Chapter 19: Ender
The name hung in the charged air, a fragile thing amidst the sulfur and ruin. Recognition was a physical blow, driving the breath from Ren’s lungs. The weathered face, so like the ghost in the hologram, was now live flesh, etched with a pain no static image could capture.
“Father?” The word was a foreign artifact, dislodged from a deep, sealed place. It felt childish on his tongue.
Hiro Ikawi’s eyes, dark pools of a bottomless weariness, drank in the sight of his son. A muscle in his jaw twitched. He seemed about to speak, to bridge the ten-year chasm with something—an apology, an explanation, a warning.
The attack came from the blind spot.
It was a silent, oily black streak, coalescing from the shadow of a fractured support column. Not a creature of mass and hunger, but one of predation and precision. A stalking-limb anomaly, all blade-like appendages and a central maw ringed with vibrating needles.
It moved with terrifying speed, a sculptor of silent death. Its target was the vulnerable human in the open cockpit.
“Behind you!” Ren screamed, the words shredding his throat.
Hiro’s veteran instincts were a microsecond too slow, slowed by the emotional tempest. He began to turn, his hand fumbling for the helmet. The anomaly’s leading limb, a whip of condensed shadow, lashed out. It didn’t aim to pierce the armored suit, but to maim the pilot.
It connected with a sickening, wet crunch against Hiro’s exposed temple, just as the helmet sealed.
The exosuit shuddered, a giant struck not by force, but by the sudden neural disconnect of its pilot. The brilliant blue light of its optical sensor flickered, dimmed. The suit listed to one side, a metal colossus going slack.
The anomaly scuttled up the suit’s leg, needle-mouth seeking the seam of the cockpit hatch.
Ren was frozen, a scream trapped in his chest. This wasn’t happening. Not now. Not after a single word.
A searing, cobalt-blue energy beam cut the air. It was quieter than the cannon, a focused lance of pure destruction. It struck the anomaly square in its core, vaporizing the shadowy flesh in a burst of actinic light and a squeal that died instantly. The smell of ionized ozone and burnt null-matter flooded the space.
Another Exosuit landed with a ground-shaking thud twenty yards away. It was a newer Mark-III, its armor sleeker, painted in the deep blue and gunmetal gray of the Academy’s rapid response unit. Its sensor light pulsed with calm efficiency.
“Pilot down. Medic squad to my coordinates,” a calm, filtered voice stated from its external speakers. The newcomer turned its formidable gaze toward Ren, then back to the stricken Mk-I. It took a defensive position, its arm-mounted plasma caster sweeping the surrounding ruins.
Ren didn’t wait. He was moving, scrambling over shattered concrete and hot metal toward his father’s suit. The massive knee joint was level with his head. He could see the cockpit hatch, slightly ajar where Hiro had failed to fully secure it. With a strength born of pure panic, he grabbed a handhold and hauled himself up, his boots slipping on the smooth armor.
He peered inside.
The cockpit was a womb of soft, bioluminescent displays and the hum of dormant systems. Hiro lay slumped in the pilot’s harness, his head lolling to the side. A trickle of blood, dark as oil, seeped from his hairline down his temple, tracing the deep lines of his face. His breathing was shallow, a raspy sound beneath the medical monitors now chirping a frantic, dissonant rhythm inside the helmet.
Ren’s hands trembled. He reached out, his fingers brushing the cool, curved surface of the helmet’s visor. He couldn’t remove it—he knew the protocols—but the helplessness was a vise around his heart.
Hiro’s eyes fluttered open. They were unfocused, swimming with concussion and pain. They found Ren’s face, so close to his own. The man’s lips moved behind the visor. The external speaker, still active, crackled and emitted a weak, broken version of his voice.
“…Ren.”
“Don’t talk. Help is coming,” Ren said, his voice surprisingly steady, a thin veneer over a chasm of terror.
Hiro’s bloodied hand rose weakly, tapping the visor as if he could touch his son’s cheek. His gaze was intense, pleading, cutting through the haze of injury. “Promise me,” he whispered, the speaker distorting the words into a digital ghost of a voice.
“Promise you what?” Ren leaned closer.
“Be… better.” The words were a spent breath. Hiro’s eyes held his, a lifetime of silent regret and desperate hope condensed into a single, loaded statement. “Promise… you’ll be better.”
His eyes rolled back, and his body went fully limp in the restraints. The medical chirp escalated to a sustained, urgent whine.
“Father!” Ren pounded on the cockpit frame. “Hey! Stay with me!”
The thunder of grav-engines announced the med-sled’s arrival. It descended in a whirl of dust, white and red lights painting the rubble in frantic strokes. Figures in sealed hazard suits swarmed the Mk-I, their movements crisp and impersonal. They pushed Ren aside with a firm, “Cadet, clear the area.”
He stumbled back, landing hard on the broken ground. He watched, numb, as they extracted his father’s limp form with efficient care, loaded him onto the sled, and sealed the doors. The sled lifted, turned, and shot toward the Academy’s medical spire, its siren a fading wail.
In its wake, a hollow silence settled, punctuated only by the distant, methodical thumps of the blue Mark-III securing the perimeter. The giant, paternal form of the Mk-I exosuit stood mute and empty, a shell now, its sensor dark.
The emptiness inside Ren was total. Then, a voice cut through it.
“Ren! A little help?!” Kai’s shout, strained and sharp, yanked him back to reality.
He turned. There, across the gaping fissure, Kai and Luna still clung to the light pole. Luna’s knuckles were white, her face a mask of concentration. Kai’s usual humor was gone, replaced by raw fear. The pole groaned, its base loosened by the earlier collapse.
His father’s words echoed in the hollow of his skull. Be better.
The interpretation was instantaneous, visceral. He wasn’t there. He couldn’t save his mother. He was just a kid, powerless, watching his father get torn away. Be better. It wasn’t a wish for him to be a better son. It was a veteran’s dying plea for a better successor. A legacy, passed from broken father to unproven son in a cascade of blood and silence. His father’s secret desire for him to avoid this life was a nuance lost in the trauma of the moment.
A cold clarity washed over Ren, burning away the shock, the fear, the years of feeling small. It left behind a hardened purpose, sharp and singular.
He looked at the empty Mk-I. He looked at his friends, stranded. He looked at the blue Mark-III, a bastion of order in the chaos.
The decision crystallized, absolute.