“Are you really going to eat that?”

  Ration packs were stacked like freshly minted paper on the steel console station. A lattice of buttons, levers, dials and screens illuminated the two CORE soldiers while they leaned back in the built-in office chairs. Chicken Alfredo, Chili with Beans, Maple Glazed Ham, Chicken Parm, Powdered Pancake, Cheese Tortelini, Creamy Spinach Fettuccine and Strawberry Ice-cream had staked their claim on the desk in a wide selection of frozen and pre-packaged meals that sat discarded in opened plastic trays and containers. The majority of their labels were faded beyond recognition, with expiry dates that were both reassuring and questionably distant.

  A plastic fork waved through the air.

  “Look, we have seven thousand tons of unused rations on this tanker and most of them expire tomorrow.”

  The two cadets relaxed in their blue uniforms with high collars and box-caps. Laminated I.D badges were pinned to their chests with pistols dangling tightly from holsters on their hips.

  “But chili with beans? Really that’s the worst one?

  The guns looked like they’d never been used. However they were certainly proficient at typing.

  She snuck a stubborn glance at the mesh of flash-frozen beef, beans and sloppy tomatoes that had just been microwaved by the other cadet. It’s smell wasn’t bad but the droopy composure gave off the same visual as splattery mud or a handful of red dirt.

  “I’m doing my civic duty, one mouthful at a time!”

  The other soldier rolled her eyes and smiled.

  Waves sloshed against the metal plates of the Aurora’s hull. Over ten feet thick, the armour surrounding the colossal subaircraft carrier had barely seen a dent in its time on the Jannic planet. Corroded scratches and lacerations shone like bulbous scar tissue on its finely painted white exterior. Nanobots and orbital repair stations had stitched the craft back from the brink of scrap countless times in the past five orbit years. In the siege of Qail the entire aft-deck had been sliced by kamikaze fighters to the point it’s crew was kept alive by six vials of oxygen and a prayer. Three orbit years prior, during an engagement with the master’s fleet the ship had been reduced to nothing more than a creaky frame with ash and ADS cannons still smoking from seventy-two hours of consecutive fire. That was of course after it’s ten-thousand-souled supernova-class parent-craft had been ripped to shreds by an ion cannon.

  Inside the well-lit and maze-like halls a skeleton crew maintained what would have once taken a small army.

  “Crazy we’re finally going back huh?”

  “Yeah….. Crazy” the other soldier mimicked.

  The majority of the systems onboard were currently automated. A logsheet displayed on the furthest monitor with a mirage of colours intertwined into code. What two months ago had been nothing short of a lengthly stream of missions parameters, combatants and Jannic assassinations had dwindled down to only a solitary chain code for Hardric’s expedition. It sat like an ink smear on the ledger's static pages, waiting to be swept away so perfection could usher in a new dawn. Only the cleaning and shipping manifest had doubled in size as the two began to prepare the Aurora for it’s own departure the Jannic sea and return to orbit. The young cadet spun in his chair with his headset on the desk infront. More touch screen commands were required but he approved the automated system in a lazy manner with his fingernail brushing against the screen.

  “Do you really think Maddy isn’t going to notice?

  The other cadet shrugged. Substituting sleep for a mixture of cryofreeze had almost halved the age expenditure on the planet’s surface but there would still be a noticeable difference. If it wasn’t for his older appearance, time had played it’s toll in more than one way.

  The Jannic planet was a place that could make the most wildest dreams above quiver. It was a world where magic replaced technology, a place of myth and legend that was held together by a thimble of logic so thin it almost defied perception and threatened to dissipate at the slightest study. The surface was a beautifully terrifying amalgamation of insanity with exposure to creatures, ideas, places, cultures so foreign and fresh to the outside world they merited decades if not centuries of study. Half of his non-combattative assignments had been tramping across endless countryside to collect cultural resources, heritage pieces, species catalogues and artifacts from the primitives for future study upon their return. A surreal experience where they cherished and documented the very same fields, creatures, scrolls and castles torched by super-charged napalm, and chemical strikes.

  “What, that your five years older?” She replied lazily. A pencil flickered between her fingers while she chewed the inside of her mouthin in boredom.

  “Yes, that we’re five years older!! Are you paying attention?”

  “You can always tell her?” the other responded.

  “Yeah like she’ll believe me….I wou..”

  The other cadet wasn’t listening. Her eyes flickered over the live feed from one of the jannic capital cities. Only a small coallesence of pixels was needed for her to recognize the magic enhanced smoke stacks and sleek ordered square streets as part of Wei. She leaned forward to grab control the camera’s flight systems. A few stealth-drones still operated in the surrounding region but most had returned to the Aurora’s deck. The pristine stone roads and looming towers of the medieval metropolis were bustling with a stream of peasants, merchants and a bizarre colourful adventurous world.

  Three months ago she had been tasked with spying on progress in Wei watcher enchantments and reluctantly dwindled most of her time off gambling in the cities dens for means of appeasement. Even dining on the settlements exotic yet equally wondrous cuisine of foreign chicken-tasting animals and magical amplification was a sharp cry forward from the monotony of dry rations or meal-kits. In the end the mission was nothing more than meagre distraction with Wei having lied about the entire feasibility of reverse engineering watchers in the first place, but that hadn’t stopped her team from savouring precious moments offshore.

  She paused for a moment while seeing a familiar face among the crowd. An older white haired merchant stumbled along the cities road with baked goods pushed out for sale from his rickety stall. Freshly minted loaves and mastercrafted pastries lined like books on a shelf, eager to share their aroma with the fresh morning air. His stall was falling apart at best but the lettering for his signs however were decent and well articulated, a feat only found at the hands of the undercover soldier who had painted it for free in a rare act of kindness. The smile on the old man’s face when she first showed him the draft had been more than enough. His eyes had lit up in a feeling of gratitude the outside had almost been forced to shed.

  It wasn’t something she was supposed to do, Hardric would have had a fit, but no matter what the facts stated, it was hard to acknowledge them as subhuman. All these years watching the primitives had almost carved a soft spot in her heart for their bizarre lives. They had hopes, dreams, aspirations, ideals, loved and were loved, the same measures of humor, wit and skepticism as those above. Truth however always hung like a knife at the edge of any conversation with the jannics.

  They were blips on a screen. Tools waiting to be enslaved by an unrelenting enemy. Logic dictates that they should be treated as little more than the creature’s crops, individuals too unimportant and insignificant to save.

  She paused as she wished her other friend was still here. He was funny and knew how to crack a few jokes even in the stiffest of situations. Her eyes trailed towards manifest ledgers, like most of the crew the soldier had already been refrozen to tide down an ever-growing list of supply costs amounted for the return to orbit.

  During the early days of deployment, Hardric had almost fired the two after they stole sixteen jannic swords and assorted armour as memorabilia from their time in service. It likely would have landed them in the stockade if the commander hadn’t let them pass it off as venerable cultural artifacts. Later on they eventually got more relaxed and let the troops keep souvenirs but they were still under lock and key. Granted a veritable hoard of items had been collected in containers and analyzed by the science teams since their entry.

  “You’re lucky you’re not twenty years older like most of the others. Look you were in cryosleep for what a thousand years? You served only five years of active service for that entire time!”

  “They’re gonna notice.” The other replied.

  He dropped his fork as he spoke and a meatball fell on the floor with a splatter. Two autobots emerged and quickly cleaned the stain.

  “She’ll be happy your alive and besides what’s it to her anyway. For Maddy it’s only been like three days? You got sixty-four citations too, that’s an impressive amount of work, when you get ba…..”

  Suddenly, a blip appeared on the console screen. A thin red bar hovered over the a 3D projection of the seven-hundred-meter-long vessel. A veritable scroll of information shot up on the displays side shooting out a hurried list of numbers, protocols and lengthy readings.

  “God, another one”

  The blaring blip seemed to fill the entire room with a swash of red light but still presented itself as more of an inconvenience to the soldiers minds. One of them bent forward to switch the survellience channels away from the sea infront and back to any choice of feed that seemed more interesting or at least non-repetative. The button was sticky and needed to be pressed twice before the change occurred.

  “Wait no I want to watch”

  “Really?” She replied sheepishly.

  “Yeah, I like seeing how far it’s gotten.”

  Outside the safety of the Aurora’s hull a creature swam through the waves. In seconds, the entire sea began to tremble and water splash upwards almost as if to boil. The world stood still as the worm wriggled through the waves, claws like spears slicing into the water.

  A world serpent had arrived.

  Thick scales dripped from the six-hundred-foot tentacle-like structure, each one crusted and bent to intertwine with the other, coarse, hard rock-like skin streaking around it’s tattered body. It’s mouth was the size of a battleship, it’s teeth and eyes likely the product of months of artificial evolution, grown out of puss sacks and crevice nests on the ocean surface. It’s single purpose, bred, designed and fostered from birth, was to kill the Aurora, split open the ship's steel hull and splatter the CORE troops inside like eggs.

  At the bottom of it’s snake-like skin was a slip of colour. Beautiful reflecting scales likely a vestigial remnant from the already gigantic serpent it had been horrifically fashioned. In the traditional world, this would have been one of the sea serpents that roamed the jannic planet. Roughly the twice size of a trading vessel or galleon they would exist solely on vegetation or taste wide swaiths of algae. What lay infront was a monstrosity and twisted vision of that innocent creature. It’s colossal body showed large fractured and jagged fangs spouted from its grainy beak as rows of earth-crunching molars lined the acid-frothing mouth. A throat connected to a mouth that no creature on the Jannic planet could feed, evolutionary attainments and adaptations that would never have arisen from natural causes. It’s teeth slunk forward. Specifically designed and blood-tested to chew through the finest steel. Sharp talons protruded from slender, unnatural hands at the front with a spinous process that fanned in the sun’s effervescent glow. It’s minuscule eyes dotted either side, beady black orbs jutting from patchy layers of moulting skin. Acidic sacks and billions of apical cell tissue lay dormant in it’s throat, waiting to splurch out an unhealthy amount of toxic resin to preform one magnificent spit-filled killshot.

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  Eyes that showed no emotion, no hindrance of sentience stared with passionate fury at what lay infront. The eyes of a machine. Infected eyes from which puss oozed. Three days prior the creature had crushed an entire Wei naval battalion with not so much as a scratch to mar it’s slick bioengineered skin. Ten days prior it had been designed into this world with one soul reason.

  The snake had been made with purpose.

  The Aurora itself also had a purpose.

  In seconds, the automated system kicked in, the two CORE soldiers barely noticed while one squinted their eyes like a child on the screen.

  A single ion cannon turned three meters left and fired.

  One bullet, one shot.

  The creature lay dead.

  —------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Sunlight glinted on Hardric’s helmet as the convoy slowly marched through Kag’s streets. The imposter Laundre had been crucial with the lesser mage having sent messages to quickly diswaying multiple checkpoints and earning the group a direct entrance to the city's lower halls. Kag seemed tiny in Hardric’s eyes. Hasty chiselled buildings mulched together like straws of hay. Smooth cobble roads worn down by centuries of age. It’s square-turned street’s and endless markets felt odd, and rudimentary. Every turn or glance into the crowd’s eyes struck a feeling of dread into his heart. The primitives were imitating humanity well.

  Looming towers that scraped the open clouds seemed minuscule and malformed. Cheap imitations of beauty that dwindled in the stagnant time. The Luitenant motioned, her face grimacing as they passed an execution wall. The Commander stared for a moment eyesight tained in wishfull blood. He could almost taste it, feel the weight of the world press against his hands. It had been twelve awake years since he landed, and who knew how many without cryosleep. Memories of their homeworld stung to his every move. A world of beauty, peace, and liberty, etched into the beating heart of every star. Elysian fields of green cascaded against cities which blotted out the horizon’s dawn. That was until the war.

  Each building, etched scrap of stone a testament to chronological glory. Universities that would span cities, parks which consumed worlds and a fair bit of commercialization. They weren’t perfect, there was crime, corruption and plenty of corporate interference but in the end compared to the Jannic planet they were paradise.

  He still could feel the rush of engines against his back. Smile as their armadas shook entire systems off gravitational course. Machines that weaved the cosmos into twisting thread cascaded by an infetismal yearning for the stars. Yet even after all this time he still remembered the war. Ships like hives swarming a red dawn.

  The first time he had been sent to the Jannic planet, he had been a Captain. It wasn’t a one-way flight back then. They didn’t know it would be. He had booked a flight after, directly home, still had the ticket in his luggage somewhere up there.

  He wasn’t even late for the return flight.

  Standard operations had set up bases along the planets coast, sending down thousands of troops to secure facilities and prepare for planetary search. It wasn’t until a few hours later did the first signs appear. Broken contact and splintered messages faced with nothing but empty static. His first mission had been simple, retrieve contact from the preliminary strike and rendezvous with the operations team. Hardric could still feel the weight of the gun within his palm, taste the sent of smoke streak the parted air. He was leading supply shipments for crates, rations. medicine and weapons development down to coastal facilities, preparing for the planets assessment before invasion.

  They knew it had done something. Altered the surface in some way. Preliminary reports had been laced with static. Chodled readings cascaded over tedious equipment. Yet they could never have imagined what lay within. A sharp clang rang through the soldier’s ear, a familiar sensation causing Hardric to press his ear and let static push through.

  “Report”

  The monotonous voice of the fleet's paroxial systems buzzed to life. It was their only means of contact with the outside world. It’s perception of time, barely compatible with even the slightest long-range message, was a lifeline to the soldiers below. Often, Hardic would wonder how many of his and his predecessors' reports had actually passed through command. What was it like to stand there, watching empty screens as the death toll rose. Wait baited and in uniform, feeling as if only hours had passed while centuries had flowed. Sometimes at night, he could see their shield rays still damaged from the Master’s armada’s blasts. It was likely ash still streaked to uniforms that had seen hell no more than a day before.

  “Enter containment zone, 14B”

  “Status?”

  “Pursuing asset, no signs of release, approaching vault upon arrival will secure asset and return.”

  “Confirmed,” the voice remarked.

  He turned to his side, watching as even more citizens flocked towards the convoy. Market stalls and various travels dotted the gilded halls. A few peasants played board games in park squares as produce left the glazing shelves. The board was chaffed badly, tiny ceramic pieces glinting in the light. Pwol. A simple game that tasked players to reach opposing sides of a maze. Peasants would spend hours answering its enchanted riddles. Smile as the board flipped it’s pieces and sent their tiny figures spiralling into unknown depths. The soldiers quavered as they passed. It was hard to not grimace at their sight, feel even the slightest ounce of pity.

  Still, he wouldn’t count these as living creatures. They were more the master’s puppets and it didn’t matter if no one could see the string.

  While seemingly minuscule to the soldiers at hand, Kag’s streets flourished under the morning sun. Countless parks and gilded statues lined row upon row of marble homes. Aerodomes, temples, plazas and libraries seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see. Scholars marched with keen glances as scrolls stuck to bent arms. Merchants barked orders to the foreman at the inner ports. Two children laughed over a sandcastle constructed by a local mage. They were nearing the town’s inner square and the keep was in sight. At least fifty stories high, the castle's looming stone overlooked the entire valley as towering red brick shingles shone in the warm morning breeze. It was a monument to the Empire’s power, that even the smallest of Kag’s cities lay at a splendour so grand it dwarfed the capitals of nations. Scratches marred its foremost towers as the chalky stone was patched into the remnants of siege. A peasant dragged hay through the streets. large bales on top of wooden carriages which slinked down cobbled roads. Two merchants set up fresh stalls. Smoke trickled through gilded chimneys, little puffs dotting the windswept clouds. A beggar reached out to receive a lump of cabbage from a passing stall.

  Mud splattered the horse's feet as the convoy slowly grinded to a halt. The Lieutenant cursed, shrill breath catching in the crisp morning air. Hardric could see him, a scout standing on the foremost wall. His presence forebode discrepancy. The officer slinked through the crowd, dark brown hair slicked with sweat as he jumped aboard to shake Hardric’s hand.

  “Long time?” the two seemed to embrace for a moment. Familiarity struck through their hurried gestures.

  “Like what they’ve done with the place?”

  The Lieutenant scoffed as Hardric’s convoy bumped past the first checkpoint. Two guards with spears nodded as they passed, statues of solidarity against Kag’s onslaught. Their faces remained stern as crimson robes draped the wrinkled cobbles. A strange sensation wriggled down Hardric’s spine as his eyes crossed theirs. The commander breathed in slowly, taking time to purse through the stuffy air. Red and blue streamers stretched like swirling clouds along the marble rooftops as splattered brown tiles and smudged glass windows glinted from above. A few children waved as they entered, oblivious to the scene at hand. Hardric raised his helmet, hand smudging against the dirt on his brow. Ahead, the road parted into a labyrinth of twists and turns. Walls seemed to swirl and slither into place as they got further into the Keep. Its architects had been skilled beyond belief, dedicated to an art style still practiced and beloved within the capital-baited halls.

  The Lieutenant scowled as a mage caught her eye. Fire brewing in their baited palm as they stoked the whispers of the weaving flames. They wore a tattered brown cloak, standard military issue sown with bright thread. Fabric stretched among the bottom hue, as tan skin cascaded against red eyes. She hesitated for a moment, reaching for her own pistol for a horse to brush by, pushing back against the cart’s axle and causing the whole convoy to churn. When she looked again, the figure was lost. Their brown hue muddled in the stream of soldiers which walked the garrison halls. The officer had joined Hardric now, pointing at the various fixtures and scars which marred the temple's roof.

  “I remember when they built those walls” Hardric noted.

  “A drunk sprite wandered down from Ieak, single breath knocked the whole village down.”

  The Lieutenant and officer laughed, smiles parting from their staunch faces.

  “Have you met Aikin, Lieutenant?”

  “No, I don’t think I have.”

  “Sorry, he was stationed here a few rotations ago, Kag is a relatively unassuming city so we keep it under distant watch.”

  The two shook hands with the Lieutenant, almost squeezing her body into a minor salute. It was a reflex driven into core, an intuition from the field of war. The gesture was alien to the jannics and should not be repeated.

  “Did you two serve together Commander?”

  “Serve?” Aikin began to laugh. His motions were fluid.

  “We did more than serve. Aikin was one of my bunkies, a squad leader for the Qail campaign.”

  “It was the early days then, the reserve fleet had decimated their colonies and what left of our forces had already begun their descent, we had been tasked with taking a citadel east gate”

  “Sometimes when I close my ears I can almost hear it, the weight of the ground shifting beneath my feet”

  “The Citadel?” the Luitentant questioned.

  “I heard it was mean’t to never fire, too much of a hazard to the city” the Commander seemed to ramble.

  The other two looked at eachother, confused yet too familiar with this kind of sentiment.

  “How many survived?”

  Her request was met with silence as the two stared into the forward street.

  “How many survived?” She seemed insensate, almost prying, but only to the untrained eye.

  “You've been on active rotation for three years, you never thought to ask?”

  She shrugged slowly.

  “There was a 98% fatality on the first strike, Lieutenant”

  Pain shot through the Lieutenant’s side, and her hands froze, fingers numbing in shock. Her brother had been in that fleet. Numbers were rarely revealed; they hadn’t wanted any form of transparency, any estimate the enemy could devise.

  “When was it?”

  “Three days ago”

  They laughed for a moment, a cruel laugh, a sound they all knew should never have come from their lips.

  Laughed for so long they didn’t see the worms in Aikin’s neck squirm.

  Then another short burst of static from the CORE cadets came over the radio. He recognized its sequence from the Aurora’s deck.

  “Commander Hardric, Sir, we’re overriding the cargo shipments to return to orbit in preparation for our evacuation as ordered but we’ve encountered something strange.”

  The soldier leaned back and let the sun trickle on his face.

  “What’s up?”

  He was used to this the very least. Conflicting orders from the fleet came almost every day as a result of the time dilation and Litmos itself was never meant to operate at such high speeds without significant drawbacks in processing power.

  “There seems to be two sign-in options under the supervisor tab of form 18217-B, yourself and someone else.”

  “What? What do you mean two supervisors? I’m the commanding office on this planet.”

  “No, uh sir according to the system you’re outranked.”

  The Lieutenant gave him an all too familiar, “I’m done with this world” glance before motioning about lack of transparency. The others groaned. Breaking in a higher official would take weeks or even months and with the evacuation slated to take place in only a month, this could only spell trouble. The sheer amount of questions they would ask about the master’s actions for the last couple thousand years and the time dilation would read like a broken record to the soldiers already fatigued lives.

  “Outranked? Outranked by who?”

  Hardric could barely believe his ears. There should have been an official declaration and blaring notifications across the entire system. At the very least their array would have picked up the ships entry. Hell, they probably could have tracked the tiny shuttle's movements through the stars like watching a snail on wet pavement. It was entirely likely that in the mesh-work of static that came from orbit this was another form of communication mistake and drawback from the conflicting speed of the two dichotomizing worlds.

  Their continued tactical strikes on the master’s primitive workshops and holdings to the north and south had all but annihilated any form of equipment or trace of minerals needed to hack their systems. Just last week an entire city of primitives had been eradicated after the creature had tried to use them as some sort of harvesting factory for saltpetre. The entire structure was airtight, the very least multiple firewalls and an entire time of six cybernetic agents worked around the clock to ensure security. Those in orbit could have sent down a general or high ranking beaurocrat but that would only lead to disaster. If a five-star admiral wasn’t already cozying up with a cup of coffee on the Aurora’s deck they were likely crash-landed in some heathen backwater and being plucked apart like carrion by ratlings. He eagerly awaited the com-links next few words, with the entire convoy listening in and weighing in their options on baited ears.

  “Wait, oh my god, it’s a model 7-A Enforcer, registered by TACTI……TACTI? SILL? Sorry TACTI S-I-L-L”

  A mixture of shock, surprise and curiosity spread amongst their ranks. Even Hardric felt something swell in his chest. The last part drew confusion with the soldier even listing Sill’s name as would a number. His voice tried everything to make sense of the words.

  Model 7A? It made no sense. They had just beeng ordered to evacuate and command wouldn’t have sent a killer like that unless they were planning an invasion.

  “Their name? Cadet give me their name?”

  “Give me a second! It’s a long form Sir!!”

  Hardric winced and clutched his eyelids shut, he prayed it was a good one. In the best of prospects, they were likely to face a full inspection and at least four hours explaining the current situation to high brass. That would amount to another seven hours under a microscope showing some confused stiff what exactly made up the planet’s surface. Still having a model 7A would have helped alot, even if it did arrive stupidly late. There were only three Model 7A’s left in the fleet. Maybe it was Proctor Ellis, he was reputable, venerable and half the army either hated or praised his every decision. Ten 7A’s were manufactured, one was lost and the majority were destroyed but right now all of them were fighting on Qail. Unless the time distortion had sped up above, it would have been near impossible for any to arrive on such short notice.

  “Typical CORE, they give us the one piece of equipment we need a couple of thousand years late” Aikin muttered.

  The Captain seemed more nervous than usual. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead to trickle down slowly. The lieutenant noticed but Hardric was too swept away in confusion. He was overly hesitant and had a gut-wrenching feeling as he waited to hear what overembelished brass he would need to spend the next six hours debriefing.

  “Here, I’ve got the name Sir.”

  The voice buzzed over the com-link. Monotonous in emotion from reading off the report list.

  “Commander Jan Theric”

  “Jan Theric?”

  Hardric uttered the foreign words with a guttural tone. He scrapped the pronunciation and repeated it slowly as if trying to use the spelling to ascertain its world of origin. Memories of article clippings, reconnaissance reports and military propaganda layered like wet leaves. He paused for a moment and tried to remember anything about the current 7A’s in distribution. Most children probably had their names memorized from continuous exposure to an unhealthy stream of military propaganda from birth. Their faces and appearance had been plastered on half the posters and banners of the galaxy.

  “I’ve never heard of that person in my entire life.”