A burst from the autocannon tore the shoulder plate from the white construction vector, its orange hazard stripes already faded by ash.
One emergency strobe died instantly; the chassis rocked under the impact.
The cockpit rang with a muffled clunk. A warning glyph blinked yellow in the upper corner, pulsing like a slow alarm, then a sharp, synthetic tang of burnt wiring filled the cockpit. Crimson emergency lights flared to full brightness.
So much for a silent retreat.
The titanium blade of the breaker punched into the police walker's chestplate. Titania pulled the control yoke hard, throwing the enemy machine aside. Another burst split the haze—she avoided it with impossible precision. Her skull pulsed with pressure. The biotic amplifier driving her cognition left no room for error. With no tactical core to share the load, the strain was unsustainable. Her fingers sparked against the insulated sticks. A single drop of blood traced down from her right nostril.
The colonel was still issuing orders—his voice clipped, deliberate—but the cover team was nearly gone. Even she couldn't deny the effectiveness of Krosa's suicide charges. Primitive, but efficient.
She gritted her teeth and moved to brush a damp strand of hair away. The movement disrupted one of the interface loops—enough to stagger the walker. It crashed onto a parked vehicle with a groan, its remaining orange beacon flickering once before dying.
Titania exhaled, seizing the pause. A quick glance at the integrity readout: right manipulator—greyed out, severed; exposed wiring sparked at the elbow joint. Left leg and torso—both red. Two cog icons blinked beside the leg—mechanical fault. Power cell—nearly depleted. Possibly breached. Charge dropping fast, the low-pitched whine of the dying battery became a flatline hum.
Two, maybe three minutes. Then she would abandon it.
Her gaze rested on the magnetic sidearm clipped above the console. Not designed for boarding armor. She knew exactly how bad the odds were.
The comms crackled to life again, this time with a male voice she didn't recognize.
"Get up. Not the time to lie down."
She grabbed the handset, fingers squeezing the call button with enough force to snap it from its housing.
"Who are you? Where did you get this frequency?" Her voice came out sharp, almost too loud for the enclosed cockpit, but the construction walker's sensors showed nothing in the smoke except firelight and outlines.
"Stop looking," the voice replied, without urgency or emotion. "If you want to survive, you'll need to listen."
"Survive?" she hissed. "You think any of us are here to win?"
"Losing a battle doesn't end a war," the voice continued, without pause, and a moment later: "Another P.A.W. is approaching your position. If you don't follow instructions, you'll be dead before you feel it."
Titania didn't respond at once. Her eyes moved across the cracked interface.
"Why are you helping us?"
"This better not be another setup," someone muttered, but no one countermanded the order.
The silence this time was longer. Then another voice, a woman's, came onto the line—tight, clipped, a soldier's edge.
"Unidentified contact, state your callsign. This frequency is locked."
No answer.
Somewhere in another vehicle, Cain removed one button from his collar and exhaled. It was hot in the cabin. Auxiliary systems had long since been shut down.
A third voice now, male again: "If you're resistance, prove it."
"We don't have time," came the woman again, before Cain could speak. "He might be useful."
"He might be Krosa."
"Switch frequency," Titania said quietly, already turning the dial.
Cain adjusted the tuner, the paper scrap on the dashboard barely legible under dim light. He tuned into a new signal just in time to catch someone trying to issue orders.
"You're the one giving commands?" Cain asked, before another burst of static. No answer. Another switch. This time, silence—until he tried again.
"Bulldozer. I know you can hear me."
Titania froze.
"You didn't come for a paycheck. You fight for something else. The idea that this world can still be yours."
Cain waited. Her silence told him everything.
"Don't listen to him," snapped the colonel. "It's a Krosa trick."
"Your capacitor's breached," Cain continued. "Six percent, maybe seven. You won't last another two minutes at combat load."
She said nothing.
"Turn left," he said. "Nine o'clock. There's a P.A.W. hull from earlier. Same model. You'll be able to draw power, if you're quick."
Another pause.
"The rest of you—reload. Tend your wounds. Clock's ticking. You've got two minutes, maybe less. Listen to me if you want to live."
He closed the line without waiting for a reply, leaned back in the seat, and stared at the radar like a gambler studying the last turn of a deck, the city spread out before him in shades of grey and smoke, his legs stiff under the console, his palms damp where the heat hadn't yet drained the nerves, and somewhere in the stale air he counted down the seconds — two minutes left before the next wave, and the interval was textbook, the way Krosa always did it, give it ten minutes to regroup and press in with infantry wrapped in walkers, as if muscle and armor alone could choke out defiance.
The IFF blinked. The radar let out a hollow chirp — too slow, too steady, signalling contact. Edge of the sweep, multiple signatures, closing in fast.
He picked up the radio again, exhaled once to clear the static from his lungs.
"You don't know me, and it's too late for introductions," he said into the receiver, his voice level, stripped of any pride or command, just fact. "But this much you do know — a bullet's dumb, a blade's honest, but a grenade with the pin pulled makes no friends, and I've seen too many hands come back empty."
A pause. The radar pinged again. Shadows moved through the fog, just shapes, occasionally lit up by dying lights. Only their optics glowed — flickers of ghostlight in the grey.
"You've got thirty seconds. Light P.A.W. group, with infantry escort, maybe a full company. They'll come through the smoke like they own it. Don't charge. Don't try to be brave. You're not here to win. You're here to make them pay. Block by block. Meter by meter. They don't own this world — we do. And they're going to remember it."
A voice cracked back through the static. "Then say your name. You want trust, give it."
"No."
He said it flatly, no emphasis.
"I can't afford a name. To the Empire, I need to stay a nobody."
There was a beat of silence. Then someone, maybe too young, maybe too tired, laughed — not with joy, but with something close to recognition.
"All right, Nobody," the voice said. "We're listening."
The streetlights cut out. So did the last of the digital signage. The fires were all that remained, little patches of heat in the wet grey of the city.
"They'll use low-light optics," Cain said, already watching the way the enemy was moving through the narrow alley channels. "Molotovs first. Trash, second. If you don't have fire, go for the flash suppressors — one shot and they'll be blind to their own light. Be where they don't want to look."
"Copy."
"Understood."
"Got it."
They didn't question him. Not now. And on the radar, the enemy dots moved closer — almost there.
Then a window shattered, and the first blossom of orange fire rose through the mist.
"Now," he said, and his voice was almost calm, as if this too were part of the script. "You, at the fence. With the mine. Stop looking around. Move southeast — there's a green sedan near the corner. Set the trap by the left wheel. Grenadier — west. Cover the pair who just fired. One-armed — fall back. You're not making that throw."
"Unit Seven is down, Four is down, Two is down," Veres hissed, more to the console than to the men around him, his fingers rapping the edge of the display like he could shake the readouts into changing, and the data streamed in, cold and simple and unforgiving, the kind of feed that told a commander exactly how many bodies he had left to throw at a wall, and how few would still be standing afterward. "What the hell is going on down there? Change codes, they're intercepting!"
"We've cycled them three times already, Captain," came the flat reply from across the room, fingers dancing across the console like that made a difference.
"Again!"
"We can't pull back now. If you want them dead, send more." Broda said. His voice had the weight of command, not conviction. "Send more men, we have to push!"
"We don't have more," Veres snapped. "They've drained everything from this district. There's nothing left to send."
"Send my bodyguards. And Bloodsuckers. One is enough."
"Captain, this is a breach in protocol!"
"I want this finished," Broda said, his voice quiet and level, and the rest of the room didn't move.
A pause hung heavy in the air
Veres swore under his breath, and nodded once.
"Yes, sir."
The last enemy tag vanished from the radar. Cain exhaled — not relief, just a breath measured by habit — as the sweep cleared and the silence pressed in heavier than before. It wasn't over. It never ended this quickly. The IFF blinked again. Four new signatures. Moving fast. No police pattern.
"Bulldozer, you've got guests. Four, closing quick. Doesn't read like law enforcement."
"We've got nowhere to run," came Titania's voice, ragged.
"I told you this was a trap," the Colonel muttered, and there was pain in it, not just in the voice but in the pause between each word, like it cost him to breathe. "Now they'll finish it."
"Bulldozer, leave the walker," Cain said, already scanning her position. "Seven meters north, maintenance hatch. Get below ground. You're inside the blast radius."
"Four?" Titania whispered, and something in her voice shifted. "Oh hell."
Inside her failing cockpit, Titania's fingers closed on the eject lever. Five blocks away, behind reinforced glass, Cain leaned closer to his screen toward the flickering screen, as if by narrowing the distance between breath and metal he might somehow pierce the smoke, the ruin, the silence that always followed.
Red paint. Sleek chassis. Purpose in every step. They moved with the calm of machines that had already killed — not cautious, not hasty — deliberate. They circled the bulldozer like wolves that understood patience, and if they were waiting for a surrender, they didn't say it with words Cain heard. Maybe one shouted. Maybe one made the gesture. He didn't need to hear the words.
In the outstretched hand of his walker was a compact automatic weapon — Imperial-issue, designed for police P.A.W. units. It boasted high rate of fire but miserable accuracy past thirty meters. The engineers had tried to compensate with an internal stabilizer, making sure the last round in every burst struck center. The logic behind that design still baffled Cain — but this wasn't the time to ponder it.
As the trio of red machines drew in, he pulled the trigger.
A hailstorm of taser rounds scattered across the street, uselessly bouncing off thick composite armor.
"What the—?! Friendly fire?! Identify your uni—" one of them shouted.
He never finished.
The final shot struck the plasma trap mounted to the back of the abandoned bulldozer-walker. The charge flared, caught, and overloaded instantly — a blinding white-blue flash that resonated through the machine's core. The overload surged into the internal systems and detonated.
The explosion melted straight through the armored floor plating, punching a ragged hole in the structure beneath. The closest red walkers were pulled into the collapse, scorched by the blast, limbs flailing as the floor gave way under them. One tried to move. Too late.
A gut instinct screamed danger as he spun the walker around just in time to block a massive kick.
The attacker leapt back. Cain saw it clearly now: matte black, red shoulder plate, a newer, sleeker P.A.W. model. No factory mark. No squad tag. Custom work—pilot-built.
The machine threw its arms forward. Twin jets of flame erupted from its palms, and the temperature warning blinked red. Smoke stung his nose. His pants were soaked - some hydraulic fluid boiled over. He yanked the controls, throwing the walker out of the inferno.
"Are you the one commanding them?" a voice rang out - run through a vocoder but unmistakably a woman. "I assume if I kill you, this mess ends."
Cain gritted his teeth. Anyone can shoot. But not everyone can think.
Before the next flame burst hit, Cain slammed the pedals. The walker charged, pinning the enemy at close range.
Fire seared his vision. Plastic insulation liquefied above his head, he smelled ammonia.
Heat warped the metal underfoot. Cain hit the eject lever, praying the cockpit hadn't fused.
The dark-gray walker smashed into the red-black one, sending both crashing down. The ejection capsule blasted free, seconds before the energy core blew, m elting the surrounding buildings into a mess of boiling steel and cracked glass.
The capsule slammed into an office tower across the street, skidding to a halt in a mangled mess of cubicles. Fire suppression systems kicked in, flooding everything around. Water smelled like bleach, and smoke, and burned carbon. Gagging and nauseous, Cain crawled out under the artificial rain, cursed as hot steam kissed his skin, and slipped on soggy office paper toward the emergency stairs.
He burst onto the street, scanning the chaos. No police, no medics, no firefighters were paying attention.
He leaned against the dumpster, drew out his phone, and exhaled in relief as the signal icon reappeared.
Hands trembling, he redialed Kasmina. It rang... then cut off.
He didn't say the curse aloud, but it crawled behind his teeth anyway, the weight of Krosa settling into his lungs like smog, thicker here than anywhere.
He spotted medics nearby loading bodies into a shuttle, and an escape plan formed instantly in his mind.
Getting out of this part of the city was nearly impossible - monorails shut, roads locked, security tight. But bodies? Bodies moved freely, and one of them has been loaded into the shuttle right now.
Cain sprinted over.
"Felicia!" he shouted, clutching a gurney, startling the medic. Cain choked, too loudly, too fast. "Is she breathing? Please—just tell me—"
Before he could say more, someone grabbed his arms and pulled him back.
"Sir, step away from the patient—"
"She's my fiancée! I have to be with her!" Cain howled.
The medic and cop exchanged glances. The medic hesitated—then exhaled, shoulders sagging.
"Let him."
"But sir, that's against regulations—"
"Forget the protocol. I want this day to end," snapped the medic. "Let him in. One more won't change a thing."
The cop grudgingly released Cain. He climbed into the shuttle's cargo bay, settling among the gurneys. The ramp slammed shut, hissing loudly as it pressurised, bolts locking with loud thuds. Engines roared to life, lifting them from the chaos. Outside, the fires still raged. But inside, everything had gone cold.
Cain leaned against the wall, exhaling hard.
Kasmina's number.
He stared at it for a moment, but couldn't make himself press "call" button again.