The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novice Zaqxsw694.
Operatives Peter, Callum Liddel, and MRTK.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
The three-story manor was structurally intimidating, but inside, it was surprisingly quiet. Mark walked up the reinforced steps of his home, his boots making dull, muted thuds against the metallic porch. He palmed the biometric scanner beside the front door, the locking mechanisms disengaging with a smooth, pneumatic hiss.
Stepping inside, the stark contrast between the hyper-militarized colony outside and the meticulously crafted sanctuary of his home was jarring. The interior didn't look like a survival bunker. Marcos had programmed the nanoprinters to extrude the internal surfaces with a micro-texture that perfectly mimicked dark, polished slate and warm mahogany. The ceilings were vaulted and spacious, the expansive panoramic windows were polarized against the glaring light of the three suns, and the air circulation system kept the sprawling first floor at a perfect, crisp temperature.
It was a home. Or at least, the closest thing to a home they had seen.
Mark moved with quiet, practiced steps through the grand foyer and stepped into the open-concept kitchen. A massive island counter dominated the center of the room, topped with a seamless slab of white-finished metal that looked identical to marble. Behind it sat a heavy-duty electric stove and a state-of-the-art refrigeration unit, both currently drawing a low, steady hum of power directly from the Shepherd's reactor grid.
Mark stopped in the center of the kitchen and took a deep breath. The smell of alien ozone, cordite, and raw dirt that had clung to him for the past three days hadn't breached the manor's walls.
He walked over to the electric stove and activated the ceramic burners, watching the coils quickly shift from a dull grey to a bright orange.
The colony's current rations consisted entirely of MRE's and other heavily preserved dry goods. It kept the people alive, but it was miserable. Mark, however, had a distinct advantage.
He opened his inventory, which had the added bonus of being a stasis-locked void where time simply did not exist. A piece of fruit placed inside would remain perfectly ripe for a millennium. A hot meal would remain steaming.
With a muffled pop of displaced air, a heavy-duty cast-iron frying pan materialized in his right hand. He set it down onto the glowing burner. With another thought, a secondary, flatter griddle pan appeared, which he set on the adjacent coil.
Then came the food. Mark accessed the supplies he had purchased in bulk from the high-end agricultural markets back on Mechanicus Station, long before the catastrophic crash.
A carton of genetically engineered eggs materialized on the counter. Beside it, a thick package of real, uncured, thick-cut bacon wrapped in butcher's paper. A large glass bottle of actual, full-fat cow's milk, a luxury that most people hadn't seen in generations, and a sealed jug of freshly squeezed orange juice followed. Finally, a bottle of cooking oil and a large mixing bowl pre-filled with a rich, buttermilk pancake batter he had whipped up days ago in the void appeared, completely untouched by time.
Mark went to work.
He poured a bit of oil onto the pan, remembering his previous life on Earth, and spread it by tilting the pan. He then unwrapped the butcher's paper, the rich, smoky aroma of the cured meat immediately hitting his senses. He laid the thick strips of bacon onto the cast-iron pan. The immediate, aggressive sizzle of the fat rendering against the oil and hot metal was the best sound he had heard in days.
As the bacon crackled and popped, spitting tiny droplets of grease onto the stove, Mark turned his attention to the griddle. He took a ladle and poured three perfectly round circles of the thick batter onto the hot surface. The edges immediately began to bubble and crisp.
He flipped the pancakes, revealing a flawless, golden-brown crust, and then cracked four of the genetically engineered eggs into the remaining space on the griddle. The yolks were massive, a vibrant, deep orange that spoke to the absurd nutritional density engineered into them by the IUC agricultural labs.
While the food finished cooking, the rich, mouth-watering smell of breakfast completely filled the sprawling first floor of the manor, Mark moved to the island counter to set the table.
He materialized two ceramic plates, real steel silverware, and two large glass cups. He piled the crispy bacon, the fluffy pancakes, and the sunny-side-up eggs onto the plates in generous portions.
Then, he turned to the drinks. It was a bizarre, highly specific concoction that Lyra had completely fallen in love with months ago. Mark poured the glass half full of chilled orange juice, then, using a spoon to stir it rapidly to prevent it from curdling, he slowly poured the ice-cold milk into the glass. The result was a creamy, frothy, pastel-orange drink that tasted exactly like a melted creamsicle. It was a sugar-loaded nightmare by standard dietary metrics, but Mark didn't care.
He put the dirty pans in the sink and summoned some water from his inventory, pouring it over the pans. He left the plates steaming on the island counter, wiped his hands on a nearby towel, and headed for the stairs.
The second floor of the manor was dedicated entirely to guest rooms and a currently empty library, but the third floor was the master suite. Mark walked down the carpeted hallway and quietly pushed open the bedroom's double doors.
The room was bathed in the soft, ambient morning light filtering through the polarized windows. The massive bed looked like a sprawling island of soft white linens in the center of the dark room.
Lyra was right where he had left her, curled into a tiny ball beneath the duvet. Her vibrant auburn hair was splayed wildly across the pillows, the rich copper tones contrasting sharply with her pale, white skin. She was clutching her alien plushy along with her stuffed bear.
Mark walked over to the edge of the bed and sat down gently, the mattress dipping under his weight. He looked down at her, a profound, complicated ache tightening his chest.
Lyra was nine years old, but her mind and demeanor often mirrored that of a six- or seven-year-old. It was a deeply ingrained trauma response. Though it could also be due to the fact that her senses of sight and hearing had only been restored a year ago, after she'd already lived through a dark hell for her entire life. She spoke with a lingering innocence, clung fiercely to her stuffed bear, and viewed Mark with unquestioning adoration that frequently broke his heart.
Because Mark wasn't her biological father, he was her adoptive father.
More damning than that, Mark was the very reason she was an orphan.
He remembered the raid vividly. He remembered boarding the pirate frigate, moving through the dark corridors before coming across the 3 dead bodies on the bridge. He remembered seeing her small, malnourished form make its way to her mother's corpse and touch her face, kneeling on dried blood just to eat with the only person who had given her safety.
Her biological father had managed to escape via an escape pod, leaving his own daughter behind to die alone on the ship, claiming it would be ridding him of a burden.
Her pirate scum of a father was still out there somewhere in the vastness of the galaxy, breathing stolen air. Mark had taken the shivering girl from the wreckage. Initially, it was an act of grim atonement. But over the months, that atonement had morphed into fierce and uncompromising love. She was his daughter now, and he would burn the universe to ash before he let anyone hurt her again.
Mark reached out, his large, calloused hand gently brushing the hair away from her face.
"Hey, Bug," Mark murmured, his voice a soft rumble. "Time to wake up."
Lyra groaned softly, her freckled nose crinkling in protest. She shifted, burying her face deeper into the pillow, hugging her stuffed bear tighter to her chest. "Five more minutes, Papa."
Mark chuckled, the dark memories receding to the back of his mind. "You can have five more minutes, but the bacon is going to get cold. And the pancakes are going to get soggy."
That did it.
Lyra's eyes snapped open. She blinked rapidly, her bright, sleepy blue eyes focusing on her father. She sat up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes with the back of her small hand, her auburn hair sticking up in a mess.
"Bacon?" she asked, her voice raspy with sleep.
"Real bacon. The thick kind," Mark confirmed, smiling down at her. "And I made the orange juice milk. But if you aren't hungry, I guess I can just eat both plates."
Lyra gasped in mock outrage, throwing the covers off her legs. "No! That's my bacon!"
She scrambled off the tall bed, her bare feet hitting the floor. She didn't even bother looking for her slippers. She just grabbed Mark's hand and tried to pull him toward the door with all of her strength. Mark let himself be pulled, a genuine laugh escaping his chest as he followed Lyra down the stairs.
When they reached the kitchen, Lyra immediately scrambled up onto one of the tall barstools at the island counter. Her eyes went wide as she looked at the feast laid out before her. In a camp where nine hundred people were currently queuing up for MRE's, she was looking at a culinary masterpiece.
Mark sat down on the stool beside her, picking up his fork. "Dig in, Bug."
Lyra didn't need to be told twice. She grabbed a piece of bacon and took a bite, her eyes fluttering shut in pure bliss as the salty, smoky flavor hit her tongue. She washed it down with a gulp of the creamy orange-milk mixture, leaving a faint white mustache on her upper lip.
Mark began cutting into his pancakes, eating at a much more measured pace, simply enjoying the quiet serenity of the moment. He watched her eat, observing the relaxed slope of her shoulders and the bright, untroubled clarity in her eyes.
"So," Mark began, taking a sip of his black coffee. "How are you holding up with all of this? The new house? The new planet?"
Lyra swallowed a mouthful of eggs, wiping her mouth with a napkin. "It's really cool, Papa. It's like a giant metal castle. And the house is so big! My room has a window that lets me see all the way to the big trees."
"You aren't scared?" Mark asked softly. He knew she had seen the terror of the crash. She had heard the autocannons shredding the flying beasts. He worried constantly about the psychological toll the hostile environment was taking on her fragile state.
Lyra shook her head vigorously, her ponytail bouncing. "Nope. I was a little scared when the ship went bump, but not anymore. You built the big metal walls, and Uncle Severus and Auntie Octavia are always walking around looking super tough. Nothing bad can get in."
She took another bite of pancake, her face lighting up as she shifted the topic to something far more important to her.
"And I made new friends, Papa!" Lyra beamed. "Not just the kids from Sister Elara's orphanage. Some of the other kids in the houses came out to play yesterday. There's a boy named Tomas, and a girl named Elara, just like the Sister! We were playing hide-and-seek in the safe zone behind the big printer. It was the best."
Mark felt a profound warmth settle into his chest, momentarily chasing away the lingering guilt of her origins. He had torn a hole in the universe, defied the Empire's corporations, fought pirates, and was currently waging a logistical war against a hostile alien ecosystem, all so that this little girl could sit on a stool, drink orange juice, and talk about playing hide-and-seek.
"I'm glad you're making friends, Lyra," Mark said softly, reaching over to wipe the milk mustache off her lip with his thumb. "And I'm so glad you're happy. Just promise me you'll stay inside the residential grid when you play. You don't go near the edges of the city, understand?"
"I promise," Lyra said solemnly, crossing her heart with a sticky finger. "I'll stay right in the middle."
They spent the next twenty minutes finishing their breakfast in comfortable, happy conversation. Lyra detailed the complex, ever-changing rules of the games she and her new friends had invented, while Mark simply listened, anchoring his soul to the sound of her voice.
But eventually, the plates were empty, and the brutal reality of their situation called to him.
"Alright, Bug," Mark sighed, taking the plates and placing them in the sink. "Papa has to go to work. We have a river to catch."
"Can I come?" Lyra asked hopefully, hopping off the stool and grabbing her stuffed bear from the counter.
"Not today," Mark said, kneeling down to look her in the eye. "Today is going to be very loud, and very dirty. I need you to go find Sister Elara. She's organizing the morning classes in the town square. You stick with her until I get back, okay?"
Lyra pouted for a fraction of a second before nodding. "Okay, Papa. Build something awesome."
"I will," Mark promised. He kissed her forehead, stood up, and watched her run out the front door, her small boots clanking against the metal porch as she headed safely toward the center of the camp.
Mark's demeanor shifted instantly. The tender, smiling father vanished, replaced entirely by the stoic, calculating commander of Rubrion Prime.
He stepped out of the house, the crisp morning air having already given way to the baking, humid heat of the three suns. He walked purposefully down the main avenue, taking in the sheer scale of the colony's ongoing expansion. In the center of the Timgad grid, the colossal 25x25-meter nanoprinter was roaring, steadily laying down the massive foundations for the new Philadelphia-style City Hall.
Above and around the rising structure, a hundred glowing blue repair drones scuttled like mechanical spiders. Marcos was actively managing their hive-mind, seamlessly orchestrating the welding of structural seams and the laying of initial electrical conduits. Below them, Vanguard mercenaries and civilian laborers swarmed the site, shouting over the industrial din as they secured support beams and directed the drone traffic. Mark offered a brief, approving nod to the bustling work crews, but his long strides quickly closed the distance as he bypassed the main construction area and headed straight toward the southern edge of the plaza, where Printer Three was stationed, and the Elites were already waiting for him.
Severus, Titus, Octavia, and Cassius stood in a loose, heavily armored perimeter around the massive, 3x3-meter mobile nanoprinter. The machine was humming loudly, the blinding white extrusion plane cycling through its final cooling procedures.
Resting on the S-Alloy grates, freshly birthed from the printer's maw, was a mechanical monster.
It was a heavy-duty continuous-track rotary bucket-wheel trencher. It looked like a brutalist cross between a main battle tank and a buzzsaw. It rode on two colossal, independently articulated treads designed to conquer the chaotic alien terrain. The front of the vehicle was dominated by a colossal, spinning wheel, easily four meters in diameter, lined with jagged, hyper-dense teeth designed to chew through rock, roots, and dense loam with terrifying ease. The cabin was heavily armored, featuring polarized, sloped glass to protect the operator from flying debris.
"It is glorious," Titus said, a wide, feral grin splitting his face as he stared up at the machine. He looked over his shoulder as Mark approached. "Commander. Requesting permission to pilot the beast."
Mark couldn't help but smirk at the sheer enthusiasm radiating from the towering super soldier. "It's all yours, Titus. But try not to flip it. We need a trench, not a crater."
"I make no promises," Titus chuckled, effortlessly vaulting up the side of the machine and swinging himself into the armored cabin. He slammed the ignition, and a sharp crack of displaced static resounded, a temporary tether from the city's grid that fed the trencher its initial jumpstart. A second later, the electric engine whined to life, seamlessly transitioning into a self-sustaining loop. It operated like a colossal industrial alternator, generating power and feeding it back into its massive capacitor banks as long as the internal components kept moving. Without a single puff of exhaust, it settled into a deafening, high-pitched rhythmic idle that vibrated the metal streets beneath their boots.
Mark turned his attention away from the trencher and looked out over the southern perimeter. Beyond the edge of the metal grates, the wild, untamed alien jungle stretched out for eight unbroken kilometers toward the river.
"Octavia, Cassius," Mark ordered, his voice easily cutting through the roar of the engine. "Fan out. Give me a fifty-yard perimeter check. I want to make sure there are no civilian foragers, Vanguard patrols, or curious eyes watching us from the tree line."
The two Elites nodded sharply, lifting their pulse rifles and melting silently into the purple grass, their enhanced optics scanning the dense foliage for any thermal signatures or movement.
A few minutes later, Octavia's voice crackled over the secure comms channel. "Perimeter is secure, Commander. We are entirely isolated. No eyes on your position."
"Good," Mark said.
He walked up to Printer Three. The machine had completed the trencher, but its primary hopper was completely empty. They needed raw materials, and they needed an absurd amount of them. Not just for the pipeline, Mark realized, checking the colony's overall resource metrics on his HUD. Back in the plaza, the other printers working on the City Hall were also running low on raw feed.
Mark stood before the printer and accessed his spatial inventory. He summoned the stockpiles he had hoarded from the corporate shipping lanes, and, with a rapid, deafening succession of concussive CRACKs from violently displaced atmosphere, forty colossal, perfectly cubic blocks materialized out of thin air, forming a neatly stacked grid on the alien dirt. The ten-ton blocks were a diverse mix of essential raw elements: dense carbon bricks, raw iron ore, industrial-grade copper, and synthetic polymers.
"Marcos," Mark said over the comms, his voice ringing in the sudden quiet after the atmospheric booms. "Divert a swarm of the heavy-lifter drones to my coordinates. Have them start ferrying these materials back to the main plaza to keep Printers One and Two fed, but leave enough here to keep Printer Three running."
"On it," Marcos replied.
Severus, standing just a few feet away, didn't even flinch at the casual, physics-defying display of dropping four hundred tons of godlike logistics. He simply watched with quiet, calculating respect.
Mark stepped up to the nanoprinter's control panel and keyed in the command sequence, shifting the machine from fabrication mode to feeding mode. The industrial grinding mechanisms inside the printer roared to life. Automated, magnetic grapples extended from the machine's base, clamping onto the closest metal cubes and dragging them violently into the hopper. The printer began to eat the material, breaking it down at the molecular level, stripping impurities, and restructuring it into flawless, hyper-dense S-Alloy.
"Alright, Titus!" Mark yelled over the chaotic industrial noise. "Start carving!"
Inside the cabin, Titus slammed the throttle forward.
The bucket-wheel trencher lurched forward, rolling off the metal of the city and impacting the soft, purple loam of the alien jungle. The colossal, four-meter rotary wheel began to spin, the teeth blurring into a solid ring of destructive force.
Titus engaged the hydraulic arm, lowering the spinning wheel directly into the earth.
The trencher screamed as it chewed into the dirt, instantly obliterating thick roots, hidden rocks, and several tons of soil in a fraction of a second. The machine was carving a uniform trench, three meters wide and three meters deep, perfectly sized to accommodate both the massive pipes and the men who would need to stand beside them to bolt them together. As the displaced dirt was continuously launched from a side chute, creating a growing berm of soil along the right side of the trench, the trencher was also working to compact the dirt behind it as it moved forward.
Titus pushed the machine forward, carving a deep, dark scar perfectly straight toward the south.
As the trencher gained distance, chewing its way fifty yards into the jungle, Mark turned back to the fully loaded printer.
"Marcos," Mark said, linking his terminal. "Before we start extruding the pipes, we aren't rolling multi-ton cylinders by hand. Load up the schematics for a heavy-duty, tracked pipelayer crane. Something with a side-boom and magnetic grapples that can straddle the trench and lower forty-meter segments smoothly into the dirt."
"Schematics loading now," Marcos replied.
The printer flared white, and within twenty minutes, a treaded pipelayer rolled off the extrusion grates. It was a utilitarian beast, designed purely to lift and lower colossal weights with precision.
Cassius immediately holstered his rifle and vaulted into the crane's open-air operator's seat, familiarizing himself with the dual-joystick controls.
"Alright, Marcos," Mark called out. "Now load the schematics for the primary aqueduct pipes. One point five meters in diameter, two inches of solid thickness, forty meters in length per segment. Ensure the internal filtration lattice is integrated perfectly into the bore. And coat the entire interior with a slick, anti-corrosive synthetic polymer, something that will not degrade, rust, or leach into the drinking supply under a constant, high-pressure flow of water."
"Schematics locked and loaded, Mark," Marcos confirmed. "Commencing extrusion."
The blinding white light of the printer flared to life again. With a loud, sustained hiss of rapidly cooling metal, the machine began to push the first pipe out of its frontal bay.
It was a staggering piece of infrastructure. The pipe emerged perfectly cylindrical, the dark, matte grey of the alloy gleaming in the sunlight. Inside the 1.5-meter opening, the slick, frictionless anti-corrosive coating lined the walls, seamlessly giving way to a complex, honeycomb-like network of ultra-fine metal latticework. It was a passively efficient mechanical filter designed to catch and shred any large debris, aquatic parasites, or alien flora that might get sucked into the intake before it ever reached the city's secondary chemical treatment plant.
The printer extruded the pipe continuously, pushing the multi-ton cylinder out across the grates until it reached exactly forty meters in length. The machine severed the connection with a sharp, plasma-cutter flash, leaving the colossal pipe resting on the ground.
Cassius smoothly engaged the pipelayer. The tracked crane rolled forward, swinging its side-boom over the S-Alloy cylinder. The magnetic grapples engaged with a heavy clack, locking onto the pipe. The crane effortlessly hoisted the multi-ton segment off the grates, tracking forward toward the trench Titus had just carved.
"Bring it down slow, Cassius!" Mark ordered, sliding down the dirt incline into the three-meter-deep chasm alongside Severus and Octavia.
With pinpoint precision, the crane lowered the pipe into the trench. It settled perfectly into the center of the dark earth. Mark grabbed a heavy pneumatic impact wrench provided by the printer, wiping a bead of sweat from his brow.
"First one is down!" Mark yelled up to Cassius. "Back up! Let's get the next one!"
For the next ten hours, the southern edge of Rubrion Prime was consumed by a relentless, punishing cycle of brutal industrial labor.
Between directing the lifter drones that ferried blocks back to the city, Mark would continue to feed Printer Three. The machine would churn out a multi-ton, forty-meter pipe. Cassius would operate the tracked crane, snatching the pipe from the grates and lowering it flawlessly into the trench.
Mark, Severus, and Octavia had to manually guide the cylinders as the crane lowered them, ensuring the flanged edges aligned perfectly. Then, using the heavy impact wrenches, they drove fist-sized bolts through the connecting rings, permanently sealing the segments together.
Even with the crane taking the brunt of the heavy lifting, it was a war of attrition against heat and repetition.
The three suns beat down mercilessly on their backs, turning the trench into a stifling, humid oven. The smell of the freshly churned purple grass and dark loam mixed with the sharp tang of hot metal and sweat. Mark's black t-shirt was completely soaked through within the first hour. Even the Elite Guards, engineered for boundless stamina, were breathing heavily, their faces streaked with dirt and grime as they locked the pipes into place.
Up ahead, Titus never stopped. The trencher roared relentlessly, chewing its way through the jungle, carving a perfectly straight, three-meter-deep scar toward the distant river, oblivious to the labor happening in its wake. And kilometers behind them, connected only by Marcos's secure comms network, the rest of the city continued to rise, the AI tirelessly directing the drones and the civilian workforce to push the City Hall higher into the sky.
By the time the three suns finally began to dip toward the jagged western mountains, painting the sky in breathtaking, bruised shades of deep violet and fiery orange. The scale of their accomplishment was staggering.
Mark stood at the bottom of the trench, leaning heavily against the side of the one hundredth pipe they had laid. He was completely covered in dark mud and metal shavings, his chest heaving as he wiped his face with a filthy rag.
He looked back down the three-meter-wide corridor they had carved. The dark, unbroken line of the pipeline stretched out behind them, a colossal artery of metal winding perfectly back to the distant, elevated safety of the city.
They had laid exactly one hundred pipes. At forty meters a piece, they had successfully positioned and bolted exactly four kilometers of infrastructure in a single day. It was a feat of mechanized and manual labor that defied logic.
But the river was eight kilometers away. Eight thousand meters divided by forty meant they needed exactly two hundred pipes to reach the water.
They were exactly halfway there. They were still one hundred pipes short, with four kilometers of dense, untamed jungle left to chew through before they reached the predator-infested banks of the river.
"We're losing the light, Commander," Severus said quietly, dropping his heavy impact wrench into the dirt. The aristocratic super soldier looked utterly exhausted, his dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat.
Mark looked up at the sky. The shadows of the towering canopy were already lengthening, stretching across the trench and plunging them into the creeping dark. The alien forest was waking up, the nocturnal clicks, hisses, and distant, terrifying roars echoing through the trees.
"Shut it down!" Mark yelled up the trench, keying his comms to reach Titus in the trencher. "Titus, kill the engine! We're done for the day!"
Up ahead, the deafening roar of the rotary saw finally spun down, the self-sustaining electric drive whining down and choking off into a sudden, ringing silence. Cassius powered down the pipelayer crane on the surface, leaving its magnetic grapples empty for the night.
"We made incredible time with the crane," Octavia noted, climbing up the side of the dirt berm and scanning the darkening tree line with her pulse rifle raised. "But we are entirely exposed out here."
"We'll hit it again tomorrow," Mark said, his voice raw with fatigue as he holstered his terminal. He looked at the pipeline, knowing that tomorrow they would have to push even harder to breach the predator dens at the river's edge. "Let's head back to the city. I need a shower, even if it's just from the Shepherd's recycled tank."
---
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