Chapter 1: The Last Two Standing
The water was cold. A deeper, wrong kind of cold that seeped through the seals of her impact suit before the acid-burn sensation even registered. Andromeda Voss breached the surface, gasping air that tasted of ozone and burnt wiring. Her lungs were a secondary concern. Primary was the jagged, smoldering silhouette of the Helios Dawn’s starboard engine nacelle, jutting from the violet-tinged water like a tombstone.
She hauled herself onto the shore, a slope of cracked obsidian slick with a film of iridescent algae. Her suit’s HUD flickered a frantic, silent ballet of damage reports across her left retinal implant: integrity at 42%, coolant leak in the lumbar assembly, nanite repair systems offline.She ignored it.The data was just noise. The raw, physical truth was the throbbing in her shoulder, the warm trickle of blood inside her glove, and the fact she was breathing.
A shape moved further up the shore.
Commander Rook Castellan stood with his back to the crater lake, his silhouette a stark cutout against the glare of the twin suns. His flight suit was torn at the knee, dark with moisture. He held his service sidearm, a compact plasma pistol, his arm extended not toward the dense, whispering treeline of black-barked trees, but down the shore.Toward her.
Andromeda froze, one knee still in the lapping, unnaturally warm water.“Castellan.”
The pistol didn’t waver. His face was in shadow, but she could see the tension in his stance, the set of his shoulders. When he spoke, his voice was stripped of its usual lazy charm, ground down to gravel. “You’re the reason we’re here.”
It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation, flat and final as a bolt being shot home.A sharp, metallic taste filled her mouth. Fear, or maybe just the planet’s atmosphere reacting with her implants. She forced herself to stand, the servos in her suit whining in protest.“The spatial anomaly was unpredicted. The navigation array overloaded.My engine modifications held longer than the stock configuration would have. You’re welcome.”
He took a step forward.The pistol remained leveled at her center mass. “Your refinements bypassed three separate safety buffers. You rerouted non-essential power from life support to the tertiary thrust array. I read the logs while you were realigning the—whatever the hell you were realigning.”
“The crystal graviton manifold,” she said automatically, then cursed herself for it. He was trying to bury her in procedure, and she was handing him the shovel. “And I rerouted waste heat from life support. A calculated risk to avoid a complete core fragmentation during the drop. Which, might I remind you, we survived.”
“Barely.” He finally lowered the pistol, but didn’t holster it. His gray eyes swept over her, a quick, professional assessment that missed nothing: the leaking coolant hose snaking from her lower back, the crack in her chestplate, the way she favored her right side. “Some of us didn’t.”
The words hung in the thick, humid air.They weren’t just about today. They were about the ghost ship Gale, about the silent comms and the unanswered hails that followed her out of every command debriefing.She looked past him, at the treeline. The foliage wasn’t green. It was a spectrum of bruise-like purples and deep blues, and it seemed to shift subtly, though there was no wind. A low, sub-audible hum vibrated in her teeth. “Where are the others?”
“Kes is trying to get a beacon out of the wreckage. Vee didn’t make it out of her harness.” He said it quickly, cleanly.A pilot’s report.But the muscle in his jaw pulsed. “The crash trajectory put us on opposite ends of this… puddle. You and me in the scenic sector.”
Andromeda activated her short-range scanners. The feed that spooled across her implant was a mess of interference and ghost signals, but one solid return blinked steadily about three hundred meters into the trees.A secondary power cell, probably from the escape pod.It would have tools. Maybe meds.“We need to move,” she said, her voice tighter than she intended. “The water’s emitting low-level radiation and something… biological. My sensors are picking up concentrated life signs beneath the surface.Large ones.”
Rook snorted, a harsh, humorless sound. “Of course it is.” He finally holstered the pistol and turned fully to face the forest. The movement pulled the torn fabric at his knee, revealing a bloody gash. “Lead the way, Chief.Your show.”
It was a trap. An invitation to take responsibility so he could lay every next thing that went wrong at her feet.She knew the play.She’d used it herself.
She didn’t argue. Arguing required energy, and she needed to conserve hers for the walking, and the thinking, and the inevitable next disaster. She just started moving, her boots crunching on the glassy rock, each step sending a jolt up her injured leg.
He fell in beside her, not behind, matching her pace. The silence between them was a solid thing, crowded with all the things unsaid: his dead crew, her derelict ship, the whispered rumors that followed them both.After fifty meters, he spoke again, his voice lower. “Why’d you do it? The overrides.”
“The calculations supported the decision.”
“Bullshit.”
She stopped, turning to face him. The twin suns painted his face in harsh relief, all sharp angles and shadow.He looked older than he was.They both did. “You want a confession, Rook?Fine.I wanted to get the payload delivered.I wanted to prove the modifications worked. I wanted to not die. The priority order was negotiable.”
He held her gaze, his own eyes searching for something she wasn’t sure she even possessed anymore. Not a lie, but a crack in the armor.He didn’t find it.
“You’re a piece of work, Voss.”
“And you’re a reckless flyboy with a hero complex who ignored three direct orders to break orbit before the anomaly fully manifested,” she fired back, the words coming out in a sudden, heated rush. “So if we’re assigning blame, Commander, let’s paint the whole picture.”
A flicker in his eyes.Acknowledgment, maybe.Or just fatigue. He looked away first, toward the waiting trees. “The picture is we’re stranded on a rock that’s trying to digest us, with one power cell between us and a slow death. Your brilliant logistics suggest we go that way.” He gestured with his chin. “So move.”
They entered the treeline.The light changed, filtering through the thick, purple canopy into a gloomy twilight. The hum got louder, settling into their bones. The undergrowth was sparse, a springy, moss-like substance that swallowed the sound of their footsteps.
Andromeda’s internal tracker led them to a small clearing. There, half-buried in the soft moss, was the emergency locker from the pod, its hazard-striped casing scuffed but intact.
Rook was on it in seconds, prying the latch.“Alright. Let’s see the hand we’ve got.” He pulled out a standard survival kit, a med-pack, a compact signal booster, and a hydration purifier.Then he froze, his hand closing around something else at the back of the locker.
He pulled it out.It was a small, blackened metal box, not standard issue. A faint, rhythmic beep emanated from it.Andromeda’s blood went colder than the lake. “That’s not ours.”
“No,” Rook said quietly, turning the box over. On the underside, etched into the metal, was a simple, familiar logo: a stylized ‘G’ within a circle.The corporate sigil of Grendel Dynamics.Their competitors. Their rivals for the very contract the Helios Dawn had been trying to secure.
The beeping grew faster.
From the deep violet shadows of the trees around the clearing, a half-dozen pinpoints of red light winked into existence, each pair hovering at head height. They resolved into the sleek, insectile silhouettes of automated sentry drones, their repulsors whining as they leveled their compact barrels.A smooth, synthesized voice crackled from the box in Rook’s hand. “Remain stationary.You are in violation of a Grendel Dynamics exclusive survey zone. Your compliance is mandatory.”
Rook slowly lowered the box to the ground, his other hand inching toward his holster. He didn’t look at Andromeda.His voice was a whisper meant only for her.
“You still want to argue about whose fault this is?”
She didn’t. For the first time, their priorities were perfectly, terrifyingly aligned.Survival. Now.
“Move!” The word tore from Andromeda’s throat a split-second before the synthetic voice finished its command.
It wasn’t coordination; it was mutual, instinctual panic.They broke in opposite directions, spoiling the drones’ targeting solution. A lance of searing white plasma sizzled past her ear, burning the air and leaving a black scar on the trunk of a black-barked tree.Her body screamed in protest. The suit’s servos ground, her shoulder pulsed a hot, wet agony with every pumping arm. She didn’t choose a direction, only away.The dense, bruise-colored foliage whipped at her cracked chestplate. The world narrowed to the next footfall, the next gasping breath of toxic air.
Rook was a blur to her left, crashing through the undergrowth with a pilot’s reckless agility. A drone banked, its repulsors a high-pitched whine, and clipped a branch aiming for him.He dropped, rolled, came up firing. His plasma pistol spat a single, brief star of energy that connected with the drone’s central lens. It sparked, veered wildly, and smashed into a tree with a satisfying crunch of metal.
“Two more on your ten o’clock!” he yelled, his voice raw.She didn’t look.She just dove. A plasma bolt kissed the air where her head had been. The mossy ground slammed into her, driving the breath from her lungs. She scrambled behind the thick, gnarled base of a towering tree, her back against the rough bark.The hum of the drones was close, circling.
Rook thudded into cover beside her, his shoulder pressing against hers.The contact was electric, unwanted. His breathing was as ragged as hers.
“You still have that power cell locator?” he panted, risking a glance around the trunk. A bolt of plasma seared a chunk of wood the size of his fist into smoking splinters.Her implant was a storm of static and panic. She forced a breath, forced her focus inward.The ghost signal. It was still there, fainter, masked by the drone interference.“Northwest.Maybe eighty meters. Through them.”
“Fantastic.” He ejected a spent energy cartridge.It hit the soft ground with a dull thunk. He had one shot left. “Your brilliant plan?”
“We don’t die here.”
“Starting to like that plan.”
The drones were smart, fanning out, trying to flank. They’d be pinched in moments.Andromeda’s mind, sharpened by adrenaline and spite, clicked through variables. The drones were corporate issue, low-caliber for containment and threat display, not full combat. Their precision was algorithmic.Predictable.
She pointed to a tangle of thick, ropy vines hanging from a cleft in the rocks ten meters ahead.“Covering fire.I go for the vines. They follow.You hit the anchor point.”
He didn’t ask. Just nodded once, a tight, sharp movement.The understanding was grim and complete.It was a stupid risk. It was all they had.
“Now!”
He leaned out and fired his last shot, not at a drone, but into the upper canopy. It ignited a pocket of volatile sap in a tree above the drones, raining down globs of sizzling, flaming residue. The drones whirred, adjusting to the new thermal signatures, confused for a critical second.Andromeda was already moving. Pain was a distant echo.She was all forward momentum, a desperate sprint across the open ground. The whine of repulsors sharpened behind her. She reached the vines, grabbed two thick handfuls, and launched herself into a swinging arc just as Rook’s second shot, from a pistol he’d snatched from his boot, slammed into the rock where the vines were rooted.The cleft shattered. The vines whipped free.
She was falling, swinging in a wide, uncontrolled arc, the world a smear of violet and blue.One of the drones, tracking her heat signature, shot past underneath her. The other, directly in her path.There was no time to think. She collided with it in mid-air.The impact was brutal, metal grinding against her damaged chestplate. She wrapped her legs around its spherical core, her hands clawing at the smooth carapace. The drone bucked, spinning wildly, its repulsors screaming in protest.Her retinal display flashed a chaotic proximity alert. The ground rushed up—a shallow, rocky stream bed.She let go.
The drone, thrown off-balance, shot downward and embedded itself nose-first into the creek bed with a crack of shearing metal.Andromeda hit the water an instant later. It was shallow, icy, the rocks punishing.The air left her body in a pained groan.A shadow fell over her. She looked up, expecting a drone’s cold eye.It was Rook. He stood above her, bleeding from a fresh cut on his forehead, his own pistol gone, holding the drone’s severed, sparking weapon array like a crude club. He dropped it, reached down, and hauled her to her feet with a grip that felt like it could break bone.
“The power cell,” he said, his voice stripped of everything but urgency.She nodded, choking on air, and pointed upstream. The ghost signal was stronger here, just ahead, around a bend in the rocky creek. They ran, not with grace, but with a limping, stumbling, shared desperation, leaving the hum of one remaining, circling drone fading slowly behind them.
They didn’t stop until they rounded the bend and saw it: the fractured shell of the escape pod’s secondary compartment, wedged between two boulders.And there, glowing with a steady, blue-white light, was the power cell. Next to it, sprawled unnaturally across the rocks, was Kes. His eyes were open, staring at the twin suns.The back of his flight suit was dark and wet.
Rook slowed to a walk, then stopped completely, a few meters from the pod. Andromeda stood beside him, the euphoria of escape bleeding away, replaced by the cold, heavy reality of the cell’s light playing over the scene.The dripping of water from their suits was the only sound.
Rook finally moved, kneeling beside Kes. He closed the man’s eyes with two fingers, his touch surprisingly gentle.His head bowed for a second.
When he looked back at Andromeda, his gray eyes were flat, hardened by the kind of loss that doesn’t hurt anymore, it just is. He gestured to the power cell, then to the silent forest, the lake, the unseen drone, the entire damn planet waiting to digest them.
“Alright, Voss,” he said, his voice quiet and utterly exhausted.“We’re alive. Now what?”
The silence after his question was thick, broken only by the faint, ominous hum of the planet and the drip of water from Andromeda’s suit onto the rocks.Kes’s blank stare was a fresh indictment. Now what?The question echoed in the hollow space her certainty used to occupy.
She walked past Rook, past the body, toward the power cell. Her fingers, clumsy in their damaged gloves, traced the status indicators.“This is intact.Seventy percent charge. It’s compatible with my suit’s systems, and the beacon.” Her voice was all business, a weak shield against the scene behind her.“Great. We send up a flare so whatever Grendel sent can come finish the job properly.” Rook didn’t move from Kes’s side. His shoulders were slumped, but his hands were clenched into tight fists on his knees.
“Or,” Andromeda said, pulling the cell free with a grunt, “we use the charge to reactivate my suit’s primary systems.Get the environmental seals back to a hundred percent.Scan for a stable location. Wait them out.”
“Wait out a corporate search team on a planet that glows in the dark and has drones in the water?” He finally stood, turning to face her. The cut on his forehead was a dark line against the ash on his skin.“That’s your calculus? Hide and hope?”
“It’s better than your plan, which seems to be stand here and blame me until something eats us.” She hefted the cell, its weight a solid promise. “We’re engineers, Rook.We solve problems.This is a problem. The variables are hostile atmosphere, hostile fauna, hostile competition. Solution: find or create a controlled environment.”
A new sound cut through the low hum—a distant, methodical whine, growing closer.A search pattern.The remaining drone.
“Controlled environment,” Rook repeated, his eyes darting to the treeline. The cocky pilot was gone, stripped away by the crash and the blood on the rocks. What remained was sharp, desperate, and looking at her with a naked, grudging need for her to be right. “Fine. Where?”
Her implant feed was still corrupted, but the suit’s basic geological scanner was coming back online as she hastily rigged the power cell’s leads to her wrist port. A simple ground-penetrating pulse.It lanced out, a quick shockwave through the bedrock. The return data scrolled across her vision, crude and full of noise.
But one anomaly was clear. Not fifty meters from their position, past the creek bed and under a heavy overhang of welded rock and thorny blue creepers, the scan showed a void.A chamber. And leading to it, a narrow, natural fissure.“There.” She pointed, disconnecting the leads. “Subsurface cavity.Stable rock. One entrance, easily defended.”
The drone’s whine pitched higher.It was searching the crash site, would find their trail.Would find them.No more words. Rook gave Kes’s body one last, lost look, then grabbed the survival kit and med-pack from the open locker. Andromeda tucked the power cell under her arm, its edges biting into her ribs.They moved.The overhang was a mess of volcanic slag and twisted roots. The fissure was a dark, vertical slash in the rock face, partially obscured. It exhaled a cool, dank breath that smelled of wet stone and something else, something old and dormant. It was barely shoulder-width.“Ladies first,” Rook muttered, his eyes still on the sky.
She didn’t hesitate.Turning sideways, she edged into the darkness. The rock snagged at her torn suit, pressed against the power cell. The light from the twin suns faded to a sliver, then vanished. Her suit’s damaged headlamp flickered, died, sparked once, and cast a single wobbly beam ahead.It revealed a rough tunnel sloping down.
Rook squeezed in behind her, his breathing loud in the confined space. They shuffled forward for twenty meters, the ceiling lowering until they were hunched over.Then the tunnel opened abruptly.
The chamber was small, maybe five meters across.The air was still and cold. Her headlamp beam swept over smooth, flowstone-covered walls, a floor of fine sediment. And in the center, nestled in the sediment, were objects that were not rock.A few rusted metal containers, labels long gone. A frayed length of synthetic rope. And a plastic crate, its lid cracked, filled with empty ration wrappers from a standard-issue survival brand discontinued a decade ago.
“We’re not the first to crash here,” Rook said quietly, his voice absorbed by the earth.
Andromeda’s beam moved to the far wall. There, scratched into the flowstone with a knife or a sharp rock, was a message.The letters were ragged, gouged deep.
G. DYNAMICS LIED.THEY WATCH FROM ABOVE.THEY HIDE UNDERGROUND.
The last word was underlined three times, the final stroke so deep it had chipped the stone.
A new sound filtered down from the tunnel they’d entered—the high, searching whine of the drone. It was at the fissure entrance, probing. The beam of a spotlight swept across the opening, casting fleeting, monstrous shadows on the chamber wall before passing on.
In the sudden, profound dark that followed, Andromeda heard only their breathing and the slow drip of water somewhere deeper in the earth. They were hidden.They were underground.
But the message on the wall stared back, a silent scream in the gloom. They were not alone, and their hiding place was already a grave for someone else’s hope.The controlled environment felt less like a solution and more like a trap they had willingly entered. The hum of the planet was fainter here, muffled by tons of rock, but it was still there, in the bones of the world and now, in theirs.