The blinking sign in front of the dingy back-street clinic was burned out and said “DOC OR”.

  Doc or death apparently, as this was the only medical facility for miles.

  A trail of blood led from the off-chute of an airduct near the explosion site, took a twisted and agonized path through the Marshes, and finally ended in a red pool outside the back door of the clinic.

  Inside, something more meat than man cried out of what used to be its mouth, as a surgeon worked diligently behind his gore spattered scrubs. The doctor was using every trick imaginable to keep his patient alive.

  He had no idea what kind of accident the thing on his operating table had undergone, but it left him looking like used tiger bait. It took every shred of the remnants of his Hippocratic Oath just to admit the creature.

  After hours of nonstop suturing, cauterizing and amputation, the patient lay in a drug induced coma. To make this thing into a man again would take a cargo load of cybernetics. The doctor only referred to it as a “man” based on its only identifiable feature: a very remarkable and intact mustache.

  ...

  The surviving members of Snake Clan didn’t skip a beat. Once they regained consciousness and the doors of their tomb miraculously opened, they found themselves buried inside the motherload of all scrap.

  After crawling their way out, they sent word by foot to the nearest clan outpost and were soon resupplied with fresh armor and a full rack of stimulants. They geared up, and went back into the ruin.

  Soon, haulers and extractors arrived at the site to begin removing any and all valuables. The wreckage of an advanced laboratory was a hot commodity, and it looked like all the other tunnels leading into the space had been collapsed. That meant there was a short time for them to grab what they could, and get the hell out of there.

  Hazza leaned against a filthy hyper hauler filled with expensive junk. He took a healthy drag from his smoke and exhaled it slowly. He was covered in blood, oil, char, sweat, and who knows what else.

  The contents of the hauler were worth a small fortune. He couldn’t help but think that whoever was communicating with them over the comm system had left their tunnel intact for a reason. Maybe he was just blazed.

  He slapped the back of the truck loudly with his fist. “Let’s load out! Gotta make tracks before the big vultures come peckin’,” he said through the burner in his lips and a cloud of smoke. Looked like he might get to spend some time with old Magda afterall...

  ...

  “What the fuck is this place?” Darby asked as he followed the roly poly man through the facility.

  After a long and painstakingly sober journey from the asteroid cluster to his once forgotten homeworld, Darby was feeling like chewed up shit. He’d been following this man past a haunted house’s worth of operating rooms and experimentation chambers for what seemed like hours.

  Through a window into a room on his left he saw a sleeping Caster laying on a table amongst a number of scientists, expectantly holding clipboards and jotting quick notes. The Casters eyes suddenly bulged out of his head and he screamed, then all the veins in his body exploded at once, splattering the window. A small robot emerged and suctioned cupped its way across, squeegeeing the blood in short ineffective swipes of its bladed arms.

  Bernard jumped in alarm but Darby was unphased. In his short years he’d already witnessed a lifetime of violence.

  The short man collected himself and then said in his nasal voice, “Erm, all in the name of science! Please we must hurry along, follow me!” and resumed his quick trundle down the corridor.

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  Through another window on his right, he saw a woman in a surgical gown hooked to a glowing IV. He could sense her psychic energy through the wall. It spiked drastically and she began cackling like an escaped lunatic before sending a wave of energy into the scientists eagerly observing in the corner, liquifying them. She immediately passed out on the floor, just before her own head exploded.

  A man eating his own arm. A woman whose skin had melted off of her body but continued to converse calmly with scientists. A sinister robot with a visible human brain. This place was insane.

  With his notepad held sideways from his face, Bernard blocked each window in turn, busily moving his squat body ever along.

  “Honestly, this guy’s pretty fast,” Darby thought to himself.

  They finally found the end of the long hallway, which opened into a multilevel chamber stacked with diligently working researchers and technicians. A hundred different wild looking projects were their labor, but Darby had no interest in them.

  Bernard led them through this area and into a private windowless white room near the back of the complex. The harsh overhead lighting seared from above.

  “Have a seat please,” Bernard instructed. A small table and an uncomfortable looking chair sat in the center of the room.

  Darby loped over to it, kicked it away from the table, and sat with his arms crossed.

  The door locked with a click and the lights dimmed. A beam of light appeared from the ceiling and scanned them both head to toe, bathing their bodies with its light. Satisfied, it retreated and the lights resumed their scorch.

  They sat there a spell, Bernard humming to himself and Darby scowling at Bernard.

  Suddenly, at the far side of the room, the wall slid open and two heavily armored and helmeted troopers entered the room. They stationed themselves on either side of the door. Then a man ripped straight from a G.I. Joe box marched through the door.

  Darby could tell immediately that this man was deadly.

  He walked in front of Darby, turned to him and regarded him with a cold stare.

  “I present to you Augustus Krueger. Mr. Krueger, Darby Cutter as requested sir,” Bernard said.

  A tense moment went by as they sized one another up. Then Krueger began,

  “A pleasure to make your acquaintance Mr. Cutter,” he said in a deep grizzly voice. “You’ve been selected for a very important job, one that I think suites you well.”

  Darby sat in silence.

  “You see Mr. Cutter, there is a war going on. Not one of the showy affairs you see on the nightly feeds, or one of the secret space wars.”

  Darby raised an eyebrow. Krueger began pacing back and forth in front of him.

  “This is a war between good and evil. A war between dark and light. A war that lesser evolved people could barely fathom in the depths of a brain melting Trinalite stupor.”

  He had a way of enunciating words that was excruciating to Darby. Treen. A. Light.

  “I would like to recruit you in this war. I’d like to pay you an absurd amount of money to do so.” He stopped to let his words sink in.

  Bernard hobbled forward and dropped a contract and a pen on the table.

  “Feel free to read through it, I know you won’t. I can tell you are a serious person Mr.Cutter, and so I’ll cut to the chase. Have you ever held true power?” he said as he placed two palms on the table and stared into Darby’s face.

  Darby waited a beat and then replied.

  “I’ve driven thousand-ton mining rigs through asteroids from distant stars. I’ve seen the light fade out of a man’s eyes as he died by my hand. And my astral form has travelled as far into the blackness of space as any man alive. So yeah, I’ve felt “true power’.”

  Now it was Kruger’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “I didn’t ask if you had ever felt it. I asked if have you have ever held it,” Kruger said, and reaching into his pocket withdrew a single vial, red hot and steaming. He placed it on the table. Bernard took a few steps closer towards the exit.

  Darby couldn’t take his eyes off of the syringe. It was like an optical illusion, or a funhouse mirror. It rippled through the heat surrounding it. Sweat broke on his brow just from looking at it.

  “What... is this thing?” he asked, words struggling to escape from his mouth.

  “This, Mr. Cutter, is the reason we dragged you off that shit-can rock. This is a way to make your life mean something. I urge you to sign the contract. We will begin experimentation immediately.” Kruger said.

  Darby shook his head, “Hang on, I’m not trying to gnaw my own arm off. Or have my head exploded. You don’t know who you’re messing with,” he said and reached into himself to find his focus.

  But it wasn’t there.

  He couldn’t summon a trace of psychic energy. He looked down at himself bewildered.

  “We took the liberty of installing a limiter on you while you were fighting the D.T.s in the shuttle,” Krueger said with a flat look.

  Darby bolted up from the desk snarling and lurched towards Krueger. Before he could make it a foot, one of the guards laced him with a stun gun, leaving him shaking and immobile on the floor.

  Krueger looked down on him, disgusted,

  “It’s always nicer when they sign the form,” he said, and his face was eclipsed with blackness as Darby lost consciousness.