Lanis squints awake to the glare of lights and the feeling of hands fumbling at her pilot harness.

“What—” she groans, but a voice cuts her off:

“You’re ok, Lanis. You’re back.” It’s Ash, her voice strained but firm. Lanis hears Sander’s deep growl too, along with the sliding withdrawal of her neural shunt.

“Careful, Ash, look at her hands. God, that one looks broken,” Sander says. There are more voices behind them, some familiar: Booker, and another of their security team.

Lanis peels her eyes open, wincing. Her migraine is back, pulsing with each heartbeat, and she feels her leg muscles cramp as she tries to sit up. She glances at her hands, bloody and torn from ripping out the Cauldron’s obstruction modules and from pounding against the interior of her pod, and tentatively flexes them. No, not broken; just mangled, she thinks. Despite her grogginess and her pain, she observes with relief that at least she can feel and move her whole body.

“Ash?” she whispers, dragging her attention away from her physical pain and trying to bring the woman into focus.

“Yeah, it’s me,” Ash says, unclipping the final buckle of the pilot pod’s harness. Another pair of hands, larger and coarser than Ash’s, gingerly pulls Lanis out from the pod, and a shoulder comes up under her to support her weight. Sander.

“Mirem is somewhere out here too…” Ash continues, but other voices impose themselves.

“Lights off. We need to move!” barks a mechanical, unfamiliar voice. Lanis tries to open her eyes wider, and does her best to take in the scene around her as she stumbles away from her suit, half dragged by the shoulder that she leans on.

It’s still dark, but the scene has a flickering, dreamlike quality to it. Around her are Versk team members, recognizable by their uniforms; there’s Booker, a stubby assault gun strapped across his chest, speaking to one of the unfamiliar figures. His white shirt is mottled black, wet with… blood?

What about Fleet? Lanis thinks, pulling her gaze overhead. It appears quiet, the night sky no longer consumed by arcs of light and blooming explosions. However, just as Lanis begins to wonder how long the battle has been over, a massive flare of light erupts across the night sky.

Not over… just ending, Lanis thinks, as she watches the death throes of a capital ship glitter overhead.

She wonders who has won.

She looks down and back across her shoulder, from where she is being dragged, and there is poor Hex, a crumpled heap of its proud former self. Lanis has a wild, fleeting urge to stumble back and run her hand over the suit’s matte-black hull, now pockmarked and scorched. Not bad for a prior-gen hexapod. Thank you, she thinks.

Several Versk technicians struggle to remove Ether’s cortex from the pod, yelling with triumph as they finally wrench the casing of the AI’s mind free. There are others behind them too, helm-visored forms in tactical armor who kneel at intervals beyond Hex in the flashes of light, their pulse rifles at the ready. And beyond them…

Shit.

The Cauldron’s staging ground is on fire.

She watches, still pulled by Sander, as a part of the pavilion's roof crumples down on itself with a roar of fire, sparks spilling upward.

“What happened?” Lanis says, finally turning her gaze forward into the darkness. Her voice still feels thick, but her legs are slowly gaining back their strength.

There’s a heartbeat pause, and then Ash haltingly responds.

“We don’t know. Everything went dark. A mag-lev brought you in. We’re under attack, but… ” Lanis can hear Ash struggle for words. “Everything’s gone wrong.”

Against the backdrop of raised voices, Lanis has noticed a roar growing closer. She staggers against Sander’s shoulder as a gust of wind and dust begin to whip against her face. Ahead, descending through the flickering darkness, is a large military shuttle, its black hull non-reflective in the flickering light. Slowly it comes to rest in the staging area’s field beyond her dead mech.

Lanis feels a sudden embrace, her weight no longer supported by Sander’s shoulder, but by Mirem’s familiar body pressing against hers. She feels her face held in Mirem’s palms, her questioning look, full of anxiety; sees the blood on Mirem’s face too, smeared down her neck and across her shoulder. There’s no time for questions though, and barely enough to feel the flood of relief: more hands are supporting her, shoving her up a short ramp and into a hard seat, unfamiliar faces illuminated by the eerie red glow of battle-lighting. She keeps hold of Mirem, and Sander and Ash are beside her too. She closes her eyes, gripping Mirem’s arm with her bloody, bruised hand as a strap is clicked across her shoulder: then the now-familiar sensation of gravity pressing against her as they lift up, the transport roaring into the burning night sky.

 

---

 

“... let her rest, she’s clearly been through it.”

“I know it’s just… what the hell just happened?”

“We’ll get answers soon enough.”

Lanis opens her eyes. Around her, in jump seat formation, sit Mirem, Ash, and several of the other Versk technicians.

“I’m awake,” Lanis says, her voice hoarse. The voices stop, and Lanis can feel a dozen eyes bore into her. She tries to swallow.

“Does anyone have some water?”

A bottle is shoved into her hand, and Lanis inhales it, blindingly grateful. Her brief lapse into unconsciousness has helped clear her mind, and she’s something approaching her normal self when she’s done drinking, besides the dull pain. But she feels grateful for that too; it means she’s alive. She gives a feeble smile as she glances at the faces that surround her.

“You have no idea how good it is to see you.”

She feels hands squeeze her knee, her shoulder, and she chokes back a sob at the upwelling of emotion. No. That can wait for later, if later comes. She takes in her team members again, their unnatural appearances finally registering in the dull red light. They look ragged, uniforms torn, their clothing blood-stained.

“What… what happened?” she asks.

The story unfolds in lurches, one team member picking up when another’s voice trails off, unable to fully articulate the madness of the past few hours.

It appears that the Cauldron’s feed was cut at roughly the same time that the Versk suit was deactivated. And it wasn’t only the Cauldron: the majority of Terra’s public net is down, trillions of digital relays grinding to a halt.

“It was when we were trying to get in touch with Versk HQ that we knew something was seriously wrong. And the screaming next door,” Ash says, her look growing distant.

It seems that the Howett Corp pilot wasn’t the only one to be infected in the Cauldron.

“Not all of them though. They didn’t all turn. In fact, just a few of them, from what I could tell,” Booker says, his voice heavy. “Unfortunately they had access to weapons. And the others didn’t.”

“I thought the Cauldron confiscated all weapons…” Lanis says, her voice trailing off at the grim look Booker gives her.

“You can always smuggle something in,” Booker says, absently stroking the stubby gun that he still has strapped across his huge chest. “But that isn’t the worst part. It was the Cauldron officials. Some of them went mad too. And they had guns. Real guns.”

Booker shakes his head sadly.

“It was butchery, Lanis. They would have gotten to us too, if we hadn’t packed these ghost guns in the suit tools. Renfol ordered us too, despite the risk of a fine or ban. Smart man. Hope he’s still alive,” Booker says, his voice trailing off.

Lanis’s attention is dragged back to the blood on Booker’s shirt, and across Mirem’s face.

“Were you hurt?” Lanis asks. Mirem and Booker shake their heads.

“A few scrapes. But this is mostly from trying to stop the bleeding on others.”

There’s a pause, and Lanis tries to meet Booker’s unwilling eyes.

“Who didn’t make it?” she asks quietly.

“Heinrich died first,” Ash answers, her voice croaking. “We put him in one of the bunks after your first fight. They managed to get in there first. I don’t think he ever saw them coming.”

Mirem gently squeezes Lanis’ arm.

“Only about half of the team made it out,” she says.

Lanis lets the words wash over her. The weight will settle later, she knows.

“And we wouldn’t have either,” Mirem continues, “but Murkata-Heisen sent a rapid response team.”

“Murkata?” Lanis says, shock finally registering across her face. “That’s whose transport we’re on? I thought this was an Admin shuttle…”

“Nope. Don’t know what the fuck Admin is doing, but it wasn’t rescuing us,” Booker says. He jerks his chin upward. “Probably has bigger things to worry about, if what’s going on up there is any indication.”

“There’s so much we don’t know,” Mirem says, picking up the thread again. “But, from what we can tell, it looks like Kaisho-Renalis is trying to stage a coup.”

Mirem grimaces at Lanis’ look of disbelief.

“They’re waging an info war, Lanis,” Mirem continues, her voice growing harder. “Along with a real one. Like we said, almost the whole planetary public net is down. Almost. There are currently only two broadcasts. One is an emergency relay alert from Planetary Administration, telling all citizens to shelter in place and await further instructions. The other…” Mirem sighs, running a hand through her bloody, matted hair.

“The other is from Kaisho-Renalis. They’re saying that elements in Fleet are attempting a planetary coup, and that Kaisho is resisting on behalf of Terra. None of it makes sense, but it’s enough to sow confusion, and clearly Admin has been paralyzed.”

A thought spreads goosebumps along Lanis’ arms, and her thought is reflected in Mirem’s tired eyes: No one has any idea of what’s actually happening.

“Now, how Murkata got word that we needed extraction, I’m not sure,” Mirem continues. “Renfol, maybe? I did ask him to run a forensic audit of the other teams. Maybe he took my advice. Or maybe Murkata is acting on behalf of Admin. Or, maybe they’ve been watching us all along. Versk is practically a subsidiary, and you’re a valuable asset.” Mirem shakes her head.

“I will say that Murkata doesn’t need much of an excuse to believe that Kaisho-Renalis has gone rogue, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re fully at war right now. They’ve hated each other for the past fifty years.”

Mirem lapses into silence, her face strained.

“Now your turn,” she says, turning to Lanis. The other team members lean in too, listening intently. “What happened to you?”

Lanis recounts her night since the feed went down. Their eyes widen when she describes her fight with the Howett Corp mech, and how she was forced to kill the maddened pilot, but there’s no real surprise. The whole world has gone mad, after all.

They do shake their heads in disbelief when she describes the rogue heavy insertion unit coming down to attack her, and how the Fleet mech engaged it, and more than one mouth slowly falls open at her brief description of the battle.

“Did any of you hear about the insertion unit that saved me? Did he survive?” Lanis asks, looking around at the other faces expectantly.

Their faces are blank.

“We just know that you were picked up by a Murkata mag-lev extraction team. They didn’t say anything about an insertion unit,” Mirem says.

“Well… clearly I wouldn’t be here if the Fleet pilot hadn’t won,” Lanis says quietly. “I hope he survived.”

She can almost feel the team's questions forming—why did an insertion unit come after you? And why did Fleet send one of its own to defend you? What do you know? She has the feeling that a lot of explaining is going to happen later.

She’s suddenly too tired to preempt their questions though, and instead she leans back, trying to absorb what’s just happened, and is continuing to happen. She feels a gentle shudder as they hit some turbulence, and then the sensation of the shuttle making a banking turn.

“So, does anyone know where we’re going?” she asks.

Booker shrugs slightly.

“All I was told was that it was a secure compound. Something buried in the mountains, if I had to guess.”

Lanis sighs, and leans her head against Mirem’s shoulder.

“Well, I hope it’s deep.”