The Pact Rakke hit Gurny’s Soldat. It didn’t seem to be equipped with any ranged weaponry, but a trio of electro talons were bolted across the back of one of its forelimbs. Their charge lit as it barreled into Gurny, the other front limb swiping at the TAR and knocking the assault rifle to one side, sending hard rounds punching into the roadway and kicking up snow.

It was fast, too damn fast, running on a jury-rigged reactor pack strapped along its back, pushing it to the limits of what its frame could endure. One thing was horribly apparent—it was too much for an old Soldat like Gurny’s.

The Ghost was inside the GuardCorps zeo’s guard, powering forward with alarming speed and strength. Electro-talons crackled as they punched into the Soldat’s underarm. A surge of power arced across the Hegemony zeo’s armor. A thunderclap rebounded along the ruined street.

Gurny’s zeo went stiff, seizing as systems blew. The Rakke pivoted like a dancer and swung to crash a leg against the Soldat’s left ankle.The zeo tumbled backwards into the snow, limbs still locked, TAR clicking empty over and over.

“Gurny!” Henshaw shouted uselessly, struggling in his cockpit. Comms were down—just about everything was down.

The Rakke seemed to hear him, its elongated head-unit swinging his way briefly before it looked back to the helpless Soldat. With a clang of metal-on-metal, it planted a hoof on the Soldat’s chest, leaning forward like a predator about to savage the throat of its downed prey.

A shriek broke the quiet. Gurny and the Rakke were engulfed by a hail of snow, smoke, and broken roadway.

Henshaw followed a smudge of contrails up to the tram overpass running across the top of the street. He felt a vicious sense of exhilaration at the sight of Seeker One, Major Brenn himself, Soldat perched on the edge of the overpass, flanked by a trooper support squad. Brenn was packing a TCL-64 Fusi Missile Pack. More rockets streaked down, narrowly missing the Rakke as it abandoned Gurny and made a loping dash toward the closest alley.

They had the Ghost on the run.

Henshaw flexed his hands in their interface gauntlets again, desperate to regain connectivity. He wanted to be part of this, if not for the bounty then at least for the prestige.

A shape thrummed past him, catching him by surprise. It was a drone, and not one of the GuardCorps support units. It was airborne thanks to a small anti-grav plate, its main frame vaguely semi-spherical with manipulation mandibles and under-limbs. It was a warper, a Pact disruption-device. That explained the interference. The place must be lousy with warpers. As soon as Henshaw became fully active, they would sting him again.

That would keep him—and his zeo, the most advanced in the detachment—out of the fight indefinitely.

A fresh squall of static cut off his curses, followed by Major Brenn’s voice. Relief that comms were at least partially viable again was rapidly eclipsed by what sounded like the Team Leader’s panic. Henshaw looked back up at the overpass. The reason the Ghost had been so effective in bringing down or evading GuardCorps patrols became obvious.

There were two of them.

‍

The Rakke that had sprung the ambush was still visible, now disappearing down a side alley to avoid another missile barrage. A second materialized behind Major Brenn on the overpass, a twin of the first. Brenn’s old Soldat was still turning as it crashed into him, unbalancing the Major on the edge of the bridge. The new Ghost carried a meson beamer along its back.The air around the two combatants distorted as it fired point-blank. Snow flash-melted into vapor that hid the weapon’s immediate effect, along with the fate of the nearby GuardCorps troopers blasting uselessly up at the Rakke with their SAR-79 rifles. 

Brenn, lost to sight for a moment with his support unit, reappeared. The Major’s zeo plummeted off the overpass, left side and rear a fused, melted wreck. It hit the roadway with a brutal crunch. 

Henshaw yelled and wrestled with his Stormer. The arms shifted, but not enough. 

Brenn was no longer active on the comms, but Big Sister’s voice returned, speaking urgently in Henshaw’s ear.

“Spotter Six, try a full system reboot. Other assets are inbound.” 

He froze, understanding what she’d suggested. Manually rebooting would take him mostly offline and use up valuable minutes, but he was already immobile and useless. It could flush out the worst of the immobilization issues. Then Henshaw would have to act quickly, before the warpers noticed his renewed power. 

He withdrew one hand from the control gauntlets, switching his view to internal so that he could conduct the manual override and begin the restart.

Being inside a zeo during full temporary shutdown was not a pleasant experience. Henshaw felt entombed, and would have been automatically jettisoned if he hadn’t repeatedly thought-cancelled that imperative. He waited in claustrophobic darkness, eyes closed, trying to remember his training: Regulate breathing and heart rate. Detach thoughts from the physical present. Only then will you find the order necessary to attain success. 

Eventually, finally, there were signs of life. He felt as much as saw systems come back online. Mindmap navigation, limb actuation, and the reassuring thrum of the reactor, as though his own heart had restarted. 

He dared flex his fingers within his gauntlets, fractionally. The great mechanical hands of his zeo responded, tightening around the grip of his TAR. 

Henshaw felt a rush of exhilaration, and a fiery sense of determination. He would have to be quick.

Then his vision returned, and he realized just how quick. 

One of the Rakkes was right beside him.

It was the first one that had struck down Gurny, the one with the electro-talons. It had stalked up to him, its single, cyclopean optic boring into him. The other one was still up on the overpass, covering it with its meson beamer.

Henshaw’s Stormer flooded him with threat proximity and target-lock warnings, painted across his HUD and giving him what felt like small electric jolts. He gritted his teeth, suppressing the urge to lash out instinctively as the Rakke got right up to him, like a hound scenting at fallen prey.

It thought he was still immobilized. He would only get one chance to prove it wrong.

Too close for the TAR. He went for his Krait V-blade, sheathed at his hip.

Everything happened in a heartbeat. He felt his zeo’s reactor surge with his own hammering adrenaline, saw the Rakke twist with an almost preternatural speed as it reacted to his sudden motion, caught the flare of the second Rakke’s meson beamer firing. His V-blade slammed through the glassy orb of his foe’s primary optic mount. Crys-glass cracked. Electricity flashed. The V-blade thrummed, synaptic feedback making it feel as though it was clutched in Henshaw’s own hand.

As he lanced it, the Rakke was still moving. The motion wrenched the knife from Henshaw’s grasp.

Then the beamer hit.

A Stormer was better protected than the likes of Brenn’s Soldat, but shields still had their limit, and the energy shot struck Henshaw square. He cried out in pain as his defenses shorted, the inbuilt ionic shield that helped protect against weapons like the meson beamer overloading.

‍

He found he was paralysed again. The warper drones had stung him a second time.

He shouted with rage, just before the second beamer shot hit him. His Stormer went down on one knee, his vision distorting, systems burned out and sparking. His zeo was dying.

The cockpit unhinged, and the cold of the Utterdark embraced him.

‍

The first thing Henshaw became aware of was the cold. For a long time that was all his consciousness could process, and he existed in a frigid void, aching, mindless, lost.

Eventually other senses began to filter in, like a zeo’s systems coming back online. He tried to swallow, tried to stretch out, and groaned as his limbs responded sluggishly. And they really were his limbs, not locked in his Stormer cockpit anymore, no longer mere phantom firings of his synapses across the Kanai-Eldman Bridge.

His head ached. He was shaking. There was warmth, though, the merest suggestion of it, fighting back against the bitter chill that had gnawed its way into his core.

He opened his eyes, and found the source of the warmth. A small stack of heat blocks had been piled up in the middle of a dark, refuse-littered room, their chemical reactions activated, causing them to pulse with a steady radiance.

That was the first thing Henshaw’s mind latched on to. The second was that he was not alone.

There was a man in the room, swathed in a bulky thermal coat and a mangey-looking synth-pelt. He was old, with a bushy, pepper pot-colored beard and unkempt hair. His gaze was feral, one eye bloodshot as he glared at Henshaw from the shadows on the other side of the heating blocks.

Henshaw let out an involuntary cry and tried to scramble back, but his body was too weak. He was snared in a foil-sheathed blanket as well, and all he could do was drag himself pathetically back until he was up against one flaking wall.

The man didn’t move any closer, but he spoke in a rugged, guttural accent, indicating his bloodshot eye as he did so.

“You hurt my Rakke, boy. I asked Myra if I could take one of your eyes as recompense. She said your little Stormer’s primary optics would have to do.”

Henshaw just stared at the man, trying to connect the pieces. Was this bedraggled old vagrant really saying he was the pilot of the Rakke zeo he had lanced with his V-blade?

“You be nice to Myra when she gets up those stairs,” the man added, nodding toward the room’s only door. “She’s the only reason you’re alive. Waste of precious resources, I said. Heat, food. I wanted to leave you out there when your ’65 dumped you out. But Myra has always been a better person than me, Stars love her.”

There was a moment’s pained silence. Henshaw caught a wailing from outside—the Utterdark storm, stabbing and beating at the room’s sealed window slits. He was still Downtown, he assumed, presumably in the heart of a Pact lair. He was appraising his chances of overpowering his captor when he noticed another noise, rising to prominence over the storm. Footsteps echoed in a stairwell, coming from beyond the door.

‍

Part 3 coming on October 15, 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.