Between Braun and Bluford, the bulky orbital radio startled. Coming from the distillation room, a stray bullet had just silenced it.

“Kulooq!” Braun shouted through the local channel, turning back to the Inuit woman near the starship impaled in the concrete. “Watch the edge!”

Corporal Nielsen let out a furious scream. After twirling her minigun in the lesser gravity, she opened fire towards the steel rods. Walls of icy grit rose around her and along the path of her bullet spray. In less than a minute, half of the closest twisted pipes had been leveled; blown to smithereens and swiveling away to the stars.

“Reload!” Kulooq shouted. Kneeling down among the floating fuming casings, she violently disconnected her M61’s articulated feed chute. Panting, she plugged it into a new ammo box lower on her back.

Meanwhile, Braun, standing by Bluford, looked up at a makeshift ledge overlooking the boardroom. “Latrine? Do you hear me?” he yelled this time. “Cover her!”

An explosion immediately shook those same heights. The sniper had been hit by a mortar.

The path of the low-arcing shell didn’t trace back to the forest from which blue-armored Marine legionaries were already emerging. The bomb came from behind the holographic consoles on the other side of the room in front of them. Pinochet’s guards have planned a pincer attack.

“Should I order the Noah to extract us at once, boss?” Bluford asked as he popped the radio case with his screwdriver. The purple circuit board appeared to be bent in half, but fortunately the fire had been nipped in the bud by the lack of oxygen.

Braun handed him the Beretta he had left at his feet while looking for his tools. “Pingu knows his job! Do yours.”

Several projectiles flew over their shoulders. Pinochet’s henchmen were quickly taking up positions all around.

The sergeant smiled before arming his gun. Up in the wrecks surrounding Uranus IX, the Noah’s Ark was certainly clearing out its way to come to the rescue. Disappointing them by getting torn down in Cressida’s azure snow appeared to be out of the question.

The three survivors opened fire all together, forcing the inbound assault squads to move more slowly. The traitors’ shots became less accurate, and their positioning riskier. A boon for Braun, who took down two of them through a frozen holographic projector.

“Kalooq?” the captain asked as he manually reloaded his magazine; a hard task in low gravity.

The third member of the group had just emptied her second box of ammunition. From a Titanium column, she was angrily forcing a jammed casing out her longer barrel. Her previous cover, the rebel starfighter, had been blown to smithereens by heavy fire. “Sir?” she responded.

“Ready to use your smokes and decoys? We will grapple up through the collapsed roof.”

“Absolutely. I’m waiting for your—what the—” she shouted suddenly.

“Corporal!” cried Braun, turning around as two explosions almost blew his cover.

The giantess lay on the ground, downed by the sword stroke of a curious android with chrome plating. The latter had clung to the pillar with long claws cracking the supposedly invulnerable metal.

Linking his smart weapon to his wrist computer despite the risk of power over-consumption, Braun quickly aimed at this new soulless opponent. The rifle automatically targeted its head, which shattered on the second impact. A luminescent mist enveloped the synthetic traitor’s upper body before it toppled backwards into a crevasse.

Bluford congratulated the MP as he unloaded a clip on an overenthusiastic assailant caught setting up a winged grenade. Slowly escaping from the soldier’s hand, the device fluttered around before bursting randomly, blowing away a drone medic. “Nielsen?” the sergeant coughed as the battle drained his oxygen reserve.

The enraged Soviet was about to run towards his fallen comrade, but movement appeared near the pillar again. Before a gust coming from the forest swept through the area, drowning in the radioactive snow the advance of another enemy squad, Braun swore he saw the mysterious android rise out of the large crack in the floor.

He couldn’t check Kalooq, as more gunfire from the back of the room forced him to the ground again. Snipers had taken position all around them. They danced their lasers across the circular desks. Similar red beams of light pierced the blue veil, glimmering over the foundations of the blown up wall. Enemies were closing in on both sides. Pinochet was ready to staple the two trapped men.

Lying on the ground, his T-shaped visor dotted with sweat beads, Braun sighed. His last clip flew away. Empty. Defeated, he stared at the dark skies. But there, he encountered a new surprise. “Latrine?”

Next to the captain, the signaller cautiously straightened, before looking at the strange figure standing on the treacherous edge, a few feet from where the French sniper had disappeared in a blast. “No,” he muttered.

More shelling made him plunge back into the rubble. Pinochet’s men weren’t aware of the presence of this new visitor and were still concentrating their furor on them.

“That’s odd,” Bluford resumed, eyeing through his optic. “This guy’s showcasing an old Patton-type panoply. With a fishbowl helmet.”

“Careful! He may be with Pinochet!” Braun reacted.

Under Uranus’ gaze, the visitor revealed himself to the ground forces. He was indeed wearing a disused khaki Techno-armor decommissioned twenty years earlier; and an even older explorer’s helmet: a simple bubble of reinforced Plexiglas welded to the chest and shoulders.

Three seconds later, the mysterious space walker leaned forward at the same time the fire stopped. In the boardroom as well as behind the shattered fighter, Pinochet’s soldiers aimed at their new exposed target. But when the last ZeG cannon raised in his direction, his ancient armor clenched, lifting the frozen loops partially covering the shoulders.

As violent blasts blew away the radioactive dust at the visitor’s feet. Glowing torpedoes spurted out from his back, before spinning across the void. The exoskeleton quickly disappeared in a dark veil of burned fuel, as the curious rockets swept through the enemy’s lines.

There was no, or very little, deflagration. The remorseless missiles sprayed a brown gas which slowly solidified in contact with the sub-zero space vacuum. Huge clouds of amber enveloped the Techno-Marine traitors, trapping them in grotesque positions. Those who dodged its grasp were soon caught by the spreading fiery shroud.

Visibly amused, the visitor leaped into the void. Armed with a worn M-16, he finished off with terrible efficiency the few survivors who had managed to escape from the hardened amberoid. Once done, his calves dusters took him a few meters closer to Braun and Bluford. Both were surrounded by freezing man-eating chemicals.

“Always knew you were nothing but a chowderhead, Son!” the visitor declared as he landed on a fossil cloud floating above the trapped board table. He had presumably hacked his way into their encrypted communications.

The MP finally saw the man’s face because it was backlit. Their savior was a burly human in his early sixties, square-jawed and grumpy-looking, chewing on an unlit cigar under the visor of an old baseball cap pulled down to his arches.

“Who are you?” asked the Soviet as he carefully straightened. Avoiding touching the infernal gas, he helped Bluford free a strap from his suit caught in an amber bud.

“The Boogeyman.”

“What a fucking stupid nickname…” Bluford grunted before Braun silenced him with a wave of his hand.

The cosmonaut laughed, then rolled his cigar on his lips. He hadn’t come alone. Held down by the oxygen supply hose of his officer’s blue and golden spacesuit, Rear Admiral Pinochet was passing out at the joker’s feet. “Know this cunt?”

Braun remained silent at first. He still found it hard to believe that this man, in an outdated battle armor wearing a cap from the Boston Red Socks—a sports team that chose to disappear with Earth—was handing them a Techno-Marine Admiral on a silver platter, after saving their lives.

“Yes. And I need him alive,” he declared at last.

“Alive? This guy’s dead already…” the man continued, shaking his prisoner like an Aqua Net aerosol. “Ever heard of YU/RI units?”

“YU/RI?” the sergeant interjected.

The military police captain met Bluford’s doubtful gaze. His young sergeant was unaware of those androids; robotic agents coated with silicone skin and deployed by the communist powers at the end of the Third World War. Their goal? Replace the high-ranking personnel who had already deserted en masse to Mars and the belt. One of the many far-fetched plans of the russian MVD then in full debacle.

“Damn right!” the man smiled, clipping his M-16 on a strap. “Let me crack open his bone-egg, and I’ll show ya.”

“Don’t—” Braun gasped as the visitor grabbed the metal back of Pinochet’s helmet. The Rear Admiral soon began to struggle violently despite lacking oxygen.

Their lunatic savior smashed Pinochet’s plexiglass visor against the edge of an office table caught by the amber. He repeated his gesture several times, until the desk flew apart, and bubbles of hemoglobin escaping from the admiral’s spacesuit froze in the weightlessness. Bluford swore as the man effortlessly opened his victim’s helmet; like he might do with a boiled mold.

Disappointed, the astronaut dropped the lifeless, yet still convulsing body. “Jesus Christ…” he spat over the sizzling radio channel.

“He was no robot! You killed him!” Braun growled, raising his rifle. His computer warned him a single bullet remained to spare in the chamber.

The man shrugged. “Things happen.” He nonchalantly threw the corpse over his shoulder. The dead body floated towards a ventilation tunnel, leaving a trail of red ice behind him. “I’ll tell you one thing, Son… You’re a chump—a wicked chump!” The elder clumsily sat down on his deadly cloud. A small metal appendix folded out inside his large fishbowl helmet to light the massive cigar. “Capturing Pinochet… How dense are you?” A tiny vacuum cleaner snaking from the exoskeleton immediately sucked up the smog after the man puffed on his stogie. Wisps of smoke escaped from behind his left shoulder. “You guys enjoy playing paddle ball with a hornets’ nest?”

Braun pointed his muzzle at Pinochet’s lifeless body, which slowly disappeared into the vent. “Pinochet is—was a crook, and—”

“And not a fucking pawn, Soviet loony…” the Boogeyman insulted him again. “Killing von Gebhardt over Saturn or Panafrican warlords in Cape Liberté went under High Command’s radar. But. Today, you were on the verge of apprehending a real criminal hotshot here…”

“That was my goal, yes.”

“And getting yourself murdered was part of the goal too, Son? The Marine and the Technocracy allowed you to have fun catching little fish or dispatching space cowboys.” He took a strong drag on his cigar that would burn the lungs of a regular human being. He didn’t even cough. “Alas, you’re digging too deep. Six feet too deep.”

Braun stepped closer, striding over the amber with his finger on the trigger. The fading death cloud was beginning to slowly disintegrate. “What do you mean?”

The Boogeyman smiled; happy to catch his full attention. “Don’t you see, after all these years being its lapdog, how corrupt Mars is! Our politicians and oligarchs—not Ringern rebels—are behind this huge mess you call ‘Civil War’. This isn’t even a ‘Civil War’. This is another large-scale Luna War, like the Red Uprising! While some play both sides for profit, others orchestrate corporate takeovers! It’s as obvious as José Conseco being on steroids—damned cheater.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

The visitor straightened as his cloud turned yellow before dislocating. “I witnessed it with my own eyes. And you saw it too with von Gebhardt! Technos trade honor for money and power when the Moon asks it. A tale as ancient as mankind.”

Touching the ground where the solidifying gas had dissolved, the Boogeyman slowly approached. Braun and Bluford eyeballed his armor, which was until then covered with ice. It was in fact embellished with multiple decals. Those transfers dated from the early space conquest or from life on the Blue Planet. Faded American flags, old car brands and political slogans from a bygone era decorated almost the entire lead slab screwed onto the breastplate.

“You served them well, chasing butterflies in the park and barking at trees,” the melancholic man resumed. “But you uncovered a fox in the earth today, Son. You’re putting them in danger if Solarians find out about our dear Augusto.” He spun to look with the other two at the dark ventilation shaft, the admiral’s final resting place. “Jesus Christ… I really thought he was a YU/RI! Turns out he was just a regular asshole.”

The man swiveled around again, before placing his hand on Braun’s shoulder as the MP still held him at gunpoint. The ZeG-5’s muzzle clinked against the thick glass, but the blue-eyed astronaut didn’t bat an eye.

“I still highly doubt you,” Braun almost whispered.

“The TMC will oust you, Son. Or kill you. Probably both, the moment you set foot on Callisto. Mark my words.”

Braun lowered his gun. “You’re crazy.”

“Me? Surely!” The Boogeyman withdrew his hand to tap the Plexiglas at his temple with his fingertip. “The system—the whole system: the Black Haven, the General Staff on Deimos or Callisto, Lunapolis—they’ve all gone mad too, Son. Solaris made them rich. Profusely loaded. Gold-coated organs wealthy. But they want more. Always more!”

“I should arrest you—for interfering! Why are you telling me this?”

The man shrugged. “I don’t like you. I killed a bunch of your buddies during the Red Uprising. I rather enjoyed it, to be honest…”

“Agent Orange melted your brain, old timer,” Bluford interjected. Braun let his justified remark pass through this time.

The visitor chuckled before typing on the computer on his forearm; a more recent addition to the original armor. “You guys are brave,” he said as he slowly bent his knees to gain momentum. “You’ll see through the lies. You already do. I know it. They know it.” He pats a military insignia on his chest plate, an old U.S. Navy medal. “You will serve under the right command. We’ll fight the traitors together soon enough!”

Aided by a blast from the mini-reactor on his back, the man flew up to reach the ledge again. Above him silently hovered a Bulldog starfighter: an American-made space bomber—the last ship to come out of the New England factories before Earth’s destruction a century ago.

“Speaking of traitors…” he resumed, manually unbarring the airlock.

“What now?”

“The biggest viper will summon you after… after you cracked open Pinochet’s head. He will be pretty pissed off after losing one of his top ass-licking pets.”

“Yeah, right…”

The man reached his vessel. “Don’t worry. There’s sometimes a friend nearby.”

“Like you, I presume?”

“Not that far, yes.” The Boogeyman grinned before disappearing into his ship. “Catch you on the flip-side, Son!”

A minute later, he was gone.

“Why are old white guys always batshit crazy? What did he want? Warn us? Recruit us? After blowing the head off a key witness to possible interplanetary corruption? He’s a damned fool!” exclaimed Bluford in a long monologue. His voice was shaking.

“Calm down, soldier. He was indeed insane…” Braun responded, before the radio miraculously crackled. “But he saved our lives. That makes us even today.”

“Whatever. The Noah’s seems online, boss!” reacted Bluford, throwing himself near the sizzling transmitter. He then paused, listening to the pilot’s report.

“Ask Pingu to fetch us,” Braun ordered.

Another few seconds of silence intervened while the MP walked towards the late Kalooq. He would have to explain her sister’s death to Chief Kodiak; the faster way known to man to commit suicide.

“He said there’s an incoming call for you. From Callisto. Not an elated one. A big shot wants to know what we’re doing on Uranus—patching you through with the ship.”

Braun raised an eyebrow under his helmet. “Who? Mega-Admiral Sherman? We disappointed him today.”

Pingu’s croaking voice finally echoed through the orbital channel: “No, Cap’. The Techno-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.”