Mereque Ventrullis stabbed the needle through the flesh on the bicep of his right arm, pulling the attached thread along behind it, he cinched the split skin back together with a grunt of discomfort.

  He hurriedly stitched his wound while beads of sweat ran down his face and dripped from his prominent chin.

  The pain was a good thing, it meant he was still breathing. Still alive.

  Minutes ago, a great beast had tried to barbecue him. The monster’s roar had rattled his skull even through the helmet’s dampeners; the jet of flame had scorched the stone where his head had been half a heartbeat earlier. Only the rotting floor of the ruins collapsing beneath his boots had saved him from becoming lunch.

  He tied off the last stitch, wiped sweat from his chin, and forced himself upright. Leopold Seven felt a thousand light-years farther away than it actually was.

  Two weeks since the Cazues had burned in orbit. Two weeks since five hundred escape pods had scattered across a planet that was supposed to be Earth but looked like every fairy-tale nightmare humanity had ever dreamed up.

  He leaned against the ruined wall and let the memories hit him like a fresh wound.

  The Cazues had been beautiful once: sleek silver, proud, the first deep-space ark Leopold ever launched. Then the alarms. Then the hull breaches blooming orange and white. He still saw it every time he closed his eyes: the ship’s spine cracking open, decks peeling away like petals on a dying flower. Escape pods spat out in frantic clusters (five hundred sparks against the black), streaking down toward a blue marble that was supposed to be salvation.

  Most of those sparks had winked out long before they hit atmosphere. Some had burned up. Some had simply vanished. He’d watched them die from inside his own pod, helmet speakers full of static and half-screamed goodbyes.

  He pressed the heel of his gauntlet against his visor, hard enough to hurt. A thousand light-years. Decades of training, oaths, and propaganda about “reunification.” All of it ending with him stitching his own arm in some forgotten ruin while a fire-breathing monster hunted him for sport.

  “Congratulations, Mereque,” he muttered. “You sure found something. I’m just not sure it’s Earth.

  The memory slid back into its box. He shoved it down deep, where it belonged.

  He’d found the ruins by accident: a half-buried wall, a flat patch that didn’t belong. One scrape of his glove and there it was: a weathered face carved into rusted metal. He knew that face. Every kid on Leopold grew up staring at it in history vids: the old Free Peoples Party emblem, the one that screamed “no kings, no masters” before the Global Coalition crushed them flat.

  His laugh came out cracked and bitter. All those years of mandatory ancient-Earth studies, all those exams on dead languages and forgotten flags, and the first proof he finds is half-erased under moss and rot.

  He pressed his forehead to the cool metal, tasting blood and smoke. Somewhere out there the rest of the expedition was either dead or wishing they were. He hadn’t heard a single beacon. Not one.

  He traced the carved lines with a shaking digit. The metal was weathered, pitted, older than anything he’d ever known. For one heartbeat the swamp, the beast, the ruined sky; all of it vanished.

  He smelled recycled air and synthesized coffee instead. Heard someone humming off-key while they stripped their rifle on a table, sleeves rolled high, grease coating a face. His old friend Ruger cleaning a favorite gun. Home smelled like hot circuitry and the steady hum of motors. Home had rules, people who answered when you screamed. Their home had been the Cazues.

  Here, nothing answered.

  What if they were too late? What if humanity had crawled back to the cradle and died quietly while the stars forgot them? What if the only thing left of Earth was rust, monsters, and this half-erased face that once promised freedom?

  His throat closed. He pictured five hundred escape pods burning up like matches. He pictured his friend’s pod among them.

  “No,” he whispered to the metal. “I’m not giving up yet.”

  He cast the fear aside like unwanted trash. Then he straightened, rolled his shoulders, and turned his back on the emblem.

  Not today. The planet could have his corpse when it earned it.

  But that worn emblem was something. Not concrete proof (not yet), just enough to keep him moving instead of lying down and letting the next monster finish the job.

  He straightened, flexed the freshly stitched arm, and felt the old Zaxvoyan oath settle back onto his shoulders like armor. Reunification. Redemption. Whatever pretty words they’d fed him back on Leopold, they all boiled down to the same thing: don’t quit. Never quit.

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  Monster or not, he had a job to do.

  The creature screamed overhead, claws tearing at stone like it had a personal grudge. Mereque crawled deeper into the dark, tasting blood and dust, every scrape of those talons above sending fresh dirt raining onto his back.

  His fingers found the Pelter still holstered at his thigh. Good. One radioactive kiss ready to deliver.

  He pressed his back to the cold wall and forced his breathing to slow. Veteran or not, his pulse was hammering like a rookie’s. Nothing in the briefing vids had prepared him for sixty tons of scales and hate that breathed fire.

  The microchip behind his eye flickered, painting ghostly lines across the blackness: tunnels, weak points, a slim fissure twenty metres left. He almost laughed. The same implant that once let him juggle cargo crates in zero-G was now his only map out of a nightmare basement.

  Higher gravity on Leopold had made him strong. The exomesh laced through his bones made him stronger. Right now, he was grateful for every extra kilo he’d cursed during the endless training and surgeries they had to endure.

  He moved.

  The fissure was tight, armor scraping stone, lungs burning, the monster’s frustrated roars echoing behind him like rolling thunder.

  For one bad second the walls squeezed and he pictured himself pancaked under a mountain of dirt and rock, just another smear on the ancestral home no one had bothered to warn him about.

  The fissure narrowed until his shoulders scraped stone on both sides. Every breath fogged the inside of his visor, hot and sour. Sparks spat from his armor where it ground against rock; the sound was too loud, too loud, the beast would hear him…

  He shoved the thought away and kept crawling.

  One heartbeat the gap was tight; the next it shrank like a fist closing. His chest plate jammed. Ribs strained. The exomesh groaned, metal threads digging into bone as they fought the pressure. For one black second, he couldn’t move forward, couldn’t move back, couldn’t breathe.

  The Earth was going to make him a fossil.

  Panic clawed up his throat. He pictured the stone grinding him down to red paste, helmet cracking, blood and marrow leaking into cracks no one would ever find. Not like this. Not after everything.

  One gauntlet found a hairline fracture. He wedged his fingers in, pulled, felt rock give a fraction. Another pull. Another. The exomesh screamed; something in his shoulder popped like cable snapping.

  Then the stone gave way, and he spilled out into grey daylight, rolling into a crouch behind a broken pillar.

  The beast hadn’t seen him. Yet.

  He flexed his stitched arm, tasted copper again, and grimaced. It was time to put some distance between himself and that overgrown lizard.

  Mereque slipped between the trees like a ghost, every footfall placed with the care of a man who’d just learned the planet ate the careless.

  The microchip painted faint green lines across his vision: safe path, thirty meters, then open ground. He didn’t trust open ground anymore.

  The creature’s cries faded behind him. He was almost free when the sky cracked open.

  The sonic boom punched him flat. Leaves detonated outward in perfect circles, every tree bowing like it wanted to kneel.

  Then the thing was there, blotting out the sun.

  Black metal, impossibly sharp, cutting the sky like a thrown knife. No engines, no heat bloom, just silent, murderous grace. Golden eyes (two burning coins) swept the forest floor and, for one impossible heartbeat, locked on him. His HUD exploded in red: UNKNOWN. UNKNOWN. CLASSIFICATION ERROR. The microchip had never thrown that code at him before. Not once in all his years.

  His body knew prey when it saw it. He froze, every muscle screaming to run while his brain screamed louder that running would only make the targeting solution easier.

  The wedge banked with lazy contempt, weapon-arms unfolding like a predator flexing claws. Sunlight slid off edges that looked sharp enough to split atoms. It wasn’t human tech. It wasn’t anything he’d ever been briefed on. And it was heading straight for the same monster that had almost turned him into barbecue.

  Mereque’s laugh came out shaky, half-hysterical. “Great,” he whispered to the empty air. “First the planet sends monsters. Now it’s got alien war-machines older than civilization.”

  He pressed himself against the ground. Whatever was about to happen back at the ruins, he wanted absolutely no part of it.

  Let the monster and the machine kill each other. He’d take himself anywhere else but here.

  Twenty minutes of hard marching later, the trees thinned and the ground turned traitorous.

  He stopped at the edge of the bog and stared at the black water stretching out like a wound that had never healed. Steam rose in lazy curls, carrying the stink of things long dead. Somewhere beneath the surface something big shifted, slow and patient, and the ripples reached his boots like a warning.

  Mereque checked the sky one last time (clear, for now), then stepped in anyway.

  The mud welcomed him with cold, greedy hands. It climbed his legs with every step, heavier than it had any right to be, as if the planet itself wanted to drag him down and keep him. His HUD painted ghostly depth readings: one meter, two, three… then gave up and just flashed red.

  He told himself it was only a swamp. Just water and rot and bad luck.

  The lie tasted almost convincing.

  It didn’t take long for him to find himself knee-deep in muck that sucked at his boots like it had opinions. The air stank of rot and old secrets. Every step made a wet, betraying sound he couldn’t silence.

  On this side of the ruins someone with a bad sense of humor had dropped a swamp in his path. It wasn’t a joke he appreciated.

  One step the mud was knee-deep; the next it surged to his waist, cold as a grave. Bubbles rose around him, big lazy belches that stank of old rot and older bones. Something long and slick brushed his thigh under the water. He refused to look. Refused to think about what might be down there watching him with too many eyes.

  His HUD flickered, battery icon bleeding red for the first time in two weeks. Even the tech was giving up on him.

  Mereque laughed, a wet, broken sound. “Perfect,” he told the swamp. “Death by drowning or death by fire. Place your bets.”

  The mud sucked harder, greedy. He grabbed a half-submerged log and used it like a crutch, forcing one more step, then another. If the planet wanted him, it would have to work for it.

  He was in the middle of the bog, completely exposed, when the wings came back.

  The roar hit first, raw fury, closer than before. Then the shadow, huge and crimson, blotting out the sun.

  He looked up just as the beast dove, jaws already glowing with fresh fire.

  Mereque’s hand found the Pelter. His mouth still tasted like copper, with an added hint of bad decisions.

  “Come on, then,” he muttered, thumbing the safety off. “Let’s see which one of us this planet kills first.”