Prologue
Lee roared as he shoved the rifle muzzle into a seam in the gleaming red combat gear of the soldier who had a forearm across his neck. "Eat this, you ugly son of a bitch!"
He pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
He'd just inherited the rifle from a prison guard who’d left it behind as he’d run for his life. Lee didn't know much about the weapon, but he thought triggers were universal. Apparently not.
"Shit," he said, or meant to. It came out as spit and bile shoved through gritted teeth.
Lee wished he had one of his own guns. Any of them. They tended to work when he pulled the trigger.
For a frozen moment, he and the soldier stood facing each other, locked in an embrace. Lee could see nothing of the soldier's face--only the yellow nuke suit he was wearing reflected in the visor of the soldier's combat helmet.
Damn Reds. What the hell are they doing here?
Lee had never seen a soldier of the Cardinal Order before. He was fifteen and had been in prison for more than a year. But though he might look scrawny, Lee was used to fighting men bigger than him, and winning.
The soldier grabbed the rifle muzzle and tried to wrench it out of Lee's hands. Lee shoved hard on the soldier's cold helmet, twisting his head back. The soldier was slapping at his thigh, trying to pull his own weapon free.
Lee felt heat build around his arm. What the hell? Even through the crude breather on the nuke suit, he smelled something burning.
It took a moment to understand. The trigger had armed the plasma bayonet on the tip of the rifle. He felt the ionized edge of the plasma blade slide through the soldier's hand on the muzzle, chewing through fingers.
Lee swung the gun into the soldier's stomach. It punctured the armor and stuttered on something that must be muscle and bone. The soldier squealed. Guts spilled down Lee's arm, thick and hot.
He shifted to a knee and shoved upward with all his strength. The rifle dug into the soldier's chest cavity and Lee's arm disappeared right up to his elbow.
The Red slammed his hard helmet into Lee's face. Blood splattered across the inside of the soft-shell helmet Lee was wearing as pain blinded him.
He felt himself toppling backwards. He lost his hold on the rifle, slick as it was with the soldier's blood. The gloves of his nuke suit had no damn grip. The suit was also courtesy of the prison; it still had an inmate code across the front and back. The colors were as bright as the three suns that kept the colony bathed in light.
But beggars couldn't be choosers when your colony was depressurizing and being overrun by Cardinal Order pigs. At least the guards had opened the gates. Better to die fighting than sitting in a cell pissing yourself.
Lee fell to his knees and rolled away from the soldier. His hand brushed against something that might be a rock. It might be nothing. It certainly wasn't the rifle that had clattered away when the soldier head-butted him.
Considering he’d already ripped half the bastard's guts out and still didn't understand how to fire the rifle, it probably meant it was past peak effectiveness anyway.
A rock would do.
Lee picked it up, ready to try again to bash in the head of the soldier behind him.
The lump of soft dirt crumbled in his grip. “Shit.”
Then he remembered he had a knife at his waist, and a punch pistol at his side. More souvenirs from the abandoned guard station.
After a year in prison, Lee had forgotten what it was like to be well-armed.
He scrambled up, groping for the handheld weapon as he turned to face the soldier. The holster was outside his clunky nuke suit, and it didn't fit the barrel right. It snagged, refusing to release.
He jerked at it.
It didn't budge.
He started clawing at the holster as he watched the soldier approach.
It was impossible to make out how much blood was flowing over the gleaming red armor of the Cardinal Order soldier. Lee figured that might be half the point. The soldier lumbered forward, surprisingly spry for something that should be dead.
Lee looked down once more at the holstered pistol, screaming in frustration. He was going to die for a damn two-credit holster from his stupid gang initiation. Those cheap bastards.
He shoved the pistol forward, then yanked again with all his might.
The gun came free with no resistance, and he almost dropped it as he spun around, out of control, his back to the charging soldier. His breath was fogging up the soft plastic mask of the suit.
He was only a handful of feet from the edge of a gaping hole in the ground. It was at least fifty feet across. He was sure it hadn't been there before. The colony wasn't known for huge fissures in the ground.
Something fluttered in his peripheral vision. The soldier smashed into his back.
Lee felt himself lurch forward. The crevice in front of him loomed larger, but it stubbornly refused to reveal a bottom.
After several wild steps, he finally found his balance and planted his feet, leaning back. The weight shifted around him as the soldier slid down to Lee's waist, and then to his knees.
Lee turned, fumbling to raise the gun with his gloved hands.
The soldier was crumpled at his feet, lying in a puddle of blood and guts.
Lee stared dumbly down. One more second of life, and the soldier would have shoved them both down into the canyon beyond. The red armor glowed slightly where the powered flash-steel was still active.
Lee fired twice into the back of the dead man's helmet. Then he spat on him, or tried to. He forgot he was wearing the nuke suit and ended up adding saliva to the blood that was plastering the inside of the soft-shell helmet.
He felt his ragged breathing slow.
An explosion blinded him, and he fell to one knee. It was the prison.
He staggered up and away, careful to keep a healthy distance from the huge crack in the ground. Everything he saw was on fire.
This wasn't the little nowhere colony Lee had grown up in. This wasn't the shitty backwater that his gang smuggled drugs through with ease.
This was a disaster.
He froze as three more Cardinal Order goons went running past a flaming building, their gleaming red armor buzzing with energy, but the Reds weren't looking his way. They were in full retreat mode.
The ground around him started to shake.
He looked up. A mushroom cloud appeared in the distance. Then another, and another.
Lee looked down at the rip in his nuke suit where the punch pistol holster had snagged on his breathing clip. “Shit.”
He instinctively slapped his hand over the gaping hole.
Good job, genius. That’ll show that pesky radiation.
He grabbed at the black comm stick hanging from his belt. Yet another toy from the guard shack. “Two Bags, I’m fully and completely screwed,” he screamed into it.
The comm crackled to life. “Happy, is that you? Where the hell are you?”
Lee looked around. His nickname was Happy, but he wasn’t feeling it right now. He’d become separated from the rest of his gang when the Reds had shown up at the prison as they were climbing out. He had lost all sense of direction.
“No idea. Where are you?”
“I’m with the crew,” Two Bags replied. “We thought you were dead.”
“Me too.”
“We’re at the port. There are Reds everywhere. They’re bugging out like rats from a sinking ship, and they’re bombing the surface.”
“No shit.”
“We’re going to roll them. We’re gonna take one of these gunships.”
Lee had an image of three underfed prison escapees launching an assault on a Cardinal Order gunship. Good luck, he thought. He had bigger problems.
The rumbling grew louder, like a train arriving.
“I have to get cover. My suit is ripped.”
Two Bags answered with static.
“Two Bags? Did you hear me?”
For the second time in a minute, Lee knew he was dead.
A dust cloud erupted in front of him.
He started to turn.
A scorching wind ripped him off his feet and sent him tumbling like a rag doll.
The universe could have thrown him anywhere.
It chose the gaping hole in the ground.
He swung his arms out, wildly grabbing for anything as he flipped head over heels. He felt dirt and rock shred the gloves of his suit and tear into his hands.
He fell further.
Something smashed into his shoulder, and he felt an explosion of pain. His head snapped back and a second impact cracked the back of his helmet. With his one good arm, he clamped down on something. He didn’t know what he was holding, only that he wasn’t letting go.
The air was warm. He had to keep moving.
Lee opened his eyes.
He was hanging on to the rail of a platform that extended out of the chasm wall. It looked like the back deck of his parents’ house. There were chairs and umbrellas and picnic tables.
He dragged himself over and staggered to his feet. Warnings flooded the HUD inside his helmet.
In front of him was a thick door with small windows on either side. He ran toward it, firing at the locking mechanism with his punch pistol. The lock exploded and fell away.
Lee barreled into the door, forgetting how much his shoulder hurt. It reminded him.
He screamed out in pain as the door jerked against its hinges, and he fell forward over a huge table surrounded by chairs.
He flipped over and found himself miraculously still on his feet. The hot blast of air that poured in from outside was decidedly less harsh in here, but the radiation warnings on his helmet were louder than ever.
Lee looked down again at the tear in the nuke suit. Yup, still there.
He ran through the next set of doors.
It was an airlock of some kind.
He hit the screw handle and jumped in.
He felt the hiss as the air changed inside the airlock. For just a moment, he basked in the silence.
I’m alive.
A poster above the door expounded on the virtues of maintaining a clean-room facility. There was a list of tips with handwritten notes on it. A computerized voice made a feeble attempt to remind him to wait for the contamination scan to complete.
“No thanks,” said Lee.
He shot the door sensor and kicked the pressure lock on the inner door. It popped open immediately.
The soundproofing in the airlock was impressive. The moment he stepped out, blaring alarm bells greeted him.
Red klaxon lights flashed. Two people in lab coats ran past, unfazed by the strange man in the airlock. They were clones. Lee could make out the blood eyes easily enough. Damn clone scientists. Of course. Wherever there was trouble, there they were.
There was genuine terror on their faces.
An automated voice was blaring over the speakers in the hallway. “Emergency destruct sequence. Evacuate immediately. This is not a drill.”
Lee laughed. Nukes were scorching the ground above. The world was ending. And the one place he’d found refuge was about to self-destruct.
Then he saw something that made him stop laughing.
He saw his parents.
A framed picture of them, laughing at a dinner party, hung in the hallway, hopelessly out of place. He recognized it from the hallway in their housing pod.
He blinked. This wasn’t right. They lived in a housing pod near the edge of the dome, not in some underground lab.
He looked around and started seeing more things from his parents’ house. His house.
There was the ugly wall clock. There was the old table his mother used for game nights. But it was all wrong, like someone had randomly picked up the details of his youth and left them scattered around here.
He was losing his mind.
His father walked past him as if he wasn’t standing there.
“Dad?” Lee said. He holstered the pistol and ran to his father, grabbing him by the shoulder. “Dad!”
His father turned. Blood was pouring out of his head. A gash ran the length of his face. Lee pulled back his hand, and found it wet and sticky where he had touched his father’s shoulder.
“Holy shit, are you—”
Lee’s mother was lying on the ground a few feet away. She was ripped nearly in two. Her chest was torn ragged. A spray of plasma scorched the wall beyond her.
Before he could react, a Cardinal Order soldier appeared from out of nowhere. The red armor was mottled and splotched with darker red stains. The red stains of blood. Of his mother’s blood, he was sure. The solder was holding a plasma rifle in his hands.
Lee screamed and launched himself at the soldier.
The soldier whipped his gun around. Lee arrived a moment before the gun came fully around. He felt the buzzing of energy beside his shoulder as the plasma discharged.
He smashed into the soldier and sent the two of them sprawling.
The soldier was huge. He still had the plasma gun in his hand. He tried to maneuver it to shoot Lee in the head. Lee began to smash the soldier’s helmet against the hard floor of the lab, or whatever the hell it was.
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