Lucid Truth - 3. Landfall

In the wake of Kerensky's jump to Mars, the consolidated defences of the Third and Fourth fleet were barely holding, even with the balance of power beginning to approach something closer to parity. Lugor's rapid response had formed the primary bulwark in the absence of the First's authority, and all of the assets formerly under Beaumont's command had been subsumed into his fleet.

Although the situation had pulled back from near disaster, it still wasn't at a status quo of fixed positions and immobile battle fronts, where a gridlock of force would play into humanity's defence. The fight had not slowed to any simulacrum of trench warfare, and that fact was painfully obvious, because the reserves working the shield protocol were themselves catching errant Disciples that made it past the fleets proper, in the preventive fracas.

The enemy was persistent, violent, and utterly relentless.

In addition, the strategic coordination displayed was as flawless as that of the human military, but perhaps to an even greater degree. Almost as if there were a hive mentality at play, any new changes in behaviour would occur simultaneously and on the greatest macro scale. Divergent points of ongoing conflict would alter to reflect each new initiative in a unison that was close to synchronous.

It was one of these flexible switchings that allowed the first grouping to break through.

Admiral Jiang saw it coming before she could warn Lugor. Perhaps the most studious of their tactical manoeuvring, she was intently following the flow of the alien movements, even as the guns of her own command vessel blasted through the shifting lines. In nearly a dozen places, disparate across the wider engagement zone, the movement of combatants was thinned out or drawn into specific patterns that opened up temporary holes in the defences.

Half of those were immediately countered with fighter cover, and her destroyer rearguard picked off those that slipped through three more potential breaches, but the rest?

The first grouping of no more than eight Disciples skipped past her back line, and then down through the reserve picket, evading the incoming fire.

Away, and onward to the surface.

She could only watch, with horror, as the cluster descended unhindered at high speed, right toward the most populous area of southern Manchuria: Liaoning province.

At the same time, a second grouping had pierced through over central Asian Khorasan, and a third above eastern Europe.

Jiang directed some of her assets down, three partial SGRs of destroyers and a handful of Peregrines breaking their guard to pursue. Even as they caught the rogue Disciples over the Iranian sector, intercepting and destroying them mere miles above the surface, her attention was brought back to the east.

"Commander," Lugor's voice was steady, but still intensely stressed, the Sudanese admiral bearing the strain of being the central lynchpin of the defence in the absence of Beaumont. "Shield protocol failure in grid 1743. Landfall, eight locations across northwest Shenyang metropolis."

Like buckshot, the enemy had scattered into the urban conglomeration, spreading over an area rife with throngs of humans.

A hunting ground.

"Landfall." Konstanin repeated it. He took a deep breath, his eyes glazing through the holo-image. "I- ... I have to stop this. You can hang me for my sins later, and wish me dead, but ... I CANNOT lose resolve." An extraordinary sharpness was in his words, and his expression was strangely hollow, angered beyond all belief, but unrepentant. When he spoke again, the painful necessity of his tone was not nearly sufficient for the extremity of the words that followed. "Admiral Lugor, cauterise it. With all necessary force across whatever area required. This is an order."

Shenyang city.

Fourteen million people.

She had to will herself to not speak, to repress the fury that came from such a decision, to ignore the lowermost line ships in the Fourth Fleet's line resetting their targeting parameters, and turning to fire downward, to the Earth's surface.

At a Chinese city.

"Ma'am," her tactical officer called, pulling her attention back again, and he transferred a magnified topographical map of southern Ukraine to the command view, "five bogeys down, the sixth has vanished. Aux relays are pinpointing somewhere north of Crimea, near the Dnieper."

Jiang straightened, her ire cool at what these alien monsters had forced upon them, her mind clear and ready.

"Hold fire, our flag only." She glared at the tiny circle of tactical likelihood that represented where the alien ship had to have landed. "All mounts on that zone. The moment you have a lock, hit it with everything."

-o-0-O-0-o-

The counter ops information was solid. There was little in the way of deficiency when it came to what was provided; the facts were verified, accurate, and seemed to have most of the necessary information for performing the task they were given.

Yet, there was an unexplained sense of unease that just wouldn't quite go away.

The theatre was the Kherson Oblast, north of where the river delta broke from a cluster of grassy marshways and islands into the Dniprovska Gulf, on the Ruthenian side of the Black Sea. Three dozen kilometres west of the provincial capital, they were tracking a team of insurgents. The terrain was flat, mostly farmland or fields, though away from the river there were intermittent tree and ranging shrub cover. There were a handful of village settlements before the suburban spread of Mikolayiv began some fifty kilometres to the northwest. There was little to hide behind, with geography affording no real advantage. Although given the state of the times they lived in, none of the agents present doubted that covert operations were now, in too many places, as desperate and dangerous as actual open conflict.

It was barely a month prior that the raid on the Brotherhood of Man had taken place, and in the intervening days, the political climate had devolved with frightening speed from a gridlocked simmering disaster, to an outright breakdown of the established order. The executive and legislative branches each were claiming the mantle of legitimacy over one another, and the dialogue had broken irreversibly. Twenty decades worth of petty regional squabbling, ideological bullying, and endless backstabbing and accusations, had finally crossed from the frozen background into the reality of the fore, and there was no turning back.

Civil war.

Parts of the world had immediately become very dangerous and were already combat zones. Others were relatively peaceful, with the civil authorities either unthreatened or still secure. Yet others were a middling peril, with the probability of harm dependent on the allegiance of the individual.

What pervaded was the sense of panic.

It was only minutes after dusk that the news arrived, along with the first images.

Invasion.

Those images were utterly chilling, and the potentially apocalyptic threat of a malevolent other should have been enough to pull all of it back to a place of sanity.

It should have stopped everything.

It should have brought the power-mongering action -- the warring ebb and flow of information, materials, people, weaponry -- to a halt.

It should have resulted in an instant cease-fire, an amnesty, and an understanding for the common good.

It should have meant a great many things, but ... it didn't.

Iskandar Shahin had expected nothing else.

For a field agent in the counter-intelligence bureau of MFM's Corporate Security, he had seen a lot of the worst of human nature, and the reaction of all parties involved was stupidly and fiercely typical.

A stocky 5'10" in his early 40s, Iskandar was ethnically Lebanese and looked the part. Short black hair, a close-cut beard, sideburns, and mustache, he was tan and vaguely Middle Eastern in appearance, but not memorably so. Average looks and average proportions made him forgettable enough to vanish into a crowd, and it was useful for his job.

It was this, and an ability to think fast, that had kept him alive.

Though his employer inspired little affection, Iskandar was paid well, and whatever dissatisfaction he had from corporate electoral repression in the Levant was secondary to the ability to provide for his wife and daughter. He didn't much care for the politics of everything, though there was an overriding disgust with the federal bureaucracy. On top of that, the realist 'freedom fighters' were worse; all the high-minded talk about liberation and restoration in values was negated by overtly terrorist acts and harm to achieve the end goal.

At his heart, he was practical, but a cynic, and a man tired of the endless circles of rhetoric and violence.

In the end, it came back to doing a job and getting paid. He owed his family nothing less.

Just now, their CorpSec deployment, like all others, was best advised to avoid the police and federal military too, on top of the realist agitators.

"Two and a half klicks west, between an old Orthodox church and a couple of abandoned farmhouses." The team leader was keeping tabs on the Brotherhood group, with their cell of four preparing to eliminate it. "Intel caught them splitting from a transfer into Moldova."

"Surprised they didn't try to run already," the second agent postulated, "because the odds aren't favourable."

None of the group knew the names of each other, just their designations for the task at hand. It was standard procedure for CorpSec's intelligence service.

"They don't know we're here." Iskandar absently adjusted the lapels of his CorpSec special operations jacket, fourth and last on the roster. The uniform was dark blue, but with black trim instead of the standard cream. "If they were aware something more than rank-and-file were watching them, we'd be pursuing, or they'd be gone."

"Oversight is probably limited anyways, because of, well," the third agent stabbed a finger skyward, "all of that."

"You really think it's the end of the world?" The second shrugged, her arm leaning on the repulsor van's rear hatch. "Seems like the media is exaggerating like crazy to scare us into laying down arms and letting Society just have everything. This 'crisis' will be gone in a couple of hours and then it'll be back to business like normal."

"Not sure what part of 'alien invasion' isn't significant to you-"

"Yeah, but an existential threat?" the second interrupted the third. "Look at everything that nature has thrown at us -- that we've thrown at each other -- and we're still around. How many times has there been some world-threatening calamity loom, only for it to be gone by daylight? It could've been nuclear war, or climate collapse, or the Black Death, or fuck knows what else, but all of those things failed."

"All of those things weren't intentional attempts to commit genocide." The third agent adjusted his visor, and shrugged. It was just past sunset, with the fading light and cooling winter temperatures and frosty air causing breath condensation. "The bubonic plague was just a disease, not a weaponised tool to collapse human interstellar expansion. You didn't see 'nuclear war' destroy the colonies and kill a couple of billion people two centuries ago."

"And if these extraterrestrials have such a hardon for Earth and are all 'War of the Worlds', then why did they take so long to do anything? You said it: 'two centuries ago.' Why fuck around for two hundred years if you're so big and bad?"

"Biding their time? Waiting for the right moment? Couldn't tell ya, but I did hear through the vine that all fleet branches were on full standby and deployed back here from Mars, and wherever else, just a few days ago." The third shrugged again, then gave an apathetic sigh. "Look, I don't trust the feds one fucking bit either, but the fleet command's never seemed reckless. They knew something was coming, and they were treating it seriously. That mindset isn't faked."

Iskandar didn't say a word.

What was occurring in Earth's orbit, he could agree it wasn't faked.

It was possible the details of the invasion were being distorted or misrepresented, because he, too, was wary of the role that global media played. Too often it seemed that information was merely an outward expression of various ideological leanings. The Society loyalists seemed to be the worst for buying into their own propaganda, and although MFM's approach was barely more honest, they were usually upfront and brazen about it when they could be, and at the minimum that was respectable.

The military, however, despite the disturbing affection for realist sympathies, was reliably unaffiliated and had faithfully retained its neutral objectivity.

There were no games being played on that count.

The danger was very much real.

"Maybe, but you'd be fooling yourself to think they're on our side. Least of all the army," the second agent groused. "CorpSec's got the best civilian-side operations gear, but facing even the low-end of the infantry corps? No fucking thanks. Peak condition, and counter-tech equal to ours."

This assessment was also true. The numerous federal and state security forces, mostly acting as police and wardens, were commonplace, but easy enough to deal with. The Brotherhood and other realist extremists were definitely more problematic and proactive, but it was the army that truly struck fear into the hearts of most CorpSec agents. From the regular guards and soldiers contracted into the myriad of corporate tasks across the planet, to the specialised roles like Iskandar's own, few had been pleased to hear the declaration of martial law.

The last thing MFM's apparatus wanted to deal with was the federal ground forces.

"Well, you can thank your lucky stars that we outnumber them by a wide margin," the team lead commented, "and that they have better things to do than go camping in the Ukrainian countryside."

"Yeah, no shit. At least that ain't me." The second gave a mocking response. "A moment of silence for our brave soldiers in the Ruhr and Belgium, God rest their souls."

"Pffh." The third snorted. "They signed the contract, they knew the risks."

"Okay, just got the eval and a timeframe. You see that?" The team lead touched the fresh link on his mini-holo, and it was shared instantly with the other three through their wristbands. "We don't need to keep any of them alive; they're just operating a temporary booster station for the Brotherhood mobile net in this area. Opportunity for an insert if we can seize and strip any free profiles. That's for you two, got it?"

The jargon for 'seize and strip' was CorpSec slang for stealing the poorly-guarded digital profile of a marked individual, and was commonly used in the context of abducting and impersonating an enemy operative, for purposes of inflitration, espionage, or occasionally even assassination. Usually the targets were Brotherhood or other realists, though they tended to be paranoid and too careful with software protection to be easily caught. Frequently, innocent civilians were victim too, when regular forms of coercion weren't sufficient.

Here, the leading agent's comments were directed towards Iskandar and the third agent; the implication being that there were at least two individuals worthy of such theft, that they could feasibly imitate.

They both nodded.

"Clock is ticking. Let's start." Hitting a virtual button, the timer began. Visors clicked into place, the four climbing onto their repulsor bikes. "Should be quick and clean, want to make it a f-"

The man's pep talk was interrupted by flashes of light in the sky, away to the north. Multiple lines jabbed upward, blinding streaks that climbed through the darkening sky. From several angles they were firing, the shots vanishing above, streamers of momentary colour in the gathering dusk, and they continued while the agents stared.

"Feds flexing on some illegal pulsi traffic?" the second wondered, but the hesitation in her voice made it clear she didn't believe the words.

"I don't think so. That's the air defence near Mikolayiv." Iskandar's reply was soft, and there was an odd dread as he watched. "That's too much for aircraft."

Far above, there was a brief burst of light, and the momentary brightness of an explosive hit. Too small to make out, the defensive arc was angling lower and further east. There was another flicker of something, and a fire-encased shape finally became visible through the light cloud cover. Small, but moving very quickly, a secondary shot glanced it, and the craft's approach switched, veering. Instead of in the approximate direction of the city's limits, it was off course, southbound, and approaching very close to their current location in a controlled collision vector.

"Ah, fuck," the third agent swore softly. "Coming this way, and it's not fleet."

"Brotherhood's on the move! They're invested and pursuing, gotta execute now!" In a heartbeat, the team lead was away, his bike accelerating into the gloom, and then the second and third agents were following, taking off on their own tangents. Iskandar's pause was momentary, his eyes following the blazing shape of the alien ship's final airborne seconds, disappearing between the trees like an impacting meteor, less than five kilometres distant.

He had a very bad feeling about what was soon to happen, and it had nothing to do with the Brotherhood group they were sent to kill.

Then Iskandar gunned the bike's engine, and he was away.

-o-0-O-0-o-

The Brotherhood team was fully engaged with their temporary mobile station's functions when the notifications began. Out of the seven personnel present, Amal Khaled was the junior for coordinating with the patchy connectivity in the Crimean bloc. The federal army was focused on the west of Europe first, with other more populated and strategically important regions second, and places like south Ukraine a more distant third. Keeping the organisation connected to its field agents when the infrastructure was overloaded with wartime dataflow was a practical necessity.

Yet, the moment he saw that little box with the 'defence condition warning' tag attached to it, he knew they had to move.

They all knew.

The team was packing up in a flurry of activity, moments before the surface-to-air batteries on the city limits were active, their status coming alive from the military's shield protocol. Doors slammed, digital lines cut, engines started, and they were off, roaring out from between the 18th century stonework of the abandoned church, past the dilapidated farmhouses and between the clumps of evergreens.

"It's on us!" The group's head was nervous, sweating, and the back and forth between the other members was rapid and tense. They were all clutching standard Brotherhood self-defence gear, their group less agents than conscripted technicians, and the pistols and local-scrambler scripts were uncomfortable additions.

"Have to check that it's down." A reply, in French.

"I- ... it's too much, the feds need to- ... we aren't soldiers."

"Ne sois pas stupide." A waved hand. "They aren't here. You want these bastards to land?"

"That's why, it's us!"

"Fuck fuck fuck!" Desperate, uncomfortable cussing. "Ez szar. Let's go home! Fuck this!"

"Quiet! We gotta deal!"

There was no time for Amal to complain, voice his opinion, nor put together any kind of protest. Their civilian ATV pulled to a screeching halt, and in moments, they were all piling out, pistols nervously clutched.

They were on the verge of a ranging field of waving grass, dim in the failing daylight. Around the edges were a sprinkling of oak and smaller birch, but mostly it was spreading clumps of pine, thickening to the north. The line of descent was very clear, with a number of trees severed where they had been plowed through. The trunks were cast to the sides, splintered and burning, blackened, with a carved path more than forty metres long. The impact depression finished with the craft itself, which had come to rest just outside the final smashed copse, one of the logs resting directly against the side of the friction-seared hull.

An alien ship.

Still where it sat, it was a thin teardrop shape, the apparently coarse surface at odds with the near perfect symmetry of its outline. Larger than one of the military's fighters, maybe comparable to a smaller model of gunship, it was blue-grey, made from a metallic compound. Almost organic in construction, it seemed to have been grown instead of built. The top of it was hatched, similar to a dorsal evacuation scuttle, but there was nobody -- nothing­ -- nearby.

Was there an occupant?

The Brotherhood team spread out, the head agent moving forward, and they began to slowly approach.

Amal, hesitant, hung back.

Even more, he retreated a few steps, all his instincts telling him to leave.

"Reading nothing." Voice soft in his ear, just as anxious and on-edge as earlier. "Merde. Better be dead from the crash."

"Pray to God," a muttered response, "don't wanna know what they look like."

"Move in." An order given, then a glance back, to where he was lagging behind, his nerves insisting this was a terrible idea. "Khaled." A motioning gesture, to advance. "Come on. Get a grip."

"I-"

That was all he managed to say, before another alert arrived.

Their oversight was stunted, because of the war happening in space, but the software tripwires were still active on their vehicle's sensors.

Incoming.

CorpSec.

His fear got the better of him and without a beat, Amal turned and ran, sprinting from the crashed alien ship, away from the speeding dots, and he barely made it, jumping into a short natural culvert near a pair of withered oaks on the field's western edge.

All at once, the night was full of sound.

Clutching his pistol, he stared with horror as the first CorpSec agents zapped between the trees, and the cracking of gunfire began. The Brotherhood members were diving to the ground where they were, two near enough to take cover behind the vessel's hull, with the other four in the open.

The two French Brotherhood members were hit first, and through Amal's paralysing fear he was able to make out the uniforms of CorpSec counter-int. His incursion script was not working, ineffectual even as he tried to adjust it to fuck with their augments. It was doing nothing, but he could detect the shadows of three agents, their weapons blinking with their boosted reflexes.

A tracker drone sped through the middle, and the Hungarian shot it down, before he was hit too. Their digital chaff was muddying the tactical view, but he glimpsed the last prone Brotherhood member nail one of the enemy, a neck shot, before she took return fire to the head.

There was a final flicker of the local Brotherhood tac-scan picking up a fourth CorpSec agent, but Amal, cowering for his life and unseen at the field's edge, didn't have a second to consider it.

The pings and pops of small-arms fire were dwarfed, as the clearing lit up with light and sound.

Curled up into a ball, arms around his head to block his ears, he pressed himself into the dirt as fire rained down from above.

In a broad circle around the crashed ship, a deafening medley of rail fire slammed into the ground. The hot zone was two hundred metres wide, and the impacts of capital-bore kinetics punched impact craters that sent plumes of ejected soil, rock, and organic particulates flying in a localised cloud that covered everything nearby.

Twenty seconds later, the bombardment stopped.

-o-0-O-0-o-

"Cease fire."

Kilometres above, the guns of the Third Fleet's command cruiser halted.

"Yes ma'am," the tactical officer acknowledged. "Analysis underway. Target status confirmed as ... neutralised."

"Good work." The admiral stared at the magnified grid of the command holo-view, with the little trail of smoke and dust over the southern Ukraine. "Nothing made it through."

With a flick of the wrist, the image minimised, the sliver of Ruthenian woodlands vanishing as she dismissed it. There were more pressing issues, and she gave a new command to the same officer, her attention already upon a dozen other things as the orbital battle took priority again.

The alternative was to think about Shenyang, and if there was one thing Jiang Daiyu was known for in the fleet corps, it was her professionalism and an acute ability to pursue the military's objectives with a dispassionate precision and calculating mind.

She could not let her emotions fail her now.

They were doing what HAD to be done.

"Update the sit-rep. The salient over the Bengali gulf, bring in lines nine and twelve to cover grid 1561." She summoned the chaotic mess of the Third Fleet's battle grouping tags over Eurasia back into the central view. "There's barely enough stopping power! Whatever Kerensky is doing, he'd better hurry. We need him back."

-o-0-O-0-o-

The slight lag of Iskandar's apprehension in following the other three turned out to be more important than he could have realised. Not more than three seconds after he reached the contact zone, his silenced weapon firmly in hand, all hell broke loose.

Everywhere around the crashed ship was lit in the glow of fleet bombardment, a mixture of bright flashes and quaking ground. Like the artillery from wars of old, smoke and dust blasted sky high around the target, and he was desperately attempting a hairpin turn to avoid running into the maelstrom directly ahead. Unfortunately, his speed was too high, and the shock of the nearest rail strike, combined with the unbearably sharp turn, sent him flying.

He struck the ground, rolling onto his back, and the bike skidded, riderless, launching on its side to careen into the dust. His gun was whipped free also, and it was flicked away at an angle, forward into the gloom.

Coughing, Iskandar sat up, hands clapped over his ears, the visor adjusting to the rapidly changing light conditions, and pulling himself up, he staggered back a few metres, head ringing from the sound.

He had never witnessed the capabilities of any larger fleet vessels in action -- few outside of the military ever did -- but now? Now he had.

Considering the power of what was just on display, he was glad he had not been any closer.

As quickly as it had begun, the bombardment stopped.

Ears ringing, Iskandar let go and surveyed what was in front of him. The dust hung in the air, but a light breeze was coming in from the south, and it began to slowly clear. The team's closed loop indicated that the three other CorpSec agents were dead, inside the blast zone, along with presumably all of the Brotherhood personnel.

He was alone.

The connection to the CorpSec operations server was blocked, either through the latent Brotherhood interference or just because of atmospheric disruption. Filtering the visual mess out, he could make out a series of craters, burning debris, and pulverised metallic constituents that had to be what was left of the alien craft.

Well, at least it was destroyed.

Scanning for his gun, he spotted it no more than a couple of dozen feet away.

Grab the weapon, trek back to the van, uplink the results, then leave.

He knew what he had to do. Rubbing his aching shoulder, his eyes on the gun, he was about to break into a walk, when-

-something moved.

Through the fading smoke, a metre back from the shape of the rifle on the dirt, the air seemed to move, as if brushed aside by an unseen shape, and then, a thing materialised, fading into existence.

A creature.

Over six feet, it was statuesque, tall, bone thin, and eerily humanoid. Every part was ebony dark and metallic, barely distinguishable against the evening backdrop, and lit only by the ambient flame of burning wreckage and airborne dust. The limbs, the torso, the head; the shape was a delineation of sharp angles and curved plating, but somehow hollow, like an animated piece of armour. The final word on its purpose were the talons of foot and hand, and a strange dancing fire wreathed it, black and hazed, as the eye sockets fixed on him.

Within, an intelligence that was wholly foreign, and truly malign.

At that sight, everything Iskandar knew about the warring factions on Earth's surface, about humankind's self-interest and the struggles for power and worldly dominion -- all of it faded into insignificance.

None of it mattered.

The alien threat was real.

The creature's head angled slightly, and with a hideously graceful movement it stepped forward, casual and slow, and without taking its attention from him, reached a skeletal arm down to scoop up the gun.

Iskandar's heartbeat was so loud, he could hear it like a drum, his breath shuddering as he fought between the urge to stand his ground, and the instinct to run for his life. He knew, in his core, that if he turned his back, he would not survive for five steps.

It was a predator.

Continuing to watch him, the creature held the rifle, turning it for a moment like it was judging the feel of it, before the grip tightened. The claws pierced into the receiver, through the breech, the barrel extension, and it applied a gentle twisting, pulling, motion. Like a sheet of paper, the gun was torn into two pieces, the metal groaning as it rent in two. The energy compressor popped, fizzling, and the halves were dropped onto the ground.

Nothing but discarded trash.

Mastering his fear and spurred to act, his arm came up, augments activating again, and he fired his wrist-mount at it, backing up at the same time. The first electro-dart bounced off the neck plating, and the second and third it snatched from the air with preternatural dexterity. Iskandar was summoning the reserve drone with a virtual signal, reaching for the hidden thigh-guard, when the creature crushed the darts in a clawed fist, the shocks ineffectual.

He barely had a chance to breathe, the machete not even half raised from the holster when the alien thing seemed to skip across the distance between them, the vapour swirling as it blinked in and out of existence. It was right there, limbs raised to slice him open, when-

BLAM-BLAM-BLAM!

The pistol fire struck the skull from the side. There was an enraged shout, fearful but desperately brave, and the only Brotherhood survivor was striding rapidly toward them, his aim unfailingly on the invader.

Recoiling, it was on the back foot as the gunfire hit it, but then the magazine was empty, and the other man was frantically reloading, no more than four bodylengths away. The creature turned, and in another motion of pure inhuman speed, it leapt directly to the newcomer in a flicker of glazed shadow. Iskandar's reactions were quick, and he was following in hot pursuit, but the not-yet-ready pistol was slapped away with the left limb, and the right grabbed the other man's neck, the claws sinking into the flesh.

Swinging the machete with all his might, it crunched into the back of the skull, the middle of the blade embedding in a couple of inches. Stuck, he couldn't withdraw it from the dense chitinous material, and the creature immediately dropped the other, twisting even as Iskandar tried to yank his weapon free. With a counterswipe, it knocked him over as if he were a child, and turning fully to face him, the machete was pulled out and tossed, skidding away on the blasted soil.

Too far.

It stepped to stand over him, blood dripping from the talons of the right hand, and the creature leaned down to the prone Iskandar, the soulless void of its eye sockets seeming oddly curious, amused at the spirited resistance of its prey.

It was playing with him.

The droplets were splattering on his shirt front, and the hand reached down, ready to complete the hunt, when the targetting AI beeped a notification in his visor, finally coming into visual range.

With the faintest nod of his head, Iskandar disabled the firing restrictions and activated it.

His reserve drone was a sniper model, and the creature could not move before the heavy rhythmic cracking of the shots began. It jerked, again and again and again, as holes blossomed throughout the left side of the skull, puffs of gritty matter ejecting from the exit wounds on the right. On the seventeenth shot, it finally collapsed, toppling sideways, the body beginning to crumble mere moments later.

"Fuck." He sat up, swearing, the surreality of the situation not yet fully understood.

Then he remembered -- the other man.

Scrambling across, around the disintegrating corpse of the alien, Iskandar reached him.

The perforations in the man's neck were deep, the skin soaked in blood, his face very pale, breath shallow. Their eyes met for not more than five seconds, and then he went still.

The shock Iskandar felt was incalculable.

This man, a realist 'terrorist' and Brotherhood agent, had just died to save him.

The sheer terrible absurdity of the situation was almost too much.

Something about existence, about the universe and everything that was happening, felt irretrievably broken in that moment.

It was all so wrong.

Yet, the cynical part of him, despite what had just occurred, knew there was more at stake than just his own anguished moralising, his lingering emotional doubt.

A new notification popped up.

The AI's attacking script had circumvented and cracked the Brotherhood group's makeshift digital defences in the absence of any living human operators, and gained access to a new profile. It was that of the man lying in front of him, only seconds after his death.

This was who the CorpSec team lead had been talking about earlier.

Strip and search.

With another virtual acknowledgement, Iskandar copied the man's profile across, co-opting it as the primary above his own.

Amal Khaled.

Syrian background, similar build and facial features, tech support, three years younger, no family listed, no record of field experience outside this assignment.

Fuck.

He didn't want to do this -- he didn't want any of this -- but, he had to.

MFM was the devil he knew, and his sins were necessary.

Connecting into the rump of the Brotherhood booster network, he was startled by a voice call request coming through the moment he rejoined under his new persona. The realist protocols weren't entirely familiar to him, but he did recognise it as the Moldovan command's authentication.

"Khaled? You're okay?" The voice on the other end had an unfamiliar accent to its English. "Lost you there. Can't get the others, is your team down?"

"Yeah," he faked the tone of concern, though the stress was still very much real. The voice modulation kicked in, adjusting the timbre just enough to fool any monitoring watchdogs. "CorpSec caught us, but I- ... I got free. Only just, I think they were special agents or something, I don't know."

"Understood. Forget your orders and come home."

"Roger." Iskandar repressed his self-disgust, ignored the literal blood on his hands from the very man he was imitating, swallowed his hatred of the choice he was forced to make. "Um, who am I speaking with?"

"A.C. Europe," Lindani Mthembu replied, before the final line. "We'll see you in Chișinău."

-o-0-O-0-o-

In the orbital plane above Dagen's Grace, space was mostly clear. The Mishith ships had departed, moved on to parts anew, and the conflict gone. All that remained from the struggle was a thinning debris field and a fading energy signature, the last remnants of a dead titan.

For some time, the cloud of shards and granular fragments simply drifted, pulled gently by the planet's rotation and gravity.

Then, faintly, it began to move in a way that had nothing to do with the mass attraction of the world below.

Slow at first, clusters came together, then as more gathered, it became quicker. Unwitnessed, unknown, the coalescence focused on a single point, accelerating, the multitude of disparate particles and chunks called to a reformation.

At the heart, a flickering unreality of a rebirthing consciousness sparked and flared.

Its purpose was not yet finished.