The cockpit of the Vanguard-One no longer smelled of ozone and hydraulic fluid. It smelled of wet earth and cold, ancient copper.
General Harry Hampton gripped the flight sticks, but he didn't feel the cold metal of the handles. Instead, he felt a pulsing, rhythmic vibration—a heartbeat that wasn't his own. Across the HUD, the amber tactical data was being overwritten by jagged, violet scripts that looked like Thorne's "Harvest" footage.
"...Harry..."
He jolted, his eyes darting to the empty seat behind him. "CALI, did you say something?"
"Negative, General. My vocal processors are nominal. However, the black oil in the cooling veins is emitting a high-frequency sub-vocal resonance. It is... mimicking human speech patterns."
"...General... Hero... Keeper..."
The voices weren't coming from the speakers. They were vibrating through the neural-link, echoing in the base of his skull. It was the collective consciousness of the New Terra colonists—thousands of fragmented souls trapped in the nanite suspension, screaming through the machine.
"Focus, Harry," he growled, slamming a fist against his helmet. "You're a 4-star General. You don't listen to ghosts. You command them."
The Skirmish at the Rim
He didn't have time to lose his mind. On the long-range scanners, a trio of Drealius Shards had detected his reactor's jump-start. They were closing in, their obsidian hulls shimmering with a predatory hunger. They didn't see a human ship anymore; they saw a "corrupted" piece of their own technology.
"Targeting lock," Harry commanded.
Usually, the Vanguard-One took three seconds to lock on. Now, the crosshairs snapped to the lead Shard before Harry even finished the thought. The mech didn't just move; it flowed.
The first Shard fired a violet gravity beam. In the past, Harry would have had to execute a complex thruster burn to dodge. Now, the obsidian veins in the mech's legs pulsed. The Vanguard-One performed a "Blink"—a short-range spatial fold that Harry hadn't programmed. He reappeared behind the Shard in a flash of violet light.
"My turn," Harry whispered.
He pulled the trigger on the minigun. But the sound wasn't the rhythmic thrum of tungsten rounds. It was a high-pitched, screaming tear in the fabric of space. The barrels were glowing with violet energy, firing "Hollow-Point" gravity slugs.
The lead Shard didn't just shatter. It imploded. The gravity slugs collapsed the enemy's hull into a marble-sized point of infinite density before it vanished into nothingness.
The Price of Power
As the first Shard died, a wave of euphoria washed over Harry. It wasn't his own joy—it was the nanites' satisfaction. They were feeding on the destruction of their "pure" kin.
"...More... free them... break the shell..."
"Shut up!" Harry roared.
The remaining two Shards lunged at him, their obsidian surfaces shifting into jagged blades. Harry engaged his plasma sword, but the blade wasn't blue anymore. It was a jagged, flickering purple. He sliced through the second Shard, the metal of his mech's arm elongating and warping to reach further than it ever had before.
He felt the "bleed" of the enemy. Every drop of black oil that splashed onto his hull didn't slide off; it was absorbed. The Vanguard-One was growing, the military armor being replaced by an organic, obsidian exoskeleton.
"General!" CALI's voice broke through the fog. "Your heart rate is two hundred! The neural link is at one hundred and twelve percent capacity! If you don't disconnect, the nanites will bypass your blood-brain barrier!"
The Tenth Fleet Arrives
Harry was about to lunge for the final Shard when the sky above him shattered.
A thousand white-hot streaks of ion fire tore through the darkness. The Tenth Fleet had arrived, breaking cover with a fury that lit up the Dead Zone like a new star. Railgun slugs from the Aegis carrier pulverized the final Shard before Harry could touch it.
"General Hampton! This is Captain Thorne!" the comms screamed. "We see you, sir! We're coming in for recovery! Stay calm!"
Harry looked at his hands. The flight suit was beginning to fuse with the seat. The obsidian veins were crawling up his neck, itching like a thousand tiny insects. On his HUD, he saw the thousand ships of his fleet, but he didn't see allies. For a terrifying second, he saw Harvest.
"Stay back, Elias!" Harry shouted, his voice sounding distorted, layered with a thousand other whispers. "Don't come near this machine! I'm not... I'm not alone in here!"
The Vanguard-One stood in the center of the wreckage, a dark, pulsing god of war. The General had his power, but the man was losing his soul.