Every gunmetal corridor aboard the Devourer reeked of ozone, oil, and rancid sweat. Claustrophobic and without an ounce of pride. Just functional. Bulky. Sturdy. BioMech's signature flavor etched into every scuffed bulkhead and worn deckplate.

  The main hangar itself was abuzz with maintenance crew, a grease-stained army of ghosts that weaved between vessels with tired purpose. Each pair of shoulders burdened by the toll of yet another Avansen campaign. The latest of twelve in the past two years alone.

  “Turn it the other way, princess!”

  “You may not be busy but the rest of us are!”

  At the far end, a gaggle of mercs in Pay Line B squawked every jab in the book, saturated in the olfactory soup of their own unwashed buttcracks and armpits. Rorik's poor nostrils were an unfortunate whiff away from weeping—assaulted by an odorous burn that put most chemical weapons to a damn shame.

  But, at the very least and in rare form, the angry mob wasn't aimed at him for once.

  “What is it your first day!?”

  “I’m trying!” Adrax hammered at the payment kiosk, an orange bulk of stubborn metal. “If everyone would just shut the fuck up for half a second, I’d be done by now!”

  "Awww, he's bashful."

  "Somebody just shoot this clown already! I wanna go home!"

  Adrax's burgundy tufts were slick with panicked sweat. Collar dark and drenched. He'd been wrestling to slot their BIC—a Battle-Identification-Chit—for over five minutes. The flimsy metal too warped and inflexible for the kiosk’s delicate sensibilities.

  “You’ve got all day to piss away your paychecks.” Jakobs stood before the crowd, G4L under one arm, voice like sandpaper on stone. “Give the kid another second. Unless you chuckle-fucks are just itchin to visit the Medbay?”

  The mob quieted like well-trained hounds, for a tense few seconds, before safeties subsequently clicked down the serpentine line. An almost musical rhythm to it. A pall of premeditated violence on every beaten and knotted brow.

  The perfect example of Jakobs' so-called people skills at work.

  More and more, BioMech security angled their slit helmets in their direction. A sizable guard in rounded slate armor stationed around the hangar, with thin skin and itchy trigger fingers to match. Battle weary like everyone else, but more than capable of ruthless intervention.

  Still, Rorik didn’t budge from the cold metal of the support strut. Comfortable and rather disinterested. He had a single wireless earbud inserted, blasting some new upstart Black Hole band—a cocktail of Grunge, Neo-Hard Rock, and the gravitational friction of a singularity converted to sound.

  Awfully catchy for a bunch of noise. It held just enough of his attention to root him firmly in place. A fair-skinned insomniac gargoyle.

  Even if the music had been utter dogshit, it was better to let Adrax simmer a while longer anyhow.

  The kid was a bona fide contradiction, charging through battle one moment, fumbling like a concussed toddler the next. From what Cassandra had told him, Adrax's home world was a barbaric ball of trash, and had robbed him of what most considered normal experiences. Too worried about being shanked or robbed as a child. It made him oddly anxious about mundane things at times.

  Rorik knew what that was like to a degree. In his twenties he'd spent a few years in the Alaskan wilderness. Alone and damn near feral. The simple stuff had made him stumble when he'd rejoined polite society too.

  So, in Adrax's case, Rorik couldn't help but have the patience of a saint. A patience he typically lacked in an active warzone.

  And boy had it been tested this past month...

  After an agonizing minute more, Rorik ripped the earbud free and shoved off the strut, tired menace enough to draw the mercs' undivided attention. He ambled over, grabbed the BIC and blew on it like an N-64 cartridge, then slammed it back into the kiosk.

  It let out a blessed beep of acceptance. An orgasmically grateful tonation after being teased for six minutes too long.

  “Thanks, LT,” Adrax muttered, sheepishly avoiding his eyes. "Must be all in the wrist or something."

  Rorik nodded, but was already on the move, his bunk aboard their shuttle calling out to his aching feet.

  “You mean you could’ve been done that?”

  "About damn time, blondie."

  Rorik ignored the mercenary peanut gallery and grabbed his supply pack, willing to leave the boys here if they weren't hugging his heels.

  “Wait a wamu-rotten, starsdamn minute."

  One of the mercs stepped decisively in his way. Rifle at low ready. Scarred. Bald. Older in appearance and much shorter. With a set of dull yellow armor that protected everything but his pale, weathered dome. A dozen men with the same patch—an ultramarine neutron star—closed ranks at his six. Not hostile, yet, but ready for whatever was about to transpire.

  He recognized the patch at second glance. Some recent off-shoot of the Gallows Garrison, now called Dead Star Company or Legion, something. Heavy hitters. Their very presence had a noticeable effect on the smaller units and lone privateers around them.

  Not all mercs were made equal. There were levels to this shit.

  “I know you,” said the lead merc. "Yeah, sure of it now. I never forget an asshole."

  Rorik huffed, only just barely able to resist tossing him thirty feet into the overhead fixture.

  “Just got one of those faces. Now move."

  The man’s recognition curdled into a slow, ugly grin.

  “No.”

  “No, you don't like having teeth? Or no, you don't want to walk for the rest of your life?”

  “Neither. I met you on Walmura. We were working an independent contract. Some Scrapper army had the capital locked down, took the governor’s daughter hostage or something.”

  “Walmura?” Rorik adjusted the pack's straps as Jakobs and Adrax silently flanked him. “Sounds a little familiar. Why, what of it?”

  “Because,” the man's voice dipped, not quite a whisper, but more like a dare. “That was over forty years ago, and you haven’t aged. Not one single, starforsaken day.”

  “A little bit of milk and some exercise does wonders.”

  The merc’s smile melted into a serious and unreadable expression. Rorik wasn't worried, but slyly shifted, ready to sling the G4L around and cut his men to ribbons if necessary.

  After a lengthy, Clint Eastwood—gunslinger-esque moment longer, the man and his squad stepped aside with a drumbeat of armored footfalls.

  “Whatever you say, just don't think me a fool superman. You lot have saved my hide more than once. Indirectly, at least.” He chuckled, and rubbed a gnarly five-prong scar on his cheek. “Also why I only take BioMech contracts these days. Whatever’s really going on there.”

  Rorik offered no words in reply, because there was nothing to be said. He just gave a curt nod and kept on a-truckin. Being thanked by humans was uncommon. Most people in-the-know wisely kept their distance from Rorik's kind, the rest wanted to prove themselves against them in deadly tests of sorts. Even machines like Two-Six and his buddy hadn't passed on the chance.

  A comparative few knew what they really were...

  ...and it was better it stayed that way.

  Within minutes, their shuttle soared free of Devourer’s ventral bay, drivefire a blue glare of fury. A bulbous, cinereal spearpoint of durtanium with a folding fin atop its dorsal hull. On the monitor over Rorik's bunk, the idle BioMech fleet shrank to little metal dots. Victorious. Bruised. Gradually swallowed by the void and a sea of skeletal wreckage. A graveyard of ships both friend and foe alike.

  Then came the gut-deep lurch of the ceedrive—the shuttle blurred into a crimson streak that blasted from Avansen at unfathomable speed, into the cosmic tide of ceespace—before steadying into a slow ebb along the universe's iridescent currents.

  Inside, the ambient consoles hummed through the ship's balmy air, trying to lull Rorik to sleep. He rolled onto his back, elbow bumping the guard rail, shirtless with the blanket at his hips. The riveted ceiling stared back, and counting its many tiles guided him toward his well-deserved rest.

  Until his lids finally shut at last.

  ...

  ...

  Then Kara reinfiltrated his mind.

  The bitch.

  In a coruscation of imagination that made sleep more difficult.

  Bottle still in hand with her toes curled over the very same rooftop ledge. Rorik's throat tightened as a terrible solicitude pierced his gut like a synthenoid's blade. He pressed a soft pillow over his face, tried to smother the thought of her away. But she was textbook stubborn. Then, now, always.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  I can't help you, I don't even know where you are, and...maybe you don't even need it.

  It sounded like an excuse, but was topped with more than a smidgen of truth. He hadn't a clue where to find her, and the Veil in his experience had only a dribble of genuine premonitions. Rarely ever indicative of current events. Maybe she was fine. Maybe not.

  The blur of the past eighty years had made it easy to forget people. But not Kara. Rorik simply hadn’t let his mind dwell on her. On her exile. Maybe, like with his mother, this vision was his guilt gnawing at what was left of his conscience.

  But why? Guilty for what?

  Rorik had done everything he could. The Kinhold had made up their stubborn minds about her long before he'd spoken up. After the shitshow that was The Wolven War, they started to look at Kara as scapegoat, a problem child to make an example of.

  And Kara fit that bill like a glove.

  And since that war, rules and regulations had infected the Clans like a virus. Gone were the days of roughneck, individualistic abandon. Mostly. It had made a few things more efficient, sure, but The Clans' soul was buried under a mountain of administrative excess. And all the extra paperwork made Rorik’s nuts itch.

  Like a virus...?

  The image of the black crate supplanted Kara, full of vials carrying the extracted wolven strain. It still had a few kinks, but Omni-Corp was uncomfortably close, enough to feel the heat of its metaphorical breath. It should’ve been impossible, according to everyone he knew with a smock and a gene-sequencer. But it was dangerously real. Built by humans, of all people.

  The surviving vial was in the shuttle vault, awaiting the Unified Clans’ best minds. And Rorik hoped, without a shred of optimism, that no more existed elsewhere.

  A muted knock tapped at the hatch.

  “Rorik? You up?” Jakobs asked, muffled by the thick bulkhead.

  Rorik didn’t answer, despite knowing full-well he wouldn't take the hint. Another knock. Louder. Patterned for maximum annoyance.

  “Got a comm call. First Commander MacDuff. I patched it through to the mission room.”

  MacDuff?

  “Alright...but transfer it to the cargo-hold. I'll be there shortly. I guess.”

  “Got it.” Jakobs started off with a cheerful whistle, then paused. “Might wanna hurry though. Sounded pretty urgent.”

  He did everything but hurry.

  Rorik sauntered through the cramped halls toward the hold, then slumped into a lone and battered leather chair. More tears than cushion, less comfort than terrastone. The room itself was a tad larger than most, yet still relatively small, bare save for a wall-mounted intangidisk and a console by the inner door.

  He set Two-Six’s skull on the console's slender surface, and retrieved the boltflusher from a cargo pocket. With a scratch at his ribs, Rorik eyed the machine’s dark optic, then fired up the intangidisk.

  It was an immersive model, a little high-end for a shuttle this cheap. Cobalt pulses rippled out and over the vacant walls and floor, conjuring a luxury office in their stead. Polished. Distant. Almost offensively exquisite. Until it swallowed the cargo-hold in vivid entirety.

  Warm mahogany and beige hues dominated the phantasmal room. Its fine furniture was semi-translucent like sculpted glass, and faded portraits alongside rustic relics lined its pristine walls.

  Seamus MacDuff was the last to materialize, sat behind a carved bonewood desk with a lit cigar between his fingers, ginger hair streaked with gray. His broad shoulders ever-burdened with the weight of command, and his many, many years.

  “Who the hell do you think you are, Lieutenant?” MacDuff’s voice cracked like a whip, calm but lethal. “Making me wait?”

  “Lose the tone, old timer.” Rorik grumbled, not bothering to look up, boltflusher sparking along Two-Six's head. “You’re the one interrupting my nap.”

  “Playing with fire, kid. Be a damn shame if you got burned.”

  The air was thick with ozone and static. Rorik still hadn't looked up, not until the long silence demanded it. Amber eyes met blue in a duel of wills, no words, just stares sharp enough to cut through diamond encrusted durtanium.

  “Good thing I packed my toothbrush,” Rorik replied, low and dangerous.

  For a heartbeat neither man moved or said anything.

  Then, they both burst into tired, breathless laughs—a flicker of confusion curled MacDuff’s bushy mustache. A stupid moment of camaraderie that was sorely missed. The boys were alright. But it was good to see an old friend.

  “Ever take a break?” MacDuff swirled a deep amber liquor around in an expensive glass. "Genuinely curious."

  “From what?"

  “Being a professional asshole?”

  “Once. For a friend's quincea?era.” Rorik shifted with a muted creak of the chair. “Now, what can I do for you on this fine Third-Day afternoon?”

  MacDuff snorted and took a deep swig. “Been trying to reach you. Almost thought you might be dead.”

  “Thought or hoped?"

  "Always depends on what memories come to mind in the moment."

  "Cute. But may I remind you that planet-wide assaults screw with local comms?”

  “I came to that conclusion. Didn't make it any less annoying though. This call is of the upmost importance. You sure your connection's secure?"

  "Triple-encoded with all the fancy bells, whistles and doodads."

  "Good."

  MacDuff’s eyes slowly sharpened, the humor bleeding out, drop by drop. Not angry. But certainly more serious than he'd seen him in a long while.

  "The Primum, Te Whetū? He’s missing. And The Kinhold and I want you to find him.”

  Rorik squinted, surprised by the words, but more so at the finality in his tone. As if it was already a done deal.

  “People in hell want ice water, don't mean they're gonna get it. The guy’s had my back once or twice, sure, but I’ll pass. I'm taking a two-week vacation starting right now. But I'll cheer the search on from the sidelines—”

  “This isn't the kind of mission you turn down.”

  Rorik drew in an exasperated inhale, pressing his palm against his forehead.

  A done deal indeed...

  “Of all the trigger-happy goons on Azrhar? Anyone can run a simple search job. I just want to get my dick sucked and take a nap, is that too much to ask?”

  “Apparently. But you're not the only one getting bent over. Your name was simply the first selected due to your... distaste for politics and picking sides. A victim of your own impartiality.”

  Rorik's fingers absently explored Two Six's wired innards, trying to appear less insubordinate than he felt. Though even paying half-attention, he was careful to avoid the rather sensitive thermionic connections. He had some mechanical skill, but the higher complexities of synthenoids were beyond him.

  “Things are getting tense around here, James. Not that you’d notice being gone all the time. The Kinhold’s on the verge of splitting in two.”

  MacDuff finished the glass and puffed out a diaphanous cloud of smoke.

  “It doesn’t help that the Primum was absent in spirit long before he disappeared. I fear we’re heading for another war, but this time it won’t split clean over ideology or lineage. Whiro and his ilk would be preferred honestly.”

  “So it's splitting over greed and power instead, huh? Let me guess, Marama and Baldric the ones with their hands in the cookie jar?”

  “Greed and power have hindered man and immortal from the very beginning. Why should now be any different?” He paused. “And yes. Who else but those two?”

  Too many of Rorik’s friends had died the last time. Brother versus brother, sister versus sister. Or worse yet, like his good buddy Dodson, betrayed him and lived to not yet regret it. Rorik wasn’t keen for another bout like that.

  Why couldn't they all just get along?

  “Some good news, though. Given all the promotions you’ve bullheadedly refused? We're bumping you straight to High Commander, effective immediately. Not taking no for an answer this time, James. Don't care if you wear the stripes or not.”

  MacDuff let the words hang, as if waiting for Rorik to either protest or dance for joy.

  “And we’re giving you command of a ship too. Light-cruiser. Seventy-two crewmen. Congratulations, kid.”

  Rorik’s ears tingled from a mix of anger and agitation. For anyone else it would’ve been fantastic news. But his ambition had long withered away. Too old. Too jaded. Too indifferent. All that motivated him now was the thrill of combat and keeping the few people under his command alive.

  But MacDuff was right, there was no other choice. Disobeying the Kinhold always came with a price. And with stakes this high the cost would be heavier still.

  So, maybe it was best to profit where he couldn’t escape...

  “Alright. Three conditions. Non-negotiable.” Rorik propped his boots on top the console. “They don’t like it, they can strip me of my rank. And find Moe or Larry—some other stooge to send instead. Been freshly squeezed of any fucks I had left to give.”

  “Let’s hear them.”

  “One." Rorik ticked off a finger. "I get paid as a First Commander. Bank account’s looking a little sad these days.”

  "Easy enough."

  “Two, I have a say in crew assignments. Like Jakobs and Adrax. Despite efforts to the contrary, I kinda, sorta like them. Feel a little responsible for them now.”

  “A paternal instinct? Never thought I'd see the day. But done and done. What's your...third request?” MacDuff’s question trailed off with suspicion. “Figured you’d ask for something ridiculous?”

  “I want Kara’s exile cut short. And I want her as my executive—”

  “There it is.” MacDuff jammed the cigar into a beveled ashtray. "Could feel it in my bones."

  “Just send over the coordinates, and I’ll scoop her up on my way back. Barely an inconvenience.”

  “You know it’s not that simple.”

  “Not complicated either. Kara’s done more for the Clans than Marama and Baldric combined. She’s earned an early reprieve. I know it. You know it.”

  "All I know is that she's a dangerous irritant with a history of instability.

  "True. But one that's also done more for the Clans than Marama and Baldric combined."

  MacDuff frowned, then went blank, the wheels of consideration turning behind his eyes. Rorik didn’t have the clearance to pull exile locations from the database—maybe once his new command codes came through, but that could be too late. Finding Te Whetū among trillions of stars was no small task, and depending on where Kara was, a long detour could affect mission viability.

  The hum of the intangidisk filled the dense silence. Both soothing and annoying. MacDuff, briefly looking every bit his nine centuries of life, rubbed gingerly at his chin. As if the entire Kinhold had just taken turns kicking him in the jaw.

  “Fine,” He finally muttered. “It’ll cost me. But I’ve got a few favors to cash in. Won’t come cheap, and you'll owe me for a long while.”

  "Or at least until you forget all about it." Rorik straightened with a grin. “But thanks, Seamus. I really do appreciate it.”

  A half-smile ghosted MacDuff's lips.

  “Keep her antics to a minimum. She’s a damn good fighter and I know what she means to you, but she cannot jeopardize this mission. If she screws this up you both go down. Plain and simple. I won’t be able to protect you.”

  Rorik nodded, loosening flakes of dried suppressant from his hair. A few stubborn bits of foam that had survived his very thorough shower.

  “Understood, sir. She won’t. Kara knows when to get serious.” He ran a hand over his stubble, half a day away from a beard. “Oh, and before I forget?”

  “What is it?”

  “Tell the eggheads to brace themselves for something big. What I’ve got locked in the vault will literally make those nerds swoon.”