“Distinguished congresspeople, I’m here today to talk about our new LT-N.O.V.A. This high-speed, high-powered attack vehicle can be operated by only two soldiers. With this tool, your army can rain pain on the enemy from above. Equipped with a full array of Light receivers, it can recharge itself in combat with no issues.”

  “You do know that soldiers also fight at night, right?” – Sales pitch to the senate, Phoenix, The Capitol

  “Sir, we’ve found something that is, well… disturbing is the only way to put it. But that’s not even our biggest concern at the moment. Our spotters are being hunted by another of the creatures that killed Ortiz,” Jack explained to his Platoon leader after getting the information from Warren and Cecile, “They found temporary cover in a system of caves, but truth be told, they need extraction.”

  “That can be arranged. How’s your progress reclaiming the control room?” Hawkins replied after of few moments, “We need an ETA, the other teams are close to mission success and you need to be ready when they are.”

  “It’s just part of the process, sir. We are systematically working our way down into the building.”

  “We? Are you moving as a single group?”

  “Yes, sir. For an enemy like this, concentration of force is best practice.”

  The radio, yet again, went silent as the Lieutenant presumably spoke with Captain Griffin privately. A few moments later, he returned with new instructions.

  “Divide into fireteams, we are too close to the wire for you to search every room as a group. Do you at least know the target location?”

  “As long as it didn’t move from the schematics, yes. However, a Raak we… convinced to talk, told us that neither was under guard, but the pathway to get there is.”

  “Sometimes I wish all you optics could pull off Officer Mayer’s memory trick to brain jack the best path forward,” Hawkins sighed. “Well, make the best of what intel you have and finish securing the building. We will have your spotters back on the ship within the hour.”

  The command channel disconnected without waiting for a reply. It wouldn’t be long before Warren and Cecile were safe, and that thought relieved a significant amount of worry.

  Unfortunately, that was where the good news ended.

  The order to split into fireteams was stupid at best, suicidal at worst. While he could ignore the order and deal with the consequences later, the bottom line was that the Lieutenant had a point when he said time was running out.

  “Command wants us to split up and cover more ground,” he said to the squad. “We will make two teams and work our way to the two control rooms. One group will be me, Alfson, and Hayward. The other will be Walker, West, Jenkins, and Mornin-”

  “Nope,” Thea interrupted. “I’m sorry, but that’s just not wise and you know it. We can’t risk being more worried about protecting each other than we are Hayward.”

  “But-”

  “But nothing, you know damned well that if we go as part of a trio, we will end up prioritizing each other over her, and I’m not having that. We get away with it most of the time because we feel safe in a large group. This is one of those times where the smarter option is for me to go with the other crew. So Nessa and I will switch. If you get injured, Candice can tie a tourniquet around anything your armor can’t stabilize,” Thea said, laying out a solid argument he couldn’t refute.

  “Alright then. You guys head toward the southern command center. According to the blueprints, it should be a few levels down. We will head to the northern command room four levels down. If you find prisoners, protect them until they can be extracted. We will send them up to the ship and let Command handle them.”

  “How are you supposed to lock down the controls without a Possessor?” Dave asked. “Without Alexander, we only have two people that can jump into machines, and they’re both with me.”

  “Jenkins, can you leave a drone on someone’s armor like you did earlier?” Jack asked after a few moments of thought.

  “Yeah, but like I’ve said before, Warren is better than me at complex machines.”

  “I know, but we don’t have him around. Send the drone with us and use it to piggyback into the command center if we get there first. All you need to do is activate the lockdown protocol. Worst-case scenario, we’ll have to try forming a long-range connection with Alexander back on the ship and let him do his thing.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” the Possessor said hesitantly.

  Objectives confirmed, the two fireteams broke apart. As much as he wanted to keep a constant eye on Thea, he recognized that desire was the core of the point she was trying to make.

  A short time later, Jack’s sub squad found themselves down four levels of stairs and staring at yet another locked door. Luckily, their team was well equipped to remove such obstacles.

  After using Jack’s ability to confirm the portal was clear on the other side, Nessa drew a hilt and summoned a blade. Not bothering with finesse, she buried it into the metal barrier and carved a fist-sized hole around the lock. Stepping back to admire her work, she holstered her weapon and kicked the door in one fluid movement.

  When the group stepped onto the catwalk beyond, they finally saw proof of the factory’s purpose. Below, massive vats of a white, semi-viscous liquid bubbled, and steam rose to fill the room. Jack watched as a line of egg-like objects traveled along a conveyor belt to be filled and sealed before continuing their path out of the room.

  In a flash of memory, he saw himself locked inside one of those pods as the fluid came to life and drowned him. He remembered waking up and believing the nightmare was over, only to be subjected to the Serum’s ministrations a second time.

  As powerful a tool as it was, the price of pain and terror inflicted on those forced to endure it without having their senses dulled and their memory wiped was hard to justify.

  But apparently, I’m the only one to survive a double dose.

  The morning after that disturbing experience, Summers explained that it was almost common practice for UHR scientists to use a recruit for experimentation. Most of the time, the Drill Sergeants could stop the process before it began. Unfortunately for Jack, the doctors had gone out of their way to keep their plans for him off the books.

  The control station sat in the far corner of the room, its dark silhouette blending with the shadows, almost as though the factory was designed specifically to hide it. The near thirty-meter stretch of dark windows left a sense of foreboding, but the group knew they were staring at their objective.

  “There,” Jack said.

  No matter how stupid he felt for pointing out the obvious, it was better than allowing the uncanny silence to continue. As they walked, the only sound echoing through the room was the slight gurgle of boiling serum and the muffled tapping of boots against steel.

  Jack figured at least one Raak’Shee would be on guard. But apparently, the aliens were so confident in their security, they didn’t even bother posting a watch.

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  What a wonderful mistake to have made.

  Jack approached the embankment of windows and tried—unsuccessfully—to cast his vision into the room. While the lack of cameras concerned him, Nessa mollified that feeling by shining her armor’s spotlight through the glass windows to verify its emptiness.

  “Door, ten meters down,” Candice said, pointing her spotlight at the metal reinforced barrier at the end of the wall.

  Unfortunately, they quickly discovered the facility’s love of locked doors extended to this one as well.

  “Nessa, would you mind?” Jack asked in a poor attempt at nonchalance. A mixture of excitement and nervousness sent chills down his spine. The mission was so close to being complete without injury, he could taste it.

  The Breaker drew a hilt and summoned a polearm from the ambient Light around her. Driving the weapon through the door, she carved a hole large enough for them to enter with relative ease.

  “Why didn’t the lights turn on?” Hayward said, following the others into the room, “Every other room in this facility is motion activated.”

  “Probably just busted, not like the maintenance man can get to every room while the rhinos are running amuck,” Nessa said, reshaping the polearm to give it a tripod base. The blood-colored Light didn’t allow for much, but it was at least a source of illumination.

  “Jenkins, it’s your time to shine,” Jack informed, letting the squad know they’d gotten to the control room.

  A small crawler drone dropped from Nessa’s armor and skittered up to the control panel. Perched on the interface, it could activate the bank of monitors, but instead of possessing the machine through proximity, the drone kept dancing around in search of a network interface.

  “Jack, I’m going to be all but useless here,” Jenkins said after nearly five minutes. “The security is too high for me to just jump in, and I’m having no luck finding a physical port.”

  “Understood. Drop out of the drone and focus on your mission up there,” the Sergeant said, switching to the command channel. “Command, it looks like we’ve hit a bit of a speed bump. Is Specialist Alexander there?”

  Staring at the wide array of information, Jack was astounded to see how much data was being piped into this room. It would be nearly impossible to try controlling this facility without Li-Tech.

  “He is, why?” Hawkins replied.

  “I need his help to complete the mission. Alexander, can you find somewhere comfortable? I need your mind for a few minutes.”

  “You got it, bud.” A loud thump suggested the Possessor had chosen that very spot as his “somewhere comfortable.” It wasn’t surprising. He would often do things in ways everyone else found odd, but his friends found it endearing, “Take me there.”

  Jack reached into the Light spectrum, following the single thread that led all the way back to the ship currently hanging in orbit. Searching for the familiar presence of his friend, he found the Possessor and pulled. Everyone thought optics were nothing more than radios, but the truth was much more utilitarian.

  This wasn’t a trick any two people off the street could do. It took a significant amount of trust on both ends. For the optic, the person they took with them could hear every bit of information passed to and from while the link was in place. While not a bad thing, it could create awkward questions at the end of a mission if someone said the wrong thing.

  The possessor took a much greater risk in this situation. Breaking the link before establishing control of the system posed significant risk of the soldier losing his or her mind to the infinite depths of space. It wouldn’t take long, but the risk was always there.

  Back in the control room, Jack built a link between the ship and the console and ensured that Warren’s mind was securely in place before cutting himself from the circuit completely. In theory, the thread would remain long enough for Warren to take over the system and perform the needed work.

  “Jack,” Nessa said, turning back to the ruined door, “You’d better be finishing up over there. We have a bit of a problem.”

  A mass of black, formless tentacles dropped from the ceiling, twisting as it dragged its body together. Instead of taking the form of the now-familiar Raak’Shee, its flesh molded into a gross approximation of an AHF soldier in full armor.

  “It doesn’t know what our bodies actually look like.” Candice said, raising her rifle and firing shot after pointless shot into the creature.

  Jack dove back into the Light spectrum, knowing what would happen if the creature got its bearing. This next part would hurt—badly—but he refused to allow another friend to die.

  He grabbed a strand from the tapestry of Light at random and punched it into the creature with a ferocity he didn’t know was inside him. Instead of reacting with indifference like the last one, the creature screamed in pain, momentarily losing cohesion before trying to reshape itself again.

  He took a deep breath and prepared for the worst before completing the circuit. Expecting the same as before, it shocked him to find that the herculean effort was simply gargantuan. Clearly, this creature was significantly weaker than its predecessor.

  Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, he pulled the connection back into himself, tied in the squad frequency, and gave the orders to shoot. Raising his weapon, he changed to three-round burst and let loose a near-constant stream of Light as the enemy lost its composure a second time.

  Within heartbeats, a sharp pain formed behind his eyes as the stress of holding the thread inside the creature mounted. Sadly, he knew the longer he held on to the connection, the worse it would get.

  “Fuck this,” Nessa grunted.

  To his left, she holstered her pistol. Never one to bring a rifle to a sword fight, the lithe warrior grabbed the polearm from the floor and dashed forward. In one hand, the weapon reformed into the familiar saber she so often preferred. With her other, she flung a small red disk at the enemy.

  On impact, the thermal grenade exploded in a three-meter radius of heat. Inside the virtual inferno, they could hear thousands of screams overlapping one another like the voices of the damned begging for release.

  Near the brink of death, the creature could no longer hold on to its form. The pile of wriggling tentacles responded to the attack the only way it could, considering its present state.

  From inside the fiery orb, black tentacles struck out wildly, desperately trying to find something to retaliate against.

  By pure chance, one found Nessa’s leg.

  Finally knowing where to focus its anger, every limb left to the creature shot out and latched on to her armor. Her shout of surprise quickly morphed into shouts of pain as the appendages constricted, slowly crushing the reinforced armor as if it were nothing more than cloth.

  Those shouts of pain became screams of terror and anguish as saw-like teeth extended from the creature and tore through skin, muscle, and bone.

  When the two threads of yellow Light wrapped around her shoulders and pulled her away from the dying creature, her throat was so raw, simply couldn’t scream any longer.

  Not even when she noticed a familiar armored leg being pulled into the dimming sphere of heat.

  “Is it dead?” Candice pleaded, refusing to turn away from the charred lump of flesh that had been their enemy.

  Smoke rose from the motionless pile, proving that a forced connection to Light and a blast of heat were more than enough to kill its kind. Sadly, the alien’s last attempted act before dying had been to cripple their strongest warrior.

  It worked.

  A groan of pain brought the attention back to the situation at hand. Candice dropped to the ground, fingers searching for the emergency release right above Nessa’s thigh. Fingers tightening around the lever, she pulled and stripped back the armor and exposed a ragged, torn, and bloody wound that left nothing to the imagination.

  “Command, we were just attacked. We have injuries.” Jack said, dropping to his knees beside the Binder, looking to help however he could.

  Reaching for Nessa’s first aid kit, Candice pulled out a can of instant coagulant to staunch the blood.

  The blood kept flowing.

  “A Raak caught you off guard like that? How? They move like a rockslide.” Hawkins asked incredulously.

  “I feel like you’re focusing on the wrong thing here. LT, Nessa has no leg.”

  Tossing the can to the side, she grabbed a handful of gauze and tried to apply pressure.

  The blood kept flowing.

  “Oh, I heard you, Sergeant, but with Alfson there, you should be fine.”

  “Dammit, sir, you made us split up. It’s just me and Hayward.”

  Desperation was setting in. They could see the exposed skin of Nessa’s leg turning pale. They were running out of time.

  “Hayward is there. Have her tie a tourniquet.”

  Realization dawned on them as Thea’s words played through their minds.

  Jack grabbed the stump, lifting it while Candice brought a thread of power to life. Not wanting to cause further damage, the binder wrapped a wide strip of medical cloth from the kit around the leg before securing it in place.

  Praying to whatever God might be listening, she tightened. Slowly increasing the pressure until the flow of blood finally slowed and eventually stopped altogether.

  Not ready to sit back in relief, Jack grabbed the bloody, discarded can of coagulant and sprayed the stump until there was nothing left. Finally comfortable that Nessa wouldn’t die, he pulled a long cloth bandage from her kit and gently wrapped the exposed flesh.

  “Thank you, sir. You saved her life. To answer your question, it wasn’t a Raak. It was one of those… things. We killed it, but it effectively removed Nessa from the fight.”

  “Can she hobble well enough to get out?”

  Jack looked down at the unconscious form of the red-haired woman and almost laughed.

  “Sir, there is nothing left past about mid-thigh. Not only is walking out of the question, but shock and blood loss completely knocked her out. The only way she’s coming home is by you gating her there.”

  “Understood.”

  “Was Alexander able to finish his connection?”

  “Yes, I was. I’m working on breaking through the various security layers right now,” a disembodied robotic version of Warren’s voice said, “and you better not let Nessa die.”

  “Don’t worry, she is stable.” Jack said, leaning back and taking a deep breath, “Oh and Alexander… please hurry.”