I used to wear the Empire’s colors with pride.

  Captain Jericho Sanchez, Imperial Marines.

  Loyal blade of Emperor Arthur I.

  Defender of freedom.

  Guardian of the new order.

  That was before I watched what power does to good men.

  Before I saw the rot beneath the gold.

  Before I became the ghost who raids the night.

  Now the Empire calls me traitor.

  The Union calls me dead man.

  Both are right.

  The Dragonfly—a quad-rotor stealth chopper the size of a double-decker bus—sliced through the moonless sky over what used to be Africa. Silent as a forgotten prayer. No stars tonight. Only the faint blue glow of crystal veins threading the cracked earth below, pulsing like the arteries of a dying world.

  She was a beautiful monster: four massive counter-rotating blades shrouded in adaptive metamaterial skin that drank light and heat, bleeding it away as waste through micro-pores of alloyed trimetal lattice. Her belly thrummed with the low vibration of zero-point dampeners—the same forbidden tech the Empire hoarded for its war machines. One wrong harmonic and every sensor on the continent would light up.

  Tonight, she flew like a shadow that had learned how to hunt.

  Ten of us sat harnessed in the bay, shoulders touching, hearts hammering in sync.

  Our mission: infiltrate an abandoned Union black-site research facility and pull data from its memory core.

  We didn’t know what the data was.

  I suspected it was important enough to die for.

  My gear still felt wrong every time.

  Lighter. Thinner. Almost fragile. Matte-black plates barely thicker than a credit chit, jointed with some impossible polymer that had no business existing. We used to joke it looked like battle pajamas. You’d swear a stiff breeze could punch straight through.

  Tonight—like every other night—it would prove us wrong again.

  Gina sat across from me.

  Regina Mendez. Lieutenant. Second-in-command. Oldest friend from the academy days when we still believed in heroes.

  Long black hair tied back tight. Pretty tomboy face—masculine edges softened by something unmistakably feminine. She caught me staring (same as always) and flicked my visor with one gloved finger.

  “Eyes on the mission, boss. Not on me.”

  I grinned behind the mask. “Just making sure you’re still prettier than the robots we’re about to scrap.”

  She rolled her eyes, but that tiny almost-smile flickered—the only thing that still felt like home.

  Harvey’s voice crackled in our ears from the FS St. Francis, the ghost carrier lurking somewhere in the dark ocean.

  “Wait just a damn minute, kids. Let the magic box breathe.”

  The Dragonfly bled altitude in a perfect spiral, rotors whispering. Magnetic clamps released with a soft clack. We dropped.

  No fast-ropes. No parachutes. Just ten bodies in matte black falling like stones for three heart-stopping seconds before smart-lines snapped taut and lowered us the final thirty meters—gentle as a mother setting down a sleeping child. Boots kissed dust. Crystal shards crunched like brittle bone.

  The facility loomed—half-buried Union black-site, ugly as sin, swallowed by white crystal fields that had claimed the continent after the bombs.

  We moved low and fast, shadows among shadows, until we reached the eastern service hatch. No markings. Just a seamless slab of reinforced plasteel pretending to be an ordinary wall.

  Fingers traced seams. Visors cycled through spectra. I found the hairline access panel first—disguised as a cooling vent. Reyes slapped the decryption cradle on before I could call it out.

  The little black box lit with pale blue glyphs, feeding stolen Union cipher keys into the lock.

  Three heartbeats. Four.

  Click.

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  The trap doors sighed open like they’d been waiting years.

  We dropped inside.

  Corridors sterile and cold. Red emergency lights painted everything the color of drying blood. The air tasted metallic—old pennies and ozone.

  Crystal filaments webbed the ceiling, pulsing in time with the facility’s faint heartbeat. Every few steps they flared brighter when our boots passed too close, as if the building itself were curious.

  Robotic sentries spun up—gatling turrets screaming, laser grids slicing the air. We moved like we’d been born in shadows. Dead Men.

  Gina dropped the first turret with a quick double-tap before it finished its spin-up whine. I shoulder-checked a security drone into a wall; it burst in a shower of sparks that smelled like burnt sugar. Harvey’s voice kept us stitched together: “Left at the junction—thermal shows three heat signatures ahead.”

  We carved deeper. Past dormitories of long-dead technicians. Through a hydroponics bay where crystal-laced plants turned blind faces toward us like sunflowers tracking a dead sun.

  The deeper we went, the louder the crystals sang—high, almost musical, harmonizing with the gunfire.

  Then the core chamber.

  The supercomputer’s black obelisk rose in the center, wrapped in slow-swirling data mist, veins of raw crystal pumping information like blood.

  “Harvey,” I breathed. “We’re at the heart.”

  “Slot the chip. Hit any key.”

  Tony—the new kid—blinked. “Which one’s the any key?”

  Gina didn’t sigh. She just shoved him aside and slammed her fist across the entire board like she was trying to murder it. The download bar lit up. Crawled.

  Then the world exploded.

  Sirens howled. Blast doors tore open.

  Union shock troops poured in—thick ceramite-and-plasteel slabs painted matte gray, shoulders broad enough to block doorways, helmets with glowing red demon-visors. Their coil-rifles spat depleted-uranium slugs the size of my thumb. Behind them stomped a Mk-VI mecha suit, twin autocannons already spinning up with that hungry whine.

  They looked unstoppable.

  We looked like we’d shown up to a gunfight in swimming trunks.

  But looks lie.

  Our plates caught the first volley like rain. Rounds that should have torn us apart simply stopped—kinetic fields flaring blue before the bullets tumbled harmlessly to the floor. Our weapons answered: smaller, sleeker, almost delicate. Each round carried a kiss of Mystic Lead—crystal-based alloy refined into something vicious. They punched through Union plating like wet paper. One soldier took a burst to the chest and simply folded.

  The fight became a storm on the way out.

  We didn’t run. We retreated like wolves.

  Reyes and Park took point—Reyes with his ridiculous grin, Park with that quiet focus that always made him our best breacher.

  They were the ones who never made it.

  Reyes—street kid from the New Manila arcologies, seventeen when the Empire drafted him—took a coil-round to the throat while covering our flank. He dropped without a scream. Just a wet gurgle and the light left his eyes.

  Park—ex-Imperial like me, shared a foxhole with me on Old Kenya when the crystal storms began—caught a mecha autocannon burst meant for Gina. It cut him in half at the waist. His upper body kept firing for two full seconds before it realized it was dead.

  “Come on, you Union bastards!” I roared, fury twisting my throat. “Eat this!”

  Gina moved like a storm beside me, never wasting a shot. We leapfrogged, covering, reloading, cursing. The corridors that had felt too wide on the way in now felt like a slaughter chute. Overhead crystal filaments blazed white-hot with every sparking round, throwing insane shadows across the walls.

  “Download complete!”

  Gina ripped the chip free. “We’re gone!”

  We fought to the roof, boots pounding, lungs burning. Union troops swarmed behind us. The mecha smashed through a wall like cardboard, cannons chewing the ceiling into dust.

  Then the sky answered.

  A shadow passed overhead—silent, invisible.

  The Dragonfly.

  Smart-lines shot down like striking snakes and locked onto our armor hard-points with a bone-deep clack. No fumbling. The tech just knew.

  One by one we were yanked skyward.

  “Jerry,” I radioed mid-pull, voice steady despite the adrenaline. “We’re clear. Coming home hot.”

  My older brother’s calm baritone answered instantly, warm and steady like he was sitting beside me instead of commanding from the bridge. “Copy, little brother. Deck’s cleared.

  Dragonfly’s got a straight shot. Just hold on—I’ve got you.”

  The words hit harder than any bullet.

  Jerry. Always steady. Always there to pull me out of the fire. The one person who never once doubted I’d make it back.

  I was last.

  I flipped my visor up so the bastards below could see my face. Smiled wide enough to split the night.

  “Tell your Union scum boss I said hi.”

  I dropped the ion grenades as the tether hauled me up.

  The explosion lit the world orange and white.

  Heat washed over us like the breath of God. The Dragonfly carved through the fireball, engines howling now that stealth no longer mattered.

  She banked hard, streaking toward the open ocean where the FS St. Francis waited—our cloaked, silent fortress ready to swallow us home.

  Inside the bay the celebration hit like a drug.

  Back slaps. Cheers. Someone sprayed synth-booze from a ration pack. Gina held the chip high like a trophy, laughing that bright, rare laugh she only released after we survived.

  But I was counting.

  Eight.

  Out of ten.

  Two chairs empty forever.

  I sank onto an ammo crate, elbows on knees, hands over my face. The noise faded. All I could hear was my heartbeat and the ghosts of two names I’d have to log later.

  Reyes, who still owed me twenty credits from our last poker game.

  Park, who’d promised his daughter a real sunflower for her birthday.

  Gina knelt in front of me. Her gloves were still warm from the fight. She pulled my hands away, then wrapped her arms around my shoulders—tight, fierce, the kind of hug that says I’m here without words.

  “They didn’t waste their lives for nothing, Jericho.”

  I nodded. Couldn’t speak. Guilt sat on my chest like the whole damn planet.

  But then I thought of the Foundation.

  The real reason we bled.

  The reason we kept coming back.

  I stood. Turned toward the open bay door. The burning facility was already shrinking behind us—a dying star on the horizon.

  I raised my fist in salute to the dark.

  I will lay down my life.

  And the night swallowed us whole.