Society collapses.

Turmoil in the lesser classes is immediately followed by the byproduct of depression and anger: strife which when festering long enough jumps the shark to outright war. Or so it was Lordes espoused while attempting an explanation on the finer points of proper financial planning to Watt and Leo. Standing guard outside the only permanent establishment on the icy planetoid designated NS-7 and being the only thee people on the entire frozen planet roughly the same size as Mars, any sort of conversation was desired as a salve against the poison of boredom.

“You see, people need money,” Lordes commented, his hands outstretched towards a Lux military heater Watt procured from a maintenance shed. An irrelevant gesture but done in an off-handed way of building comradery with the two poor men who wore off the shelf Mizran military contractor armor. It was bad enough he wore Ushirian CLOTH, which cost more than both men would amass in their entire lives, the least Lordes could do was pretend to be on the same level as the two financial idiots.

“Need is a strong word.” Watt peered at Lordes from beneath a scarf wrapped around his head, muffling his voice and hiding his eyes. A large snowflake drifted downward to land on the pedestal heater. The brief sizzle of water acting a lure to bring Watt even closer.

“Not really. Why do governments give all their citizens monthly stipends?”

“A stipend is a fixed monthly amount for a salary or allowance,” Leo spoke up.

Lordes turned his head to the right to look at the short man leaning against a compact particle beam rifle like it was walking stick. The man didn’t show much bother to the blistering cold, but Lordes guessed the mustache frozen solid with snot didn’t feel too good. He, on the other hand, had to resist pulling at his collar to let free some heat his CLOTH created.

“Thank you, Mr. Dictionary, you have proved my point. Citizens get a salary just for being alive. Why? Because everyone needs money. We all just don’t want it, we need it, like we need air to breathe—.”

Lordes flipped his custom Stallion Smartrifle, SSR, to his shoulder as a falling tree crashed into surrounding forest. He stepped forward and left, around the pedestal heater, while his helmet extracted from the collar of his CLOTH in a series of dark gray interconnecting plates. Watt sputtered a curse, Lordes held up a hand for silence. With the Ushirian armor fully sealed, amplification of sound lay available to him. An option he used to hear the footsteps of fifteen humans and the hum of six flying drones; all making such a racket it was obvious none expected to find a mercenary able to afford the ridiculously priced CLOTH standing guard.

Lordes crouched down behind the stump of a tree that had fallen sometime far in the past, the frozen majority of the tree lying away from him. Moving a finger to hover over the SSR trigger, Lordes glanced over his shoulder. The left half of Watt’s face erupted in a spray of blood that covered the snow like spray paint. Steam rose under hot crimson fluid while Watt’s body collapsed where he stood.

Not bothering to mourn a person who refused to see eye to eye on any subject brought up over the past month, Lordes turned his head forward and grinned. Excited photons from Leo’s Compact Particle Beam, CPB, reacted with the atmosphere, turning the beam a bright yellow that cut through frozen wood like a hot knife through a wet noodle. A cacophony of noise—steam hissing, wood breaking, enemy bullets and rockets fired—drowned out the movement of incoming hostiles. Compensating for loss of echolocation, the CLOTH AI took to tracking the trajectory of incoming projectiles; displaying trajectory arcs and lines with distance and speed information in a colorful chaos of lines that soothed Lordes’ soul.

A yellow beam stabbed uncomfortably close over his head. He slid to the left and half-pulled the trigger, sweeping his SSR to the left in a L-shape then squeezing the trigger at the end of the L. A volley of eleven bullets roared from the barrel of the custom-made rifle. Each round locked onto a target. Bursts of light illuminated the forest as the rounds exploded against portable tactical shields Lordes naturally assumed a group so brazen to attack a location in the middle of nowhere would have. The perpetrators had to have assumed a complex that used as much energy as a heavily populated moon would have security. If said complex were guarded, the attackers wouldn’t want to be injured so far away from medical help, which meant portable tactical shields. Lordes smiled, pleased at justification of his brilliance and the ability to show a bunch of assholes just why he poured so much money into customizing the SSR he gave the name of Dello.

Tracing a line with his thumb down the handgrip produced a munition menu on the HUD which tracked eye movements. An electrical charge in the buttstock of Dello modified the rounds, the munitions option lit green. Lordes pulled the trigger. Five rounds burst from Dello towards five targets not hiding behind trees. The rounds tore through the tactical shields as a drone shaped like a box, burst from the canopy. Frozen leaves raining down, Lordes fired once at the drone’s underside and jumped into a backwards run, firing on the move. He passed Leo who fired at the drone, sending it careening back into the forest, and then hit the wall of guard shack.

Leo returning fire to the bullets coming from the forest, Lordes side stepped to the right and mule kicked. Strength amplified by an absurdly complex exoskeleton in his CLOTH, the door tore from the hinges as if shaped charges had been detonated around the door frame. Leo now on the run toward him, Lordes fired a volley at the trees just to stall the assholes trying to murder them both.

The two entered the lone guard building which was oddly attached to a power depot. They made it all of four steps when a rocket renovated the exterior wall. A chunk of steel shot toward the two like a bullet, deflecting off Leo’s shoulder and sending him off to the side, his CPB clattering on the ground. Lordes took one look at the particle beam rifle and made for the large crate of extra ammunition in the next room.

Shouts and screams amplified by the CLOTH berated his ears. Explosions rang out like fireworks. Bullets ricocheted off metal walls inside the small room. One glancing off the synthetic material of his armor, giving him that extra step needed to shoulder his way through the locked door.

A table with playing cards on it, three chairs around the table, sat in the center of the room. A faucet and a coffee machine on a wheeled cart lay to the right. On the left, next to another exit door, lay the large ammunition crate. Lordes grabbed Dello by the barrel and slapped her against his back, gecko glue properties of his suit holding it into place, then ripped open the lid. He flinched at the sound of an explosion in the previous room and shook his head at another likely lost life.

In front of him lay enough ammunition to supply a few dozen guards, which briefly made him wonder why the place only employed three guards at any given time. Cost savings obviously. He chuckled at the thought and smiled broader at hearing Leo shout curses. While Lordes would have enjoyed more time to peruse his selection of presents and choose the most lethal, he just grabbed a black egg.

“Leo!” Lordes shouted. A wet splat his reply. Lordes squeezed the grenade to prime it, tossed it over his shoulder at the open door, and grabbed four more on his way out the other door.

An explosion shook the ground, his CLOTH introduced white noise to save his hearing, and a fireball followed him into a hall, tendrils licking at his calves. Only a few steps into the hall the wall next to the vaulted ceiling burst inward. Steel screaming in protest, ceramic-concrete, conramic, pelting his head, two box drones appeared silhouetted in dust. Lordes crushed two of the grenades, hurled them up, and used his boosted muscles to pull Dello into his hands with the speed of a striking cobra. He fired twice at the balls heading upward and fell prostrate.

An explosion.

Searing heat engulfed his body, pushing the CLOTH to its technological limits in keeping him alive. Air burned his lungs, agony in his muscles. He pushed it all aside in a bout of self-preservation and scrambled forward in the connecting hall to the power station.

Yellow particle beams stabbed down from inside the lingering balls of fire. The beams going wide, directed by damaged targeting modules. He pulled the trigger as he came up on a closed door, aiming for the hinges, and barreled into the door, momentum carrying him and the heavy slab of reinforced conramic forward. The slab hit the ground, sliding and turning on the handle, sparks flying up as it gouged the steel floor. A smart rocket whizzed overhead, his CLOTH’s HUD giving it a blue line. The line winked out as the rocket made impact with something. Green fire lit the room he fell into illuminated by white overhead lighting.

Complex machinery designed to supply amazing amounts of power in small packages loomed around him, looking like an abstract sculpture of vegetation made of metal fused with fungi. Pipes resembling vines ran between the metallic shrubs that blinked with lights like a Christmas tree. Connecting at the top of every energy source, massive tubular constructs rose, all heading in the same direction, some connecting with others on their way to the far wall.

Still laying on the door, Lordes primed one of the two remaining grenades stuck to his CLOTH and hurled it through the doorway. He brought Dello to his shoulder and held the trigger. Seventy rounds created zig-zag patterns through the smoky air of the hall, searching for targets. When no more left Dello, he leaped to his feet, slapped the rifle on his back and ran to what appeared to be a control console.

Arrogance in no guards ever getting through that giant slab the builders called a door, or piss-poor planning—Lordes thanked both—left a control console unlocked. He stared at the foreign console for a moment before the AI in his CLOTH took control, accessing it through the air. As the commands in the pedestal became slaved, one by one, by his CLOTH, Lordes pulled free the only extra mag he had on his body—old habits always had him carry one more than Dello held—dispensed with the spent mag and slid the fully loaded one home without looking.

He heard human shouts and saw a box drone zip through the air overhead, following the direction of the tubes. “Overload it. I want big explosions. Lots of them,” he said to his CLOTH, putting Dello to his shoulder as he walked backwards.

“I suggest finding cover,” CLOTH replied.

Lordes squeezed the trigger and cursed when rounds hit a shield. He selected the munition to penetrate shields and fired again, taking the shoulder from a man who thought himself safe behind the shield. Lordes glanced at the energy producing machines.

“That would be inadvisable,” CLOTH commented as it tracked his eyes.

“No shit.” He looked around, firing three times at the opening he had come through, keeping the people inside the hall. Several large rectangular boxes, reinforced conramic he hoped, lay behind him to the right with a gap between them and the wall. He made for the gap, shooting four more rounds and then throwing his last grenade.

“How much longer?”

“Four seconds.”

He counted to four just as his back touched the large boxes. Sparks flew from the metallic shrubbery as transistors gathered far more electricity than were designed. Breakers tripped, backup generators came to life. Pent up electricity backtracked into the backups. Loud cracks sounded. A bright light came from deep within the electrical room. Then every light shut off.

“Not what I was hoping for.” Lordes scowled.

Just as he made it to the gap his amplified hearing picked up a rumbling. It grew in intensity, causing his armor to shut off the amplification and induce white noise to save his ear drums. The ground began to shake then wave like in a powerful earthquake. A roar that could only be a large building collapsing vibrated the very air. Michael aimed at two humans exiting into the room he occupied who were followed by eight more. The people pointed at the tubes above him falling like tape failing on party streamers, beginning at the wall far behind him. His CLOTH shut down audible noise to protect him from the cacophony of steel falling, the roof lifted free, and there in the dim winter sunlight he saw the damndest thing he had ever witnessed.

Hovering hundreds of feet in the air a Calabi-Yau manifold, a deep swirling purple in color, continuously folded in on itself as if reality kept forgetting the remembering how it should be. Falling snow around the oddity twisted, flakes swirling up and to the side. The object grew in size to that of a large transport ship, and then it flexed, like a muscle blossoming into a titan that dominated the sky. Lordes fell to the floor, his ankle twisting from a phenomenal force that shoved him against the ground. A strange language screamed in his head. Snowflakes flattened on the ground and burst in an equilateral fashion away from the oddity. Lordes struggled to grasp at his ears then the screaming ceased and unconsciousness followed.

Next Chapter: Unsaid