Chapter 1
“All right boys and girls, the time has come to do your part!”
Hayley Cage stood in the back of the line of mercenaries, last in the five-individual squad of Riders making the drop onto the Fringe planet known affectionately by her CO, Colonel Quark, as ‘the dirty shithole,’ or ‘TDS’ for short. She didn’t know the real name of the planet, but it didn’t matter all that much. They were only going to be there for a few hours. Enough time to drop in, take care of business, GTFO. Simple.
“You okay there, Witchy?” the squad mate next to her asked. Julip was an Atmo - a lanky, hairless, grey-skinned alien with a large head and huge eyes.
The Atmo were the first extraterrestrials humankind had encountered. They were the original space-faring race, their starship tech second only to the original Shardship and the Nephilim’s space-folding Harvesters. They didn’t tend to make good grunts because they were fragile as hell, but the ones who managed to excel at the job? They were top of the line soldiers.
Everyone in Quark’s Riders was a top of the line soldier.
Except, maybe, for her.
Hayley nodded. “I’m fine, J. Thanks for asking.”
She was lying, in part. She knew it. Julip knew it. Hell, the entire squad knew it. She was a greenie. A rookie. And even though she had been training for this moment for what felt like her entire life, training wasn’t the real thing.
Her heart was racing. Her hands were clammy. She was half-fear, half-eagerness. Quark would tell her it was a good thing, that she needed the right mix of both to succeed. He was full of shit. He wasn’t afraid of anything. He would only say that to make her feel better.
“Stay close; you’ll be good. We do this shit what, ten times a week?” Julip said, nudging the mercenary down the line, a massive human specimen whose given name was Xavier, but who everyone, including himself, always referred to by his call sign, Ram.
“I do this shit in my sleep,” Ram replied. He had a deep voice with a flat affect. Everything he said came out with the same volume and pitch that made him sound disinterested in pretty much everything. “Hell, I’m sleeping right now.”
His tone of voice made the statement funnier than it would have been otherwise. Hayley couldn’t help but smile.
“That’s right, kid,” Julip said. “Keep calm and quarry on.”
Hayley tilted her head slightly, tapping at the side of her head. Every single one of them had an implant behind their ear or whatever passed for one that would translate the many different languages of the galaxy to the one they understood. Earth Standard English in her case. Her implant had been glitching all week, and while their engineer, Sykes, swore she had figured out the problem, it was apparent that wasn’t completely accurate.
“Translation chip?” Julip asked, noting her amused confusion.
“Roger,” she replied.
“Okay, okay,” Colonel Quark barked from the front of the line. “Enough jibber-jabber. Witchy, you twitchy?”
The other mercs laughed. Hayley shook her head. She had been waiting for him to use that.
“I’m good, Colonel,” she snapped back.
“Damn right you are,” Quark said. “Don’t you fragging forget it.”
He froze in place. It was hard to tell what he was doing. His eyes were implants. Replacements. Dark boxes with cameras in the center, feeding into processors that gave him vision that was a hundred times better than nature provided, with more functionality thrown in.
He had earned them during one of his missions, when they had either been clawed out, cut out, picked out, burned out, or magicked out, depending on which story he decided to tell at any given time. The end result was two large scars around them that on his grizzled, weathered face only served to make him more attractive to the opposite sex. At least, that was what some of the other female Riders said. Quark was too much like a father to her for her to ever see him any other way.
Most grunts were at least a little envious of what the Colonel could do with his eyes. The benefits of built-in infrared, smog filters, shading filters, and more didn’t need to be explained to them.
There had been a time when Hayley had been the most jealous of them all. There had been a time when she had been envious of everyone around her. Nowadays, there was no reason in the galaxy for anyone to be blind.
No reason, save one.
“Black Squad!” Quark shouted, unfreezing suddenly. “Asses out in t-minus sixty. One last summary because most of you are dumber than you look, and that’s a terrifying thought.” He flashed a grin that vanished as quickly as it arrived. “We’re coming down in what I call Shithole Number Two, for obvious reasons.” Ram and the big, hairy Curlatin at the front, Currl, snickered. “It’s a garbage city. A third-world slum. The alleys are dense and tight, and there are a lot of civvies dancing around down there. Be careful not to shoot any of them. Our target is an abandoned warehouse half a klick from the LZ. Latest intel says there’s a Nephilim Venerant trading in kids down there, and you know how much that bullshit ticks me off.”
“Riidderrss!” they shouted in response to the statement.
“We got a count of guards, and they’re all marked in your TCUs. They look human on the satellite photos, but you know the Nephies.”
“I brought my dog whistle,” the second soldier in the line, Neo, said.
“Can you call yourself with it?” Ram asked.
Neo flicked her middle finger up at the big grunt, earning a laugh from most of the squad. Hayley was getting more nervous with each increasing beat of her heart. Too nervous to laugh.
Quark froze again, only for a moment. “We drop in ten. Check your coms.”
“Currl, check,” the Curlatin said in his gravelly voice.
“Neo, check.”
“Ram, check.”
“Jewel, check.”
“Ha- Witch doctor, check.”
“Riiidderrrsss!” the rest of the squad shouted in support.
“Time to earn your paychecks,” Quark said. “Witchy, time to lose your virginity.”
“Riiidderrrss!” they shouted again.
Hayley’s face flushed with the comment. He laughed at her reaction as a green light flashed on over his shoulder, and the jump hatch started to slide open.
Cold, breathable air washed into the dropship. It would have been uncomfortably freezing if not for their combat armor. Matte black, light and tight, it clung close to their bodies regardless of the shape or size of the wearer.
Even so, Hayley shivered slightly. The lightsuit was more comfortable for the others than it was for her. Unlike the others, her arms were bare from the shoulders down, keeping the intricate tattoos that wound around the length of them, and covered almost all of her body save for her neck and head exposed.
Her call sign was derived in part from those tattoos. Even though she had been born on Earth, she had been raised since she was eleven by Quark and his on-again, off-again, sort-of wife Nibia on Nibia’s home planet of Koosa.
She hadn’t spent the last seven years of her life becoming just a soldier. She was also one of the best witch doctors the planet Koosa had ever produced.
“A word of advice on your first mission,” Ram said, glancing back at her.
“Five!” Quark shouted.
“Oh, not this,” Julip said.
“Four!”
“What?” Hayley said.
“Three!”
“He says this to all the newbies on their first drop,” Julip said.
“Two!”
“Wait for it,” Ram said.
“One!”
“What?” Hayley said again. “Spill it.”
“Go, go, go, go, go!” Quark bellowed.
“Don’t die,” Ram said.
He winked at her, and then moved forward in line with the rest of the squad, vanishing out of the dropship a moment later.
“Asshole,” Julip said, right before taking the plunge.
Hayley paused for a second at the edge of the open hatch. She couldn’t see the city beneath them, but she knew it was there.
“You’re ready for this, kid,” Quark said, standing beside her, always the last to jump. “Your mom would be proud.”
Her mom. Yeah, right.
She jumped.
Chapter 2
The air screamed around her, the coldness of it causing her skin to pucker and pimple in response. It bit into her, the sudden shock of it nearly causing her to lose her focus. Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her head, her adrenaline rising with it. Calm. She needed to be calm. She couldn’t see the ground below. She couldn’t see anything, and being off by more than a tick or two in her internal countdown would be the difference between a clean landing and becoming another stain on the ground.
It felt like hours, but she managed to recalibrate in seconds, getting her mind right. Once she felt comfortable, she reached outward. Not with her hands, but with her mind.
The Koosians called it Meijo. The Nephilim called it the Gift. The Seraphim sometimes referred to it as the Light of the Shard. It was magic, or it was technology, or it was the fabric of the Universe, depending on perspective. Scientifically, they were called naniates. Artificially-intelligent, nanometer-sized machines that had the capability to enter a symbiotic state with humans through their bloodstream. They had been carried into the galaxy by the Seraphim and the Shard millions of years ago when he had first seeded their universe with life.
For many of those millions of years, the naniates had been the sole property of the Shard. But then Lucifer decided to betray him, fleeing to the edge of the universe with his followers, the Nephilim, and his own version of the molecular machines.
Millions of years later, they had been accidentally freed to start spreading across the galaxy; an unstoppable, invisible, near-infinite count of microscopic machines whose level of intelligence and overall motives were still unknown.
The genie was out of the bottle.
Pandora’s box was open.
There was no going back.
Now everyone in the universe had to deal with the fallout.
The naniates still needed power. That was where humans came in. The machines entered through the air and took residence in the bloodstream, parasites using the body’s energy to recharge and reproduce. Most humans on the Fringe were infected, though less than one percent would ever know the naniates were even there. But for the lucky, or unlucky few, again depending on perspective? They could subconsciously communicate with the machines and tap into the energy they produced, giving them supernatural type powers. Rapid healing. Enhanced strength. The ability to fart fireballs. That was just a taste of what the little buggers could do.
And then, there was her.
When she was eleven, she had woken up in a canvas hut on Koosa with an awful smelling poultice over her eyes and Nibia at her side, offering comforting words and a warm touch. Her mother wasn’t there. Her father wasn’t there. And all she could see was an explosion of ever-shifting color like someone had detonated a nuclear paint bomb behind her retinas.
The first few minutes had been terrifying. She was in a strange place, with strange people, and she couldn’t see and couldn’t remember. The last thing she could recall was being at home with her father, doing her schoolwork.
Even all of these years later, the memories of what happened still hadn’t come back to her. What she knew, she knew second hand, the truth through the filters of someone else’s experience. Quark and Nibia’s in her case. She knew her mother had asked Nibia to bring her to Koosa, both to protect her and to try to restore her vision; the Koosians were known as the best natural healers in the galaxy. They hadn’t been able to give her back her eyes. Neither had the best scientists.
She also knew she had been forced to take the Gift, to drink from the blood-font of a powerful Nephilim who was hoping she would become as strong in the use of the Gift as her mother. He wanted to use her as a tool in his war against the One who had sent the Shard.
That wasn’t what happened.
At all.
In fact, it was the total opposite.
When the human body rejected the Gift, it was usually fatal. Thousands had already died across the Fringe, though to all but the savviest doctors it appeared to be from sudden heart failure.
Her body had rejected the Gift, fiercely and violently. She had gotten sick. She had lost the use of her eyes. She had forgotten most of what she had been through.
But for some inexplicable reason, she hadn’t died.
The naniates were unable to survive inside her. But it was more than that.
They were afraid of her.
She didn’t know why except she was the only person who had ever rejected the naniates and lived. It wasn’t something she thought about all that much. It wouldn’t put food in her stomach or a roof over her head. The bottom line was that she held power over them.
Power she wasn’t afraid to use.
So she reached out for the Meijo, calling to it with the help of the visor wrapped around her head, which turned her brainwaves into frequencies the naniates would respond to.
“Come here,” she said.
And they came, rising instantly from within the populace below, answering her call as if she was an angry mother and they were her frightened children. They gathered in the ruts and ridges of her arms, building in the invisible pits hidden within the tattoos and beginning to glow with their energy, wrapping her in a nanometer thick shield that protected her from the cold.
She continued to fall.
“Snow,” a voice said, forming somewhere in her mind. “Three inches and still precipitating.”
“Thanks, Gant,” Hayley replied, another thought sending the command to start slowing her descent. She shifted her body, putting her feet down as the anti-gravity pad on her back started spinning up. “Give me squad positions.”
A series of tones in her ears gave her instant spatial reference for where the rest of Black Squad had landed. She continued to slow as she counted down the last few ticks.
At zero, she cut the anti-grav, falling the last five meters to the surface, flexing her knees as she timed the final landing. She could sense the snow around her booted feet. She wished she could take a second to put her hand in it. There was no time.
Now that she was down, the darkness of her vision had been replaced with the now familiar color bomb, a kaleidoscopic mix of the different energies around her.
It took a moment for her to turn the chaos of color into information she could use. The electronics in her visor helped, but most of it had come from experience. Painstaking experience. Learning to use the damage the naniates had left her with and ‘see’ like this had been the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life.
“Black Squad!” Quark said through her com. Form up!”
“Three hundred meters forward, one hundred meters left,” Gant informed her.
She had named the visor’s AI after its inventor. Or rather, she hadn’t bothered to change the name it had been given by default. Gant was a friend of her mother’s, from an alien race also called the Gant. He was different from the rest of his kind, though. Smarter, thanks to illegal experimentation the Republic R&D department had done on him. A genius, though he often claimed he was nowhere near as intelligent as he used to be right before he started spouting off on some esoteric scientific hypothesis nobody had ever heard of before.
Whatever. He had made the visor without even being on Koosa to get a real-time look at her condition. He asked Nibia for data. She provided it. Two months later, it was dropped off by a passing Crescent Hauler cargo ship.
It was too big at the time, a memory that still brought a smile to her face. Gant had sized it for an adult version of her, instead of the then-twelve-year-old. But she had made it work, and the visor and its intelligence had been a near-constant companion ever since.
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