Chen Feng sat rigid in the driver’s seat, his hands resting on the manual control yokes, his gaze locked on the terrain scanner as it painted a garbled, half-corrupted map of the mutilated rainforest outside. The Adamantine hull around them groaned softly, a beast in constant, low-grade pain.

  In the passenger seat, Alina Ludwig worked with sharp, jerky movements. She had discarded her helmet, and her short, black hair was plastered to her scalp and temples with sweat that had nothing to do with the humid heat. It was the sweat of shock, of defeat. With a hiss, she applied a medical nano-spray to the angry, blistering burns that snaked up her forearm and dotted the side of her neck. Each touch made her flinch, a flicker of raw pain she quickly suppressed behind a mask of fury.

  The silence was a physical weight, broken only by the hum of the idling reactor and the hiss of the spray canister.

  It was Alina who shattered it, her voice a ragged tear in the quiet.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, Chen Feng?” She didn’t look at him, her focus on the burn on her arm as if it were a personal insult. “Hearing Flora get dragged away. Watching me… watching this whole mess burn to shit—” Her head snapped up, her eyes, wide and bright with unshed tears and a building, frantic anger, drilling into the side of his helmet. “Do you feel at all? Are you sick? Why haven’t you shown a shred of emotion since… since when? When did you begin acting like this?”

  A memory, unbidden and sharp: Chen Feng, newly thawed, his face a raw canvas of confusion and terror, screaming at a New Terran interrogator in a language no one understood. She had seen it. She had seen . The man in the armor now was a ghost, a machine.

  Chen Feng didn’t turn. He didn’t flinch. In the faint glow of the panel, the reflection showed his pupils, dark and slightly dilated, fixed on the scrolling data. The chemical dam in his veins held firm, suppressing the storm, turning his focus into a laser.

  The numbers provided him with more comforts.

  Alina’s armored palm smashed down on the composite dashboard. The entire console shuddered. “Damn it, answer me!”

  Chen Feng jolted, a full-body spasm that was purely physical. The hyper-focus shattered. He blinked slowly behind his visor, the world swimming back into a more mundane, more painful clarity. He turned his head a fraction, the servos in his neck whining softly.

  “Hm…” he began, his voice a dry, neutral rasp. “There might be some issues. But let’s not talk about that now.” He shifted in his seat, the movement unnervingly deliberate. “Are you hungry? I’m a bit hungry. We can grab something to eat before we catch up with the Hellwraiths. So, we don’t run out of steam when the fighting starts.”

  Alina stared at him, her mouth slightly agape. The anger in her eyes curdled into pure, unadulterated disbelief. “Are you really that heartless?” she whispered, the words laced with a tremor of genuine fear. “Chen, don’t… don’t scare me like this. We have to save Flora. You can’t afford to suddenly break down .”

  Chen showed no reaction. His gaze drifted back to the instrument panel, to the comforting, logical stream of numbers. Then, as if retrieving a file from a corrupted drive, he spoke again. “Oh. Sorry. What did you ask me earlier?”

  Alina’s fists clenched in her lap. She watched the rigid line of his shoulders, the absolute stillness of his form. The fury bled away, leaving a cold, hollow dread. When she spoke again, her voice was quieter, forced into a semblance of calm that did nothing to hide the concern she was trying to frame as contempt.

  “…How are you… feeling?”

  Chen didn’t hesitate. “Haven’t noticed. I don’t think I feel much.” A pause, then a clinical afterthought. “But that’s fine. Too much emotion would mess up my aim. Or make me drive us into a ditch.”

  Alina was speechless.

  “One more thing, Alina,” Chen continued, his tone still that of a technician reporting a minor malfunction. “If you need to rest, I can take command temporarily.” He anticipated the protest he couldn’t even see forming. “This isn’t a coup. It’s a tactical rotation.” He justified it with a cold, irrefutable logic that was, in its own way, more caring than any touch. “An exhausted commander gets everyone killed. Including herself.”

  The silence that followed was thick enough to taste. Alina’s breath hitched. She could feel the truth of it—the shakiness in her hands, the hollow ache of shame in her gut—and she hated him for seeing it. The irritation bloomed, hot and fast, into outright anger. She unbuckled her harness with a violent click and stood up in the cramped space, her head nearly brushing the low ceiling.

  “Take command? ” The words were a venomous sneer. “A living fossil who can’t even explain what he’s fighting for?” She leaned in, her burned face inches from his helmet’s faceplate. “My duties. My shame. I’ll bear them myself. You just focus on your job. . That’s all you’re good for.” She spat the final sentence like a curse. “Yeah. Killing is all you can do.”

  Chen’s helmet remained fixed forward. The insult washed over the chemical barrier in his mind without leaving a mark.

  “The enemy is called the Hellwraiths. A Scavenger gang. Extremely brutal.” His voice was a flat, tactical briefing. “I took out some of them when I got separated. You and Flora took out some too. They’re smart. A threat. But they can be killed.”

  Alina scoffed, crossing her arms, a gesture of defiance that looked as fragile as she felt. “Hellwraiths. Got it. Fine. Now tell me something I don’t already fucking know.”

  “Their leader is called Erebus. Possibly one of the most evil men in these lands.” Chen’s delivery was devoid of judgment, simply stating a fact. “He’s working for Teodulo now. Teodulo’s been paying Erebus and his paramilitary group to capture slaves for the past months.” He finally turned his head to look at her, the single red optic a baleful eye in the dark. “Why did they attack us? Teodulo is trying to capture live New Terran specimens. Something about ‘genetic artifacts.’ He’s offering a high price, so the Hellwraiths are going crazy over us. That’s the bad news.”

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  He paused, letting the horror of that sink in.

  “The good news, as I deduce it: They probably won’t kill Flora. Because my ‘tongue’ told me Teodulo only pays for live captives.”

  Behind him, where he couldn’t see her, Alina’s face went slack. The color drained from her cheeks.

  “You… ‘tongue’?” She swallowed hard. “ tongue?”

  “Military jargon from my time,” Chen explained, his tone that of a strange familiarity. “It means taking a prisoner with intelligence value , then interrogating them for information. ‘Tongue’ refers to the poor bastard being interrogated.”

  Alina remained frozen, the term "genetic artifacts" turned her stomach. It was a dehumanization more profound than any battlefield slur. It spoke of a fate worse than death, centuries of humiliation taught in every Republican primary schools.

  "Is this information reliable?" she managed, her voice tight. "Did you… kill that ‘tongue’?"

  “No, I didn’t kill him,” Chen said, as if discussing the disposal of trash. “I didn’t have the means to handle a POW. So, I left his fate to Mother Nature.” He shifted his gaze back to the console. “The information… is reliable. He was a mid-level commander of the Hellwraiths. His entire immediate squad was wiped out. He had no reason to go back to Erebus, and no reason to lie to me.”

  Alina took a deep, shuddering breath, the air scraping in her lungs. She looked at the back of his helmet, at this man who was both a relic and a monster, her comrade and a stranger. The weight of command, of their situation, of the shameful secret she carried, settled on her like a shroud. She straightened her spine, the gesture one of grim, monumental decision.

  “Chen Feng, listen carefully.” Her voice was low, stripped of all its previous emotion, becoming pure, hard command. “There’s something crucial you need to know. My superiors have kept this from you due to its connection to a humiliating history of oppression and confidentiality protocols. The situation has changed. So, you must hear this, remember it, and accept it. Treat this as classified military intelligence. That’s an order. Understood?”

  Chen Feng was silent for a long moment, his posture unchanging. The only sign he’d heard her was a slight tilt of his helmet.

  “…What’s this all about,” he finally asked, his voice a low, wary rumble, “so serious?”

  The Red Vulture tore through the night, a wounded predator fleeing one hell and charging headlong into another. Its groaning adamantine hull shouldered through hanging veils of toxic moss and splintered the skeletal remains of trees that clawed at the sky. The headlights, one cracked and flickering, cut twin cones of stark white through the perpetual, swirling haze of the polluted atmosphere. Above, the sky was a starless, bruised blanket, a deep chemical purple occluded by the ghostly green of high-altitude pollutants, offering no light, no comfort, only a suffocating ceiling.

  Inside the rattling cockpit, the silence after Alina’s command was heavier than the armor plate around them. Chen waited, his focus split between the treacherous, debris-strewn path and the looming confession.

  Alina spoke, her voice concise, serious, wasting no words, using the sharp edges of hatred and anger to mask the grief and humiliation that threatened to swallow her whole. "We New Terrans... we were originally slaves."

  She let the word hang in the ozone-tainted air, a bomb detonating in the confined space.

  "In 2110 AD, the 'Ark Initiative' was launched. Terrantec—short for Terran Interstellar Technology, a super-corporation, arrived at New Terra—our current capital planet—using primitive FTL methods." Her words were a sterile recitation of a foundational nightmare. "They engineered the genes of the baseline labor force to create a... slave species. That's us."

  Chen Feng’s hands tightened minutely on the control yokes.

  "Huh?"

  "As for the reason?" Alina sneered, the sound ugly and sharp. "The capitalists of that era had already managed to resurrect slavery on Earth through political maneuvering." She looked out at the blasted landscape, as if she could see their ghosts in the ruins. "Of course, not so blatantly. They dressed it up with pretty terms like 'lifetime contract employees' and other elegant euphemisms—typical capitalist 'linguistic artistry.'... And then, well, you see the result."

  "So, this is the result of genetic editing?" Chen’s voice was low, a statement of dawning horror rather than a question.

  "Yes."

  The simplicity of the answer was a punch to the gut. Chen’s mind, still swimming in the chemical numbness, fought for a tactical foothold. "...Specifically, what kind of editing? What do I need to know?"

  "The birth sex ratio of my people is 1 male to 3.57 females. And our physical appearance... is what you see." She gestured vaguely at her own face, at the fine-boned structure and striking features that were the hallmark of her people. "Back in the day, heh, the capitalists considered us highly desirable merchandise. Teodulo... he must desperately want one of us. Just gives us more reason to flay him alive."

  Chen Feng felt a lurch in his stomach, a physiological nausea that the suppressants in his bloodstream couldn't fully quell. It was the sickness of history, of understanding the true, vile value of the friend they were racing to save.

  "I won't speak of it," he said, the promise gritty and absolute.

  Alina’s gaze snapped to him, her eyes burning with a fierce, warning intensity. "You won't. After the fall of the First Republic and the founding of the People's Republic in 2314, our homeworld suffered five major military invasions. Three of them were either sponsored or launched directly by slavers trying to capture people. That's why our Republic is so heavily militarized."

  The pieces clicked into a devastating, brutal picture. The constant vigilance, the ideological fervor, the deep-seated hatred for the corporate world—it was all born from this.

  "...But, why?" Chen asked, his voice barely a whisper, clinging to the one, stark biological detail that horrified him most. "Three times more women than men?"

  "In that century, female slaves commanded a higher market price than males, while the cost to raise them was the same." Alina’s explanation was so cold, so ruthlessly economic, it was more horrifying than any rant. "So, this ratio was artificially designed. After we wiped out Terrantec’s influence from Sirius and founded our nation, we tried to reverse this... edit. But research by the Department of Science showed... the cost of such an undertaking would be too high, so it wasn't done."

  The conversation, which had felt eternally long, finally ended, leaving a silence thick with the echoes of atrocity.

  Chen Feng felt as if a cold fist had clenched his stomach, squeezing bile into his throat. Fragmented memories flashed through his mind, their meaning now twisted and dark: his first encounter with Alina and Flora, their stunning, almost otherworldly beauty that he’d naively attributed to the hallmark of a fucked-up, totalitarian state obsessed with image, enforcing a universal standard of "perfection" through advanced, mandatory cosmetic surgery; their finely crafted features that possessed a harmonious, almost androgynous perfection; the starkly unnatural female-to-male ratio in the Republic's military ranks, which he'd always seethed with a quiet, bitter resentment at the command staff, believing they had squandered a generation of men in some long-past, idiotic meat-grinder of a war... Now he understood. The truth was far more cruel than his darkest suspicions. This wasn't cosmetic enhancement or demographic chance; it was a brand of shame etched into the very DNA of an entire people.

  China had a century of humiliation. A bit more than one hundred years.

  They had three.

  "Fuck," he finally swore under his breath, the suppressed nausea surging back, accompanied by a chill crawling up his spine like a venomous insect. "So that's... how it is." He shook his head, a slow, weary motion of final, horrific comprehension. "Oh my fucking world, it sucks."

  Alina watched the shock, the pity, and the final dawning revulsion flicker across what she could see of his face. Something tightly wound within her, a coil of defensive fury, seemed to loosen slightly. The burden, now shared, was no lighter, but it was no longer hers alone to carry.

  "Now you understand," she said, her voice flat, emptied of all its previous fire. "We're almost there."

  In the distance, beyond the shattered tree line, pinpricks of light glimmered like fallen stars, their reflection catching coldly on the internal displays of the Red Vulture.