Up the street they went, fighting and killing. The black titans plunged through the flesh of Primary like a blunt knife, leaving in their wake Rayor’s broken people. Halfway to the CBC site, four of the nine Jar’ron who had landed on Raysor were dead at the Gold One’s hand. The monstrous bodies, encased in armour and grit, were discarded and left in the dust, vulnerable to the molestations of those who had escaped the massacre. But the closer they came to the corpse of the first colony’s decaying fusion reactor, the less likely they were to be disturbed.

  When the fifth Jar’ron was dropped from a height of two hundred meters by the winged figure, cast in metal and light, its body was left alone, half buried in the dirt on the very same street where its comrades had been picked off before.

  When four Jar’ron heavies remained, marching toward the temple of man’s technological failure, the Gold One attacked with prejudice. As the crowds thinned and the threat of radiation increased, the golden warrior grew bold. It dove from the sky, weaving between columns of smoke and dust clouds, and plunged toward the marching alien warriors like a seabird to a school of fish. Its first victim was plucked from the dirt and tossed skyward. After three seconds of cartwheeling flight, it separated into two halves as if cleaved by an invisible blade.

  The Jar’ron attempted to repel the next attack with shrapnel screens and exploding munitions. Still, the golden warrior plunged through the maelstrom without hesitation, seemingly unscathed by streams of high-velocity projectiles and expanding cones of razor-sharp fragmentation. For the first time since entering the field, it unsheathed a sword, which flashed like metal fashioned from the heart of a sun. The first warrior died when the searing blade vaporised its meaty torso in a flash as bright as phosphorus. Its next victim was set alight with precise fenestration of the warrior’s power plant. Those watching remembered the screams of a burning alien; they remembered the inhumanity of the uncanny screeching and mewling, for humankind had never heard such sounds before.

  The final Jar’ron warrior and the leader of the landing party watched its comrades die at the hands of the golden warrior with a stoicism that spoke of an indifference to the fate of its comrades or perhaps a fervent belief in the necessity of martyrdom. Marneka continued forward, marching over the broken concrete, as the mournful figure in golden armour beheaded the last of its comrades, it's staring mask only just visible amongst the swirling obscuration of sand and smoke.

  _____

  The alleyways around the main street were chaotic, congested and bulging with refuse, like arteries clogged with fatty plaque, threatening to rupture at any moment and bring all flow to a standstill. Arker and Gop ran away from the hellish main street as best they could. Most of the people they encountered were heading the same way; other more determined or deluded individuals were heading towards Jar’ron. Arker didn’t try and stop them. He received mixed reactions to his nanosuit; women and children often screamed when they saw him; others stared with wonder or cursed and shook fists. He ignored them; they were from Raysor, after all.

  After a few minutes of weaving between shabby locals and their discarded refuse, he and Gop came to a fork in a narrow alleyway. A group of men were talking passionately over the barrels of their geriatric weapons. When they saw Arker, jogging in his clay-like nanosuit, and Gop barrelling down the alleyway, they turned with wide eyes and fired from the hip. Arker squealed and brought his hands up to his face. Dull blows hammered into his torso and arms, making him flinch and stumble as he blindly ran to the right.

  He kept running away from the trigger-happy degenerates.

  After a few minutes of panicked scrambling down namless streets, he flattened himself against a rough stone wall and sucked in the cool air circulating in his helmet. He checked himself for wounds and found his armour covered in small depressions, like miniature craters left by stones tossed into thick mud. As he watched, the nanomaterial slowly pushed flattened slugs from the armour on his forearms. The fat lead bullets popped from his armour, falling to the dusty street with dull thuds. He looked around for Gop, but the robot was nowhere to be seen.

  He heard quick footsteps to his right and glanced down an alleyway.

  He glimpsed the small white robot running at full speed while a street cat leapt at his bulbous head, screeching like a banshee and swiping at the white shell with claws outstretched.

  “Gop!” Arker cried out. But the robot was already gone.

  He began walking in the direction he had seen Gop, calling out for the robot. At the next intersection, he encountered more locals - young boys much the same age as Arker but with eyes like criminals. Engrossed in their game, they largely ignored Arker as he sauntered past. That in itself was worrying. Where was their curiosity, their fear?

  In a circle, they flipped stones and cried out as luck and skill twisted fortunes one way or another. Another stone was flipped, and jeers erupted from the group. A smaller boy swore and walked to the wall beside the circle. As the rest hollered and laughed, one boy picked up a whip. The loser pulled up his shirt, and Arker saw his back was already a patchwork of scarred and thickened skin, with a fresher wound oozing blood like a tree leaking sap.

  They whipped him three times and enjoyed themselves thoroughly. The lashed one stumbled to the ground and held back tears.

  Arker left them behind, unsettled and dismayed.

  At the next intersection, Arker sat on a set of stone stairs and started crying. He wasn’t really sure why. He had the overwhelming sense that everything was wrong in the world; it felt like the whole universe had gone crooked. He was lonely; he needed his father, even if the man ignored him. He wanted to ignore him too; he just wanted to be back on the station – melancholy and wistful as he passed the time. Instead, he was on Raysor in the midst of a terrible calamity, lost and abandoned while the local people tore themselves apart.

  He leant to the side, rolled onto the ground, and stayed there, listening to the thumping and cracking of gunfire: just punctuation in the story of a pointless struggle. He wondered how many more would die before the Jar’ron gave up or the golden warrior picked them off. His tears dried up in the filtered air of his helmet and even that felt like a slight.

  Sometime later, there was a tearing sound, as if the atmosphere was being pulled apart. He glimpsed the gunship screaming overhead, towards the centre of Primary. Where was Gop? Abandoned again. First his mother, then his father and then his father’s pet robot – it seemed like each one was less important than the last. Perhaps that trend reflected the sad fact that he had nothing important left to lose.

  ____

  The Jar’ron stared. An exercise in geometric deterioration rose above the world, slouching heavily and forlorn, dying in the weak, filtered light of the distant sun. The buildings of the failed colony project were like the bloated corpse of a giant mammal, stripped of colour and painted grey by time. The Jar’ron warrior turned around. The foe approached, clad in gold armour and surety of victory. The Jar’ron was alone in this. His comrades were dead, his ship unresponsive, and his people separated by space so grand in distance it was capable of making light grow old in transit. To face this enemy, most grand and substantial, was something of an honour. To die alone was a sacrifice. To burn this whole city to ash, to crumble the but stone and liquefy the bone – a pleasure.

  He sent a command to the predator gunship.

  The machine changed its course and began arming its high-yield nuclear payload. It would approach from the sky and arm all of its remaining ordinances before diving to the ground, cooking off every last explosive and capacitor, detonating its nuclear weapons and splitting its own fusion stores. This last resort was inconsistent with his official orders, but this foe necessitated ultimate destruction.

  The enemy approached.

  They were on open ground, and nameless forces had leveled all the hovels this close to the taint. The Gold warrior strode over the rubble, bright as a constellation, with its wings folded neatly at its back in the fashion of a resting angel.

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” it said, speaking for the first time that they had crossed paths.

  “What are you?” the Jar’ron Commander replied.

  “You know what I am.”

  “No, I do not.”

  “I’m the squall over the Everglade Coast, I’m the frost wind singing through the Spiral Stairs to God, I’m the Rock Spider in the Fields of the Flayed Bear, I’m the Message to Arc’Ron’s daughter.”

  The Jar’ron Captain froze at the mention of such intimate details of his cultural heritage. Its armoured bulk shifted instinctively into a stance programmed by genes, sculpted by generations of his forefathers in the struggle for survival. The Jar’ron lowered its head and hunched its shoulders.

  The Gunship screamed towards them.

  “Well then, vengeance is mine today, demon”. The Jar’ron commander replied.

  The Gold One seemed unperturbed. A crowd of onlookers had formed on the rooftops of the closest buildings. The Jar’ron welcomed them; let them see how this ends.

  The alien roared and charged the golden figure. The Gunship plunged from the sky toward them.

  ___

  Arker watched the little girl saunter over the deserted square. She made the pretence of picking at the refuse whilst keeping a sideways eye on the stranger in the nano suit. Arker begged her to get on with it, to walk over and prod him like she did with the rest of the trash.

  Eventually, she made it close and turned towards him, studying his figure with the eye of na?ve curiosity. Perhaps that was an unfair description; the girl lived on Raysor, after all.

  The girl moved past him, put her back against the same wall, and slid down next to him. The little girl regarded him with small, bright eyes. Arker’s eyes filled with another batch of tears. Such simple kindness. The kindness of a lack of fear and loathing.

  Then Gop came barrelling round the corner, little white feet slipping and sliding on the loose ground. The girl leapt to her feet and ran off down a smaller alleyway before disappearing into a hovel opposite him.

  Arker scowled at the robot, but the machine had green eyes of cheery optimism.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” Arker spat

  “No time to explain, I’ve got us a ride out of here.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Gop’s eyes practically tingled with excitement.

  Arker heard a cheer erupt from the direction of the centre of Primary. The gunshots had ceased.

  Then, the air began tearing itself apart again. A sonic boom swept over the pair as the Gunship air-braked not thirty meters overhead and began hovering above them.

  “Ta-da!”

  Arker got up. “No way”

  Gop skittered over to the centre of the small square and looked up at the gunship. Sparks appeared at the back of the small white figure and formed into a mico tornado; Akrer was about ask if the robot was alright when the wall of the hovel opposite them came apart in pieces, drifted towards the robot and then arranged themselves into a perfect staircase to the waiting belly of the gunship.

  ‘What the fuck”

  “Let’s go, Arker” The small figure leapt up the stairs like a nimble child in a space suit.

  Arker followed quickly and began to take the stairs two at a time. Then he stopped and looked to the side. The hovel that had donated its wall to construct their staircase was now open to him. Inside were rusty beds where sickly bodies lay. Filth filled the buckets under each bed, and the room was choked with medical paraphernalia, which looked wholly improvised and crude. A haggard woman had paused to wash one of the ill, a filthy rag in her hand and her toothless mouth agape. The little girl had also paused in the act of pulling one of the buckets out from under a bed, the black contents sloshed alarmingly close to the rim. The soon-to-be corpse on the same bed eyed him with an icteric and glassy eyeball, the measure of which communicated a suffering unlike any other.

  Arker tore himself away from the sight and slowly continued up the stairs.

  “Gop, I think you better replace the wall when we’re done.”

  _____

  The Jar’ron Captain lunged just as the gunship seemed to be upon them.

  The Gunship screamed over them, barely a meter above the pair. The Gold One pirouetted away from the Jar’ron and snapped open its wings; the Jar’ron captain was halted mid-lunge by an unseen force. The Gold One’s wings began to shimmer and hum and caught like an insect in a trap, the alien screamed.

  The Gold One raised his hands to the crowd, wings outstretched with the alien frozen behind it. The Jar’ron’s armour melted and sloughed off as molten pieces jittered and danced to the spayed wings' inaudible tune. The crowd continued cheering as the gunship shot off over primary and then arced back the way it came, heading off to the west. Then they exulted as the Jar’ron fell to its knees, dark grey skin wrinkling and charing like bark in a fire.

  The Gold One spun, grabbed the flagging alien by the crotch and neck, and javelined the alien towards the onlookers. The golden warrior then leapt into the air, chasing after the ballistic figure trailing the smoke of burning fat. As the barely conscious alien approached the crowd, the Gold One darted past it on a trail of shimmering air, landed like a sparrow and drew its sword.

  The Jar’ron, falling headfirst towards the dirt like a missile, passed the Gold One as the sword came down.

  The headless body crunched into the dirt of the street from whence it came, neck first. The Gold One held the charred head of the alien aloft, and the crowd cheered.