The Assault Unit’s HUD sparkles back to life as Lanis’ eyes crack open. For a single excruciating second she imagines that she’s back inside the Demeter’s Navigation pod, the hunger of the Anomaly licking against her neck.

  No. She strains against the gel fluid of the pilot pod, spitting out a mouthful of tongue-bitten blood, remembering where she is. In some ways, it’s even worse than the Demeter: there is no tech-savant to pry her from the Navigation pod, no ship AI to sedate her. She’s alone.

  Ether? she calls out inside her mind. Nothing. Each heartbeat sends a pulsing ache across her head, terminating to a sharp pain at her neural shunt. She wiggles her fingers and toes, feeling a slight surge of relief that she probably hasn’t experienced an intracranial hemorrhage.

  “Ether!” she plaintively yells.

  The only response to her cry is the bleating indifference of the Assault Unit’s alarms.

  Dead—is she dead? She thinks, panic rising in her chest. That’s what the Anomaly has done to every AI that it’s come into contact with—at least as Fleet knows. And Ether grappled with the thing; Lanis clenches her jaw, remembering Ether’s scream as her hands melted away under the thing’s grasp, the smoke drifting up from her motionless dream-body.

  Alongside her grasping search for a trace of her AI partner, another part of Lanis unwillingly takes back control of the Assault Unit.

  It’s harder without Ether—like flying a ship with a single finger—but not impossible. As if sensing her awkward groping, the Instinct Admin of the Unit rises up along with her, taking over tasks that Ether once oversaw. The Unit’s instincts feel completely altered now that the ghosts of its old pilot and AI are truly gone; more measured, but also slower, and less intuitive.

  The tire-sized optics of the Unit glow back into existence as the power core flares into combat mode, sending a tremor through the Unit’s body.

  Lanis tentatively reaches down with a massive arm, grasping the Grav-maul and pulling it up from where it tumbled like a fallen monument. She rises, and scans the battlefield through the Unit’s HUD, trying to absorb what’s just occurred.

  Three mechs remain standing: Lanis, the enemy Unit, and Aegis Three. However, even as she watches, the enemy Insertion Unit sways, and then topples over, like a skyscraper that’s had a misfire in its detonation, the ground trembling as it crashes into the earth.

  Behind it, Aegis Three stands. It’s missing most of its right arm, and wisps of smoke drift from gouges across its chest. Still, it’s alive, and Lanis feels the ping of a requested comm channel. She haltingly accepts.

  “Lanis here,” she croaks.

  “Commander,” Aegis Three responds, their voice crackling into the emptiness of the pilot pod. “Are you… well?”

  If I wasn’t, you’d be dead by now, Lanis thinks. Instead, she responds, “Affirmative. Both enemy Insertion Units are dead.”

  She hesitates, the Assault Unit’s pivoting to the smoking wreckage of the two Kaisho mechs, along with the scattered remains of the other Aegis Units.

  “Are you the only one left?”

  “Yes. I’m all that’s left,” Aegis Three says, only a slight pause betraying the emotion behind those words. “Our forces are requesting a status update, Commander. It appears that comms interference has been lifted. Shall I give the go-ahead for the breakthrough to commence?”

  Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

  “Yes. Give the go-ahead,” Lanis responds quietly, hefting the Grav-maul. She feels the request of other pings from the Murkata commanders behind her. If Ether was still here, she would be juggling all of this, but instead it’s just her, slow and stupid.

  “My AI is down,” Lanis continues, the horrible truth of the words catching in her throat. “I won’t be nearly as effective as before, but the Kaisho forces don’t know that. I’ll lead the final assault.”

  If that’s even necessary. She thinks back to what just occurred in her dream construct, how she reached inside of the Anomaly and ripped it apart. Her tingling exhaustion reminds her of the afterglow of Warp jump training. How deeply was I able to hurt it? Was I able to sever its grasp?

  “Yes, commander,” Aegis Three says. The Murkata Suit dutifully follows Lanis as the Assault Unit begins to trudge toward Fleet Academy. Overhead, Murkata skycraft scream, apparently unopposed. A portion of her HUD expands, a strategic overlay of the area once again coming into focus now that the Anomaly’s strange interference matrix is down. She and the Murkata mechs have fulfilled their purpose as the hammer of the assault; now it’s time for the scalpel. She watches Planetary Admin’s Rapid Response battalion form up behind them, five and ten-ton Breaker Suits followed by Murkata and P.A. troop carriers.

  One comms ping is more urgently recognizable than the rest, and Lanis opens a channel. The concerned voice of Admiral Ren crackles in her ear:

  “Lanis! Good God woman, what’s just happened?”

  Lanis swallows another taste of blood, glancing at a readout of her vitals that expands more prominently in her HUD. Maybe it’s not just her tongue that’s bleeding. She’s tachycardic, and her blood pressure is creeping downward. She hadn’t even noticed that the Unit’s Instinct Admin has been fluid bolusing her ever since she woke, there’s merely too much information for her tired mind to keep track of. As she watches, a vasopressor alert pops up across the HUD; she winces at the renewed pang of her headache, along with a sharp jab along her back. She’s definitely bleeding from somewhere, somehow, and the Unit is attempting to locate the source.

  “I fought it,” Lanis whispers. “And I think… I think I won. But Ether, she’s gone. I don’t know how to explain…”

  There’s a pause on the other end of the channel, and Lanis can hear muffled voices speaking before Ren’s voice returns into her ear.

  “Your vitals are shit, Lanis. We need to get you out of there; Ether’s cortex too.”

  Lanis opens her mouth to argue—what about the assault?—but Ren continues.

  “Whatever you did, it’s had a debilitating effect. Resistance has mostly collapsed. A few Kaisho Units are still fighting back, but it seems more out of confusion than organized resistance. Now we just need to get at those cadets…”

  As Ren speaks, Lanis crests a small hill, and there, laid out before her in green-lawned perfection, are the grounds of Fleet Academy. If she didn’t know better, she would think that nothing was amiss: the pale glass towers glisten in the afternoon light, and the ivy-covered brick buildings invitingly sit, as they always have. She pivots, optical eyes narrowing at a cluster of white buildings. The Navigation school.

  She watches, pulse rate continuing to rise, as Rapid Response Suits sprint across the manicured lawns, their armored feet gouging out clumps of grass as they move between cover. She hears dull explosions in the distance, but it’s eerily quiet on the Academy grounds; only a few destroyed lancer and anti-air emplacements hint at the prior presence of Kaisho forces. The grounds seem abandoned now, as if they’ve all simply melted away into the ground.

  She tracks a group of Murkata APCs roaring down a narrow lane across from the cadet cafeteria. I remember having lunch there. Laughing with my friends, she numbly thinks, as she watches one of the armored carriers disgorge an armored Sec-team, who immediately blow down a door at one end of the Navigation school.

  “Extract team approaching,” Admiral Ren says, but Lanis is barely listening, instead wholly focused on two other Murkata teams who are breaching other entrances, rifles drawn. She tries to ping one of the extraction teams, but her mind is too clumsy to find the proper code-channel.

  “What are they finding, Admiral?” Lanis whispers. She registers another bolus of artificial blood being pumped into her veins, and there’s a pinch under her clavicle as the Unit accesses her deep subclavian vein for the administration of a second vasopressor.

  Admiral Ren waits just a moment too long before responding. “We’ll discuss it when you’re out; Lanis, prepare for evac,” she says, and Lanis feels the sensation of something landing and latching across the Assault Unit’s wounded back. An extraction protocol blooms across the HUD, awaiting Lanis’ acceptance.

  “Not until you tell me what they’ve found, Admiral,” Lanis responds, gritting her bloodied teeth.

  Lanis can feel a weight of reluctance behind the Admiral’s silence before she finally answers.

  “They’re dead, Lanis. They’re all dead.”