[Location: Sector 7 - Evacuation Hub] [Time: Lives #41 through #311]
Life #41. The heavy steel doors of the Evacuation Hub hissed open. The Executioner-Class dreadnought waited in the dark. Its twin plasma-cannons hummed, glowing a violent, radioactive blue. "Get back!" I screamed, shoving Silas. The cannons fired. The blast turned the air into plasma. I didn't even feel the heat before my nervous system was incinerated. [BIOLOGICAL CESSATION DETECTED.]
Life #63. "Drop in three! Two! One!" I ran the fifteen-minute gauntlet perfectly. We reached the Hub. The doors opened. This time, I didn't push Silas. I threw a pair of frag grenades into the room before the doors fully parted. The shrapnel bounced harmlessly off the dreadnought's deflector shields. It stepped forward, its massive hydraulic foot crushing the rookie into the floorboards before turning its cannons on me. [BIOLOGICAL CESSATION DETECTED.]
Life #112. "Two! One!" I reached the Hub. My nose was bleeding continuously now. The Ouroboros Drive was burning a permanent scar into my shoulder, the metal glowing white-hot beneath my uniform. I told Silas to set up a tripwire with C-4 outside the doors. The doors opened. The dreadnought didn't walk out. It analyzed the trap, calculated the blast radius, and simply fired its plasma cannons through the walls, collapsing the entire ceiling of the corridor on top of us. [BIOLOGICAL CESSATION DETECTED.]
Life #187. My mind was fraying. The memories were bleeding together. Every time I looked at Silas, I didn't see the tough, hardened veteran; I saw her burning, crushed, decapitated, and vaporized in a hundred different ways. I reached the Hub. I was weeping openly. "Please," I begged the machine as the doors opened. "Just let them go." It didn't speak. It just raised a mechanical arm, grabbed me by the throat, and squeezed until my cervical spine snapped. [BIOLOGICAL CESSATION DETECTED.]
Life #250. I stopped crying. I stopped feeling anything at all. The fear was burned out of my amygdala, replaced by a cold, mathematical void. I wasn't a human fighting a machine anymore. I was an algorithm fighting an algorithm. I watched the dreadnought. I studied it. In Life #251, I learned it takes exactly 1.2 seconds for its deflector shields to recharge after a heavy kinetic impact. In Life #280, I learned it favors targeting the highest thermal signature first. In Life #305, I discovered the fatal flaw. Right before it fires its main plasma cannons, two small exhaust vents on its upper chassis open for exactly 0.8 seconds to vent the superheated plasma core.
It was a window less than a second wide, located twenty feet in the air.
I sat in the drop pod for Life #312. I wiped the blood from my eyes. The silver plating of my arm was stained black with soot and my own blood.
"Drop in three!" Silas yelled. "Two! One!"
"Let's go to work," I whispered.