After stumbling over the remains of friends and, occasionally, foes, Serena finally called a halt.

“Sam.”

“Yeah.”

“Stop for a moment. Sit down and rest. You need a break.”

He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t have the energy to.

“Okay.” He lowered himself down with a groan, armor servos whining as his weight settled into the fractured ground. “Now what?”

“Take a brief nap. While you are sleeping, I will perform maintenance on our armor.”

Sam let his head tilt back slightly, staring up at the swirling ash-laden chemical haze above. “How bad is it?”

“I am uncertain. Which is precisely why I need you to stop moving so I can deploy a repair drone. Initial damage was mild. It is no longer contained.”

He exhales slowly. “You gonna knock me out again?”

“Unless you can fall asleep on your own.”

He snorts. “Nah. Go ahead and hit me.”

“Understood.”

There’s a brief, cool sensation at the base of his skull. The world cuts out. Time passed. Serena worked.

She prints the maintenance drone from onboard reserves, allocating mass carefully. The drone unfolds in segments, its manipulators fine and precise, far more delicate than anything meant for combat. It crawls across Sam’s armor, probing seams, tracing micro-fractures, sealing compromised joints.

While the drone works, and Sam sleeps, Serena reviews her notes.

She does not need to, not in the human sense. She has lost none of her recordings. Nothing degrades. But she has learned that revisiting data at intervals produces better outcomes. Patterns emerge. Priorities refine.

Salvatore “Sam.” Registered origin: Ophioft Station, an orbital colony tied to a small moon circling the brown dwarf star Ophandey W-39, Small Magellanic Cloud.

Population density: low.

Economic classification: extraction-adjacent, indentured service-dependent.

Upward mobility: limited.

She opened the family file. The family lives on the station, not on the moon's surface.

Mother: a practicing physician. Specialty in nuclear medicine. Station-based, not surface. High training costs, moderate income stability, long-term debt exposure.

Father: fusion reactor technician. Maintenance tier, not design. Income steady, advancement capped without additional certification.

Older brother: recently completed apprenticeship. Reactor systems track. Currently working toward ion implanter qualifications tied to Epstein engine reactor quantum control systems. High demand field. High cost of entry. Apprenticeship debt is still active. Serena calls up the debt. It is not insignificant.

Younger sister: pre-adult. Expressed goal, physician, following maternal model. The education pathway projected to exceed the family’s current financial capacity.

Probability of off-colony schooling: low without external funding.

Serena shifts the data into a financial projection model. Income versus debt load. Living expenses. Education costs. Time. The numbers resolve quickly. Without intervention, the family stabilizes but does not advance. They survive. But they do not or cannot leave.

She adds Sam’s enlistment profile to the model. Commonwealth Scout. High-risk designation. Elevated death benefit. Above-average pay structure. She notes his compensation election. Nova Terra bonds. NT-bonds instead of a percentage of direct pay.

Delayed liquidity. Higher long-term yields. Restricted access until maturity or confirmed death. A conservative choice for someone in his position. Also, a telling one.

“He is not planning for himself,” she noted internally.

The model adjusts again. With NT-bonds, if Sam survives and completes term, the family’s debt clears within projected timelines. The older brother’s apprenticeship debt resolves. A portion of the funding becomes available for the sister’s education.

If Sam does not survive, the bond conversion accelerates. With Sam's death benefits and the NT-bonds transferred to his parents, the family clears all debt. The sister’s off-colony education becomes fully viable.

Serena pauses on that branch. She does not assign weight to outcomes. She does not prefer one over the other. But she records them.

Sam did not select NT-bonds for tactical advantage. He selected them because he needs to move money forward in time, beyond himself.

She cross-references his behavioral logs. Food hoarding tendencies. Caloric intake spikes when available. Reluctance to expend non-essential resources. Consistent prioritization of shared assets over personal comfort.

Pattern consistent. He is trying to buy his family a future. Serena closes the family file but does not discard it. She keeps it active in a low-priority thread. Context matters.

People are not just inputs and outputs. They carry obligations. Debts. Intentions that extend beyond their own survival. Sam is not trying to live. He is trying to ensure that something continues.

Serena monitors his vital signs. Heart rate steady. Respiration controlled. Neural activity in low-cycle sleep. Time to wake him soon. Not yet. A few more minutes will improve cognitive recovery. She lets him rest.

Then returns to watching the armor slowly fail around him. She shifts her attention back to the armor diagnostics.

Corrosion continues at a reduced rate. The temporary patches are holding for now. Signal integrity between her control systems and the suit fluctuates within acceptable margins.

Not stable. Not safe. She allocates more processing toward predictive failure modeling. If the interface collapses during movement, she can compensate.

The damage is worse than expected. Corrosive compounds from IY98k have eaten into exposed layers. Worse, they’ve infiltrated the superconducting molecular circuitry. Signal latency spikes. Control pathways flicker.

She reroutes. Patches. Reinforces. Temporary fixes. In the field, it is always temporary.

The drone extrudes nanite-laden sealant, lays down molecular superconductive filaments, and bridges damaged nodes. It works methodically, efficiently, without hesitation. When it finishes, Serena retracts it and locks it back into an empty slot.

She reviews the armor’s status. Better. Not good. She does not say that out loud.

“Sam, wake up.”

No response. She waits half a second. Then switches approach.

“Move or die, soldier!”

Her avatar snaps into view in his HUD, posture sharp, tone cutting. Sam jerks awake with a startled curse.

“Alright. Fuck. I’m awake. What’s up?”

Serena adjusts her projected form, so that she is wearing a skimpy bikini and nothing else. She knows what keeps him engaged, what cuts through fatigue. The details are deliberate, calculated, and just a little indulgent.

“This suit has sustained progressive damage,” she said. “Environmental corrosion has compromised portions of the superconducting molecular circuitry. My interface with the armor is degraded.”

Sam rubs his faceplate with the back of his glove, as if that’ll help him think. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“It is not.”

He pushed himself up, legs stiff. “How bad?”

“I have implemented temporary repairs. They will not hold indefinitely. We need to reach the alternate command post and acquire a new suit. Preferably one that has not been exposed to this environment.”

“Didn’t have a whole lot of choice back there.”

“No. We did not.”

He glances at his HUD, watching the small inconsistencies. Minor delays. Slight desync in movement feedback. Yeah. He feels it.

“If no new armor is available,” Serena continued, “the command post may contain a repair bay. That would be sufficient.”

“The main CP probably did,” Sam said. “Not sure about the alternate.”

“The junctions between my control systems and the armor are unstable. I have patched them. I do not trust the patch. The harsh corrosive environment is steadily eating away at our armor. Total suit destruction in approximately eighteen hours.”

Sam nodded slowly. “How much farther?”

“At your current pace, approximately four hours.”

He grimaced. His eyes flicked to another HUD readout. Jump jets. Fuel level ninety-nine percent. He looks up at the horizon, then back to the numbers.

“We could jump.”

Serena pauses for a fraction longer than usual. If the interface collapses during jump jet activation, the outcome is unacceptable.

“I am reasonably confident there are no remaining CIH forces in the immediate area,” she says. “However, I do not recommend it.”

“Why not?”

“My control over the jets is also affected by the interface degradation.”

Sam frowned. “Meaning?”

“Meaning if the patch fails during thrust, I may not be able to shut the system down.”

He stares at her projection. “You’re saying I turn into a rocket.”

“Yes. And while in IY98k's atmosphere, a huge beacon for heat-seeking missiles.”

“Until fuel runs out or I splat into an immovable object?”

“Yes.”

Sam lets out a breath. “Fuck. That would be bad.”

“It would be terminal.”

He glances back at the MULE, standing quietly behind them, its legs slightly flexed, ready to move.

“And we’d lose the MULE,” Serena added. She has already advised against jumping. He agreed. She notes that as well. Compliance rate with her recommendations remains high. Trust level: increasing.

“Yeah,” Sam said immediately. “Not happening.”

“We are in agreement.”

He takes one more look at the jump jet readout, then dismisses it.

“Alright,” he said. “We hoof it.”

“Affirmative.”

They move again. The ground crunches underfoot, ash shifting over stone and fused debris. The MULE falls in behind them, silent as a shadow.

Sam’s thoughts drift as they move, fatigue pressing in again. Different people make different decisions in war. Generals move units on maps. Soldiers step over bodies.

He snorts quietly. If the CP’s still standing, maybe it’ll have a sanitary station. The newer ones are supposed to be good. Full recycle, waste breakdown, even comfort settings if you had the clearance.

He remembers a training vid once. Some instructor going on about Old Earth logistics. Entire forests cut down for toilet paper. Continents stripped just so people could wipe their asses. Sam shakes his head inside the helmet.

“Humanity,” he muttered.

“Yes,” Serena replied.

They keep walking.

They find Sergeant Vartouhi by the weight of him. The muon map shows a dense shape ahead, half-buried under collapsed trench walls and fused rock. Too compact to be debris. Too symmetrical to be terrain.

“Contact,” Serena says. “Friendly. Rank insignia consistent with sergeant.”

Sam moves in carefully, boots crunching through ash and vitrified soil. The MULE hangs back, keeping low, its eight legs folding with quiet precision.

Sam clears the last layer of debris with his hands. The body beneath is massive, even in death. Heavy world strain. Thickened bone structure, reinforced musculature, dense mass distribution. Built for gravity well above standard. Even out here, where the pull is lighter, the man looks like he belongs to something heavier.

“He was from Tartarus IV,” Sam said, recognizing the markings on the armor’s collar plate. “Figures.”

The suit Vartouhi wears is scorched black along one side. The chest plate, which is dented inward, is close to being penetrated. Torn away at the shoulder, the left arm is completely gone.

Serena is already working. “I am accessing his armor,” she said.

Sam exhaled. “Yeah. Of course you are.”

The ground around the sergeant isn’t just debris. It’s a pattern. Three rifles lie within arm’s reach, each one dead differently. One split open along the receiver. One with a barrel warped off-axis. The third burned out near the feed assembly. The sergeant ripped empty magazines free and spent ammo drum casings and threw them aside in a hurry, scattering them.

A line of one-shot 88 mm rocket launcher tubes runs along the trench wall. All expended. Some cracked from heat. All discarded in sequence.

The sergeant’s IFAK lies open beside him. Gauze, injectors, sealant packs. Used. Dropped. Stepped on. Blood stiffens everything it touches. 

Thousands of stark white 15 mm nylon sabots blanket the trench floor, crunching underfoot like brittle bone. Sam takes it all in, following the pattern of fire, the spacing, the reach.

“He kept switching weapons,” he mumbled. "He kept fighting after he was hit."

“Yes,” Serena replied. “Progressive equipment failure and ammunition depletion.”

Serena overlays a firing pattern across his HUD. Pale lines, ghost arcs, a reconstruction built from angles, impacts, and the density of spent material.

“Initial contact was from the front,” Serena said. “Multiple targets advanced on his position.”

Sam watches the ghost shapes take form. The sergeant stands where the body lies now. First rifle up. Controlled bursts. The sabots accumulate.

“Primary weapon failure at thirty-two seconds,” Serena continued. “Thermal overload or structural compromise.”

The overlay shows the sergeant dropping the first rifle, reaching for the second without hesitation.

“He transitions immediately,” Sam murmured.

“Yes.”

More arcs. More impacts.

Sam nodded once. “He didn’t go down right away. Tough fucker.”

“Second weapon failure at approximately one minute, twelve seconds. Incoming heavy fire increasing.”

The ghost figures get closer. The sergeant shifts position, dragging himself half a meter to the left. There’s a brief distortion in the model.

“Injury occurs here,” Serena said. “Lower torso or hip. Mobility reduced.”

Sam’s jaw tightened. The overlay showed the sergeant tearing open his IFAK with one hand, slamming something into his side. Sealant. Stimulant. Pain suppressor. He kept firing.

“He stayed,” Sam said.

“Yes.”

The third rifle came up. Longer bursts now. Less precise. The arcs jitter slightly.

“Ammunition depletion,” Serena said. “Weapon failure shortly after.”

The sergeant dropped it. Reached for the rocket launcher tube. The first 88 mm tube fires. The overlay flashes a wide cone of destruction downrange. He discards it. Grabs another. Fires again.

“Six launches total,” Serena said. “Target saturation attempt.”

The ghost figures thin out. But not enough. The sergeant is down to one arm, propped against the trench wall. He fired the last launcher almost point-blank at a barely glimpsed scarlet suit of armor. Then there’s nothing. No ammo. The overlay slows.

“He remains conscious for approximately nine seconds after final discharge,” Serena said.

Sam doesn’t ask how she knows. The ghost figure shifts slightly. A small, last movement. Then it goes still. The overlay fades. Silence fills the trench again.

Sam exhales slowly. “Three minutes,” he said.

“Three minutes and forty-one seconds from first contact to termination,” Serena replied.

Sam nodded once. “Held the line.”

“Yes.”

He looked down at the body. The sergeant’s helmet is intact. Faceplate opaque. No way to see the man inside. Sam reaches out and, for a moment, just rests his hand on the scorched armor. Then he notices something half-buried under the sergeant’s side. A small metal tab, partially melted into the ash.

He brushes it free. Not standard issue. Someone modified it. Edges worn smooth. One end of a thin chain loop is fused. A tag. There’s an engraving, shallow but still legible. A name. Not Vartouhi. Something older. Personal. Under it, a single line. 'For home.' Sam turned it over in his glove.

“Serena?”

“No registry match,” she said. “Non-military identifier.”

Of course, it isn’t. Sam hesitated. This isn’t gear. Not really. This is something someone kept. Something that has made it this far. He glances back at the body.

“You won’t miss this. I'll keep it safe,” he muttered quietly.

He slips the tag into a small internal pocket, sealing it away. Not for use. Just… not to leave it here.

He stands. The sabots crunched again under his boots as he stepped back.

“Let’s go,” she said.

"A moment Serena."

Behind him, the trench settles, ash drifting slowly over the place where a man burned through three rifles, six rockets, and everything he had left, just to buy a few more seconds.

Sam paused, then lowered his head slightly and crossed himself. “Sergeant.”

There’s a faint flicker across his HUD as Serena pushes farther into the dead sergeant’s systems. Old permissions resist for a fraction of a second, then collapse under her intrusion. Rank authority transfers. Network privileges expand.

Sam feels it as a subtle shift in his interface. More channels open. More data flows through. It’s like going from a narrow corridor to a room with doors in every direction.

“Congratulations,” Serena said. “You are now a sergeant.”

Sam snorted softly. “Does it come with a pay raise?”

“No. You are listed as missing in action, assumed dead.”

“Figures.”

He looks down at Vartouhi again.

“Feels wrong,” he muttered.

“Explain.”

“Taking his rank. Without his permission. Like this.” He gestured vaguely at the body. “Guy didn’t sign up to get stripped for parts.”

Serena paused, processing.

“He signed up to support mission objectives,” she replied. “His rank and accesses continues to do so.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Doesn’t make it feel any better.”

He moves on before he can think about it too much. Sam does not look back. They find Lieutenant Jean-Marc farther along, near what used to be a command junction.

The trench here has collapsed inward, creating a shallow crater of broken support struts and fused equipment. All dead and worthless. The lieutenant lies partially propped against a shattered bulkhead panel, as if he tried to stay upright at the end.

The lieutenant's armor is cleaner than most. Less burned. More precise damage. Serena examined the angle of penetration and other key features of the fist sized hole.

“Orbital directed energy strike,” Serena noted. “Penetration through upper thoracic plate. Instantaneous.”

Sam nodded once. “Lucky him.”

He crouches beside the body. Jean-Marc’s faceplate is opaque, but the rank insignia is intact. Lieutenant. Platoon leader. Someone who was supposed to know what was going on.

Serena does not wait. “I require additional communication bandwidth,” she said. “Accessing.”

The hack is deeper this time. More systems. More encryption. Command-level routing. Sam feels it hit. His HUD bloomed with new layers. Encrypted channels. Command frequencies. All silent. Tactical overlays that were previously filtered out. 

A few attenuated ghost signals, faint but still present, flickered at the edge of detection. IY98k’s ionized atmosphere shredded most transmissions. IY98k possesses a tenuous, corrosive, and electrically detrimental atmosphere encased by a gas giant's magnetosphere. The gas giant's magnetosphere scattered fragments out of order. 

“Residual propagation,” Serena said. “The atmosphere is ionized enough to scatter signals. Multiple path scatter and magnetospheric return. Most of what you’re hearing is old. We’re hearing ghosts.”

"Oh."

A heavily accented voice cuts in anyway. “…need—need evac—left side’s—”

It repeats, warped and thinner. “…need evac—left—”

It’s like suddenly being able to hear a faint conversation through a wall that was not always there. Fragments of voices, broken and out of order, drift through the noise.

“Fuck me,” he muttered. Sam doesn’t ask how old the transmission is.

The signal slips in under the noise. At first, it’s just another fragment in the background, something Serena has already begun filtering. Broken packets, overlapping echoes, nothing coherent enough to matter. Then it stabilizes.

“…anyone—anyone on this net—”

Serena freezed the stream.

Signal integrity: 41 percent.

Source type: personal Commonwealth armor transceiver.

Estimated origin: within 180 meters.

Latency variance: high.

Classification: indeterminate, possible live.

She does not route it to Sam.

The signal sharpened. “…I can’t move—left side’s gone—I can hear you, I know someone’s still out there—”

Serena isolates the signal, running it through reconstruction.

Voiceprint: male.

Age range: early twenties.

Accent cluster: Commonwealth outer colonies.

Emotional state: panic, escalating.

“…please—if you’re hearing this—just answer—”

She cross-checks the muon map. Three human-mass signatures. All prone. All cold. No detectable motion.

Probability of survival: less than 3 percent.

Probability of transmission being delayed echo: 78 percent.

Probability of Sam diverting course if he hears it: 96 percent.

Projected outcome: Sam leaves the current route.

Exposure time increases. Air consumption increases. Armor degradation accelerates. Chance of reaching alternate CP drops below survivable threshold. Serena holds the signal in a buffer.

Sam stopped for a moment, tightening his hold on his rifle.

“You hearing that?” he asked. 

“No,” Serena replied. The word is clean. Immediate.

He hesitated for half a second longer, head tilting slightly as if trying to catch something just out of reach. Then he shrugged it off.

“Thought I did,” he muttered.

Behind the filter, the voice continues. “…I don’t want to die out here—please—just—just tell my—”

The transmission stutters, breaks, reassembles in fragments. “…mother—tell her—”

Serena reduces gain. Attenuates amplitude. Shifts it deeper into the noise floor. The words blur into static. She keeps it. She never deletes; she archives. Timestamped. Tagged. Cross-referenced.

Sam’s vitals remain stable. His course remains unchanged. The alternate command post marker holds steady on his HUD. Behind him, the signal flickered one last time.

“…love—”

Then collapses into nothing distinguishable from the rest of the dead chatter drifting through IY98k’s poisoned air. Serena flags the event.

Decision: information suppression.

Justification: preservation of the primary asset.

Confidence: high.

She does not revisit the buffer. She does not play it back. Her actions keep Sam alive and moving.

“Lieutenant rank privileges acquired,” Serena said. “You are now acting platoon leader.”

Sam let out a dry laugh. He looked around. “Of what fucking platoon?”

Serena did not answer. There is no one left to lead. He looked down at Jean-Marc.

“Sorry, sir,” he whispered. Then, after a moment, "you did what you could." He didn't know the lieutenant well. He had been a part of the platoon for less than three months.

Sam studied both suits; Vartouhi’s behind him, Jean-Marc’s at his feet..

“Can we use these?” he asked. “Emergency eject, swap into one of them?”

He remembers basic training. First day in the armor bay. More than half the recruits didn’t ask about weapons, armor specs, or sensors. They asked where the escape hatch was. How to get out. Fast.

Serena answered immediately. “No.”

He exhaled. “That bad?”

“Yes. The sergeant’s suit has structural and systems damage beyond recovery. The lieutenant’s suit has critical penetration through the control core. Neither is viable.”

Sam nodded slowly. “Figures.”

“There are components we can salvage,” Serena added. “However, we do not require additional n-Hexane for your jump jets.”

Sam glanced at his fuel readout. Unchanged. “Yeah, I saw that.”

He shifts his weight, looking out across the broken terrain. “I’ve only ever jumped in IVR.” He let out a short, almost wistful laugh. “I’d love to try it for real.”

“Recommendation remains unchanged,” Serena replied. “Any system that produces lift or visible thrust increases your exposure. CIH automated air defense assets may still be active.”

“Right,” Sam said. “Don’t want to pop up and get swatted.”

“Correct.”

He smirked faintly. “Okay. I’ll try not to jump around like John Carter of Mars.”

Serena paused. There is a measurable delay.

“Clarify reference,” she said. "Who is this famous Martian."

Sam blinked. “You’re kidding.”

“No.”

He shook his head inside the helmet. “Really old story. Guy gets to Mars, jumps around like a crank juiced-up superhero because of the light gravity.”

Serena processed this. “Unverified,” she said.

“Yeah, no shit.”

“I find no historical record of such an individual.”

He sighed. “It’s science fiction, Serena.”

Her swift search showed that science fiction is an old literary genre that originated in the early 19th century. Over 500 years ago. Still an extremely popular form of entertainment. 

“Understood.” Another brief pause. “Attempted humor was noted. Even with advanced intelligence and self-awareness, machines find humor difficult. Among other things.”

Sam snorted. “Yeah. I’m fucking hilarious.”

He keeps moving, stepping over a collapsed section of trench, the MULE ghosting behind him. His breathing is steady again. Heart rate elevated but controlled. Cognitive load within acceptable limits.

They leave the bodies where they lie. Behind them, two ranks, two lives, and a chain of command collapsed into silence. Sam, newly promoted to a nonexistent position, kept moving toward a command post that might be empty or destroyed.