Chapter 2: War Torn
The world had narrowed to the jagged edge of a crumbling wall, the taste of copper, and the wet, sucking sound of his own breathing. Elias Kane pressed his hand harder against his side. The fabric of his uniform was already saturated, warm and sticky, but the pressure was the only thing keeping the pain at a manageable roar. It didn’t matter. Nothing outside this two-foot span of rubble did.
An artillery shell screamed in from somewhere far off and slammed into the skeleton of a bank tower two hundred meters away. He didn’t flinch. Chunks of reinforced concrete the size of cars sailed through the air, crashing down with earth-shaking thuds. Dust, thick and grey, snowed down on him. He blinked it from his eyes.
He was just so tired.
His helmet comms crackled with static, a chorus of dying voices. “—anyone on Gamma channel? Respond—” “—fall back to the LZ, fall back—" The signal dissolved into a wash of white noise, then a flat, dead hum. Command was gone. The squad was gone. The only company he had left was the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the alien walkers, a sound that vibrated up through the pavement and into his bones.
He let his head loll back against the rough concrete. The sky was a bruise, purpling with toxic twilight and streaked with the contrails of dead aircraft. He tried to focus past the metallic ringing in his ears, past the insistent, drilling pain in his gut. He thought about his quarters on the Lunar Ark. Not the sterile walls, but the holo-frame on the shelf. Lena had taken it the day they’d left Earth, just before the final civilian ships launched. She was standing in their sun-drenched kitchen, back on Earth, smiling with her whole face, one hand resting on the gentle curve of her stomach.
They’d argued about the name. He’d liked Mark. She’d liked Matt.
“Mark-Matt,” he’d joked, his voice thick. “We’ll call ‘em Sal.”
She’d thrown a dishtowel at him, laughing. The memory was so clear he could smell the lemon cleaner she used, see the dust motes dancing in the slanted morning light. A world that didn’t exist anymore.
A searing bolt of energy, vivid green, sheared through the air where his head had been a second before. It vaporized the wall behind him into molten slag. The heat washed over his face, blistering. He slumped lower, his breathing turning into shallow rasps. Every inhale was a knife twisted in his side. He could feel things inside that shouldn’t be moving, shifting. The world started to tip, the edges of his vision softening into a fuzzy grey static.
Just a little longer, he told himself. Just hold the line a little longer.
That was the promise. That was the deal. He volunteered for Project Prometheus, let them pump him full of whatever miracle cocktails they’d dreamed up, not for glory, not for some abstract ideal of humanity. He did it for a ticket. One Lunar evacuation ticket, guaranteed, for his pregnant wife. His duty here, in this hell, bought her safety there, in the cold, quiet void. A fair trade.
Another explosion, closer this time. Shrapnel whined through the air. A piece of it, hot and sharp, embedded itself in his thigh. He grunted, but didn’t even look down. The pain blended into the symphony of the rest.
His hand, slick with his own blood, fumbled for the data-pin on his collar. The emergency beacon. The final upload. He pressed his thumb to the sensor. A weak, blue light pulsed once, twice. It was sending everything—his vitals, his last visual feed, his location. A final report. For the record. For the people who might sift through the ruins later.
The grey static at the edges of his sight was spreading, tunneling his vision. The sounds of the battle began to distort, stretching and slowing, like a record player dying. The walker’s thump-thump-thump became a deep, lulling drumbeat.
He saw Lena’s face again. Not in the holo, but as she was the last time he’d held her, on the departure gantry. Her eyes were red-rimmed, fierce. “You come back to us, Elias Kane,” she’d whispered, her voice breaking. “You find a way.”
“Always,” he’d said, knowing it was a lie they both needed.
He couldn’t feel his legs anymore. A coldness was creeping up from his extremities, a deep, quiet numbness that was better than the pain. He was so, so tired.
He focused on the image of her, on the idea of a child—Mark or Matt—growing up under the artificial sunlights of the Lunar domes. Safe. Unscarred by this wasteland. That was the line. That was what he’d held.
A faint smile touched his cracked lips. The world had faded to a faint murmur, a distant light show. The cold was in his chest now, stilling his heart.
He gathered the last molecule of air in his ruined lungs, forcing it out in a husky, wet whisper, each word a mountain to climb.
“For… M-.”
His breath left him in a long, quiet sigh. The light in his eyes guttered and went out. His body, propped against the wall, went slack.
On his collar, the data-pin’s blue light continued to pulse for another seven seconds, dutifully transmitting the final packets of sensory data, the last flickers of his cognitive patterns, the fading echo of his vitals. Then, with the last of its stored power, it performed its final protocol. It encrypted the data stream, packaged it with the subject identifier [KANE, ELIAS - PROMETHEUS, STATUS: DECEASED], and shot it like a desperate, digital ghost into the chaotic rubble of the planet’s networked ruins.
Then it too went dark.
The battle moved on, leaving his body in the sudden, relative quiet of the devastated city.