondered this out loud, thinking about the waves of rent hikes across the Inner Colonies making urban life unpalatable. "It couldn't have been Reach, right? Or were you on Earth?"

He shook his head. "Elysium," he said.

"Really?" I asked.

He nodded. "It was all right, even with the military there. There was plenty of anti-UN sentiment, but everyday life was OK. We didn't have it as bad as some of the other worlds."

I nodded, as if I knew anything about it. I was on the other end. I was probably fighting Insurrectionists on Eridanus Secundus at the same time, a cursed asteroid base orbiting the wealthiest outer colony. If it was just a few years ago, I thought, I might have even been patrolling Madrigal, that IED-ridden hellscape, by the time of his youthful glory days.

"So why are you here?" I asked.

He was silent for a while.

"Black Friday Massacre," he said. "The Innie cell in Luxor was ramping up their attacks worldwide, and they left notice that they would bomb a huge train station. It was down the street from our building, and—"

"And the fire spread through underground paths, and a gas line exploded under your building," I said, recalling the story in the news, four years ago. It had made interstellar headlines. "Jesus, that was you."

"We were there, yeah," he said. "And it was on Black Friday. What were we going to do, evacuate on the busiest day of the year? With Elysium rent? There's no way those bastards didn't know what they were doing. They were out for blood—my blood. Our blood. One hundred and sixty eight died, most burned alive, and a few crushed. 'Missing,' which means they're still there. The station was fully evacuated. Everyone who died was in the tenements and the shops down the block."

"I remember that," I said. "Shit. You survived, though."

"I was visiting that girl," he said. "All my friends died. Then she did, too."

"She did?" I asked, speaking faster than I was thinking. "Why?"

"It's a whole thing. She got her Ph.D in creative writing and was rejected from the university teaching jobs. The last one got really personal and rude with her, told her she was a living joke and that her qualifications just weren't enough for a teacher's position. She wasn't publishing enough, her resume wasn't impressive enough. She had been laid off two months before by another university as a teacher's assistant. They didn't send her a severance package.

"Then she missed a payment for her student loans, and they took her tax return, and she missed her rent payment. Then the bombs went off, and the state made a huge deal about not giving any aid packages to the victims' families and friends, said they needed to evacuate too, not shelter-in-place.

"She asked to borrow my .22, said there was a guy who had been following her and she was just nervous, and blew her brains out in her flat on Valentine's Day, right after our date.

"She kissed me goodnight that night," he whispered, so softly it might have been swept up in the frothy autumn wind. He might have thought I couldn't hear him. I wished I couldn't. "Smiled like I'd never seen her smile before. Told me everything was going to be OK. It was so hot that night. I still smell the sweat and dew and perfume."

I was silent under the humming of the Warthog. The hills rolled by our convoy.

"My parents begged me not to join up," he said. "They begged me. I don't know. I guess I just went a little nuts."

I stared ahead, catching my reflection in the windshield—a glimpse of the dark bags under my own eyes. It killed me to say nothing, like little pins and spears in my heart.

"They said it was my fault," he said. "That I let her die. That I was making a mistake by not confronting that. Point blank."

"That's bullshit," I said.

"Is it?" he asked, turning to me. "Is it?" he repeated, more quietly.

I turned, compelled to reach over and bump his shoulder, and confidently say, Trust. But something stopped me. Something deep and cold, from a place I couldn't pull to the root.

"So do you feel that you pursued vengeance by enlisting?"

"At the start, yes," he said with a sigh. "But a lot of that is gone now. Now, I just don't know what else to do. I can't think of another life for me. The world I left is rotten and gone.

"I hate to admit it," he said, his voice a grumble that barely carried over the roars and whistles of the engine, "but… I got really good at killing."

"It's our burden," I said. "It's our burden to choose."

We didn't talk much for a while. It was quiet in one of the towns we surveyed. Not silent, but quiet—the bottom feeders and birds chirping eased our nerves.

The serenity had a deceptive quality. A hurricane brewed within the RTO and myself.

We launched the all-out attack at 11:00, rolling out most mobile units and leaving our bases lightly guarded. The Mammoths rumbled past the newly repaired gates, barely clearing them. Vipers followed and fanned out, breaking into three-tank platoons and covering a wide berth. As soon as we deployed, the GAR was sure to meet us halfway to the assembly, given they were watching us for activity.

Scores of Longswords and Sabres launched from the nearby FOBs and improvised airfields, soaring overhead and launching missiles at adversaries distantly over the trees and hills. A formation of three dozen aircraft—Hornets, Pelicans, and Nightingales—buzzed off their pads and growled over the trees.

Once again, I was topside with what remained of my platoon of Bullfrogs. I had my SOLA back. I had earned a new reputation after my stint in the Cyclops, netting me some fist bumps and grabs of the shoulder. The boys joked with me that I was invincible—that I've died already, and now my soul had come back to haunt the Republic and win this damn battle. They might have been right.

The attention, however, swelled something powerful in me. It was recognition for something meaningful, something real, my first taste of glory. Real glory—not just college acceptance letters and marksmanship pins. People were actually talking about me, fraught with wry smiles and heartfelt shoulder pats. I lavished and languished in it.

The sound of a slipspace rupture in atmosphere was a painful one. It was like listening to paper shear—air ripping into shreds and splitting apart.

Then, miles above us, I could see the Spirit of Fire decoupling her escort frigates. A swarm of fighters, Pelicans, Herons, and SOEIVs descended out following. They were met with hundreds of proton torpedoes, a spray of pink streaks and black contrails ascending from behind the assembly—out of silos that appeared to work like Aegis Ashore and Misriah Bulwark systems.

"Not good," I whispered. This was new. The enemy was not on alert the first time we arrived. They had no time to heat up their silos. They'd learned from that mistake.

Similarly, hundreds of ARC-170s launched and burned to high altitude to meet our squadrons. Y-wings diverted from attack paths toward us to engage Spirit Group.

Within seconds, we started to see Pelicans and Albatrosses burn up. Herons were struck by torpedoes and air-to-air missiles, breaking apart and descending in massive fireballs.

Looming behind and within the assembly, we saw several battleships and carriers lift off. They pointed upward and jetted a stream of white smoke and condensation, burning high to altitude, ignoring us.

"Entering Sector J1," Sumner called over the command channel. "Contact!"

My eyes locked forward. I sighted into my weapon ahead of the Mercury Ice Breaker, watching the horizon as a line of AT-TEs crested and fired barrages at us. Vipers scrambled in front, flanking and returning fire. Cannons thundered against each other like a Napoleonic battle line, if every gun was on horseback and constantly shifting the front to look like an abstract ballet.

LAAG turrets and Gauss cannons erupted across Mercury Ice Breaker's chassis. Marines topside blasted away with twin-tubed Jackhammers, covering the Vipers with wire-guided missiles. Black smoke from the conical M41 backblasts drenched us with a rotten, carcinogenic layer of soot.

Jericho War Elephant, about two miles to our east and rushing a front, plowed through the AT-TE line. The immense chassis crushed the tanks and an AT-AP at speed, crunching the metal and squashing it like a bug before the tibana canisters and magazines burst, erupting into giant jets of flame. The Mammoth rolled through the roaring flames and smoke, nearly unharmed. She turned her railgun toward one of the carriers and fired two shots, the crew reloading rapidly.

"Juggernaut!" Sumner called. "Direct front. Headed our way. I see squirters."

Sure enough, the Juggernaut ahead of us launched ARC jump troopers—before a railgun slug sliced clean through her chassis, blasting the thing apart and vaporizing them all. Not even the ARC troopers escaped, as the fireball enveloped them, incinerating the dismounts with the crew.

"Target eliminated," the commander of Jericho War Elephant announced.

"Trying to take our kills, are you?" Ridgebank said. "That one was mine!"

"Sorry, Ultra-Heavy 211," the tank commander replied. "But we've just lost our gun. Capacitor's overheated. Hang on—I'm seeing another Juggernaut, three o'clock, close. Where'd that thing come from?"

Ridgebank broke into a bizarre, maniacal laugh. "Our turn!" he said. "Major?"

"Let's go, Captain!" Sumner called. "Get us over and patch that flank. The Vipers can handle this here."

"Yes, sir!" Ridgebank said. He said it the way a cowboy would belt Yeehaw, rather than a Marine would respond to an order. "Driver, hard starboard. Ahead full, bearing 84."

The Mammoth whirred, engine roaring as we lurched to our right, crashing through trees and the odd enemy tank, taking constant heavy arms fire.

"Ultra-Heavy 219," Sumner called, "I copy you've got a dead capacitor. Is that it?"

"Affirm," Jericho War Elephant responded. "You got a spare?"

"Let's just say we don't need ours. We're going to deliver you one."

"Understood," the allied supertank replied. "Be quick. I'm not sure how much punishment we can take out here."

Massive, thunderous trembling shook the skeleton of our Mammoth—direct hits on our left side from AT-AP direct-fire artillery and AT-TEs. We had overextended past the line by a few hundred meters to cut through to Jericho War Elephant, and we were surrounded.

We could see the Mammoth still, swarmed by jump troopers and taking constant fire. She had ground to a halt, her engines or wheels possibly damaged. A line of Vipers held a small perimeter, returning fire, and were picked off one by one. Missiles arced in a fair parabola from the Juggernaut, bearing down upon their position, firing heavy blasters in salvos and coating the battlespace in boiling plasma.

We cruised into the battle, riding high, while Captain Ridgebank activated the PA system. Speakers blared out from the Mammoth, bursting the sound of his voice in open air.

"All right, you sons of bitches," Ridgebank called. "Who wants to hear the song of my people?"

The PA then began blasting "Southern Nights" as we rolled over the trees and lines of enemy "speed bumps," smearing the grass with dirt and blood and oil, spreading fire wildly into trees and brush.

"Captain!" Sumner barked, his tone sharp and irate.

Ridgebank cleared his throat and cut off the PA broadcast.

"Stay frosty," Sumner said. "We're going into the thick of it. I need everyone fighting smart. We're not cavalry. We're a giant tank. Prioritize enemy anti-armor and artillery. Focus fire on bigger targets. Conserve your Jackhammers and use machine guns on large clumps of infantry, mortar pits, and anti-tank riflemen. We've got to buy them time, and we've got to take out that Juggernaut."

"Bullfrogs," Sumner called, "I need you to get airborne once we take out the Juggernaut's weapons. We'll demobilize it with combined fire as soon as we can."

"Where are we going, sir?" The sergeant asked.

"You're boarding that thing," Sumner said, and you're clearing it out."

I exchanged an uneasy look with my squad. They looked back, their eyes betraying nothing but steel.

"Understood," the sergeant said. "Get set!"

ARC troopers flew over us, buzzing by and throwing grenades. The top deck erupted in blasts that shook us while we returned fire.

Machine gun tracers arced up after the jump troopers, downing almost half their squad. The rest soared higher and higher, firing down at us. We returned fire, picking them off to a man.

Rocket fire and combined bursts sprayed down the missile launchers and laser guns aboard the Juggernaut, appearing to silence them.

"Go, go, go!" Sumner ordered. "Ridgebank!"

"Got it!" Ridgebank said. The Mammoth sped up, bridging the gap even further, as heavy thumps rocked the supertank from direct-fire blasts.

We fired up our SOLAs and bridged the gap. We had to be careful about landing on a moving vehicle. We reared around it, catching up and matching speed with the Juggernaut before cutting our boosters and slamming down on the roof. Blaster bolts zipped by, just barely missing us—but within a minute, we were across, and we all landed on the Juggernaut. My thighs screamed at me. My knees felt sore.

We dropped our SOLAs, backpacks, and extraneous devices on the roof of the Juggernaut. The close-quarters fighting would be too cramped to take rucks.

"Blow the hatch and prep grenades!" The sergeant called.

The explosives specialist planted C7 on what looked like an entry hatch, then detonated it. We lobbed two M9 frags in immediately after. Terrible pops shook the inside of the Juggernaut. Shrapnel sprayed out of the hatch and high into the sky. The RTO took point, climbing down, one hand on each rung and another on his MA5B, his weapon light streaming a beam of white glows into the compartment.

We heard short bursts like marbles dropping on a tub. He called up, "Clear!"

We followed him in. It was cramped and dark. Only three of us could fit in the compartment. The rest waited for the RTO to open the next door and clear it out. But in our haste, we missed that the door was already cracked open, the muzzle of a blaster peeking through already.

A flurry of blaster shots sprayed through the gap, only a few inches wide. The RTO collapsed beneath me. I returned fire at full cyclic, gunning down the shooter in the compartment. In the chaos of deafening gunfire, the sound dampened by my sealed helmet, the weapon fire churned in the ribbed acoustics of the space. Two shots sounded like eight.

The shooter in the cracked door fell, his corpse hitting the door controls. The door slid open, revealing a single clone bleeding on the metal floor.

"Damn it," Ridgebank said. "How do you stop that thing? Wheels aren't—"

Then we heard static over the command channel, before his entire uplink died. Silence. An explosion thundered outside the Juggernaut.

The sergeant gave a slicing motion toward the cockpit door. We stacked on it, opened it with the door controls, and threw a frag grenade in. Then we sealed the door.

A loud pop crashed inside the door, denting it and thrashing the bodies inside. Blood and hot shrapnel mixed on the consoles, frying them.

The Juggernaut slowed, the engine idle, brakes idle, and listed in one direction toward the trees.

"Downstairs!" The sergeant called. "Clear out the lower bay!"

We doubled back to the main bay and threw grenades down the hatch. When the others descended to clear the lower bay—an empty compartment that would hold two dozen dismounts, the crew chief was already dead. We opened the rear hatch, inviting the drumbeats of explosions and blasts of war inside.

I stayed with the RTO. He was on the floor, blood smeared on the inside of his helmet. He coughed. It was wet and painful. He grabbed my hand, and I squeezed it tight. He reached for his tags and handed them to me.

"Stay with me," I said, trying to give the tags back.

"I'm not staying," the RTO said. "I'm not. I'm going to see her."

"Stay alive for her," I said. "She wants you to carry on. She—"

"Don't take this from me, Silva," the RTO said. "Damn you, Silva, don't you dare."

I stared, unsure of what to say. I couldn't say yes. I couldn't say no, anymore.

"What was her name?" I asked.

He struggled now, struggling even to cough. Blood spilled from his mouth.

"Her name is Daisy," he whispered, fluid rolling in the back of his throat. "She—"

I leaned closer, trying to see his eyes through the red smears inside his helmet. I squeezed his hand tighter.

I felt nothing from his hand. His vitals were flat on the TEAMCOM.

I pocketed the tags. The sergeant helped pull his body out of the tank.

Standing before the wreck of Mercury Ice Breaker, the sergeant offered a eulogy for Captain Ridgebank, Major Sumner, and the Marines aboard. The heat of the fire stung my face as Vipers crawled by, taking land abandoned by the retreating clone tanks.

We loaded the bodies up with a hospital unit—it was procedure. Some of us wanted to burn them on the pyre pre-made for us, the broiling Mammoth we all loved and lost. But that wasn't what their families would wish for. That was a selfish wish.

We had no short supply of those.

The sky seemed to glow hotter than the day. A burning, scorching meteor arced with wisps of sublimed oxygen. The Spirit of Fire was about to crash into the massive assembly, her engines giving out under the constant fire from enemy ships and surface torpedo launches, headed straight for the dome. Hundreds of Marines roared in shock, diving for cover. An order came down from the captain—stay put, dig in, wait for further orders.

I stood, watching, tall over the reddening grass, as the wreck came down, ready for it to upend the facility into a giant, blinding mushroom cloud and turn us to glass. Ready for it to take the enemy with us. All fleeting senses of self-preservation drained from my body. This was how I wanted it: to die in battle, like the rest of my battalion, to be remembered and discussed among my friends and aunts and uncles over Thanksgiving dinners, like my cousins at Harvard and UVNA, like Eliška.

"Glory, glory, hallelujah," I whispered.

There were a lot of eulogies at our homecomings. Some of my comrades at Anaxes were from Statesville. The ones who came home did so with me through Charlotte-Douglas and we presented at the Mac Gray Auditorium, a short ceremony and some speeches for the others. We talked about them like old friends. We told little stories about our games and our memories of the town. We re-earned our kinship with the next generation.

We talked about heroism, our hands in our suit pockets. We spoke about Captain Ridgebank and Major Sumner, and their sacrifices, the way they inspired us. They were remembered not as failures, unable to deliver the capacitors to Jericho War Elephant, but as heroes who laid down their lives to save the men and women trapped in a Republic snare. They were honored.

I did not say, We should be so lucky.

The teenagers grew up and never remembered our names. They never remembered the names of the Marines and sailors and soldiers and airmen who died on Anaxes—none but their own parents' friends, fathers, mothers, or older brothers or sisters. They watched their chatters for most of our presentations—the ones who had no relatives in the military—and talked afterward about the Master Chief and his exploits on Kaller and in Soell.

Yes, Spartans were the heroes of the wars, they said. Spartans were the ones who turned the tide. Spartans never die.

When my contract was up, I had a chance to go home, to see my family, smell the roses and dew, lie in the thick greens with some girl I could meet again. But that was not a burden to bear; it was not a path I could choose for myself. That was not where I would make my name, not on the floor of an auditorium, not in some firm in Davidson or Catawba, and not as a political scientist at a UNC school—not even those routes, successful lives picked up by the other men in my old squad.

I just couldn't stay here and die quietly, invisible, unheard of. I simply hated the boy who graduated that high school, who glanced his fingers between Eliška's, who had no sense of purpose nor penance:

Inglorious.