The Khadak had been beaten back from the colony, at least for now, but as far as Nyla was concerned, the bastards deserved credit for effort. This was the fourth time they'd tried to storm the outpost in as many weeks, and the Ladybird—Nyla's tank, her home, her coffin with tracks—wasn't looking much better for it. The hull was pockmarked with holes and split seams where the acid had licked away at the armor, exposed wiring like glistening pink guts. Most of the damage came from the crawling types, the ones with too many legs and bony mandibles that could shear through a man's femur like cardboard. But the Khadak weren't married to any particular shape or form. If it was ugly, violent, or reeked of ammonia and rotting fruit, they'd find a way to slap it together and send it at you.
The newest batch—the ones the grunts called "screamers"—were an evolutionary gift from whatever sick intelligence ran the hive. They were tall, spindly, with weirdly human faces stretched over blank bug eyes, and they spat a caustic sludge that melted right through polymer and flesh. Nyla had seen a group of them take down an entire platoon of shock troopers in five minutes flat, leaving nothing but steaming, half-dissolved skeletons. She'd lost sleep for days after that, waking up with the scent of burning bone crammed in her nostrils.
She tried not to think about that now. The worst part, honestly—the absolute worst—was the smell. Not just a single, describable stench, but a living, moving, aural assault that clung to your hair, your skin, your tongue. Like burnt plastic and rancid cheese and something sweet, something floral, that made your nose sting and your teeth ache. The Khadak didn't just want to kill you; they wanted you to remember them in every sense possible.
The fighting had ended not long ago. The Ladybird was parked at an awkward angle just past the colony's perimeter, one track sunk half a meter into the mud. The engine still ticked and hissed as it cooled. Nyla sat on the sloped front glacis of the tank, boots digging slow furrows in the grimy ground. Her hands were shaking—really shaking, hard enough she had to brace them between her knees and squeeze so tight her knuckles went white. She told herself it was the adrenaline, but she knew better. It took more than nerves to get a seasoned tanker rattled. It took the kind of terror that was bigger than you, the kind you could taste.
It had taken two hours to push the Khadak assault back from the colony walls, and the cost was written all around her. Human bodies, bug bodies, parts of both, knit together in a tapestry of carnage that would haunt her dreams for weeks. The command hub—really just a ring of prefab towers and comms dishes—stood at the center of it all, battered but intact. Every window glared out over the killing fields with a kind of stoic indifference, like the structures themselves had already adapted to the ugliness of war.
A few techs in blue oversuits picked their way across the open ground, checking the dead for survivors, shooting the wounded bugs in the head for good measure. Nyla didn't look at them. She couldn't. Instead, she stared at her hands, willing them to stop trembling.
She tried to breathe in through her nose, out through her mouth, like the medics taught. She tasted blood and copper and the faint, syrupy trace of burned Khadak tissue. She wanted to be sick, but her stomach was long past empty.
The rest of her crew was nearby. Henley, her driver, was hunched over the idling engine, muttering curses as he tried to coax a few more hours out of the battered machine. Knox, the commander, was nowhere to be seen, which meant he was probably raiding the supply depot for anything flammable or fermentable.
The sun—or whatever the local star was called—hung low over the horizon, a dirty orange blot in a sky smeared with chemical haze. Shadows stretched long and distorted over the battlefield. Someone, somewhere down the line, was singing a song about home, but the wind twisted the words into nonsense.
Nyla let her eyes wander. She caught sight of a body—human—lying face up in the mud just a few meters from the tank. He was young, probably younger than her. His uniform was the pale gray of a raw recruit, still stiff at the seams. His face was slack, expression stuck somewhere between surprise and terror, and his eyes—glass-clear, unblinking—were fixed on Nyla like an accusation.
His lower torso was missing, just gone, as if the Khadak had taken a bite out of the world and left him as a reminder. The blood had long since stopped pumping, but the mud around him was still wet and dark. Nyla felt the bile rising again, and this time she didn't bother to fight it. She spat a mouthful of sour spit onto the tank's hull and closed her eyes, just for a second, pretending she was somewhere else.
She remembered New Hope. Her home. The sky there was always blue, no haze, no stink. She thought about the old library dome, the way the glass caught the sunlight in the afternoons, and the smell of ancient paper and fresh rain.
She wondered if anyone would remember her when she was gone.
The clang of metal on metal startled her back to reality. Knox had materialized above her, popping the commander's hatch and climbing out onto the battered skin of the Ladybird like a drunk spider. He was grinning, or at least showing teeth, and he had a bottle clutched in one fist.
"You alive, girl?" he bellowed, voice echoing across the tank's battered hull.
Nyla flinched at the noise, then managed a weak half-smile. "Barely," she said. Her helmet sat heavy in her lap, a dead weight. She ran a hand through her short black hair, greasy with sweat and dust.
Knox sat down next to her, legs dangling over the edge. He looked at the battlefield the way you'd look at a painting you didn't understand—curious, faintly disgusted. "Hell of a day," he said.
Nyla nodded. "They barely let us sleep this time," she said, voice thin. "It's like they knew."
"They always know," Knox said. "That's the problem with fighting a goddamn hivemind. You win, it learns."
For a moment, they just sat in silence, listening to the distant thumps of artillery and the soft, wet crunch of the techs doing cleanup. The bottle in Knox's hand caught the sunlight, the liquid inside a deep, radioactive amber.
He offered it to her. She hesitated, then took it. The glass was cold and slippery. She sniffed the contents, recoiled at the chemical burn that clawed up her sinuses. It smelled like paint thinner and regret.
She forced herself to take a sip. It burned all the way down, a living thing clawing at her throat and belly. She coughed, wiped her mouth with the back of her glove, and passed the bottle back.
Knox grinned again. "Good girl. That's how you keep the shakes off."
"Doesn't feel like it," Nyla muttered. She glanced at him sideways. "How old are you?"
"Old enough to know better," he said. But he was probably twenty-three, twenty-four at the most. His face was a roadmap of old scars and new ones, one eyebrow permanently singed away.
Henley appeared below, slapping the side of the tank. "We're good to roll, boss," he called up. "But we're leaking coolant and morale."
Knox spat a wad of something dark over the side. "Didn't ask for a diagnostic, Henley."
He jerked his head in the direction of the bottle. "Pass it down."
Nyla obliged, feeling the throb in her head settle to a dull ache. She looked at her hands. They'd stopped shaking. She wasn't sure if that was the booze or just the exhaustion.
Knox leaned back, holding the bottle up to the gray sky. "To the Empire," he said, voice mocking but not unkind.
Nyla smirked. "To the Empire," she echoed, and meant it just as little.
The bottle made its way down to Henley, who took a swig and coughed so hard Nyla thought he'd puke on the treads. He wiped his mouth, grinned up at them, and gave a thumbs up.
Knox turned to Nyla, serious for a moment. "You did good today," he said.
She shrugged. "Didn't die. That's all."
"That's more than most," said Knox. "You keep thinking about that, it'll eat you alive."
Nyla looked at the body in the mud, then back at the tank, and then up at the ugly, bruised sky. "Doesn't seem like there's much left to eat."
Knox laughed, a low, tired sound. "That's the spirit."
Knox gave it another minute, then jerked a thumb at her, all business again. "See how bad the damage is. I want a full diagnostic, not the Henley version."
Nyla wiped her palms on her grime-slicked trousers and slid down from the hull, boots splashing into the clotted mud below. She popped the side hatch and ducked into the Ladybird's belly. The interior air was thick with cordite, ozone, and the unique, nose-curling funk of old coolant and nervous sweat. She loved it in here, in a way she could never explain to anyone who hadn't ridden a tank. The outside world was loud and wet and tried to kill you with every breath; in here, the world was filtered through steel and polymer and distant, muted rumble.
She collapsed into the gunner's seat, wincing as a sharp plastic edge caught her hip. The diagnostic console flickered as it booted, stuttering through the startup sequence like an old man's heart. She mashed the reset button and watched the green-and-orange blocks assemble themselves into a crude readout.
TANK MODEL: ID-74D
HULL INTEGRITY: CRITICAL
ARMOR PLATING: CRITICAL
MAIN WEAPON: 4× 40mm Auto-cannons
ENGINE: 80 KMH MAX
COMMANDER: SGT. Samuel Knox
Ladybird's hull integrity and armor plating were hanging together out of pure spite. Nyla's scan of the latest diagnostics confirmed what her bones already told her: the tank had maybe two more good fights in it, and after that, they'd be riding a steel coffin. The hull was cratered and pitted, the right side sponson half-shorn away, and the main battery's linkage threatened to seize if she so much as looked at it wrong.
She scrolled through the error codes with numb efficiency, watching the system log pile up with warnings, failures, and outright death sentences. Each line of red text was a little more assurance that the colony's repair queue would laugh them to the back of the line. The Ladybird was an infantry support and anti-air platform, which meant the MBTs—the Emperor's pride and joy—would get all the fresh parts, the priority techs, the actual attention. Nyla and her crew would be lucky if someone remembered to top off their coolant before the next push.
Knox dropped back into the turret bustle, head and shoulders filling the hatch ring. He looked like he'd been through a wind tunnel of broken glass, and his mustache—he insisted on calling it that, though it was really just a greasy upper-lip smudge—twitched at the edges as he squinted at the diagnostic screen.
"How bad is it?" he asked, voice quieter inside the steel shell. He'd seen the Ladybird from the outside; he didn't need the numbers to know she was living on borrowed time.
Nyla didn't bother sugarcoating. "We're venting half our hydros. The loading arm for the main guns is buckled, and if we get hit again on the starboard track, we're not moving. At all."
Knox grunted. "So, not great."
"Less than great, Sergeant," she said. "We need a full shop rotation. At least twelve hours. More if we want it to not explode."
He looked at the readout with an air of resigned fatalism, then at her, and nodded like that was exactly what he expected. "Copy that," he said. "Set us for the motor pool as soon as the line's clear. I'll see who I can grease to get us patched up before the next bug wave."
He slid past her, smacking the inside of the hatch for luck. "You want to run the gun check while we're rolling?" he muttered, already halfway to the commander's seat.
"Sure," she lied, though she wanted nothing more than to turn the Ladybird around and drive it into the nearest river. She checked the breech on the autocannons, listening to the click and whine of servos struggling against bent machinery. Every sound was a potential death knell.
Henley was waiting at his driver's station, hands planted on the controls, feet bouncing with barely contained energy. He looked back at Nyla through the shatterproof glass of his blast visor. "We clear?" he called.
"Yeah. Let's limp it," she replied, strapping herself in.
The Ladybird shuddered to life, treads churning in the sticky mud, the engine's electrical whine loud enough to rattle her teeth. They crawled across the pockmarked ground, heading for the battered skeleton of the colony.
The landscape was even worse in daylight. Rows of hab modules lay flattened, their contents scattered like the guts of some enormous, plastic-and-steel insect. Burned-out shells of vehicles marked the retreat of the last defensive line. Nyla watched a pair of medics dragging what was left of a comm tech out of a ditch, his legs trailing behind him with the lazy, boneless grace of a child's toy. She made herself look away.
What struck her most wasn't the chaos, but the silence—but not the silence of peace, the pause in violence. It was a dead, heavy thing, the vacuum left behind by the Khadak after they'd moved to the next target. It made every sound—the groan of Ladybird's wounded hull, the distant fizz of electrical fires, the wet slap of boots in mud—seem impossibly loud.
At the perimeter fence, she caught sight of a cluster of refugees being herded by a pair of overwatch drones. They moved in a single, exhausted mass, faces blank, eyes unfocused.
She wondered how many of the faces she saw now would be gone by sundown, or if anyone would bother to remember them.
The motor pool was a hive of frantic, organized chaos. MBTs rolled in with their turrets askew, hulls charred black or shiny with fresh welds. IFVs and troop haulers clustered in the loading bays, most of them patched together with zip ties, resin, and sheer willpower. Maintenance crews in yellow hazard vests swarmed over the vehicles, shouting at each other over the growl of power tools and the hiss of coolant lines.
Henley guided the Ladybird into a rearmost slot, conscious of how tiny and battered it looked next to the newer tanks. Knox, true to his word, popped the hatch before the engine had even stuttered off, and vaulted out with the kind of sudden energy that signaled intent to cause trouble. "Nobody touch my ride," he barked at a passing tech, who didn't bother acknowledging him.
He turned to Nyla and Henley. "Stay put. And Henley, don't eat anything that isn't labeled for human consumption."
Henley gave a mock salute and immediately began rummaging through the ration bin. Nyla slouched in her seat, closing her eyes for a moment, letting the noises of the repair depot wash over her.
They sat like that for a while, the adrenaline leeched out of the moment, exhaustion making her limbs feel stitched together with soft lead. She opened her eyes and looked at the diagnostic again—not because she expected it to be different, but because it was better than thinking about what came next.
Henley broke the silence, voice lighter than she expected. "How old are you, again?" He was reclined so far in the driver's seat that his helmet almost touched the rear bulkhead, fingers dancing over the remains of his ration bar. It looked more like compressed cardboard than nutrition, but he nibbled it with the indifference of someone who'd long since stopped caring what things tasted like.
"Eighteen," Nyla replied, letting out a gust of air from her lungs. She regretted it instantly—the air inside the tank stank of ozone, burnt insulation, and the peculiar cheese-funk of old coolant. It was a smell that could peel the paint off her memories, but she'd gotten used to it. Or maybe she'd just stopped noticing.
"That lottery is a bitch, isn't it?" Henley laughed, his voice echoing off the inner hull like it had nowhere else to go. He broke off a corner of his bar and flipped it toward her; it ricocheted off the targeting periscope and landed in her lap. Nyla took it, mostly out of habit, then remembered she hadn't eaten in nearly twelve hours. She bit off a small chunk and made a face. The taste was awful, a mixture of wet sand and metal shavings, but she chewed it dutifully.
"What about you?" she asked, too tired to mask the curiosity in her voice. Now that she thought about it, she didn't really know how old Henley was. He could have been anywhere from sixteen to thirty, depending on the light and how much sleep he'd had.
"I am twenty or so," he replied, mulling it over like he was still deciding. "Maybe twenty-one. Not sure anymore." He shrugged, eyes not leaving the dashboard readout as he watched coolant levels drop in real-time.
"Or so?" Nyla repeated, pulling her knees up to her chest. "You don't know?" She tried to turn it into a joke, but it came out more like a dare.
Henley shrugged again, not looking at her. "Does it matter anymore?" He smiled, but it was a thin, brittle thing.
Nyla stared at him for a moment, then looked away. She thought about her own father, who'd lied about his age to get into the old surface navy back on New Hope. He'd spent the better part of his life telling stories about the war, only to have his daughter drafted before she could finish her first semester at the academy. Now she was here, eating ration bars in a mobile coffin with a guy who might not even remember his own birthday.
"You ever think about home?" she asked, voice low.
Henley hesitated, then nodded. "Sometimes. Mostly when I get shot at. Or when it's quiet." He twisted a bolt on the steering yoke, more out of habit than necessity. "What about you?"
Nyla almost said no. But the truth was, she thought about it all the time. Her mother's greenhouse, the trickle of morning sunlight through condensation-streaked glass. The way her kid brother used to sneak into her room and swap out her textbooks for prank gifts. The way nothing ever smelled like cordite or sounded like dying.
"Yeah," she said instead. "I miss the rain."
Henley grinned. "I miss food that doesn't come shrink-wrapped." He held up his bar for emphasis, then crumbled the remains into his mouth. "We had a cook at my school—real food. Even the slop was better than this."
The two of them let the silence settle in again, suffocating but not unwelcome. Outside, the clamor of the motor pool seeped in through the hull: the staccato slap of hammers, the whine of grinders, the distant yammer of techs shouting over each other. For a moment, it almost felt safe. Like nothing could touch them in here.
Suddenly, a loud knock on the hatch made them both jump. Knox opened it and stuck his face in, mustache twitching like a nervous caterpillar. "Go get some chow in the pool," he ordered, voice flat. "I got one of the techs to do some work. Might even attach some new plating in."
Nyla wanted to muster a comeback, maybe a sarcastic salute or a dig about Knox's mysterious ability to always talk his way to the front of the line. But the thought of hot food, or at least lukewarm sludge that passed for it, short-circuited her. She was halfway out the hatch before Henley even unbuckled.