Whiskey burns differently when your bloodstream’s half synth-blood.

  Lucas Voss slammed the Ceres Station mercenary’s face into the irradiated ice bar, relishing the crack of cybernetic jaw components. The guy’s ocular implant skittered across the floor, still projecting a wanted hologram of Lucas himself.

  Classy.

  “Told you,” Lucas growled, driving a monomolecular blade under the merc’s ribs, “I don’t work for fucking TerraGenesis anymore.”

  The bar’s gravity generator chose that moment to fail.

  Bodies and blood droplets suspended mid-air as Lucas’s neural scar lit up like a fusion torch. The lightning-shaped implant etched into his skull itched—a relic from the Kuiper Belt Wars where they’d hardwired his brain for perfect recall. He remembered this exact scenario. Three years ago. Sixteen hours ago. Now.

  Memory Fragment #8821A:

  The medic’s hands shaking as she injected the mnemo-enhancers. “You’ll remember every kill, Voss. That’s the price.”

  The merc’s scream pulled him back. Lucas floated upside down, watching his own reflection in the guy’s remaining organic eye. His platinum hair swirled like toxic algae. The scar pulsed.

  Click.

  The gravity returned.

  So did the pain.

  ——

  Ceres Station’s underbelly smelled of ammonia and betrayal. Lucas staggered into a coolant duct, the station’s rotation mimicking gravity just enough to make vomit spiral prettily. His spinal implant buzzed—the dead quantum chip they’d left inside him was reacting to something.

  Bad sign.

  He pulled the 1920s flask from his thigh armor, letting bourbon drift in amber globules. Drinking in zero-G required finesse. So did ignoring the ghost of Private Cho, who’d died laughing at a joke Lucas couldn’t remember.

  “You’re being hunted,” said the duct’s rusted AI terminal. Its voice modulator was stuck on “creepy little girl.”

  “Join the queue.” Lucas thumbed fusion rounds into his antique Mako pistol. “TerraGenesis? Martian Syndicate? Or the cute barista I ghosted last week?”

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  The screen flickered to show security feeds. Six Cerean Syndicate hunters in adaptive camo, their weapons glowing with forbidden Bose-Einstein condensates.

  Ah. The war criminals.

  Memory Fragment #0043D:

  Burning habitats reflected in Cho’s visor. “Orders are orders, LT.” The smell of fried pork and melting polymers.

  Lucas’s scar flared. The duct’s walls dissolved into the Kuiper Belt’s frozen hellscape. Phantom ice crystals tore at his lungs.

  Not real. Not now. Fuck.

  He bit his tongue until copper flooded his mouth. The present snapped back, brittle and sharp.

  ——

  The hunters found him near the hydroponic farms.

  Lucas crouched behind a vat of genetically modified wheat, watching their thermal signatures blur. Ceres’s spin gravity left blood pooling in stupid places—his left foot was going numb.

  “Voss!” their leader barked, voice filtered through a Grunman-7 vocal scrambler. “The skull artifact. Where is it?”

  Skull? The memory hit like a railgun slug:

  Mars. Blood pooling around Elena’s boots. A crystal monstrosity rewriting physics.

  Lucas blinked. Wait—he’d never been to Mars.

  Had he?

  The hunter raised a quantum destabilizer. “Last chance.”

  Lucas’s spinal implant screamed.

  He moved on instinct, Mako pistol singing. Three shots—center mass, throat, groin. The destabilizer fired wild, its beam liquefying a support strut. Ceres Station groaned as atmospheric pressure ripped the hunters into the void.

  “Should’ve aimed better,” Lucas muttered, mag-booting to the floor.

  The last hunter clung to a ruptured oxygen line, helmet visor cracked. Lucas recognized the insignia on her armor—a black sun swallowing planets.

  Cerean Syndicate didn’t use that symbol.

  Memory Fragment #5521X:

  A dead city on Titan. Same symbol carved into frozen methane. Cho screaming as their guns jammed.

  The hunter spat blood onto her cracked visor. “He’s coming for the skull. You can’t—”

  Lucas put a round through her forehead.

  “Hate cliffhangers,” he told the corpse.

  ——

  The flask was empty.

  Lucas floated in a stolen maintenance pod, watching Ceres Station shrink behind him. The spinal implant had gone quiet. The whiskey hadn’t.

  A proximity alert blared.

  On the rear cam feed, a Terran battleship materialized from quantum stealth—all jagged angles and predatory grace. Its hull bore TerraGenesis’s logo: a DNA helix strangling a planet.

  “Lieutenant Voss.” The comms crackled with his old court-martial prosecutor’s voice. “Surrender the artifact, and we’ll make your execution painless.”

  Lucas snorted. “Bold words from a guy who needs fifteen Dreadnoughts to fight one drunk.”

  He punched the emergency burn. The pod’s thrusters screamed. The battleship fired.

  This is it, he thought. Dying sober.

  Then space ripped.

  ——

  The crystal skull floated in the pod, singing in ultraviolet.

  Lucas’s neural scar blazed. Memories flooded in—wrong memories:

  Elena’s hands on the skull. Omaha Beach overlapping with Mars. A choice: save reality or save himself.

  “Bullshit,” he whispered.

  The skull’s song peaked. The Terran battleship’s missiles became clouds of chromium butterflies. The stars twisted into Vognir glyphs.

  A woman’s voice, Hungarian accent sharp enough to cut glass: “Stop drinking, you suicidal idiot. We have work to do.”

  Lucas reached for the skull.

  His pod exploded.