The throne was an arrogant pile of shit.
Honestly. It was just a jagged, rusted mess of fused T-90 tank treads and the scorched cockpit of some Reaper drone that Asher had personally dragged out of a radioactive bog because he had nothing better to do on a Tuesday. The metal bit into his spine. It was a constant, dull ache that reminded him he was still breathing, which, frankly, was a miracle considering how many people he'd had to bury to sit here. Comfort was for the dead, or for the idiots who didn't plan on keeping what they'd stolen.
Asher sat there, picking at a hangnail until it bled, and watched the Mojave rot.
From the crest of the Iron Bastion, the world was just different shades of yellow. Radioactive dust blanketed the ruins like a funeral shroud. It was heavy with isotopes that made your molars throb in a way no aspirin could touch. Skeletal skyscrapers poked through the haze—ribs of a dead god, maybe, or just the leftover trash of a civilization that had been too busy checking its social media to notice the sky was falling.
Below the gantry, ten thousand throats opened up. It wasn't a cheer. You don't cheer in a graveyard. It was a bark. A rhythmic, guttural sound of animal relief. The sound of a pack realizing they weren't going to be eaten by the neighbors today.
"You unified the bastards," Su Wan said.
She was standing at his right, smelling of stale grease and that sharp, metallic tang of ozone that always followed her around. Her face was a wreck—pale, sickly skin mapped with a spiderweb of blue veins that pulsed every time she used that brain of hers. The price of being a Psionic. She looked like she hadn't slept since the 21st century.
Asher didn't look at her. He was busy staring at a small, dead beetle on the floor. He took a slow, deliberate sip from a dented tin cup. The water was clear. No grit. No metallic aftertaste of lead. A small, expensive miracle bought with high-grade nuclear filtration and enough corpses to fill a stadium.
"War's just a line item I'm tired of paying for," Asher muttered.
He leaned over the side of the gantry and spat a glob of thick, grey phlegm into the wind. He wondered if it would hit anyone. Probably.
"Resources wasted on ego. It's just bad business, Wan. Now we move the Blood-Wolves to the northern pits. Give 'em double rations of that synthetic protein sludge. If they're busy digging, they're not busy thinking about how to skin me."
"The generals wanted them executed," Su Wan whispered. She was fidgeting with a loose thread on her sleeve. It was an annoying habit.
"Generals think in medals. I think in calories."
Asher looked at his hands. The skin was... off. Leathery, grey, mapped with dull patterns. Rad-Skin. He could breathe air that would turn a normal man's lungs into lukewarm soup. He was twenty-four, but he felt like he was a hundred. He'd spent his entire life in the dirt, fighting over rusted cans of peaches, and now that he'd finally won the whole damn pile, he realized it was just a pile of dirt.
He had this sudden, stupid thought: I wonder if they ever found a way to make real chocolate again before the lights went out.
He almost asked Su Wan if she remembered the smell of a Hershey's bar, but a guard stepped forward, boots crunching on the gravel.
"Lord Asher, the water pressure in Sector 4 is dropping again. The Blood-Wolf captives are—"
"I don't care about their complaints," Asher cut him off without looking up. "Tell them if they don't hit the quota, I'll stop the filtration entirely. They can drink the mud for all I care."
The guard hesitated, then nodded and retreated. Su Wan sighed. "You're acting like a tyrant, Asher."
"I am a tyrant, Wan. That's how we survived."
The sun was a pale, sickly disc hanging in a bruised violet sky. It looked like a bruise that wouldn't heal. And then, the world just... stopped.
It wasn't a silence you could describe in a poem. It was a failure of physics. The forty-knot wind that had been howling through the Bastion's struts just died mid-breath. The constant, comforting click-click-click of the guards' Geiger counters—the heartbeat of the whole damn fortress—flatlined to zero.
Asher stood up. His knees popped. The sound was deafening in the new quiet. His mouth suddenly tasted like he'd been sucking on a copper pipe.
Something's wrong.
He looked at his guards. They were frozen, staring at the sky with their mouths open like landed fish. Su Wan was clutching her head, her nose starting to leak a dark, syrupy red. She looked like she was trying to hold her brain inside her skull.
"Asher... I can't hear them," she choked out. She fell to her knees, her fingers digging into the rusted floorplates until her nails cracked. "The minds... they're gone. There's a signal. It's too loud. It's like... a barcode scanner."
The purple sky didn't cloud over. It unzipped. A perfect, vertical line of blinding, clinical white light tore the atmosphere open. It was too straight. Nature doesn't do straight lines like that. Nature is messy. This was... math.
And then came the octahedron.
It was smooth. Disgustingly smooth. White as a bleached bone and polished like a corporate lobby in a dream. It floated down, a thousand feet above the Bastion, mocking the rust and the dirt and the blood that Asher had spent his life navigating. It looked expensive.
A beam of light swept over the crowd. It didn't feel like fire. It didn't even feel like light. It felt like being appraised by a butcher who was already thinking about which parts of you would go well with a nice red wine.
A voice boomed. It wasn't a voice, really. It was a synthesized vibration that bypassed the ears and landed straight in the back of the brain, right where the lizard-fear lives. It spoke English, but it sounded like it was reading a ledger.
[Universal Asset Evaluation Terminal V9.0]Target: Earth-998 (Alpha) Status: Ripening Cycle Complete. Commencing Harvest.
"Ripening?" Su Wan sobbed. She was curled in a ball now, shivering.
Asher lunged forward. His Rad-Skin began to glow a dull, bioluminescent orange. He felt the heat in his marrow starting to cook. This was his dirt. He'd killed for it. He'd bled for it. He wasn't going to let some giant floating geometry set take it away.
"Identify yourselves, you bastards!" Asher roared.
His voice had the kinetic force of a shotgun blast, echoing off the scrap-metal walls. He drew a jagged vibro-blade he'd found in a bunker, the edge humming at a frequency meant to cleave through Tyrant-Class bone. He swung at the air, purely out of frustration.
The white ship didn't give a damn about his blade. The beam settled on him. He wasn't a King anymore. He wasn't even Asher.
He was a line item.
[U.G.L. ASSET EVALUATION]
Target: Specimen #492 (Local Designation: Asher) Current Valuation: 12.5 Star Credits Biological Grade:F+ (High-Yield Protein / Fodder)
[Analyst Note]: Neural activity in the prefrontal cortex is abnormally high. Potential for 'High-IQ' reality tier matches. Crate with care. Do not damage the brain-pan.
"Twelve credits?"
Asher whispered the words. He felt a sudden, hysterical urge to laugh. A vein in his temple was thumping like a trapped moth. He had spent twenty years, sacrificed millions of lives, and built an empire from the ashes—and they were pricing him like a side of spoiled beef in a clearance bin.
12.5. I'm worth a handful of change.
He wondered what the exchange rate was. Could twelve credits buy a real candy bar? Or was he the price of a cheap screwdriver?
The light expanded. Thousands of needle-like drones began to rain down from the ship's belly. No bullets. No screaming metal. Just blue energy nets that ignored gravity and momentum.
"Zodiacs! To me! Move, you idiots!" Asher screamed.
He tried to leap. He tried to unleash a kinetic shockwave that would shatter the drones. He'd done it a hundred times before. But the air had turned to gel. His muscles felt like they were being filled with cooling lead.
Through the blue shimmer, he saw his elite guards—men who could tear a tank apart with their bare hands—being hoisted into the sky. They weren't fighting. They weren't even screaming. They were being packaged. "Asher, help!"
Su Wan was lifted off the gantry. Her boots dangled in the air. One of her laces was untied. It flapped uselessly in the artificial wind. Her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated until they swallowed the iris.
Asher pushed. He forced his bones to move, hearing them groan and pop. His skin charred as he pushed his mutation past the limit, trying to reach her. He reached out, his fingers inches from her untied lace.
I told her to tie those three times this morning. Why does she never listen?
[Warning: Specimen #492 is resisting the tether.] [Action: Deploying Class-G Sedative.]
A small, silver needle hissed through the air. Speed of a railgun slug. Asher's hyper-adaptive eyes tracked it. He moved his head an inch—a reflex that should have been impossible. He felt a surge of triumph. He was going to win. He was going to—
Fifty more needles hit him at once.
The needles found the gaps in his Rad-Skin. The King of the Mojave felt his consciousness slipping into a cold, dark pit. He tried to hold onto the image of that untied shoelace, but it was fading. The last thing he saw wasn't his kingdom or his people. It was the clinical text scrolling across his retina, projected by a ship that didn't even recognize him as a person.
[SYSTEM ALERT] Batch 998 successfully crated. Estimated Shipment Value: 215,000 SC. Destination: Babylon Station - Sump Level 1.
Darkness took him. The King was gone. The livestock was in the hold. He hoped someone would at least tie Su Wan's shoe.