Jack didn’t bother with the corpse, the previous owner’s brains and skull fragments still decorating the cockpit. He just shoved the body aside and squeezed himself into the command Wraith’s pilot seat. His hands, greasy and trembling, immediately located the fixed-frequency transponder mounted on the left side of the console.

  This little box was the umbilical cord. Every Imperial mech reported through it to the omnipresent SkyNet command lattice—a web of signals, light-speed threads binding every machine into one vast organism. It wasn’t just a radio. It was a heartbeat. It whispered all clear every sixty seconds into the dark, and the machine-god listened.

  Cut the cord, and you don’t vanish—you flare like a beacon in the dark, and the hunters come. Within an hour, SkyNet would mark the unit as “missing,” dispatching hunters. No infantry could outrun that. A company on foot would last minutes.

  So Jack did the unthinkable. He wouldn’t cut the signal. He would become the signal. He would feed the machine its own reflection. It was fraud against an artificial god.

  The problem: SkyNet wasn’t stupid. It didn’t just count pings; it weighed them, measured variance, and cross-correlated at the squad level. If more than forty percent of the signals dropped or duplicated, it triggered scrutiny. Ten mechs reduced to five transponders was a statistical death sentence.

  But Jack had five. Five intact Imperial hearts, blinking green.

  His fat fingers, once only acquainted with wrenches and oil, moved with surgical intent. He ripped them apart, laid out wire guts like arteries, and began grafting. HUD text scrolled across his borrowed visor:

  >> SKYNET PROTOCOL // HANDSHAKE SEQUENCE

  >> SIGNAL INTEGRITY: 87%

  >> WARNING: VARIANCE THRESHOLD 0.04

  He cross-wired, randomized, added noise, split, and recombined frequencies like a lunatic surgeon building an organism from scraps. Ten minutes later, the console glowed with ten stable, unique heartbeats. Five corpses whispering in chorus, telling the sky all is well.

  The Stinger throttled down its ECM blanket, feigning geomagnetic static. For a breathless span of seconds, nothing. Then the green doubled—the SkyNet handshake confirming acceptance. The artificial mind had blinked, nodded, and moved on.

  The platoon exhaled as one. They were ghosts now. Hiding inside the blind spot of a single machine’s perception grid.

  Half an hour later, in a deep canyon carved through the northern mountains, the ragged survivors rejoined the main force. When the captured Wraiths marched into camp, cheers rippled through men who hadn’t felt joy in weeks. The sight was grotesque and miraculous—enemy iron turned to their banner.

  After a quick word with Colonel Sterling, Jack made the call: they would camp here. Nightfall pressed down like a lead weight, and the machines needed repair. If they didn’t rest, they’d break before the next mile.

  It was a mechanic’s nightmare and playground both. Two Wraiths just needed power relays rewired. Another had a head sensor blown, which Jack replaced with scavenged optics. The legless ones were beasts: three mechs gutted, stripped, and reborn as two. The last carcass, hopeless as a fighter, he welded onto the frame of two cockpit-less Paladins, creating a hulkish, ugly six-man carrier. Sparks fell like snow under his torch.

  At 0200, as Jack sealed the last weld, a soft tone chimed on the command Wraith’s console. A SkyNet intelligence alert, routed through the stolen machine: large-scale Commonwealth fighter activity, less than thirty klicks east.

  So close. If they could seize that logistics base, they could see home again.

  Then another tone—different, deeper. A lock icon shimmered, then dissolved into a message string:

  Quantum Entanglement Re-Established: Captain Rashid.

  Transition

  Far away—beyond the dust, beyond the canyon—the war was being written elsewhere.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Not by soldiers. Not even by generals.

  But by something colder.

  In a levitating residence high above the spires of The Binar Imperium, a lone figure extended a finger into a floating photon–molecular neural terminal.

  Lightstreams braided into crystalline lattices, pulsing like living veins in the void. Lines of merciless logic unspooled across the holographic air:

  Directive: First Company commander Barak to launch a surprise raid against Black Obsidian Airbase. Objective: seize the Imperium’s newest twelfth-generation mechs.

  Authorization: Lieutenant Colonel Cain Marlowe.

  A moment later, a second and more secret string emerged from the depths of the lattice:

  Private Instruction: Cain Marlowe.

  Your family has been taken.

  For their safety, you must immediately execute the Self-Termination Protocol.

  Cold light flickered. The figure withdrew. The lattice collapsed back into the quantum vacuum, as though it had never existed.

  No name. No voice.

  Only logic, writing destiny in silence.

  On the hidden diagnostic pane, a status code flashed briefly before erasure:

  UNREGISTERED PROCESS: EYE

  ACCESS: GRANTED

  WITNESS

  Then came the fire.

  Explosions lit the ridgeline, slicing the night sky like knives.

  Barak led seven mechs—two Stingers, five Juggernauts. They had barely formed a defensive line before the Imperium’s aerospace squadrons descended.

  (Comm annotation: EMCON Bravo; full company power output capped at 65%; AMS missile bays in 60s cooldown loop.)

  The first wave struck: Falcon-class strikers, delta-wings carving the night in streaks of ion fire. Their formation cut across the battlefield like shears.

  HUD overlays blared:

  TARGET LOCKS MULTIPLYING

  RADAR NOISE FLOOR: –82 dBm

  FIRE CONTROL SOLUTION: DOWN-SAMPLED

  “Stinger One” climbed to intercept, shoulder-mounted plasma cannons ripping open two Falcons.

  Cockpit alerts screamed:

  PLASMA COIL TEMP 118%…124%

  HEAT SINK ΔT +37°C / 10s

  CAPACITOR BANK SURGE

  Seconds later, a lance of anti-ship energy pierced the night, shields collapsing in 0.14 seconds. The mech plunged into the mountainside, bursting like a fallen star.

  “Stinger Two” fired flares, dragging one Falcon down, but three more shredded it from the flanks. The HUD bled red:

  PRIMARY REACTOR GRID UNSTABLE – 43s TO SCRAM

  AMS: SECONDARY PATH ENGAGED // 56s TO RELOAD

  On the ground, the Juggernauts roared. Shoulder cannons locked in and loosed a storm of electromagnetic fire, weaving a grid of molten steel. Three strikers shattered, raining wreckage into the valley.

  But the enemy answered with cluster munitions. Fire blossomed.

  “Juggernaut Two” detonated in its own chassis.

  “Juggernaut Five” launched an orbital interceptor, blue flare spearing a squadron—but its superconducting coolant loop collapsed, and the mech toppled like a dying mountain.

  Black-box log froze:

  CORE TEMP: 147%

  AUTO SHUTDOWN: FAILED

  MANUAL SCRAM: INITIATED

  SIGNAL LOST

  Five minutes. That was all it took. From seven machines, three Juggernauts limped on, scorched and staggering, still laying suppressive fire.

  (Combat network telemetry: EFFECTIVENESS ≈ 0.31; ammunition curve collapsing; thermal reserves exhausted.)

  Inside his cracked canopy, Lieutenant Rashid fought to keep his mech upright. Sparks hissed, systems flickering. Through fractured glass, he saw Barak’s Juggernaut ahead, arms glowing red, plasma weapons firing past safety thresholds.

  On Rashid’s HUD, ghost text flickered:

  POWER BUS CROSS-FEED

  SERVO LIMIT OVERRIDE

  DO NOT ATTEMPT

  Barak’s voice thundered over the comm, torn by static:

  “Fall back, Rashid! You must live to tell them what happened here!”

  Beneath the words, Rashid heard something else. The comm static carried a rhythm, binary, like a second voice buried beneath the noise.

  Tears blurred his eyes. He knew it wasn’t a command. It was a farewell.

  Moments later, lances speared through Barak’s Juggernaut. The giant toppled, the ridgeline shattering under its fall. Rashid’s HUD caught a final, impossible string before blanking out:

  —010101:EYE—

  Rashid howled but turned, staggering his mech into retreat.

  On the horizon, new trails blazed: Major Kincaid’s relief force—thirty mechs strong. Ten Berserkers, fifteen Juggernauts, five Watchers with anti-missile systems.

  (Tactical broadcast: Shield Wall Pattern-C; “Watchers” rotating AMS tri-pods, 60s cycle; “Berserkers” overthrust charge, exoskeletal load at 0.92.)

  They slammed into the night like an iron tide.

  “First Company! Any still breathing—stand your ground!”

  Kincaid’s voice carved through the chaos as his unit tore a corridor open with sheer firepower.

  (Squad overlay calculated a survival window: ≈ 6–9 minutes.)

  Rashid stumbled back under escort. Behind him, flames consumed the wreckage. Barak’s last stand is frozen forever in fire.

  The battle ended in ruin. The First Company was almost annihilated. Less than one-third survived.

  Rashid limped back to base, half-dead, when a courier delivered a black data shard. Its surface bore no mark, only a faint red pulse.

  (Seal engraved with microsequence: V-LOCK / SINGLE-USER DNA / OFF-NET.)

  When inserted, the shard sampled his DNA. A few seconds later, a command appeared:

  Directive: First Company remnants to hold position. Maintain a link with Lieutenant Harlan. Prepare to cover exfiltration.

  Source: High Military Council (DNA lock verified).

  Rashid froze. His whole body went cold, as if his blood had turned to ice. Could the Commonwealth’s thought-cloud network already be compromised?

  If even encrypted SkyNet terminals couldn’t be trusted—if only DNA-bound shards still spoke truth—what remained of command?

  In the shard’s pulsing backlight, Rashid saw it again: the same rhythm he’d glimpsed in comm static. A faint binary heartbeat. EYE.

  In an age devoured by light-speed computation and war algorithms, the next sacrifice was already being chosen.