The

  shouldered through the jungle, its damaged anti-grav whining with each meter. Chen Feng's hands rested lightly on the manual control yokes, his knuckles whitening as he navigated around a fallen tree.

  Alina Ludwig sat in the commander's cupola, her helmet off, sweat carving pale trenches through the grime that caked her cheekbones. The emergency lights cast the compartment in bloody crimson, painting shadows that made her hollowed eyes look like pits. She scanned the terrain through the cracked optical sight, her breath fogging the lens with each exhale.

  "We're two kilometers out," she announced, her voice stripped of its usual fire, reduced to tactical precision. "Thermal shows capitalist heat signatures concentrated in that pre-collapse warehouse complex. Likely an Erebus forward operating position."

  Chen grunted. "Scan for vehicles. Specifically, motorcycles."

  Alina adjusted the scanner, the faint blue glow reflecting in her eyes. "I'm seeing approximately twenty-three vehicles. Mostly trucks and other civilian vehicles. One motorcycle is missing from their motor pool."

  A tense silence settled between them. The only sounds were the groaning metal of their vehicle and the drip of acidic condensation from the ceiling. Chen's right hand moved to his thigh pouch with practiced stealth—a motion too quick, too rehearsed. His fingers worked the magnetic clasp with deliberate precision despite the fine tremor in his wrist—a tremor he'd mastered hiding until this moment. He extracted a small, unlabeled canister, popped the lid with his thumb, and dry-swallowed two grey hexagonal pills—twice his usual protocol. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly as the bitter compounds hit his tongue.

  He thought he was quick, stealthy even.

  He wasn't.

  Alina had seen everything in the flickering emergency light. Her gaze locked onto his shaking hands as they returned to the controls.

  "Chen," she said, her voice low and dangerous. "Your hands are shaking. Are those... the pills from the brigade sickbay? What are those?"

  Chen didn't look at her. "Not now, Alina. My tremors won't affect the mission. Focus on the scanners. It's need-to-know basis."

  "You're taking drugs," she pressed, leaning forward. "Since when do you need medication? Who administrated them? Are you sick and why didn’t you tell me?"

  Chen's jaw tightened. "What I'm going to tell you is that Flora's life depends on us maintaining operational focus. Everything else is secondary."

  Alina opened her mouth to argue, but Chen cut her off with a sharp gesture. "Look. The main communications array on their perimeter. See it? Snapped clean off during the earthquake. They're blind and deaf."

  Hesitantly, Alina forced her attention to the scanner. "…You're right. Their corporate infrastructure is down. But they might have contingency protocols—"

  "Test it," Chen ordered. "Try to patch into their frequency. See if they're broadcasting anything."

  Alina keyed the comms panel, her fingers moving with practiced efficiency despite the burns on her knuckles. Static hissed through the speakers, thick and soupy.

  "Nothing but noise," she confirmed. "They can't transmit a signal through this foliage with their main antenna down." She paused, adjusting the scanner.

  “Missing bike… the dots connected, they’ve sent a physical courier,” he said, the words flat, final. “They know their comms are dead. They’re not stupid enough to rely on burst-transmission through static.”

  Alina grunted, a sound that was half-approval, half-bitter memory. “Our revolutionary heroes during the Liberation War did the same. When the capitalist ex-rulers started scraping our social medias, monitoring our messages and posts…” She trailed off, a dark smirk twisting her lips. “We went analog. Sent kids on bicycles with microfilm sewn into their collars. One false alarm could get you purged. So, we learned to trust silence.”

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  Chen didn’t respond. His gaze had drifted to the secondary screen—a live feed from one of Alina’s

  drones, hovering in the skeletal rafters of the ruined warehouse. The thermal overlay flickered erratically, its signal stuttering in and out.

  Alina Ludwig manipulated the controls for her recon drones. "I'm deploying the Rabes for overwatch. Need to get a proper layout of their... what the hell?" She frowned at a flickering display.

  “One of your drones is glitching, intermittent signal loss.” he noted.

  “I know,” Alina snapped. “Electromagnetic ghosts from the quake. Or maybe the locals wired old microwave emitters into their scrap fences. Either way, it’s unreliable.”

  Alina squinted, studying the thermal overlay, then a cluster of heat signatures near the camp’s periphery caught her attention. Her eyes lingered on the signatures a beat too long. Small. Clustered. Stationary. Not the erratic scurry of scavengers.

  She pushed the thought down.

  Behind Alina, Chen had clearly done brooding over the tactical feed and shifted his attention to mission priority. Chen Feng unbuckled his harness. The movement was stiff, like rusted gears forcing themselves to turn. “I’m going in.”

  Alina’s head snapped toward him. “What?”

  “I’ll infiltrate on foot. You stay with the . Keep it hidden in the tree line, two klicks west of their main gate. Set up fire support. Monitor their movements. And…” He paused, his voice dropping. “Try to get a EW jam on them. I’m concerned they might jury-rig a comms relay. Scavs are clever with scrap.”

  “You’re not going alone,” Alina said, her voice low, dangerous. “Not after what happened to Flora.”

  “I’m not Flora,” Chen replied, meeting her gaze for the first time. His eyes were exhausted, hollow, but sharp—like flint struck in the dark. "Your burns need time to heal. You can barely grip a weapon. I need you here—positioned for extraction, providing fire support if needed, and maintaining drone overwatch. Besides," he added, a ghost of his sardonic smile touching his lips, "someone needs jam their radio—that is our tactical advantage."

  The words hung between them, cruel and necessary.

  Alina looked away, her throat working. She wanted to rage. To scream that he was broken, that his hands shook like an old man’s, that he’d swallowed double his dose like it was candy. But she was a Feldwebel. And the mission was bleeding out.

  He looked at Alina, his eyes catching the red emergency light like hot coals. "The Scavengers think in straight lines. They think in brute force. I don't. I think in shadows and silence."

  Alina's jaw worked silently for a moment. "This isn't a boy scout camp, Chen. This is real. People die—"

  "People already died back there," Chen interrupted sharply. "Flora's life is ticking away every second we debate tactics. I have a plan. A good one. The kind that only works when you're alone."

  He unstrapped himself from the driver's seat, the harness releasing with a soft . The Adamantine plates of his armor hissed and ground as the servos engaged, lifting him from the seat with mechanical precision. He retrieved his Type-95k pulse laser carbine from its rack, checking the power cell with practiced movements.

  “Fine,” she said, her voice tight. “But if you’re compromised, I’m not waiting. I’ll level that camp with autocannon rounds until there’s nothing left but ash.”

  Chen gave a single, slow nod. “Fair.”

  He stood, the servos in his power armor’s legs whining softly as he stretched. For a moment, he was still—and then memory seized him, sharp and sudden.

  Chen blinked. The jungle replaced the Negev. The memory was a ghost, but the lesson was bone-deep.

  He turned back to Alina, his posture shifting—shoulders rolling, spine straightening. The tremor in his hands didn’t vanish… but it was controlled. Subsumed.

  “I have a goddamned plan,” he said, and this time, there was fire in it. Not hope. Not courage. Just the cold, brutal certainty of a man who’d learned long ago that survival was a form of violence.

  “And also, prioritize scanning for vehicles returning from Saint Aurora. Their courier should've reached Erebus by now if their comms were operational.”

  Alina stared at him. She saw the pills. The shaking. The way his pupils were too wide, too black in the dim light; and she wondered, with a chill that had nothing to do with the rain.

  Could she trust him? Not just with the mission—but with Flora's life. The Republic had made her a soldier, but this moment demanded something more human. But before she could voice it, Chen was gone.

  The rear hatch hissed open, then sealed behind him with a soft, final . On the external cam, Alina watched him melt into the undergrowth—a shadow among shadows, his armored silhouette blending into the twisted flora like a scar on living flesh.

  She exhaled, long and slow, then slammed her fist into the console.

  “Alright, you bastard,” she muttered, her fingers flying over the EW suite. “Go be a ghost. But if you get us both killed because you’re too proud to admit you’re coming apart at the seams…”

  She didn’t finish the sentence.

  Instead, she launched two more drones into the toxic sky, their silent rotors vanishing into the bruised purple gloom.

  And in the belly of the , the war machine began to wake.