Henryk

  The Sons of Mars, in full force, marched with Maelia toward their transport ship. Their Warcaskets were onboard—but not the one Henryk needed.

  He’d ditched his tie somewhere back in the chaos. His dress shoes slapped the ground, every step heavy. The unbuttoned jacket trailed him like a tattered flag. Overhead, the artificial sky blazed red, painting everyone in the warm hue of firelight. They were all running—running under a blood-colored dome pretending to be sky.

  It looked like Pompeii must have. Right before the ash came.

  Henryk ran. Through crowds that surged like currents, past faces blank with panic, past children howling for parents already gone. That was when he heard it—the sound of the world tearing. Like a million windows shattering at once.

  He halted. Everyone did.

  The artificial sky cracked open.

  And behind it—was the real one. The void. Black, ancient, endless. It sucked everything upward like God had turned on a cosmic vacuum. Whole towers lifted. Steel twisted. Neon signs flickered and vanished. Screams bled into the wind. A cathedral's steeple bent backward, then snapped like a toothpick. It was biblical.

  Henryk’s legs kept moving. His body surged forward on instinct alone. Toward the dock.

  That’s where the Stargazer was. It had been undergoing final tuning, getting prepped for transport after the speech. Well, so much for the speech. So much for transport.

  And so much for the plan.

  He darted through the sliding doors of the dock. The interior was full of noise and motion. Families dragging bags, engineers cursing, security shouting into radios. Henryk drew looks, not for who he was, but for going the wrong way.

  They were leaving.

  He was coming back.

  The word echoed again in his skull: hell.

  That first mission with the Sons of Mars, it was supposed to be a supply run. In and out. Edward had promised it. But then GrimGar showed up. Full invasion. Then Oceana—the papers were green, everything was legal. Didn’t stop them from being shot at. Then the Mathias op. Total failure. A dead child. A murdered heir. And now? They’d failed again. The speech was in ruins. Maelia’s broadcast had ended in fire.

  Hell.

  Henryk reached the center of the lobby, his gaze whipping side to side. Nurses cradled wounded students. Medics dragged crushed limbs. The air reeked of burnt cloth, panic, and blood. Rubble littered the floor. Somewhere a baby cried. Somewhere else, glass began to crack.

  That sound. That sound.

  He turned—fast.

  The lobby windows were spider-webbing, lines etched in slow, terrible motion.

  A heartbeat passed. Then his mind went white.

  The sixth sense lit him up from the inside—every nerve ending sparking. Like touching lightning.

  “Get away from the doors and windows—now!” Henryk roared, the force of it cutting through the static. Heads turned. A few gasped.

  “Downstairs! Escape pods! The battle’s gonna tear open more holes, the Block is coming apart!”

  That got them moving.

  Screams ripped through the lobby as the crowd surged. Henryk led the charge, feet pounding the stairwell as people stampeded down behind him. Every breath was fire.

  The voices of the Knights of Mars echoed in his head, all the pride and bullshit they used to pump him full of. Great honor, ancient blood, warriors of legend. All hollow. If not for their weapons and history, they were barely more than costumed boys with egos.

  Edward—was he even a leader?

  He wasn’t a serpent like Zephyr. He showed guilt. Regret. That reluctance made him human, but was it enough? Was he too compromised? Henryk remembered what Bea had told him. The arrangement. The blackmail. The fact Edward hadn’t just stumbled into his life—he had sought him out, deliberately.

  And then there was the blood. The stain on his uniform. Crimson, dark, soaked in.

  Isaac was dead. August and Joseph were missing. Who would be next?

  Henryk thought of his mother. His sisters. He’d wanted to leave once. That thought wasn’t just back.

  It was clawing its way into his chest.

  He charged down the staircase. Every level descended brought more chaos—explosions cracking like thunder behind him, pressure rolling through the walls like an earthquake in slow motion. The docks stretched out like a half-finished prayer. Rows of hangars framed in steel ribs and flickering emergency lights. To his left, one wall flickered with a translucent blue field, and beyond it—space. Pure, untamed, howling with absence.

  Henryk ran harder.

  His arms and legs flailed like loose wiring as his boots pounded across the deck. Escape pods shot out in bursts like muzzle flashes, like the station was spitting teeth. Ahead, students scrambled into test-type mobile suits—most of them half-complete, barely functioning. Anything that moved, anything that flew, they were taking. All of them fleeing this doomed wing.

  But Henryk’s mind wasn’t on them.

  His eyes widened.

  Black mobile suits. Out near the edge of the Block’s horizon. And something else. Something wrong. Something familiar.

  It sank into his bones like cold water.

  “M-Mag’s…?” he muttered.

  And out in that void, Mag’s eyes opened inside her cockpit.

  Bright control lights danced across her face, each one like a slap. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t breathe. Her body folded into the flight seat, encased in the hard embrace of a high-spec pressure suit. Behind her, the gleam of secondary controls shimmered. She hadn’t moved.

  But Henryk felt her.

  That was the thing. He felt her. Like gravity. Like guilt.

  She was out there.

  “Mag’s!” Carmen’s voice barked through her comms. Her tone was a whip crack. “They're on the other side of the wreckage! Push forward!”

  Mag’s was already ahead of her. Her Warcasket extended both arms, launching its drones from their racks. Four angular drones—two mounted beneath her knee-plates, two from shoulder pods—blasted forward. Each bristled with micro-missiles and rotary beam repeaters. The drones zipped out into space like hornets, weaving around hunks of debris.

  She didn’t even open her eyes.

  Instead, her frequency took over. An old trick. Her Warcasket’s neural net sang in resonance with her mind. She felt her drones like fingers.

  The enemy didn’t even see them coming.

  A scream tore across open comms as the first drone impaled a command unit, slamming its barrel into the cockpit. Mag’s squeezed the trigger. Rapid fire. No mercy. The enemy pilot died in a burst of static and light. Carmen and the rookie burst from cover, cackling as they rode the shockwave.

  Mag’s recalled her drones in formation, circling back like trained vultures. The Block loomed before them, wreathed in flame, shadows moving through it like ghosts. They dove.

  Back toward the inferno.

  Henryk’s boots hit another hangar floor, his eyes wild. “Where the fuck are you!” he bellowed, breath ragged.

  The world exploded again.

  He went airborne, crashing into a wall of crates, struggling to his knees. Alarms screamed around him.

  “Gravity malfunction. Mal—” the voice died.

  Everything went quiet.

  Then Henryk was floating.

  The world shimmered with zero-g light, an eerie blue overtaking the red. His limbs drifted like kelp. He twisted in the air, mouth open.

  Then he saw it.

  The machine.

  The one he’d built from blueprints, piece by cursed piece.

  And he grinned. Bloody and wild.

  “Better than the fucking simulations,” he whispered.

  It was docked to the wall, chained like a beast. Its armor was painted in garish yellow—the kind used on crash dummies and prototype units. But it didn’t look experimental. It looked hungry. No external pack. No third-party gear lashed to its spine. This model had something else.

  An internal transformation system. One designed and tuned by Henryk himself.

  It was leaner than most Warcaskets, but taller—more upright, like a knight forced to wear a predator’s skin. The shoulder guards flared like a wolf baring its teeth. The chest was blocky but sleek, ribbed with armor that peeled back when the machine folded into assault mode. Its rifle wasn’t elegant—it was brutal. Boxy. Heavy-barreled. Designed for anti-ship combat. The shield mounted to the forearm looked more like a slab of riot armor, scorched from test runs.

  It was the MTW-Stargazer 02. A war child born from necessity. Forged in the guts of the Block, stitched together with ambition, caffeine, and guilt.

  And Henryk knew exactly what came next.

  Piper

  Piper wiped a string of damp orange hair from her bionic eye, the strands clinging to the alloy socket like ivy on stone. The eye always itched when she sweated, especially around the implant seal. The sensation annoyed her—and worse, it reminded her of Henryk. Of the power he’d once held. Still held. The scar didn’t let her forget.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  She pushed into a rec room tucked in the station’s east quarter, half-expecting it to be empty. It wasn’t. The room buzzed with cheap energy: clacking pool balls, low-grade laughter, holographic gunfire from three different gaming consoles. A stale smell of processed food hung in the air like a wet cloth.

  Soldiers from Jesus’s unit lounged across couches and beanbags, lost in games, snacks, and jokes too small for the lives they led. Piper didn’t smile. Her boots clipped hard against the floor as she made for the tiny kitchen cubicle, weaving through soda cans and discarded ration wrappers. Her expression grew darker with each step.

  “…come on, guys. What the fuck?” she snapped, slamming the mini-fridge shut. Silence rippled. Heads turned. Joysticks fell quiet.

  She held up a crumpled brown paper lunch bag like a flag of surrender. “I got this planetside. One day ago. One goddamn day. You know how hard that is when you’re on rotation?”

  The bag was empty.

  “And not only did someone eat it,” she growled, shaking the limp thing like it had insulted her ancestors, “they had the balls to write ‘Sorry Piper’ on it. In pen.”

  She glared at the circle of uniforms. No one moved.

  Two girls at the far end barely looked up from their phones, their screens buzzing. Their eyes widened—but they said nothing.

  “This is the third time this has happened,” Piper went on, voice sharpening. “I get that most of you fresh-spawn haven’t earned a trip down yet. I’ve been nice. You try this with Zephyr, you’d be floating outside the hull. Jesus would’ve had your ass doing push-ups in zero-G till your ribs cracked. So maybe I should do that.”

  A few of them chuckled, unsure if she was joking.

  She wasn’t.

  Piper’s eyes narrowed as they scanned the room. A skinny recruit with crumbs on his lips tried to casually brush them off. His eyes were locked onto hers. He wasn’t breathing.

  “We’re a good unit,” Piper said, and her voice softened just enough to become dangerous. “We handle things that most people in the system don’t even want to think about. So this—” she held up the bag again “—this is kindergarten-level bullshit. But I believe in redemption.”

  She folded her arms.

  “I’ll give the person who ate my sandwich a second chance. Come forward now, and I won’t be mad.”

  The room held its breath.

  The boy with the crumbs began to rise, sweating like a busted pipe.

  And then—

  A scream.

  One of the girls bolted upright, her phone slipping from her hands. Her mouth opened, but no words came—just another shriek.

  “What the hell—?” Piper’s voice cut short.

  The girl pointed at the screen with a trembling hand, her whole frame already convulsing with sobs. “Turn it on,” she cried. “Turn on the TV. Please—turn it on.”

  Piper was already moving.

  She pointed at the nearest guy with a paused game on the screen. “You—TV. Now.”

  He hesitated, controller in hand. Then the second player beside him, already pale, snatched it and started cycling channels.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Then the feed hit.

  The room drew in like a fist.

  All eyes turned toward the three flat screens mounted on the far wall. What they saw wasn’t footage. It was a funeral pyre. The Block—their Block—was burning. Columns of fire arced up like claws. Mobile suits spiraled through space like flailing gods, explosions igniting like breath held too long.

  Two of the younger cadets sat cross-legged on the floor, silent now, their faces lit orange by the fire on screen. Reflected in the glass of their glasses. Flames. Screams. Escape pods. Gunfire.

  “Holy shit… is that the Block?” someone muttered from the cluster around the TV. “What the fuck happened to it?”

  “Online’s saying engine failure. Or a terrorist attack.”

  “Engine failure? You dumbass, it’s in the middle of the system, not some backwater freighter.”

  “I didn’t say I was right, asshole!”

  And then the shoving started. Elbows, curses, a shoulder to the jaw. The knot of soldiers started to spiral.

  “Enough!” Piper barked, voice like a crack of lightning. She drove both palms into their shoulders, pushing them apart like a schoolteacher breaking up a fight with a belt. “Jesus, you two fight like preschoolers on synth-jello.”

  They backed off, eyes on their boots. Piper brushed past them, all fire and muscle memory, and looked up at the screen.

  Her breath hitched.

  The Block—the Block—was bleeding fire. A place she’d walked through a dozen times, its sterile white corridors, its bustling hangars and massive lecture halls… now reduced to a flaming corpse hanging in orbit. It looked like Oceana all over again. That same sky. That same orange hell. The way the world just changed, all at once.

  And then the sirens started.

  A hollow wail shook through the ceiling, rolling through the lounge like a predator’s breath.

  “Huh? Now?” someone asked, too quiet to be heard.

  Piper’s face had already changed. The woman who had been yelling about a sandwich was gone. What was left was all edge and instinct. She tapped her comms.

  “That’s the emergency siren,” she said, moving fast. “Grab your gear. All of it.”

  “What the hell’s going on?” one of her squadmates called.

  “This isn’t GrimGar,” Piper said coldly. “And that sure as hell wasn’t a damn engine failure.” She stole one last look at the burning sky on the TV screen. The lounge behind her had emptied, just like that. No more games. No more jokes. Just war.

  Her radio buzzed.

  “…reporting,” she said, already moving toward the armory.

  “Piper.” It was Jesus. His voice was tight, locked down with command. “You and your squad are first out. Get to the Martian Bascinet. Boosters have been removed. It’s in standard orientation again.”

  Piper almost grinned. “Good. I wasn’t feeling the back boosters anyway.”

  Jesus didn’t laugh, but she knew he would have, if the situation allowed.

  “Like I said, we noted your complaints. But right now I need you in the sky. Everyone else is gearing up. You’re the vanguard.”

  She paused. Her eyes narrowed. “Understood, but… what the hell’s going on, Jesus? The news feed looked like a massacre. Is this really a terrorist attack?”

  There was silence on the other end. The kind that made the skin crawl.

  “…we don’t know who,” he finally said. “But there’s a confirmed team of at least seven to ten Warcaskets. New builds. No registered callsigns. Black suits. No ID. And they’re armed to the teeth.”

  Piper’s jaw clenched, her teeth grinding.

  Jesus continued. “Reports keep coming in. We’re assuming coordinated. Could be more. No one’s confirmed how they got that deep inside. Be ready for anything. You’ll go out in the Bascinet. The others will follow in Pipperds.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, locking her tone back into that calm soldier’s mask.

  And still, she could hear it in his voice, just the ghost of a smile.

  “Happy hunting.”

  Marcus

  When the Warcasket drifted into view, Marcus didn’t call it by name. Not out loud. Not even in thought.

  The Stargazer.

  No. Henryk’s machine.

  And Marcus made it his quiet mission not to speak that name.

  W-Wilson. That was the boy’s name. Just a kid still wet behind the ears, floating beside the thing like it was a goddamn coffin in space.

  The Stargazer was belly-up, its armor glinting faintly in the far-off glow of the Block, the ghostly light catching on its angular body, its wing binders fanned like a hawk at rest, and its weapon mounts glistening with dormant promise. The machine was terrifying even in sleep.

  “Did he really make this?” Marcus whispered, not expecting an answer. He was soaking it in, every inch of it. A part of him wanted to spit. Another part wanted to reach out and touch it.

  “Y-yeah, so… they’re all safe in there?” Wilson’s voice cracked through comms. Marcus could hear the tightness in it. Fear braided into every word like a frayed rope about to snap.

  Iman nodded. She was holding onto the edge of the container, while Wilson kept one gloved hand clutched to a rail tethered in open space.

  “There’s enough air to last until rescue comes,” Iman said, her voice more composed than she felt. “We’re far from the worst of it. We just have to hold on.”

  Wilson exhaled, but it wasn’t relief. More like guilt purging itself in pieces. “When everything went to hell… I ran. I grabbed the Stargazer and launched. I thought I was helping. But the moment I did, everything fell apart.”

  He clenched his fingers into a fist. “I should’ve stayed behind. Helped more people. I’m a coward.”

  Iman’s voice came flat, merciless. “You’d be a coward if you stayed and let your siblings die.” She wrapped one arm around herself, shielding against the chill of memory. “You want to beat yourself up? Fine. But your family’s alive because of you. You’re breathing because of that Warcasket. So don’t act like your choices were nothing.”

  Wilson sniffled. The tears didn’t fall, but the shame was still loud in his breath. “W-what are you planning?”

  Iman exhaled. “I’d like to kick some ass and even the score. But I don’t have a Warcasket, so I’m staying put.” She raised her hand like she was surrendering to reason. “We wait. Rescue's on its way. We’re far enough from the fight. For now.”

  Wilson stared out across the black. The Block had become a distant red smear now, flickering with firelight and chaos. The stars were cold and still, but something out there felt like it was watching them. Moving closer.

  He turned to the Stargazer’s dormant eyes. Then back to Iman.

  “What if,” Wilson said slowly, “I let you borrow Henryk’s Warcasket?”

  Iman’s eyes flicked to him. Marcus turned his head too, already grimacing.

  Wilson pushed forward. “It’s top of the line. Next-gen Martian engineering. You pilot it, do your thing, and when it’s over… you give it back. You win us some breathing room. I keep my family safe.”

  Iman didn’t respond. She just looked at him.

  Because deep down, there was a scream building in her chest. Not from anger. From memory.

  All the ways Henryk haunted her. His voice, his hands, his silence. The taste of that night and the cold that came after.

  And now she was supposed to climb into his machine. Ride it like a lifeline. Kill with it. Survive by it.

  How could she face him after that?

  How do you say thank you to the ghost of someone who already tore you in half?

  She gritted her teeth, hands flexing at her sides—but before she could let the fury spill, Marcus’s hand dropped onto her shoulder.

  “I-Iman,” he said, voice low and urgent, “if this is the only mobile suit left… you’re the only one who can do this.”

  “With Henryk’s machine?” she snapped, practically spitting his name.

  Marcus didn’t flinch. “This isn’t the time to act like a little girl.”

  “Oh that’s fucking rich,” Iman growled. “Somebody’s being a little girl by not saying what they really feel. Pussy on the side got your tongue, right, Marcus?”

  His face didn’t move. Flat. Weathered. But Wilson was between them now, nervous and twitchy, eyes flicking like a kid caught between two feuding wolves.

  “H-hey, I didn’t mean anything by it,” Wilson stammered, arms half-up like he was dodging blame. “I’m the last person who should be pushing anybody into a fight. I’m a total—”

  “That’s not what this is about!” Iman snapped, and Wilson instinctively shrank back.

  Her eyes locked onto Marcus, blazing. “I’m doing this for me. Because your friend? He’s not good at mobile suits. The time I saw him in combat?” She scoffed. “Sloppy. Atrocious.”

  Marcus just chuckled. Not loud. Just enough to raise her blood pressure another twenty degrees.

  “Then prove him wrong,” he said, voice like steel dragging on stone. “Show him you can outpilot him in his own machine.”

  That stopped her.

  Something mean and hungry curled at the corners of her lips. A grin that could gut a man. “Now that,” she said, “I like the sound of.”

  Moments later, she was in the cockpit. All black. Still. Deactivated.

  Outside, Wilson hovered at the open hatch, the stars his only cover. Iman’s fingers flipped through switches, her grin closed-lipped but coiled with anticipation.

  “So,” she muttered, “this is Henryk’s new toy.”

  “It’s more than a toy,” Wilson said, voice coming through her comms. “It’s packed with next-gen systems, Martian-developed tech. Full innovations across the board.”

  Iman just huffed. Her grin didn’t fade. Her fingers danced over the console. Slowly, the machine hummed to life around her. Panels lit up in amber and white. The cockpit bloomed with detail.

  Her eyes widened.

  She hadn’t realized, in the darkness, how lush the interior was. There was only one pilot seat, but the space could’ve fit more—like a king’s throne room masquerading as a death machine. The entire field of vision, front to back, wrapped in 360-degree panoramic resolution. 8K crisp. Unflinching.

  For a heartbeat, it was just her and Wilson, floating in silence above a burning world.

  “…woah.”

  Even her hate couldn’t hide the awe. Her brown eyes drank in the stars, the crimson plumes of fire pouring from the ruptured Block. Explosions still belched from the wounded station. Light flickered across her face like a funeral pyre set to music.

  “What is this?” she asked, half-whisper.

  “Pre-Fall Martian tech,” Wilson said, his voice barely keeping up with her wonder. “This system was meant to go into the mass-production series. Never made it.”

  Iman’s eyes tracked left and right, scanning the suit’s input as she turned her head, watching the world follow seamlessly. “No blind spots… I can see everything.”

  Wilson chuckled. “Yeah. Full field awareness. Even behind you.”

  A smile threatened the corners of her mouth again. She hated how much she liked this.

  Her gaze dropped to her left thigh. “What’s this knob?”

  Wilson blinked. “Transformation control. And the AI sync system.”

  “AI and transformation?” she said, skeptical.

  Wilson rolled his eyes, his boots barely anchored. “Not full-body transformation, just partial shifts. The limbs are designed to fold for speed. The suit merges with submodules to adjust form. Think of it like a fighter jet with limbs. You’ve got the loadout.”

  Iman raised an eyebrow. “That why the legs are shaped like they’re broken?”

  The Warcasket’s calves extended far too straight, too mechanical, like ramming pylons. And beneath them, the heat shimmered like ghostfire from the thruster ports.

  “Exactly,” Wilson said. “That’s ‘Stargazer Mode.’ Fighter config. Slam the throttle and it’ll ride like hell.”

  He hesitated.

  “But… this machine was built specifically for Henryk. His inputs. His reflexes.”

  “He’s not human,” Iman said, deadpan.

  Wilson stared up at her. Iman stared right back.

  “Not fully, anyway,” she added, her voice curling into a smile. “But that’s fine.”

  She reached for the cockpit canopy. “Because I’m not either.”

  The cockpit hissed shut.

  She grabbed the throttle with both hands and slammed it forward.

  The engines roared awake like ancient war drums. The binders on the backpack folded into an X-shape, stabilizers flaring open. Light screamed out of the calves as her entire body was shoved backward into the seat.

  “Hell yeah!” she howled.

  She yanked more power out of the console, cranking the knob to redline. The thrusters shrieked, the frame groaned, but the Stargazer didn’t buckle. It wanted more. It dared her.

  “You can handle more than that, can’t you, big boy?” Iman growled.

  The cockpit rattled. Lights flickered. The suit transformed mid-flight, fins deploying, vents splitting. It was like driving lightning through a coffin.

  Then the sky bent.

  The Stargazer 01 fired into the void like a comet streaking from God’s own hand, a blue streak across the chaos, streaking back toward the Block like vengeance on rails.