One quarter-cycle since arriving in the heliosphere—local time—and Henshaw was already hunting Pact.

The old hands at the academy had told him GuardCorps service was ninety percent boredom, ten percent violence, and it seemed he was finally about to hit that one-tenth. He mentally crouched and his Stormer zeo reacted, squatting with a soft purr of mechanical actuation behind a tram carriage that had come to a permanent halt a little way down from an overpass line.

Snow fell thick, invisible in the darkness but caught in beams of light cast from Uptown. It added softly to the white heaping up around Henshaw’s zeo, seemingly doing its best to smother and hide the damage done by a tri-rotation of civil unrest and, at times, outright warfare.

Henshaw listened, aural units amped to maximum pickup. He could hear nothing besides the reassuring thrum of his Stormer’s power systems, and the distant, background grinding of Uptown. The labor insurrection had been contained to Downtown so far, and it was the intention of the New Khoine Corporation Board that it remain that way.

The quiet was unnerving, but according to Operations it wouldn’t last much longer. There was another storm inbound from the west, another blizzard of ice and sleet and knife-wind and sheer bastard misery. Anything without shelter, temp-regulator suits, or the warmth of a zeoform’s reactor shaft would be dead in minutes.

Henshaw hadn’t been on New Khoine for long, but it hadn’t taken much time to work out that the place was inimical, at least during the long months when the moon was on the far side of its parent-world, cut off from the light of the system’s star. That period, according to the briefing dockets Henshaw had absorbed while en route to the Juno heliosphere, was known as the Utterdark, a time of perpetual night and bitter cold. Traditionally the inhabitants would have retreated to hibernation bunkers to see out the worst months. For the past five rotations, upgraded corporation quotas had kept the mines open and work continuing, even through the darkest and coldest period.

No wonder the moon’s mining clans were rebelling, having to live and work in a Stars-forsaken pit like this. He kept that opinion to himself. A GuardCorps zeo pilot, especially a cadet like him, had no business questioning the labor regulation systems of an Incorporated Prefecture.

He cycled through his other sensory inputs. The images overlaid over his own sight by his helmet’s VR visor glitched for a second before resolving. He toggled the other spectrums, the tactical overlays, the system HUD—all functioning, and none picking up anything it discerned as a threat. 

No movement at all, besides the slow, silent snowfall.

“Problem, Seeker Six?” ticked a voice in Henshaw’s ear—Big Sister, the otherwise-nameless Tactical Auditor who, at the command of Major Brenn, was overseeing the hunt, tapped remotely into the systems of the Corps zeos and their support units.

“Negative,” Henshaw replied hastily. “Just reorienting. Moving off now.”

He had lingered too long. A zeo like his Stormer should never go static for extended periods, even in cover. Henshaw could practically hear his Pan-Prefecture Academy doctrine masters cursing him.

Meltwater pattered from his armored form as he started moving, the snow turning liquid on contact with the powered metal. He was running hot, reactor just below maximum output. The Stormer wouldn’t be able to sustain more than another half hour without system deceleration, after which he’d be forced to request that Operations cycle him out. The storm might well require the whole force be called off before then anyway.

He prayed to the Stars they made contact soon.

Slotting back into the patrol route preset into his uplink before they had moved out of Camp Restoration a few hours before, he wasn’t sure about the viability of the path he had been ordered to take, or the wisdom of dividing the patrol’s zeo teams the way Major Brenn had. As far as Henshaw was concerned, the lack of immediate support went against the kind of sound doctrine he’d spent years learning at the academy, but then he was just a cadet-pilot, newly arrived on-world with another batch of what the New Khoine GuardCorps garrison tauntingly called slipheads, rookies and z-chaff.

In truth, none of his experiences since graduation had matched expectations.

“We don’t need you, we need your Stormer,” one particularly antagonistic veteran, Gurny, had told him just a few hours after he had shipped in. “So, when the Ghost gets you, make sure you don’t leave too much of a mess behind. A real pilot will be needing your zeo.”

“The Ghost” was what the New Khoine GuardCorps had taken to calling the Pact presence on the moon. It was just one zeo, apparently, classification unknown, but its pilot was a fiend. They had been confounding the local GuardCorps at every turn, evading patrols only to strike at reserve depots or rear echelon sectors like Camp Restoration. Worse, their defiance was keeping the embers of the labor revolt alight.

The Board that ruled New Khoine—or, at least, controlled eighty percent of the moon’s labor activity and habitation property—wanted them stamped out, before those embers could further catch and spread. There were fears the successes of the elusive Ghost would draw further Pact military support. Escalation risked bringing unwanted attention. Instructions from the corporation: terminate the Ghost.

Henshaw stalked forward through the snowfall, head swinging from side to side as he maintained visuals. No one had actually seen the Ghost and lived to tell the tale, and the assumption was the insurgent possessed some sort of jamming or stinging device that inhibited machine-senses and scrambled comms. Henshaw knew not to trust solely in his system readouts.

He stepped over a screed of rubble littering the roadway, broken masonry from the shattered habitation units around him crunching beneath his Stormer’s weight. His passage dislodged more rubble, making him twitch and bring up his weapons.

Nothing else moved. Broken masonry settled.

A little further on, his systems triggered a warning alert. He swung hard left, his TAR assault rifle locked and loaded. Artificial senses stabbed into the frigid blackness of a neighboring alleyway.

There were zeos there, but after a tense few heartbeats, his Stormer relinquished its target lock. The outlines were familiar from plenty of Academy briefings. Only Rakkes, low-level laborers. Pact sometimes made use of them militarily, but there were plenty of civilian ones on New Khoine, and these ones looked long abandoned, slumped and lifeless.

He was jumping at shadows.

Henshaw pushed on further, his headset’s view briefly glitching and distorting again before resolving. He would need to get that checked by the Tech-Ops back at Camp Restoration.

Still no sign of life anywhere, no movement apart from the snow. It was coming down more and more heavily.

“I’m not picking up anything, Big Sister,” he reported, trying not to sound uneasy.

“Just keep going,” Major Brenn growled before the Tactical Auditor could respond. “I want this patrol sweep completed before the storm hits.”

That seemed unlikely, but Henshaw pressed on. He wasn’t getting paid enough to question orders.

He wasn’t getting paid enough point-blank, but he’d known that would be the case when he volunteered for a backwater posting like New Khoine. He didn’t have the kind of contacts that could parachute him into one of the mainline cohorts operating in the major Unitas Prefectures. His first assignment was a stepping stone, one that would let him build up credit with Operations and maybe snag a few bonus payments.

The bounty on the Ghost was the real prize, but he tried not to think about that. He had to stay sharp. He was confident in his Stormer’s abilities—they certainly outclassed the old Soldats being used by the New Khoine Guardcorps garrison—but he wasn’t going to underestimate his enemy. 

He paused again at a roadway circular, crouched beside a burned-out ore lugger. Sensors probed the dark between the shafts of light from up-slope. His vision fuzzed again then resolved. 

“There’s nothing out here,” he reported over his headset.

That was the moment the Ghost struck.

‍

The first thing Henshaw noticed was his zeo’s immobilization. He experienced a moment of surreal confusion as he tried to step out from behind the lugger and found he simply couldn’t. His Stormer was as frozen as the surrounding urban wasteland.

Before he could parse what was happening his vision glitched again, badly, jagged and pixelated. Systems readouts dipped then locked entirely. Static filled his ears.

“Oh, Stars,” he said aloud as his situation became apparent. He was locked within his zeo, body pinned by the machine’s paralysis, senses muzzled. The horror of living entombment rose up to choke him.

His first instinct was to eject, but he fought the impulse. Popping now would leave him exposed to the elements, a death sentence. He had trained for moments like this. He had to stay calm. Follow protocol.

“Big Sister, this is Seeker Six, I’m experiencing serious malfunctions across all systems,” he said, trying the comm channel. “Requesting immediate support at zone alpha, section four.”

“…reading… all units… redeploying…,” came the garbled, static-chopped response. 

His full auditory senses returned with a brief whine, and his visor blinked and resolved, if only partially. He locked on to what its field-of-vision showed him.

Seeker Five, Gurny’s Soldat, waited back along the street line, partly lit by muzzle flare as he opened fire with his TAR. The weapon’s chatter filled Henshaw’s renewed hearing, but he couldn’t see what the Soldat was targeting.

It was only then that he realized for certain it wasn’t a malfunction at all. The patrol was under attack.

His Stormer had been stung. He felt like a fool for not realizing it sooner. An interference burst had taken him out of the fight. Now he was out in the open, defenseless, of no use to anybody. Just z-chaff for whatever was hitting the patrol.

It had to be the Ghost.

Another section of his VR visor resolved, several targeting overlays pinging back up. His systems were coming back online, recovering from the data-sting. He found if he moved his interface gauntlets he could clench his zeo’s grip on his own TAR-29d, though he couldn’t yet move the arms or legs.

He saw what Gurny had engaged. It burst from the front of the gutted habitation stack on the right side of the street, shouldering its way through the façade with a crunch of crumbling masonry. Gurny tried to lock-on but it was too fast, moving not like the GuardCorps zeos Henshaw was used to, but with a predatory stoop, hunched over and lunging forward on all fours.

Henshaw recognized it, not from briefing sessions and target recognition exercises, but because he had actually seen it, just minutes earlier. It was a Rakke, one of the ones he had taken for broken and abandoned, back down the street. The ones his own sensors had attempted to warn him about.

A Rakke wasn’t what they had been searching for. No one Henshaw had spoken with had entertained for a moment that the Ghost was just a combat-repurposed mining and maintenance zeo. Suddenly, the way it had avoided GuardCorps patrols for so long became clear.

Rage filled Henshaw. 

It was his fault this was happening. He’d led them right into a trap. He strained, temples throbbing, trying to force his Stormer into motion, to at least get his weapon system working. 

There was the faintest whirr suggesting actuation motion in the upper arms, but nothing more. He was still stuck fast.

‍

Part 2 coming on October 8, 2026!

About:

Robbie MacNiven is a Scottish author and historian. His published fiction includes over twenty novels in genres ranging from sci-fi and fantasy to historical fiction. He has also written novellas, short stories, audio dramas, comic scripts and graphic novels, has worked on narrative and character dialogue for a number of digital games, and has written colour text and branching narratives for multiple RPG rulebooks, including the award-winning Undaunted series by Osprey Games. In 2022 his X-Men novel First Team won a Scribe Award for tie-in fiction.