It is a great irony that the nature of war, always reveals the true nature of those who fight. And from our earliest days we fought, war after war, like a storm it swarmed over the earth with no end in sight. But in the midst of the death and the dying, humanity by accident stumbled upon it's seeds of salvation, science, but in that hope humanity also found the seeds of it's destruction as well.
Yet it never came to that, for he came—gifted, not born of normal means—an answer in flesh. We do not remember the age before his coming, the time before the proclamation of the Holy Calendar. For it is no longer history, but a legend and a caution of what possibly once had been nearly our end. The names are gone; only He remembers.
And in the primitive time before the holy calender, it was the Immortal Emperor who broke the tyrants, ended the last civil night, and sat the Throne, and so it was that the calendar turned holy and the cycle broke. Man no longer fought man, but for unification the Earth paid the price. So it was that humanity then set it's sight's upon the stars and left it's old home behind.
Much is not known specifically of this earliest of times in our holy calender, but after his crowning we marched for over ten thousand years. World by world, and Sector by sector the galaxy came to be ours. We terraformed deserts into breadworlds, raised forge‑hives and cathedral bastions, and taught our sons to pray with rifles. The vile Xenos who sought to eradicate us knelt or burned. The map of the Milky Way learned our name, and bent to our design, humanity's will.
And for a time… the guns cooled.
Administrators replaced generals. Borders hardened. Families planted orchards where firing lines had been. We called it peace, but it was only the pause between drumbeats.
At the dusk of the Eleventh Millennium, the quiet cracked.
A new shadow we called the Verdant Swarm came and breached the far rim. There was no parley, no herald. Sector Aetherion fell under siege, but we held the line well. However, now after 40 years of hell, another threat comes from the western rim of the galaxy, headed for the newly established Sector Helion, and there not by design but by chance it moves towards a green world the Empire trusted with its daily bread: Achios.
Fields like oceans. Cities with marble faces and iron hearts. A paradise that wore armor under its skin.
We didn't know this new enemies name or nature. We only knew this:
The Long Peace was over, and besieged from two sides humanity would soon find itself hard-pressed to hold onto that which it had so painstakingly claimed.
****
High Orbit of the planet of Achios — Listening Spire‑3.
The station looked like a ring speared clean through—Tenth‑Millennium architecture: broad delta‑vanes bristling with dishes, and, at its heart, a graphite‑black needle as long as a mountain, stabbing the dark. Men on night shift spoke in the hush that old hulls teach.
Beyond the slotted viewports, the planet rolled like a lantern of green and white beneath the Vigilance Crown—the orbital defence net that hung over Achios like a wreath: one command ring, ten bastions, and a small fleet of 22 ships drifting in close order about them, lights drowsing amber. Crew ferries nudged at spoke‑piers on Vigilance Prime, the crown's ring‑station, while the bastions kept their gun‑faces closed. Night shift breathed in whispers.
"Track Eleven… picking up a biometal mass heading our way," the scope tech said. "Not an asteroid storm or regular ships, seems like a blob of biological matter and metal. Scatters read mixed return: metal and… something living. Nothing else, I don't think it's the Verdant Swarm."
Watchmaster Rhys came to the scope techs side and stared until the jitter became a shape that wasn't quite a shape. "Indeed, that's not rock or the swarm, I think we have an incoming alien fleet coming to possibly test our defences it seems," he said. "Flag Condition Amber. Quiet chain only for now. Crew the ring and the orbitals. Keep the mantle warm, not lit. And begin preparing the defence fleet for a possible interception if these aliens change course and try to bypass us."
And with those words the alert quickly stepped planet ward, heard only by soldiers, not by the civilian crowds.
Down on the planet, in the mid‑sized city of Mikri Poli, life had the softness of a holiday. The lake wore a rim of light; rowboats drifted; couples pretended the world had finally learned to be quiet.
On a small arched bridge where the feeder stream met the lake, Sergeant Halvern stood with a woman two heads shorter than him. In his pocket: a ring and the idea of a simpler life—two wives, two hearths, an old soldier set free at last from a rank he'd never wanted.
He took her hands; she looked up; he drew breath to say the words he'd once said to his first wife.
His watch buzzed—red triangle, black exclamation.
He didn't look.
"Read it," she said, soft but absolute, fingers hooked in his collar. Amber eyes fixed him like a blade. "You swore an Imperial oath. Don't you dare break it. I'm not marrying a lawbreaker."
He scratched at his neck, laughed once, thumbed the slate.
AMBER / SILENT STAND‑TO. BIOLOGICAL UNKNOWN. MASKS. TO POSTS. AWAIT FRAG ORDERS.
The watch felt heavier; so did he.
"We'll do this another time," he said, hating how it tasted. He palmed the ring, kissed her brow. "Go home. If the sirens sound, go below. I'll see you tomorrow—or next week."
She caught his sleeve. "Stay safe, Hall. May the Emperor keep you."
"He keeps fools and soldiers," Halvern said. "Today that's the same thing. Still—death has a habit of avoiding this face, so don't worry."
He winked his unscarred blue eye and ran. Laughter carried over the water as he cut off the path and down into the metro service ways—others running with him, men answering duty—through blast doors and along long flights into Mikri Poli's under‑skin.
Subsurface Barracks — Gallery Three
The hidden barracks used the bones of the city: vaulted galleries ribbed like a ship's belly, overhead cranes asleep on their rails, deck‑lines stencilled in yellow to tell pilots where to land a century ago and tanks where to park today. Clone‑clean arcs of steel and light, polished once for parades, now woken for war. Hangar doors were disguised as maintenance walls topside; below, everything was real—vast, orderly, and ready.
Thousands moved without shouting. Locks thumped. Fans woke. Dust sheets came off racks. Pilum IFV batteries ticked alive, engines barking like old dogs; ammo trams rattled crates onto belts. On the streets above, nothing looked strange save the number of men heading for the underground and the spaceport.
Halvern reached Gallery Three, lungs burning, and found his section: fourteen helms on pegs; fourteen boys trying to sound like men. Only Corporal Venn looked fully grown—square‑jawed, quiet, a long‑range vox pack already riding his shoulders. His nod said I saw the code too.
"Up and kit," Halvern said, voice flat. "Masks first—seals tight. Armour over them to keep the seals clean. Rifles after. Biohazard posture stays until I say otherwise: no exposed skin. You eat through the feed‑straw, you drink through the feed‑straw, and you use the sanitation port under your backplate. We do not break seal for curiosity. Rask—heavy. Dax—flamer. Orrin—medic. Venn—vox and second. Everyone else is rifle."
He let the silence hang, then added, "And take grenades until your belt curses my name. Extra weight is temporary—you'll spend it fast."
They moved. Standard kit came off the wall like liturgy: olive carapace plates for chest and shoulders; tall greaves; heavy gauntlets; sealed full‑face respirators with gold visors; canvas packs with bedrolls tight. Lasrifles clacked from racks; pistols found thigh holsters; frags and sticky‑gel canisters clipped to webbing. Solvent and canvas made a church of the room; the prayers were the thuck‑thuck of magazines seating, the click‑press of canisters twisting home, the thin fan‑whine of masks spooling to life.
A recruit grinned as he slapped a mag into place. "How many wars you fought, Sarge?"
Halvern thumbed the boy's filter until it bit and rapped the helmet twice. "Enough to know the difference between excitement and discipline. One gets you dead. The other lets you die old. Learn fast."
Another called out, "Outer‑rim sieges, right? Last man standing—twice?"
"Three," Venn murmured, not looking up.
"Twice," Halvern corrected. "Third didn't count; he lived. I dragged him out." He let the boys laugh at Venn's scowl, then cut it short. "Listen: battle proves a man. It's also a stupid way to chase a long life. We follow orders. No heroics. Stay calm."
He walked the line, checking seals himself: tapping filters, tugging straps, shaking a forearm to feel plates settle. Masks here were the newer pattern—indefinite filters, integrated feed‑straws, sealed sanitation lines—meant for months if a commander was cruel enough to require it. Nobles usually were. Men were cheap; grief was cheaper. Halvern had buried too many squads in too many alien brush wars to pretend otherwise.
"Loadouts," Venn called, voice amplified. "Rifle teams: Karst, Juno, Fenn, Morel, Hadrin, Mikk, Pavel, Tosk. Rask on rotary. Dax on promethium. Orrin—medicae and reserve rifle. Sarge roams. Form on my beacon."
They ran the drill: masks up, masks down; canister swaps blindfolded; clears to the floor silhouettes. The Pilums rolled from their bays, dozer‑prows shining, hulls stencilled with the city's crest. Crew chiefs signed litanies and kicked their drivers into gear.
Halvern paused at the gallery door and let himself wish—for a field, for an orchard, for two laughing kitchens and fourteen children climbing his legs. Then he shut the door on the wish and followed his men.
Planetary Defence Command — Achios Prime
Under sainted friezes the bunker woke without moving the city. Orders rolled out clean: crew the defence fleet; man the ring; arm the orbitals; hold the line. Across the world, shuttles spun up; crew pods stacked on launch rails; tug pilots blessed their boards and lit for orbit.
Up high, crew cylinders knifed toward Vigilance Prime in tidy strings. On the ring, spoke‑piers glowed, swallowing shuttles as fast as the surface could cough them up. The orbital bastions walked their capacitors from cold to warm. Station decks filled with men in the same olive armour and white respirators as below.
Sunward, a picket drone cleared the glare and got a clean look at the approach. The picture sharpened. The packet hit the Listening Spire‑3 watchfloor.
"Putting it on the wall," Rhys said.
Not a formation—a migration. Ships the size of continents, hulls that moved like schools of things that weren't fish, seams like cracked lips, a green particulate misting their wake. Instruments tagged the cloud as organic.
"That's not standard anything," someone breathed. "That's an invasion."
"Route frames to PDC, ring command at Achios Prime, and House Steiner liaison," Rhys said. "Recommend Crimson."
A heartbeat of held air.
"Recommendation accepted," came the calm reply. "On your mark, we initiate Crimson Protocol."
The planet inhaled. The defence net in orbit stiffened. And down below on the surface of the planet all was about to change. But for a little girl named Lili, the day had been like a picture of perfection thus far, as it usually was.
Lili knelt in the grass where the park's walk met a little tongue of sunlight, her dress tucked under her knees, her sandals sinking into the warm earth. She pressed three white lilies into the dirt, making a small ring of pebbles around their stems so no one would step on them. The sun would find them here and they would grow old and pretty, she thought.
Inside her chest the warm pebble pulsed—her secret little heart beside the real one. She breathed in, breathed out, and drew a thread of its warmth into her arms. It tingled down her wrists and into her hands. A very soft white shiver—so faint it almost wasn't there in the bright morning—left her palms and fingertips and slipped into the pebbles and the soil and then into the green. The leaves steadied; the petals lifted; the roots seemed to take hold as if the ground loved them back. Lili smiled and patted the dirt smooth.
When she looked up, the city's edge framed a sea of color. Past the tall apartments and the quiet road, the flower‑fields ran away in bands—gold, white, violet—circling Mikri Poli in a broad ring before the true farm‑country began. Achios always smelled like this in summer: bread and blossoms and clean stone. It was a place that fed other places, Papa said—a world made for growing.
"Lili." Mama's voice clipped the air. "Do you always have to be on your knees all morning. Just look at your dress—and your shoes, all dirty." Mama sat at the park bench showing her to brush the dirt away with quick, small hands.
"Sorry Mama," Lili whispered, cheeks hot. She scratched the back of her head and quickly glanced toward the playground. The big boys were there—the ones who sometimes called her white rabbit when she didn't want to climb or race, because of her platinum blonde hair and timid nature. But luckily none of them were looking at her now. Relief loosened her shoulders.
Papa laughed, the soft kind that meant it's nothing. "Oh come now, she's just a child, Elenya, and dirt happens."
"And who washes 'dirt happens'?" Mama said, but her mouth twitched like it wanted to be a smile. She looked at Lili's knees a last time and sighed.
Lili stood, dusted herself carefully the way Mama liked, and tip‑toed back to the bench. Papa and Mama sat close, shoulders touching, a slate balanced across Papa's thigh. Lili climbed onto Mama's lap, and leaned against her chest, both hands cradling a few white flowers she had still not planted in a safe place—and watched the moving pictures. She couldn't read the texts on the screen yet, but she could see and hear.
A man in a helmet spoke to the glass eye while the ground behind him leapt and smoked. Lines of men in trenches worked their long guns. Walkers lumbered past like metal animals. Far above, aircraft scratched white lines across a sky that wasn't Achios. Papa had called that place Sector Aetherion, where the Verdant Swarm pressed and pressed and was pushed back and then pressed again.
Lili leaned forward, mouth a little open. She liked the way the pilots' darts climbed together and then split apart like swallows. She did not like the sound the ground made when the big guns fired; it reminded her of doors slamming in dark halls.
Mama's hand rested on her belly, thumb tracing a circle. "Dont worry my little Lilypad, we will only watch a little," she murmured. "Then we can walk to the lake and feed the birds."
Lili nodded. She was good at nodding.
On the slate the reporter's mouth kept moving and talking about victory being near on the planet of Aedes, but then suddenly the picture stuttered and went black. A single line of white letters drew itself across the screen. Papa's slate chimed. Far away, another chime answered it, and then another, coming closer through the trees like a flock rising. It was as if all the grown-ups in the city got the same message nearly simultaneously.
Papa's eyes narrowed in the way they did when the clinic sent for him. He thumbed the slate, read once, and read again. "Message from Planetary Defence," he said, steady and calm. "Unknown contacts entering the system. They're moving to a higher alert."
Mama's fingers tightened just a little on Lili's arm. Not fear—readiness.
"What does it mean?" Lili asked, very quietly.
"It means we keep our heads and listen to instructions," Papa said, kissing her hair. "And we stay together."
And then they rose from the bench without fuss. Papa swung Lili up to his shoulders the way he always did—one hand to her ankle, the other steadying her knee—while Mama straightened the hem of Lili's dusty dress with quick, precise fingers.
"Stay with us. No dawdling," Mama said.
"Count your steps, Lily‑pad," Papa added, easy and calm. "Twenty to the gate, then we turn."
They joined the flow leaving the park. Doors along the street opened; people came out still talking in their inside voices. A few shut off their engines and stepped from their cars to walk with everyone else. Lili twisted to wave goodbye to her little ring of lilies. Grow well, she told them in her head, and faced forward.
The crowd thickened by the block—office men, shopkeepers, wardens in white capes over green armor motioning with open palms. Screens on building corners pulsed a clear message in a steady voice: General Alert. Proceed to Mikri Poli Spaceport for evacuation. If you lack passage, descend to Metro shelters. Follow wardens. This is not a drill.
Then the sirens were sounded, they came like a low note that found its own echo and grew. People didn't scream, but they moved faster. Papa's hand settled firmer on Lili's ankle. Mama took hold of Papa's sleeve, and the city began putting on its other face.
Lili heard a loud rumbling noise, it came from the edge of the city where the flower fields where, and then the ground there opened up like double doors being pushed open, flowerbeds were flying aside and tipped as thick metal walls began to rise. Lili winced at the sight of the flowers getting crushed and petals tumbling away. Out of the opened ground the wall climbed—thick, blunt, higher than the apartment building roofs—locking together with a sound like heavy books closing. The city was surrounded now by them, and on them were metallic towers with large multi barrelled guns just waiting for soldiers to man them.
Farther on at the center of the city, the tallest of tower faces shed their glass skins; dull plates shouldered outward and clicked into place, and at their tops large cannon's rose to point skywards. From the parks, secret ramps opened up to the underground, and from there Pilum carriers rolled up first, then the heavier tanks with patient guns and deep engines. Men in sealed masks came by the dozen out of Metro mouths and service stairs. They moved like a machine that knew its work: coils of wire unrolled, sandbags stacked, trenches cut with shovel‑teams, firing pockets marked with chalk, emplacements stenciled with numbers. To Lili, the masked men looked like big, faceless toys that someone else was moving. It made her hold Papa a little tighter.
"Eyes forward," Papa said softly. "We're fine."
Mama's voice was firmer. "Do not loosen your grip, Lili."
They turned onto the great straight—the boulevard that ran a long, bright line to the spaceport. At the end stood the spaceport that to Lili always looked like a big metallic gray mushroom: thick stem, wide dome, hangar‑seams like eyelids. A broad ramp climbed to the blast doors. Buildings on either side funneled everyone into a single river of bodies. Wardens at each cross‑street split the current, sending some down the Metro stairs beneath the plaza so the ramp wouldn't choke.
Lili had always known the city as quiet and tidy. Now the air had a burr in it: voices too fast, footsteps too many, metal talking under the streets. She felt the change sit on her shoulders even above the crowd—like a big hand that wasn't Papa's.
"It's fine Lili, just breathe," Papa said, still calm. "We are finally going to go and see the spaceport now, just like you have always wanted to. Let's just hope that not all the ship's will be taken once we get there."
"Surely not, I'm sure they'll have plenty of space to go around," Mama murmured, while she as well kept scanning for new signs, for the next turn, the next stair if they needed it.
Lili said nothing, she just watched in amazement as a shadow slid across them as the spaceport's many hanger bay doors in the dome opened. The large doors parted and fighters kicked free in pairs and lifted, engines rumbling over the boulevard before their sound thinned in the blue sky above. Heavier craft followed—bombers with blunt noses, then sleeker shapes with hard angles tucked under their wings. Lili's small fist rose without her thinking. "For the Throne," she whispered, shy and proud.
She tracked their path upward. The sky wore a faint blue glaze now, as if someone had drawn a circle around the world. If she remembered correctly it was the world's planetary shield at work, giving off the faint blue glow. And past the shield and on the far edge of her sight, she thought—just for a moment—she could see a ring and tall pins of light where the defenders waited in the darkness of space, shifting into their places like stones in a crown. In the black where the Crown like shaped station held the defence ring in the center. She could almost count the defensive fleet ships up there—the twenty‑two medium sized vessels wheeling close to the station.
Then the battle began.
From the darkness of space further away, the enemy showed its teeth: hulks with hulls like diseased reefs, seams opening and closing as if the ships were breathing. The first defensive volley reached them—straight, clean lances that stitched the dark with white and gold. Lili saw those lines strike and bloom, saw armor slough away like rotten bark, saw a few of the vile hulks come apart in gray fire. The answer came back dirty and wrong—globes of sick green that splashed across shields and plating and stuck there, eating as they burned.
The Crown fired again—bastions flaring together—and, for a moment it seemed that the line would hold.
But one of the great enemy craft pushed through anyway. It did not turn to trade guns. It pushed it's red glowing engines to the maximum, shouldering the void aside, and rammed through the incoming fire like it was nothing. Its huge mass flickered with light's of explosions like it were a whole continent under fire and then it slammed into a small defender that tried to hold bravely. Lili saw the loyal ship buckle like a dropped cup; saw her spine crack; saw men's courage fall with her. But the ramming thing broke itself on that courage. Its hide split. Its belly tore.
That was when the guns of the city of Mikri Poli woke.
High on the cathedral towers, the massive guns charged up and the city showed the other face Lili had only ever seen in pictures and videos. The first tower‑cannon fired it's gun with a raw and made it seem like it had just vomited daylight. The sound didn't echo; it emptied the world. Everything else—the crying, the orders, the rumble of engines—fell away under the blow of it. The stones under Papa's boots trembled; dust hopped in bright rings along the boulevard. A second gun answered, then a third, and the air became a bell the size of a city.
The wounded leviathan in orbit took those shots in the gut and began to be torn from the inside out. Holes opened through it like mouths and it began to break apart, but as it did, from each mouth, a dark vapor poured—black‑green, full of faint sparks—spreading and spreading until the cloud blocked out the sun from Lili's point of view and still continued growing as it descended. It rolled downward like a slow‑falling sickly night sky.
The faint blue glaze around Achios folded and flexed as the cloud touched it. It was as if the shield was contemplating on if it should let it through, but as it did most of the cloud simply slipped through anyway.
Daylight died. Shadows sharpened. The sun became a coin behind colored glass. The boulevard turned the color of bruises, and all along the great straight to the spaceport, people looked up and forgot how to speak. Lili felt Papa's hand clamp tight on her ankle; she felt Mama's fingers close on Papa's sleeve; she tasted metal between breaths.
Every head tilted up. The cloud was wrong—green‑black, thick as smoke and moving like weather with intent. The murmur on the boulevard turned hard. People pressed for the spaceport ramp and found only more people. Wardens—men in sealed masks—cut side streets into lanes and pointed others toward the Metro mouths yawning under the plaza.
"Masks—get them up here!" the ramp captain barked, and half his line peeled off at a run. Webbed sacks thumped open along the barricades; gray respirators passed hand to hand until the hands ran out.
Elenya clutched her husband's arm as if holding him might hold the world. Perched on his shoulders, Lili did the only comfort a four‑year‑old knows—she patted her mother's hair, small palm soft on sweat‑slick curls.
The cloud reached them.
Snow began to fall—dark flakes rimmed in green, ringing faintly as they touched stone. It was beautiful in a way that made grown men forget themselves.
Lili's mouth opened in awe as she held out her hand. A flake kissed her palm and slipped into her skin like a secret. Heat rushed up her arm, a mean, bright fever searching for a place to bloom, dragging an itch behind it.
The warm pebble beside her heart woke.
It pulsed once, then again—thumm, thumm—and a cool white shiver ran down her veins. The heat hit her secret core of light within her and died. Looking closely Lili noticed the flakes were full of something tiny and winged that tried and tried to get within her, but they couldn't pierce and instead burned away without smoke as they touched her. Inside her, the wrongness unraveled before it could root at all, but around her, the snowstorm turned to work.
Papa scratched the back of his neck once, then twice, then with a groan that came from somewhere deeper than skin. The patch there had swelled into a green blister between heartbeats. He raked his nails across it. The pustule burst with a wet pop and sprayed his collar in shining threads.
"Papa—stop!" Lili squeaked as she was also hit by it.
He didn't hear. He was too busy scratching again, harder, as if reaching for a thought he had dropped behind his eyes.
From the barricade up on the ramp, a warden sprinted in with a sack and hurled masks into the crush. People put up empty hands too slowly; most fell to the stones. One struck Papa's cheek and bounced away. No one laughed, no one seemed to even notice. Some took the masks but failed to seemingly figure out how to put them on. And everyone Lili heard the same sound blooming:
Wet pops. Wet pops. Wet pops.
Men, women and children all writhed, clawing at necks and wrists as blisters rose and broke, spraying the next patch that hadn't learned to bloom yet. Panic tipped into pain. Pain fell into confusion. Names slid out of mouths and wouldn't come back.
Mama's grip spasmed. She blinked at Father whose sleeve she held, but now she looked at him as if he were a just the ice-cream man at the park. "Who… who are you?" Mama asked, voice thin and formal, like a stranger practicing a language.
"I… I don't know," Father whispered back, eyes wide and wrong. "Who am I?"
Those same type of words and questions ran through the crowd like a current. Who am I—where is this—who are you? A noble in ruined velvet pushed to the front, chin high and he pointed at the soldiers there demandingly. "Let me pass you fools, I must board now! I'm, I'm important, I think... No, wait who are you?" The sentence died. He looked down at his hands as if they would answer him and then, as the soldiers looked around unsure on what to do the man just folded to his knees and fell limp to the ground.
It happened suddenly, like all the people were dominos being pushed over, they began to fall one by one in a wave. People fell against eachother and the soldiers knew not what to do but helplessly watch it all happen from the sides of the crowd.
Tens of thousands dropped as if the strings that kept them standing had been cut. Bodies thumped the stones. Limbs rattled. Lili felt Papa's big hands slide from her calves and the as he fell, her world fell backwards with him. She tried to hold on, but she bumped hard against someone's chest and tumbled off Papa's shoulders onto an old woman's chest whose mouth was foaming and eyes rolled backwards. Then slowly the woman's mouth began to turn into a smile, not a normal one but a terribly wide one. Then her eyes stared to cry.
All around people were spasming and shaking similarly. Some let out low groans, deep, animalistic and hungry. Then the masses began to move in ways bodies should not move as far as Lili knew.
She saw papa convulse. Veins stood out like green wires, muscles writhed under skin gone ashy. Bones shifted and pushed. Sharp points shouldered along his forearms from the inside. His fingers lengthened, nails blackening, curling to hooks.
"Papa… no, stop it," Lili cried out, small and hoarse.
She turned for her mother for help, but Mama was no better. Mama's elegant hands were fusing, knuckle to knuckle, into two hard blades. Her lips melted away and mouth peeled back and did not find their way forward again. The grin that replaced them had nothing to do with joy. Her blue eyes streamed, helpless, human.
All along the ramp, flesh learned new shapes: ribs walked; hip bones spun; spurs pushed up under scalps and foreheads; hands lost their cleverness and became clubs. Mouths smiled. Eyes wept.
At the barricade the wardens choked on what they were seeing, then remembered their training. Safeties clicked off and muzzles came up.
"Sir… what do we do? Do we shoot?" a young soldier called from behind the barricade above on the ramp. His voice shook inside the mask.
The captain hesitated.
A brave trooper standing up on the rail of the ramp, still trying to toss masks to the changing crowd suddenly yelled in panic. A hand that was not a hand hooked his ankle and yanked. He hit the railing once with a hollow clang, then disappeared into the sea of bodies that suddenly began rising and laughing in madness. They tore him open like children tearing bread. The mask vanished first. The scream cut off. All that remained was the sound of laughter that didn't belong to human throats.
For a heartbeat all the soldiers just watched, then the captain's side arm rose as did his voice. "Fire, fire at will."
And then the first bolt hit. The first not‑man jerked, but merely smiled and moved. Laughter swelled—high, low, gurgling, whistling—like a choir from a nightmare. Rifles chattered all around from behind the barricades at the ramp and at the streets where some had stood and now found themselves surrounded by mad changing people, hot red glowing lights stitched the boulevard, bodies jolted, fell, and rose again if their heads were whole. Those that stopped for good had nothing left above the jaw. The lesson taught itself in seconds.
But Lili didn't stop to look, as the old lady under her opened her eyes and looked up at her, Lili just ran.
Small, exact steps—over coats and bodies, around running none people that luckily seemed more interested in the soldiers than her. Lili ran past a warden on his back, white cape dirtied with blood as he tried to fight off three smiling things pulling at his legs. She kept the tower‑guns on her left, running right next to the buildings walls, the mushroom‑domed spaceport falling further and further behind her as she moved. She picked a path through the convulsing carpet of people, her sandals sliding on stone slick with green and red.
By now she could hardly see anything through the mass of bodies and the green storm of snow that was quickly thickening into a dense fog. A bolt hissed past and blew a spark from the curb beside her heel. Another clipped the ironwork ahead and filled the air with teeth of glass. She didn't look back for Mama or Papa. She couldn't, and as young as she was she knew that they weren't themselves anymore.
The fallen didn't stay fallen. They spasmed, tried their new limbs, and came up laughing, ribs walking under skin, mouths torn into smiles while their eyes cried like little children left outside. The ones who didn't rise immediately sang: not words she could say, but a soft promise that made her lips want to open. Come now, friend… the song is kind… why not join our song? I've heard it brings many smiles upon many faces. Lili bit her mouth shut until the skin hurt. The warm pebble by her heart pulsed once, cool and steady, and the syrup‑song slid off her like rain on wax. She would not be tempted to sing along, no matter how much the words tried to make her do so.
She skidded to a stop. Ahead, the changing mass had thickened into a wall—shoulder to shoulder, a hundred grinning faces turning at once toward her. She wanted to run back, back to the park where life was nice, maybe from there she could go to her home at the edge of town, her home where her bed and bunny pillow awaited for her, but now she didn't know anymore where to go, she was trapped. But then the Metro mouth to her back‑right vomited shouting men in green and heavily armed, already cutting down none people like gardeners cutting weeds. They were fifteen soldiers strong, all in white respirators and green plates bursting up the stairs, bayonets already fixed and red with blood and rifles crackling with shots.
"On me! Push forward and purge these vile mutants. Blow their heads or they keep coming!" the sergeant barked.
They crashed into the nearest cluster with cold iron and close fire. Rifles popped short and mean; bayonets worked the last inch their shots didn't; heads broke like jars; the laughing turned to gargles. The noise drew the crowd like meat draws dogs. As the mob swung toward the shout, Lili cut left, sprinting for the glass doors of a tall tower that housed the food market she vaguely remembered visiting once with Mama.
The doors were too heavy for a child in calm, but fear lent her a second set of hands. She stuck her finger's into the gap of the doors and pulled, and it amazingly opened just enough for a little body to slip through. She fell onto the tile, panting and feeling more exhausted than she had ever before felt, but her rest fell short.
With a thump, faces suddenly came and pressed to the glass immediately, leaving wet snail‑tracks. In fright Lili turned and saw a woman in ruined silk tilting her head as if to ask for help; the grin took her and her palms flattened on the pane like a child's. The pressure of her body closed the small gap Lili had left.
Then a rifle cracked outside, and the woman's head burst against the glass; red and gray slid down in slow, awful sheets. Lili screamed and ran deeper.
The market's bright aisles felt like a different world—clean light, clean lines, everything labeled. She veered left into produce, into the cold brightness, and clambered up the strawberry display with stubborn little grunts, dress snagging, knees slipping on plastic. The berries were cool and heavy. She burrowed until the mound covered her shoulders, lilies crushed to her heart, the warm pebble stroking her fear the way Mama did during thunderstorms.
Buried under the strawberries Lili felt a sense of safety, but even still the voices seeped through to her. The sounds of battle were loudest, but mixed in was a low roar of laughter, screams, coughs and wheezes, but worst of all was the singing. Through rotten vocal cords and pusfilled lungs they sang their simple toon over and over again. "Join our song, sing along, celebrate our sickness, through our bile we will smile. One and all bare witness to our unifying sickness."
Lili shook her head as she tried to get the words out of her mind. It was so simple, like a child's lullaby or something her mama sometimes sang to her before bed time. She pressed her face into fruit until the seeds bit her skin. The core within her beat: thumm, thumm. The want to sing once again slid away.
The song dwindled under an engine's growl—treads grinding over a sea of meat and bone. A long iron belly came on, crushing and not slowing.
The front doors blew inward. A tank barged through, half its hull already flensed where claws had worried at the plates. Its gun spoke once—heat slapped the aisles like a giant's hand. Laughing faces swarmed the hull and pecked at seams with bone‑knives for fingers. From inside the iron belly someone shouted a prayer. Five pins snapped in a row.
The world turned over.
Shelves fell like trees. Glass rained. Lili slid with the avalanche of strawberries and wedged under the bin lip, safe by luck and softness. The tank's carcass lay smoking in the threshold, half out, half in, burning like a stove. Green fog breathed around it and then through it, low and slow, pooling across the tiles like a sick tide.
Footsteps came—measured, together, like a drill‑team—but wrong in the knees. They were coming, spreading all around the building searching for something. Lili heard their coughs and wheezes coming closer and closer. She held her breath and dares not even blink.
She didn't want to become like them, she didn't want to sing their song. Then just as the footsteps came offly close, men's voices came from the center of the building, yelling up from the metro entrance there.
"Flamer forward! Fire at will, and Rask use that heavy gun of yours to move up the middle, cut them down!"
Lili didn't see them, but she heard them burst up from the Metro well at the center concourse—fifteen soldiers yelling through their respirator masks, bayonets fixed and cutting into flesh, moving like a single machine. Fire and heat blossomed in a long, hungry roar as the flamer walked towards the entry. Rifles snapped in hard, economical bursts. A big man's heavy footsteps could be heard as he shouldered a rotary cannon that purred angrily and stitched the doorway with red light, holding the breach like a gate. To Lili, they were just sounds somewhere in the build, more faceless men like toys. To the laughing ones, they were a wall.
The wall held, then bowed.
More came through the broken glass, shoulder to shoulder, laughing and weeping, tens, then hundreds, then a river. The flamer's breath ran short; the rotary's song climbed toward a scream then needed a reload, rifle packs flashed amber and emptied. "By pairs—fall back! Use your grenades!" The order carried clean. Two men moved, two covered, pins rang, hard cracks rolled, the front rank folded. A trooper stumbled—caught and vanished, his last act the clean click and toss of his own pins. The blast was small and final. The line shortened to the stairs.
"Man down!"
"Drag him, go go!"
"Back to the tunnel's! Blow the ceiling, seal it!"
They went by the book, pairs, cover, move, dropping two and dragging two, leaving three in neat prayers on the tile. Then the Metro swallowed them. Echoes of shots marched away into the tunnels until even the echoes were gone.
Silence climbed onto the market and sat there. Only the tank burned and the green weather breathed. The tower‑guns far away spoke now and then like slow thunder, and somewhere nearer a squad fought a fight that wasn't this one. The laughing ones drifted after those sounds, sticky feet peeling from tile, leaving snail‑tracks of green.
Time pulled long.
Evening crawled under the skylights and, when the power hiccuped, a deeper dark pooled in the aisles. Lili waited until the quiet hurt more than the noise had. She pushed her face through bruised fruit and looked out with one eye—at the wrecked doors, the door‑stop tank, the scattered boots, the three still men near the stairs, the soft snow of ash, the green breath rolling along the floor.
She did not climb out. She did not call. She held the lilies tight and kept as still as fruit.
She didn't yet dare to move. The market had gone dark enough to feel.
Lili tried to blink the blackness into shapes. Nothing moved—only the hiss of little fires and the slow tick of falling glass. She made her eyes try harder, squinting the way Mama said not to. Inside her chest the warm pebble heard and sent a little river of itself up her neck and behind her eyes. The dark thinned. Edges remembered they were edges. Aisles became faint halls and the broken doors were no longer just a mouth, but a mouth with teeth. Her breath eased.
She listened a long time for steps that weren't hers.
When none came, she wriggled out of the strawberries and slid to the floor, knees sticky and cold, dress smeared red and sweet. She was tired. Hungry. She ate three berries with small, careful bites, then stopped—the dark felt too big to sit still in. A torn‑handled bag lay near the tills. She picked it up and, moving shelf to shelf, chose only what a small girl could carry and a long night might need—berries, a crust from the cracked bakery case, two little waters. She tucked her lilies in as well, with two green bundles that looked friendly.
At the counter she looked around for anyone. No one answered. She bowed her head toward the empty lane and whispered, "I'm sorry. I don't have money. I'll bring it back when I find you. I promise."
Her lilies had drooped from all the running and holding. Lili set the bag down, cupped the stems, and stroked them. The warm pebble let a thread into her hands. Bruises smoothed; a petal or two found their way back; the flowers lifted their faces again. She picked the prettiest and set it on the counter for the absent shopkeeper, like a coin. "There," she said. "All good."
Bag hugged to her chest, she stepped into the main aisle. To the right: the broken doors, the slow green fog, the street full of still, wrong shapes. To the left: the Metro mouth, its emergency lamps making small islands of good yellow. The Metro meant home in her head—stairs and trains and Papa's coat and Mama's hand—so she went left.
She walked on her toes, past boots without feet in them, past blackened shapes that smelled like the stove when it was angry, past puddles of colors that weren't right. Three men lay near the stairs as if the roof had told them to sleep and taken their heads for a pillow. She did not look at faces. She held the bag and the lilies and went down between dead escalators that no longer hummed.
The platform was a cold cave of flickers and wires, not like she remembered it. One tunnel mouth had fallen in—concrete and rebar knitted across the throat. The other gaped on, rails running into black that felt crowded with distance. No trains came. No voice said mind the gap. The lamps clicked once and held.
Lili chose the open dark because there was no other choosing to do.
The drop from platform to rails was bigger than she remembered. She sat, turned sideways, and slid until her toes touched ballast. Her sandals slipped. She fell the last handspan and caught herself on both palms. Pain splashed bright. She grabbed for anything and found a rock.
The pebble in her chest leapt toward the hurt and ran down her arm like water downhill. The stone under her hand answered. Its grit softened; its gray learned to glow from the inside. A white breath woke in it and did not go out.
Lili lifted her hand. Where the ballast had been sat a crystal the size of an apple, bright and gentle, making the sleepers and the rail lines into things instead of shadows. "Thank you," she told it. She meant the stone and the warm pebble both. She didn't know what it was; she knew it was hers, and good.
She walked. Rails shone like snakes asleep. At the next junction a wall‑map took up half the world: colored lines knotted into a city under the city. A fat main trunk wore letters big enough for even her to sound out if she took time: ACHIOS PRIME EXPRESS LINE. The words felt like a door. Farther on, voices murmured—low, careful, the kind of voices that saved breath because breath mattered.
She held the crystal close and edged around the turn.
Rifles came up like a gate—seven muzzles, seven beams of lamp‑glow cutting her little sun into seven smaller ones. She froze. The crystal lit her face on their mask glass.
"What do we do, Sarge?" someone asked, the voice small inside the mask.
A taller man stepped forward one pace. Broad in the shoulders. Calm in the way winter water is calm. He reached into a pouch, drew out a ration bar, and tossed it underhand without hurry. It arced neat and true. Lili's bag jumped in her hands and caught it as if it had planned to.
Something loosened in the men—barrels easing by a breath.
"What's your name, little one?" the tall man asked, not unkind.
"L‑Lili," she said. It came out small but whole.
"Lili," he tried it on, as if to see if it fit his mouth. "I'm Sergeant Halvern. This is Venn"—a nod to the man with the big radio on his back—"Rask on the rotary, Orrin our medic, and rifles Karst, Juno, Fenn. We're seven." He studied her one heartbeat more, then said into the air, "She's fine." Somehow the others believed it when he said it. "Not infected."
He knelt. A long knife slid from his sheath and lay on the concrete between them, handle toward her. From his pack he pulled a spare shirt, a mask‑hood, and boots that were boats for a child, but still better than bare feet. "If you come with us, you carry something that can bite back. That's yours, if you can lift it."
Lili picked up the knife with both hands. It was heavy in a good way. The shirt swallowed her to the knees; the hood's straps tickled her cheeks; the mask glass made the world a small, clear circle. The boots were too big, but her toes found their way to the ends and stayed.
Venn had tape. Halvern pointed to the light in her hand. "We want that where you can use it." Two quick bands made a lamp on her hood; the crystal's spill turned the map into an easy thing to read. Orrin tugged her mask seal until it bit home, then patted it once, like you pat a faithful dog. The rest watched, half wary, half… something else Lili didn't have a word for. Awe, maybe. Or luck.
"No one breaks seal," Halvern said, voice level. "If the singing starts, think about home and keep walking. Venn on point. Rifles front. Rask mid. Orrin center. I'm rear with the girl. We move quiet. We move now."
He turned to the painted map and tapped the thickest line with a gloved knuckle. "Express Spine east to Achios Prime. If the main throat's blocked, we take service trunks and come up under the inner ring." The names meant little to Lili, but the way he said them made them feel like safe roads.
She took one small step forward and then looked back, just once—toward where the market was, where Mama's hand should have been, where Papa's coat should have been.
A hand like a shovel settled on her shoulder. "Eyes front, little one," Halvern said, not unkindly. There was a stone in his voice, and a hurt behind it that didn't leak. "Whatever you left behind is gone now. All we can do is look forward, like I have always done, for no matter how hard you try the ones behind are not coming back again."
He took her shopping bag, slid it into his ruck with a tidy fold, and nodded down‑tunnel.
The men moved as one. Shadows stretched long on the tiles. Lili stepped into their middle—knife in one hand, a little sun taped to her brow, lilies tucked safe—and the tunnel breathed cold air that smelled of iron and old dust. Behind them, the city laughed where it shouldn't. Ahead, the Achios Prime Express Line ran like a promise through the dark.
She did not look back again.