I should have known this was how it would end.
In some other life, I like to imagine it might have happened differently. Maybe beside someone I loved. Maybe lying in a field of green, watching the sky blur overhead as I took my last breath.
But this…
What was I thinking?
An impromptu rescue mission to one of the frontier colonies on Mars for people who, frankly, were already dead. And here I was following in their footsteps.
Jut then another violent shudder ripped through the ship.
I braced myself against the wall, but the next impact threw me off my feet. I slammed hard into the floor, glass biting into my shoulder and palm. A mirror lay shattered beneath me, countless fractured versions of my face staring back with the same hollow brown eyes and disheveled hair.
A dozen different men. A dozen lives I could have lived.
None of them ended well.
Pain flared through my hand as I pushed myself up, warm blood slipping across my skin. The pressure of our descent felt constant now, like the whole ship was caught in an invisible fist.
I grabbed the edge of my cryo chamber and forced myself upright.
Only then did I really look around.
Others lay sprawled across the floor between the pods, some tangled in harness straps, some motionless, some groaning as they tried to move. Whatever had hit us had hit hard.
And from the looks of it, we didn't have time.
But was that really an excuse for what I was about to do? Could I really leave these people here to die?
Yes…
That was the sad truth.
If I stayed here, I would only add to the corpses when this ship finally came down.
I staggered into the corridor just as the lights overhead flickered, buzzing like dying insects. The passage was already too narrow on a good day, barely tall enough for me to stand straight, and now I had to half-stumble, half-crawl through it while the ship convulsed around me.
More than once, I had to climb over bodies thrown into the passage by the impact, each one making it harder not to wonder whether they were unconscious or dead.
Averting my eyes, I pushed on, clinging to the hope that the hangar was still intact.
Then the lights cut out, plunging the corridor into an abyss of darkness so complete it felt like a piece of dead space had been poured into the ship itself.
I reached out blindly, grasping for leverage, dragging myself forward one hand at a time while the ship wailed around me like some ancient beast fighting desperately through its final moments.
Somewhere down the corridor, metal screamed once more. Then the emergency strips along the floor flared red in a sporadic stutter, offering me just enough light to guide me forward.
Step after step, I dragged myself onward, each breath feeling like it might be my last.
Yet by some miracle, I reached the hangar access door, my pulse hammering so fast I almost expected to collapse right there from a heart attack before anything else could kill me.
But I persisted and slammed my hand against the biometric reader, only to curse when the scanner flashed yellow.
"Error. Please keep your hand still."
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me—"
The ship lurched sideways.
I was thrown hard into the wall with enough force that I could've sworn I lost a tooth, only for my head to rebound off it like some bobblehead. The nausea from waking up after God knew how long flared into a throbbing pain that pounded through my skull.
Gritting my teeth against it, I shoved myself back toward the panel and pressed my hand against it again, forcing it flat even as the ship trembled beneath me.
"Error—"
"Dammit!" I slammed my fist into the scanner hard enough to crack the screen. "I don't have time for this! Open u—"
"Credentials verified," the system chimed. "Welcome, Atlas Mercer, to—"
The voice crackled. "Hang— ha— hell—"
The moment the door slid open, I was ripped off my feet with such force that I barely managed to catch the railing on the other side. Pain shot through my arm, every bone in it seeming to pop out of place before slamming back in as the room beyond howled with decompression.
Beyond, a massive tear gaped through the far wall, opening straight into the void, where the endless black of space was already being swallowed by the red skies of Mars.
Signaling the ship's final moments.
Then the emergency systems kicked in.
With a violent hiss, thick sealant sprayed across the breach in heavy streams, rapidly expanding until it plugged the opening like some grotesque artificial scab. The pull of the vacuum weakened, and the pressure slowly began to normalize.
With the vacuum's pull finally easing, my grip on the railing loosened enough for me to drag myself over the ledge, almost grateful I had no food in my system, since my stomach would've thrown it up at the sheer horror of what had just happened.
I almost died… for a moment, I lay slumped against the grated floor, trembling from the sheer horror of it.
Yet despite that, I forced myself forward and started down the stairs.
Or tried to.
The ship bucked so violently that I was hurled through the air and smashed into the metal hull. My head cracked against the alloy hard enough to burst white across my vision. A sharp ringing consumed everything, drowning out the alarms, the groaning steel, even my own breathing. For a second—maybe two—the world tilted so hard I couldn't tell which way was up.
Then a metallic hand shot into view, grabbed a fistful of my shirt, and with almost effortless ease yanked me upright.
Before I could even process who it belonged to, something jabbed into my side.
My thoughts snapped into place all at once as a flood of adrenaline tore through my system, burning away the fog in an instant. Whatever the stranger had injected me with, it worked.
Allowing me to stagger forward, blinking hard until my vision steadied enough to read the name stenciled above the storage rack in black lettering.
Atlas Mercer.
And there it was.
For one brief, absurd second, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
My exoskeleton waited in its slot beneath the red pulse of the warning lights, its dark silver frame catching each flash in a muted sheen. It wasn't oversized or showy, but every plate, every joint, every exposed mechanism had been built with brutal purpose.
But as much as I wanted to stand there and admire it, I knew that if I didn't get inside it right now, I'd probably end up admiring it as a ghost.
So I grabbed the cold metal frame, hauled myself into place, and slammed the harness shut around me just as another violent shudder tore through the ship.
The system came alive at once.
The harness tightened and adjusted across my chest, shoulders, and legs with precise mechanical pulls. Then the servos began to click and whir one by one until the entire frame settled against me like a second skeleton. A faint hum ran up the spine, followed by a soft vibration that synced with the rhythm of my breathing.
By the time the calibration finished, the arms no longer felt like machinery strapped to my body.
They felt like mine.
Then came the suit.
Armored plates over reinforced mesh, matte black with silver trim. Tough, flexible, and built for warzones we had always hoped we'd never see, but trained for anyway.
I secured the buckles one by one, each strap drawing the weight tighter against my frame. The moment I disconnected from the wall mount, the exoskeleton compensated with a low mechanical hum, matching my movements so naturally that it felt more like muscle memory than machine assistance.
The gauntlets snapped around my hands.
I flexed my fingers just in time to catch myself as fresh cracks splintered across the ship's emergency seal. Through them, the first fiery streaks of our descent bled through, flashes of burning atmosphere and the red fury of Mars beyond.
I slammed my palm against the nearest support, triggering the magnetic locks.
They engaged with a sharp clunk.
A second later, the chest plate sealed over me with a heavy thud, and a soft pulse rolled through the interior lining as the suit's systems powered on.
Then came the helmet.
For the briefest second, I caught my reflection in the visor before pulling it on. The seal engaged with a hiss, locking into place with a finality I had come to associate with missions like this. Once the HUD flared to life, streams of data flooded my vision—vitals, orientation, suit integrity, atmospheric pressure, impact predictions.
One last step.
The rifle waited for me on the wall rack, its dark silver frame promising nothing but death. A pulse rifle, compact enough for close quarters and powerful enough to punch through hardened armor if it had to.
I grabbed it with both hands and ripped it free, not a second too soon.
The ship screamed.
Then a whole section of the hull tore away, and just like that, my world vanished beneath me.
One moment, I was inside the ship. Next, I was weightless, ripped out into open air as metal, fire, and bodies were hurled screaming into the void. I caught flashes of others tumbling beside me, their limbs flailing as the magnetic hold in their boots failed all at once.
Then they were gone, swallowed by the chaos of the burning wreckage.
And so was I.
I fell alongside the broken corpse of our ship as it tore through the Martian sky like a dying comet.
Above me, several escape pods blasted free, streaking away from the wreck.
For a moment, I watched them cut through the sky like fleeing sparks.
Then the numbers caught up with me.
There weren't enough. Not even close. The Dauntless had carried far too many people for those few pods to matter, which meant most of them were already dead, and the rest were likely about to follow.
But I didn't have room to think about them.
Because I was falling.
Fast.
I slammed my hand against the gravity drive controls.
"Come on—"
The air around me began to warp, bending and shimmering around the suit in a faint distortion.
Too slow.
Way too slow.
Panic clawed its way up my throat as the mountains below swelled larger with every passing second, no longer distant shapes but jagged stone rushing up to crush me. Through the blur, I caught sight of a massive city carved into the Martian expanse, its outer structures sprawling around the great dome that shielded Alpha, the first major exploratory settlement. Even from here, its walls looked impossible and unmoving, as if the planet itself had shaped them.
I barely had time to register any of it. The ground was rushing up far faster than I would have liked.
I sucked in a sharp breath and braced as death surged up to meet me.
Then, at the last possible second, the gravity drive caught.
The distortion around me deepened with a violent pulse, and suddenly my body lurched as my weight dropped out from under me. One second, I was a falling slab of metal and flesh. The next, I was something lighter, though by no means a feather.
Just enough to give me a chance.
Which meant all that was left was the landing.
Though calling it a landing was generous.
I'd call it a—
I didn't get to finish the thought. The next moment, I slammed into the ground with enough force to carve a crater beneath me, and for one half-formed second, I thought that was the worst of it.
Then the ship came down.
The explosion hit like the fist of a god.
One moment, I was sprawled in the dirt, stunned and barely aware of the impact I had survived. The next, the blast wave tore through me and hurled me across the Martian wasteland like I weighed nothing at all. Rock shredded against my armor. Dirt and sand swallowed me whole. I hit once, bounced, then slammed into a slab of stone hard enough to stop me cold.
The breath left my lungs in a single violent burst.
Pain followed a second later.
It speared through my side so sharply I almost blacked out. My ribs screamed with every twitch, every breath, every attempt to move. Broken. Bruised. Cracked. I didn't know which, only that something in my chest was very wrong.
For a while, I could only lie there and watch.
Through the thinning haze of golden dust, the wreck burned.
The ship combusted again somewhere within the storm, flames racing through its broken frame in hungry waves. Fire poured from the shattered hull, turning the twisted metal into a jagged silhouette of orange and black. Beyond it, I caught sight of the descending escape pods dropping through the haze in slow, controlled arcs, flames licking at their outer shells before they vanished into the dust.
Oh, what I would've given for a landing like that.
A rough laugh escaped me, only to immediately turn into a strained groan as pain stabbed through my ribs.
"Yeah," I muttered to no one. "This is not how I planned my day."
Not even close.
I rolled onto my side and pushed myself up, every movement slow and ugly. My suit whined in protest as I forced it to help me. Once I made it to my feet, I stood there for a second, swaying, waiting to see if the world would stop spinning.
It mostly did.
And once I was reasonably sure I wasn't about to pass out, I looked myself over.
Overall…
I was lucky.
The suit's seal was intact. Oxygen reserves were stable. And no major breach warnings flashed across my HUD. For someone who had just fallen out of the sky and been caught in the aftermath of a crashing ship, I was doing surprisingly well.
Besides the fact that my leg joints were a mess. The servos in both lower limbs were throwing warning indicators, probably bent from taking the brunt of the landing. And every breath I took sent a hot, grinding ache through my ribs that made it very clear I wasn't walking away from this uninjured.
Also, I really had to piss.