When I woke up, every inch of my body ached, and it was pitch black. I began to question what had happened when I blacked out, but the computer in my head had dutifully recorded every moment and relayed the whole thing to me in as slow motion as I desired. The charge had gone off, as intended. It’d flooded the rails with obscene amounts of energy, which had picked up the trash can we were all hiding in and flung us.

  Waste energy from the charge had, as planned, been funneled into the gravplates that Steve had bolted to either side of the can, and that was the only thing that saved us. They’d kicked in an instant into the acceleration, saving us from the worst of its effects. Instead of being a pulp, I merely felt as if I’d been in a minor car crash. Fortunately, the tons of garbage beneath my body had served as an excellent crash pad, and I’d probably sunk two feet in, preventing me from getting a concussion.

  Then, we crashed into something very hard, going very fast. The inertial dampening from the gravplates had still been active at the time, so other than bouncing around like peas in a pod when we’d crash-landed, we were more or less fine. After ensuring that all my bits were still attached properly, I dug my way towards the edge of the can and jammed my fingers under its lip, groaning with effort as I heaved it off of us. Sunlight, fresh and clean and more pure for the lack of an environment filtering it, shined down from above as the huge, heavy steel container toppled over.

  Some small part of me was expecting to be immediately shot upon doing so, but the more rational part of my mind knew that the odds were nearly nonexistent. Though we had a huge base on the moon, the USAS had very little in the way of forces actually capable of responding to a threat on the moon. Nothing the USAS had ever heard of could even reach the moon without getting kissed by the defensive railguns, and even if they did, there was precisely one base up here, filled to the gills with stone-cold killers.

  With four birds on the moon along with a couple dozen surface-lunar shuttles, none combat rated, we weren’t at risk of hostile air patrols gunning us down. On top of all that, drop marine space suits weren’t remotely rated for actual combat in vacuum. All of this together meant that nobody could respond in person to our landing even if they for some reason believed that we’d survived. Since we didn’t have inertial dampening tech and weren’t even sure it was possible, that was distinctly unlikely. Of course, “unlikely” wouldn’t prevent anybody from targeting the landing spot with kinetics from the railgun and absolutely confirming the fact that we were dead.

  With that in mind, there was little time to waste. I’d been unconscious for only a few seconds, and I sent a ping to the helmets of all my gathered men to rouse them. Several groans came through my pickups in response to the signal, but there was no time to wake them up with coffee and bacon. Rising like zombies out of the garbage, four men and Steve pulled themselves to their feet. I noted, grimly, that one of them wasn’t getting up, and I opened a line with Cung.

  “You’re missing one.”

  “His seals failed,” Cung replied, his tone cold and empty.

  “Well ain’t that some shit,” I responded, trying to sound genuinely sad about it. There wasn’t much else to say, but the hate-filled look he shot me informed me that perhaps saying nothing might’ve been a better option. Regardless, I pressed on. “Base is that way,” I told him, pointing along the path my internal compass was pointing. “We should get moving in case they bombard us.” My NII helpfully placed a waypoint in the upper fifth of my vision to guide me, and I started along it. The ragtag squad of men followed along rapidly, likely spurred along by the threat of bombardment more than any camaraderie.

  Walking quickly in a low gravity environment while trying to keep below any ridges wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Of course, on the moon, a person's weight was a sixth of normal, but that didn’t mean that there was any less mass, and tightly controlling that mass while your balance was thrown off was no easy task. As a drop trooper, I’d had some degree of training in the matter. I’d had to wander around on the moon with full gear for many long hours, after all, and on occasion they’d have us do hikes, runs, and full-on sprints across the surface. Cung and his men, on the other hand, had no such experience.

  They were each struggling in their own way, occasionally bouncing a bit too high, overcorrecting and losing their balance, or simply exaggerating their movements and wearing themselves out. The latter two weren’t terribly important to me, but every time one of them took too hard a step and drifted a little too high I cringed a little, expecting a round to take the unfortunate man’s head off. It never quite happened, though, and eventually I began to relax, until the moon bucked underfoot and we were all tossed over like a set of bowling pins in a line. Luckily there was no atmosphere to transfer a shockwave, or else the lot of us would’ve been killed right then and there.

  As it stood, we had to clutch and hold onto the gray moon rocks below us for dear life for nearly an hour as the huge railguns pounded the moon, until we could keep going on our way. I turned back to watch the incoming strikes with something akin to awe. My eyes couldn’t track the incoming projectiles, of course, but their effects were easily able to be discerned. As each tungsteel slug came in, there was a flash, something like lightning, as the projectiles literally exploded when they collided with the moon. A dust cloud was being thrown into the air, many kilometers high but the bombardment kept coming and coming straight through it. Finally, after what seemed like hours but my NII dutifully reported was a mere matter of minutes, the bombardment stopped.

  Getting up and shaking ourselves off, myself and my little group took off again as the dust spread out through the vacuum above us, obscuring our perfect view of a pristine Earth as we started again on our long journey to the moonbase. It wouldn’t do to come down directly in sight of Luna Base, so Captain Cross and myself had come up with a trajectory which saw us slamming down a few dozen kilometers from the edge of the dark side. Nobody was going to have a second firefight in them after thirty kilometers of marching, me included, so I was looking for a cave instead of a fight.

  It didn’t take too long to find. The moon was littered with craters from bits of space crap slamming into it, and these impact sites had the fortunate side effect of breaching into cave systems underneath the surface. For a while there it had even been a passtime of wealthy explorers from the USAS to visit Luna Base and venture out from it to see various caverns. The hike wasn’t nearly so glamorous for my little posse, but we made do.

  Sitting within gray stone walls, we ate our nutrient paste, delivered to us via a nipple inside our helmets, and listened to our own breathing. I got the feeling that Cung and his men were talking to one another, but they certainly weren’t interested in talking to me, so I set down my pack and took the first watch at the mouth of the cavern. I’d always thought that the moon was pretty, and tonight was no exception.

  By now, the titanic dust cloud had either settled or drifted off into the void, leaving an unobscured view. Overhead, the stars in their millions burned steadily down at me, refusing to twinkle in the lack of atmosphere. Earth, reflecting sunshine, practically glowed with brilliant colors, the greens and yellows of the land contrasting with the deep blue of the sea and the white of cloud cover and ice caps. It was enough to make me want to kick back with a beer and watch it spin away far, far beneath me.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” came Steve’s voice over a closed line.

  “I was thinking about how well a beer would go down,” I responded.

  “Guess it was too much to hope that you’d be thinking of the big picture in all this.”

  “I dunno, the planet seems pretty big from here,” I gestured to it while I spoke.

  “Does it, though? Aren’t you curious, at all, about all of this? Other near-human beings out there, aliens, an invasion of body-stealing parasites from beyond the stars?” If I was being perfectly honest, I wasn’t. None of it interested me in the slightest. Except, of course, for the girl with the ice blue eyes and raven-black hair. She was plenty interesting.

  “I just want to get back home,” I told him instead.

  “Melvin, home doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone. The town will have been evacuated by now. They’ll probably bury the whole place after scooping up anything radioactive and firing it off at the sun. There’s nothing for you to return to.” I sighed, the sound loud in my ears. Without an atmosphere, my breath was the only thing I could actually hear since his voice was being transmitted directly into my mind by my NII.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Saying it didn’t make anything any better, nor did it do anything about my thirst for a cold beer. “I guess it’s all my fault, isn’t it?” Steve laughed at that, having a good long guffaw while I sat there in silence.

  “Yep, I suppose it is. That’s alright, though, you’re kind of a retard.” I bristled at that, and turned towards him. Steve must’ve sensed impending violence, because he put his hands up in a placating gesture. “Look, you’re what they made you to be. Take a man’s brain and bathe it in drugs and hypnotherapy and you get… Well, you. You’re probably a perfect study for what they were trying to do.”

  “Thanks,” I grunted, without putting in the effort to actually give the word any venom.

  “Hey, the upside of all this is that your brain is probably on the mend. The first time you went into a medpod cleared all the residuals of the drugs out of your system and did a number on repairing your nervous system. Your brain probably isn’t going to get a lot better but at least it won’t get any worse.”

  “How the hell do you know any of this?” I asked him.

  “Chief Engineer told me, he read your stats from the medpod,” he explained, and for a while he fell into pensive silence. “Look, you saved my life back at the railgun base. You brought me along on your escape when you didn’t have to, and I’m a little bit grateful for that.” I raised my eyebrow in response, turning to look at him. He seemed all sorts of conflicted, but finally made up his mind and went on. “The Dragons, beyond Chief Engineer getting me back, don’t care one whit about either you or Cung and his guys. Apparently Cung has done a bit of organ harvesting to finance his rebellion, and you’re… you. You’re a scorpion and a spider in their eyes, and they don’t care which of you ends up on top.”

  “Yeah?” I wasn’t sure where he was going with his little spiel, but I knew I wanted to hear the end of it, and he seemed like he needed a little encouragement to keep going.

  “Just… come up with a plan B. They’re probably not going to give you a ride back to the planet, they might not even let you live. They’re definitely not going to intervene when Cung tries to kill you. When, not if.”

  “Shit,” I muttered. Getting a ride from them had been a central part of my plan. At least I didn’t have to worry about Blart, as the rival group of Dragons had kept him and given me the assurance that he’d be safe and sound until I could get back to Tirana, wherever that was. They’d gone through all the effort of phrasing it like they were taking a hostage, but some small part of me actually hoped they would make it a more permanent sort of thing.

  “Yep,” he responded. “Here, Chief Engineer gave me this,” he told me, handing me a small rectangular object, maybe three times as large as a candy bar. It was surprisingly heavy for its size. I tossed it up and down in a hand, catching it out of the air each time I did so.

  “What is it?”

  “A very powerful bomb,” he told me nonchalantly. I stopped playing with it.

  “What?” I asked, holding the thing at arm’s length, as if that would protect me.

  “Don’t worry, it’s extremely stable. When you want it to go off, press the button on the side, hard. It’ll explode after five seconds, and it’s full of monomolecular metal shards. In short, it’ll punch through anything we’ve ever built.”

  “He really gave you this?” I asked, incredulity plain in my voice.

  “Among other things,” Steve agreed. “We’ve grown very close in the time we’ve had together.”

  “Man, I still can’t believe you’re banging a crab alien,” I chuckled, and Steve’s expression soured.

  “Yeah, sure, whatever. Good talk. I’m going to sleep.”

  “For your information, Chief Engineer doesn’t count as a real girl!” I called at his back as he walked into the cave. I spent the rest of my watch wishing for a cold beer and watching out for any of my former comrades turned enemies on the planet below. All the while, only meters behind me my former enemies turned allies slept behind me. Fate worked in mysterious ways.

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