In the perpetual dusk of New Hope—a world so far from the heart of the Empire that only the most desperate or the most loyal would bother with its name—Nyla lay flat on her back, limbs splayed, as she watched the night sky unravel above her. The dark was already thick with summer gnats and the sweet rot of wildflowers, but the stars still came through, fighting for their footing in the void. They twinkled, yes, but not the way the holos in school told you stars should twinkle; these ones flickered in odd, arrhythmic pulses, sometimes vanishing, sometimes flaring, and if you'd lived here long enough you knew it wasn't the atmosphere. It was the endless procession of satellites and station beacons, the unblinking vigilance of Empire ships patrolling the orbital lanes.
Nyla's best friend, Peter, was sprawled next to her. Peter always sat so close their arms or hips would touch, and Nyla never minded, though she pretended otherwise when their mutual friends were around. They'd been like this since their earliest memory, two scabby-kneed kids in matching Legion hand-me-downs, hiding in the dry, grassy berms and sharing whatever snacks they'd managed to lift from their mothers' kitchens.
Tonight, Peter's finger stabbed at the sky in triumph. "Look, there. Above the old comm tower. You see it?"
"It's moving too fast," Nyla said, squinting, then regretting it as sweat dripped into her left eye and stung like hell. "That's not a freighter. Too smooth. And too bright."
Peter's hand made a gun-shape as he tracked the speck's arc. "That's a patrol ship, for sure. Maybe even a destroyer. They're doing drills before curfew again."
Nyla snorted, a bitter sound she'd learned from her father. "Like anyone would actually attack us. This planet is dirt and bureaucracy. Let the Empire keep their toys in the sky. We'll keep the dirt."
Peter didn't answer at first. He was too busy following the blinking light, his mouth slightly open in awe, like a baby catching snowflakes. Nyla watched him, a little wistful, a little jealous.
He shifted onto his side and propped himself up on an elbow, which meant Nyla had to roll to face him or risk getting a neck cramp. There was a little silence while Peter worked up the nerve to say something that mattered.
"Are you going to leave?" Peter asked.
Nyla blinked. "What?"
"After school's done. Are you going to leave New Hope? Like, take the scholarship? Go to the Academy?" His voice cracked, and he winced. "I mean, you could. You're smart. You'd get out of here."
Nyla laughed, but it came out harsh. "And do what? Homework, but in a different solar system? It's all the same grind. At least here I know which assholes run the place."
"I'm going to leave," Peter said, ignoring her sarcasm as always. "I'm going to join the infantry. Get posted off-world. Hell, maybe I'll even make it to the Core before I die."
"Don't say that," Nyla said, softer than she intended, but Peter just grinned.
"I'm not scared," he said, and for a second, Nyla believed him.
They both looked up at the sky again. The blinking ship was gone, replaced by a denser lattice of motionless points—Empire satellites, probably, but more likely the same recycled constellations their ancestors programmed in when they landed on New Hope generations ago. Nyla wondered if, from the surface of any other world, the sky would look this crowded, this artificial.
She was about to say something—maybe even something real—when she tasted it: the oily tang, acid-burned, of metal and smoke. Her tongue went numb at the edges, and her vision tunneled so the stars began to streak like watercolors left out in the rain. Peter's voice faded into a howl, just as the world inverted itself.
—with a jolt, Nyla was somewhere else. A different kind of night, thick with diesel haze and the smothered roar of combustion. The air was wet here, humid with sweat and the collective terror of everyone packed inside the hull. Someone was screaming, a sound she registered only after two seconds of dead silence. Then the voice resolved into words.
"Private Kael, wake the fuck up!" Sergeant Knox's voice was a bludgeon, not a whip—short, thick, meant to cave in whatever part of your skull was being sentimental.
Nyla flinched so fast she banged her helmet against the interior of the turret. "Sorry, Sergeant!" she yelped, and the apology felt like a mouthful of broken teeth.
The tank's official designation was IFV-74D, but no one in the platoon called it that. Knox had christened her LADYBIRD in fat marker on the hull and the name stuck, even when it was so goddamned crowded in the crew compartment that Nyla privately thought a ladybug would suffocate within seconds. The inside was a furnace. Layers of borrowed body odor, engine off-gas, and the gun oil they used to clean the autocannon coated every exposed surface. It wasn't just hot. It was damp. The kind of heat that pooled under your tongue and made your gums itch.
The inside of the Ladybird was a coffin with an engine. Nyla had seen holos of tanks from the Core-world museums, all smooth lines and plush seats and bright candy-colored dials, but the real thing was a patchwork of greasy levers, hot metal, and rattling plastic. The 'crew compartment' was a joke: three people could fit, but only if they kept their arms to themselves and didn't mind the perpetual smell of burnt lubricant and other, less pleasant emissions. Every surface sweated condensation. If you were lucky, you didn't get your eyebrows singed off by a misfiring fuse when the main gun cycled.
Sergeant Knox—her commanding officer, spiritual tormentor, and current owner of her ass—sat perched in the commander's saddle beneath a jury-rigged periscope. He kept one hand glued to a battered console, the other scribbling notes with a stylus that had been chewed to half its length. He wore his helmet like a biker's skullcap, refusing to cinch the chin strap, and his face had the permanent squint of someone who'd spent the last decade staring into the sun.
Specialist Hanley, the Ladybird's driver and official morale officer, was wedged into a hole barely big enough for his knees, a neurofibre wrap jacked directly into his occipital lobe. Hanley had once been a child prodigy—Nyla knew this because he told her every chance he got—but the Empire didn't care about test scores once you flunked out of officer school. He ran the Ladybird like a delinquent joyrider, which explained the obscene graffiti scratched into the side of his helmet, the collection of plastic bottle caps hoarded in his footwell, and the way he flicked the throttle with the reckless delight of a kid breaking windows.
Nyla herself had the gunner's seat, which was not so much a seat as a dented slab welded to the hull. Her helmet's visor fed her a 270-degree view stitched together from a half-dozen exterior cameras, but the chem-fog in the air meant everything beyond a kilometer was a blurry soup. She wore gloves two sizes too big—standard issue didn't make anything for women of her build—and her fingers flexed clumsily around the tank's ancient, grease-caked gunsticks.
The Ladybird and her sisters trundled down a cracked blacktop road, trailing a convoy of APCs so battered their armor looked like the skin of a dead whale. Even with the hatches sealed, Nyla could hear the whine of the engines ahead and the distant, arrhythmic thumping of artillery fire echoing off the horizon. The wind outside carried a taste of iron and burnt carbon, and every so often a dust devil would slam against the tank's flank, rattling the hull like the laugh of an angry god.
Hesperides IV was the kind of posting they threatened you with in basic, and Nyla had barely been out of her training blues when her deployment notice landed in her inbox. The planet was, officially, a "critical manufacturing hub" for the Imperial war engine, but nobody mentioned the surface temperature or the storms that clocked in at three hundred kilometers per hour. Growing up on New Hope, she thought she knew wind and dust. Hesperides didn't have weather, it had vendettas.
In the three months since arriving she'd seen exactly two things on this planet: sand, and things that wanted to kill her.
"Flyers coming in fast!" Knox's voice was already half-buried beneath the howling din—pressure alarms, the wet grind of treads over broken stone, and the constant, electrical whine from somewhere in the turret ring that nobody could ever fix. Nyla barely registered the words before her hands, stiff with adrenaline and grime, tightened around the gunsticks.
The viewport in front of her exploded with movement. On the display, the sky above the convoy had gone from a muddy rust to sickly gray, a sudden blooming that at first looked like a dust storm, but Nyla had been here long enough to know better. Interlaced through the static and heat shimmer, the thermal overlays painted arcs of white heat—hundreds of them, arrowing through the haze with impossible precision. The HUD recognized the threat, tagging the formation in angry red. "KHADAK FLYER SWARM," the display declared helpfully, as if she could fucking miss it.
Nyla hyperventilated once, twice, then forced her lungs down to regulation. The first time she'd heard "flyers incoming," she'd damn near pissed herself. Now? It was almost routine, if "routine" meant a fifty-fifty shot at surviving the next five minutes.
She jammed the targeting trigger with her thumb and the Ladybird's main gun whined, servos squealing as the turret slewed to catch the fastest of the approaching blips. She squeezed the firing stud. The tank kicked, violently enough to rattle her teeth, and the autocannon barked three high-ex rounds into the blackening sky.
WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP.
The shots went wide. Nyla could see the red streaks of tracer lancing past the swarm, detonating against nothing. Shit. She overcorrected, jerked the gunsticks, and fired again; this time, the rounds caught the edge of the formation, and one of the flyers spun out, trailing a comet of burning particles as it spiraled toward the ground.
"Lead them, Kael!" Knox bellowed, not bothering to look up from his own targeting screens. "You're shooting behind!"
"I know," Nyla hissed, but she didn't know. Her hands were shaking too much. She gritted her teeth, forced her brain to sync with the HUD overlays. The targeting computer spat out recommended vectors, but the flyers never moved the way they were supposed to. Too many wings, too much speed, too much hate.
"Jesus, give me a second to stabilize!" Hanley's voice buzzed in her helmet, punctuated by the clatter of empty ration cans as he took a corner too hard. He was always piloting like the goddamn planet was on fire, which, now that she thought about it, was probably fair.
The Empire was supposed to be invincible—a galactic artery pumping order and concrete through every world it touched. They'd conquered, colonized, and subjugated so efficiently that Nyla grew up assuming history was just a list of other people's failures. Then the wars started, plural, and suddenly everyone in the Empire remembered what it felt like to bleed. On Hesperides, the other side wasn't rebels or aliens with laser rifles, but something older and meaner: the Khadak, a hive-mind species that viewed every soft thing with a pulse as caloric intake. They didn't negotiate. They didn't even hate you. They just arrived, in swarms that blacked out the sky, and ate until the landscape was bones and quiet.
The Khadak flyers had a reputation, even in boot camp. Everyone called them "razorbeaks," as if that was cute, but the holos showed what they did to armor, and nobody laughed. They'd been engineered—by nature, or maybe a vengeful god—for only two things: flight and murder. Wings so thin they buzzed like industrial saws, a carapace that shrugged off shrapnel, and a hooked beak that could carve through steel or spinal columns with equal indifference. There were stories about crews fighting off a full swarm, fending them off until the last shell was spent, only to be ripped open and devoured the moment the tank stalled. Once, back on base, a bored comms tech had played an old propaganda vid on the mess hall's big display: slow-motion footage of a razorbeak punching through the hatch of a heavy tank, dragging out the commander in a spray of blood and fire-retardant foam. The voiceover had called it "nature's perfect weapon." Nyla hadn't eaten for two days after that.
"Eyes on the swarm, Kael!" Knox again. "Priority threat!"
The Ladybird's hull vibrated with every report of the main cannon, the recoil making her ribs and teeth buzz. Sweat poured down Nyla's back; the suit did nothing for cooling, and the desperate edge in Knox's voice told her she was about to get a helmet-to-helmet chewing out if she didn't start hitting targets. She blinked the sweat from her eyes and tried to focus.
The swarm was almost beautiful, in a way—each flyer moving independent but in lockstep, a fractal nightmare of sinew and iridescent carapace. They moved in geometric patterns, at angles no living thing should have been able to coordinate at these speeds. Nyla bracketed the formation and fired off three more rounds. This time, two of the flyers at the edge vaporized, blown to mist by the high-explosive shells. The rest didn't even break rank.
The tank's comms filled with chatter now—reports from the other IFVs in the column, every gunner screaming about the size of the swarm, the speed, the numbers, the usual panic that always seemed to escalate right before people started dying. Nyla recognized a couple of the voices, even through the static. Some of them she'd trained with, shared bunks and cigarettes and chemicals with. She wondered, briefly, how many would make it.
One of the flyers peeled off from the main cloud, diving low and fast, its trajectory a perfect intercept course for the lead APC. Nyla saw it coming, but the gun was still cycled from her last burst. There was a moment, half a breath, where she could do nothing but watch.
The flyer hit the APC like a meteor, ripping a molten gash in the side armor. The comms erupted with screams—real, human, not the synthesized barks of the officers. Nyla's HUD updated: "APC-THREE: DAMAGED. CASUALTIES PROBABLE." In another window, a thermal camera caught the flyer already tearing at the exposed flesh inside, moving like a mantis on amphetamines.
"Shit," she said, voice gone thin and high.
"Keep firing, Nyla! Don't let them cluster!" Hanley's hands worked the controls like he was playing some ancient, frantic arcade game, and the Ladybird bucked sideways, nearly throwing Nyla from her seat. The sudden shift lined up her reticle with the densest part of the swarm. She depressed both triggers and emptied the magazine.
The world outside the viewport went orange-white with the stuttered flashes of detonation. Bodies—alien, winged, nightmarish—fell from the sky in arcs, some of them still alive, claws and teeth gnashing even as they tumbled. The rest of the flyers scattered, reforming into smaller packs, and the comms reported that the rear of the convoy was now under attack as well.
Knox finally looked up from his console, one hand on the safety bar above his head. "Good shooting," he said, the compliment so grudging it barely registered as praise. "But don't waste shells. These fuckers are smart. They'll bait you into burning through the magazines before the real attack."
Nyla nodded, even though she knew he couldn't see her. She focused on the next cluster, this time waiting until the flyers broke formation in their attempts to dodge the prior salvo. She initiated a short, controlled burst, two quick shots, and took down another pair of targets. The rest evaded, diving low between the battered hulls of the APCs.
If you'd asked Nyla six months ago what she thought "infantry support" meant, the answer would have involved parades, or maybe crowd control. After just three days on Hesperides IV, she knew the real meaning: the job was to kill everything that moved, and if you couldn't, to die making sure someone else had a running start.
"Holy fucking shit," Specialist Henley choked out, voice cracking. "We're driving straight into that meat grinder?!"
Knox's laugh cut through the comms like broken glass. Nyla wrenched the turret hard, servos shrieking in protest, and the viewport filled with nightmare: the colony's perimeter ablaze, defense towers toppling, and swarms so thick they looked like storm clouds pulsing with lightning. Human figures, ant-sized at this distance, ran between collapsing structures.
"Let's fucking go, Ladybird!" Knox roared as he slammed the throttle forward. The tank howled beneath them, treads tearing chunks from the earth, hurtling toward hell at eighty kilometers per hour.