I sighed, the sound lost in the hum of the transit corridor. The air here was different from the 128th’s barracks—sharper, cleaner, with a metallic tang that spoke of expensive filtration systems and less… goblin. I followed my orders, navigating through the node station. The UPF had almost total control over all major space-borne nodes in human space. Planetary nodes were a different beast, almost always located near rift nexuses. Taking one was a good way to wind up quickly, and messily, dead unless you were on a major raid.
There were a few exceptions, of course. Core planets had protected transport nodes, but they were fortresses, layered in defenses and security procedures to stop the chaos spawn that would be drawn to such a tasty source of creation essence. Just being near a powered-up planetary node would probably fry a wood-rank like me from essence overload. My Forces affinity could reduce the effect, but in the end, I was mortal. That wasn’t likely to change anytime soon.
I could feel the essence coming off the station node as I approached, a low thrum of power that vibrated in my teeth. It was shielded, the energy diffuse and tolerable only because space-based nodes didn’t gather the same enormous life-energy concentrations as planetary ones. The sensation was a twisting, spiraling vortex of potential, millions of strands of reality being woven and unwoven.
Most people just felt a queasy lurch. I saw the machinery behind the curtain, and it was enough to make me want to vomit. You didn’t teleport; you were… shifted, your pattern disassembled here and reassembled there. I only paid enough attention to the process to ensure it was still the same me that exited on the other side, but the psychic vertigo still almost cost me my breakfast.
“Heh. Node sickness… do you need a bag?” The attendant at the arrival terminal asked. She had either a decent dye job or a minor genemod, with short, shockingly bright blue hair. Based on her slightly oversized, luminous green eyes, I was betting on the gene mod.
When cosmetic gene modding had first exploded, a huge portion of the population had chosen to alter themselves to look like some ancient cultural custom from old Earth—something called ‘weeaboo.’ It involved nonstandard primary or fluorescent hair colors, oversize eyes, tiny mouths, and permanently slender figures.
I didn’t personally find it appealing, especially in males—it looked fragile—but considering my own deep, illegal genemods, who was I to be critical? Full genemods were banned, but recessive screening and cosmetic gene therapy were still hugely popular for baselines who could afford it. I bet this girl’s grandparents had been very wealthy, or she herself had a lucrative side hustle.
“No…” I said, gulping back the acrid taste of bile. I took a steadying breath. “I need to find a transit stand. I’m assigned to the Assault Shuttle J-School.”
She nodded, her expression professionally neutral, and called a transit pod for me. Fancy cosmetic weeaboo gene-mod or not, this station was all fleet. The pod was a sleek, automated capsule that whisked me through transparent tubes running along the station’s exterior. For a few breathtaking moments, I was treated to a view of the stars, cold and sharp and infinite, and the massive, gun-studded bulk of Hachimoto Station itself, a city of steel and light hanging in the void.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
The pod deposited me at a heavy-duty airlock, the entrance to the J-School. Someone with more artistic flair than tactical knowledge had converted an entire bulkhead into a sprawling, well-crafted holomural of an assault landing. It was a scene of glorious, chaotic violence: dozens of bulky, ancient-looking drop-ships landing in a hail of beam-fire and explosions. Power-armored human figures stomped down boarding ramps, forming into neat, organized ranks like something out of a history vid. Other sections showed them in heroic melee and firefights with lizardlike chaos spawn.
It was thrilling. It was exciting. It was absolute, unadulterated scrot.
A million things were wrong with it. Assault shuttles never landed that close together; it made them a single, giant target. Armored troopers specifically avoided formations, spreading out to prevent a single firebreath or acid splash from wiping out a whole squad.
Living troops usually used high-speed drop capsules, screaming into the atmosphere in individual pods, not parade-ground formations from a grounded ship. Drones might pop out of a landed carrier, but the transport unit and its vulnerable pilot would be kilometers away, not parked in the middle of the firefight. And where were the drone controllers? The goblin and dwarf techs who were the real backbone of any ground operation?
Nowhere to be seen. And since when did chaos spawn use lasers and airbursts? They didn’t oppose landings; they tried to eat the invaders as quickly as possible. You can’t absorb the essence of a living creature if you blow it up in the sky. The whole point of a Chaos Lord taking a world was to entice defenders to try and take it back, creating a farm for the essence released by the conflict.
It was propaganda, pure and simple, right out of a war holodrama. I sincerely hoped no aspiring assault pilot who walked through this door was dumb enough to believe it. I wasn’t even a veteran, and the absurdity was glaringly obvious.
Could a void beast eat a world? Absolutely. An undefended world could be consumed in weeks. But every captured world had a chance of being recovered. A hell-world was valuable bait in a cruel cosmic game, as Chaos Lords and defenders vied for the resources and essence released by the conflict. The defenders usually won, which was the ultimate irony. Their losses in regaining ground just made the victorious Chaos Lords that much stronger.
A single sapient creature’s death released more essence than an entire dead planetoid. Wholesale destruction was bad business. Void beasts were terror weapons, not a viable strategy, and there was a lot of conjecture that they existed to be defeated, reaping the rewards for their controlling lords from the hundreds or thousands who died stopping them.
Shaking my head at the mural’s naivety, I entered the main lock warily, my boots clicking on the polished deck plates.
The air inside was different yet again—ozone, hot electronics, the faint, sweet smell of nutrient paste, and the unmistakable scent of focused human(oid) stress. I was ready for whatever weird, brutal crap they considered necessary to teach me.
I wouldn’t gain any real essence advancement until I guided actual combat drops or found a rich essence zone, but I hoped that whatever they had to teach was worth learning, despite the fictional decoration out front.
