We were wrapping up what had been an incredibly boring interrogation, as far as such things went. Being on the other side of the fence had completely ripped away any smug sense of superiority Davian might have had and he’d folded instantly, especially when he saw there were four identical, faceless Marines just watching him silently. He seemed more freaked out by us than the people doing the actual interrogation.

  Their methods were, as expected, quite brutal. They were cleaner, but magic didn’t seem inclined to gentleness from what I’d seen so far. Though, the same could certainly be said for us and our technology. Much of what Eric had seen from us was neither gentle nor clean, but that wasn’t representative of our culture or technology as a whole.

  The interrogator used magic where I would’ve used a more physical tool, but the methods were mostly the same and therefore the results were quite familiar. Davian spilled a lot, though I still don’t know how much of it was true, or if it was everything. That’s one reason anyone with time on their hands doesn’t use torture to get information; it inevitably proves unreliable. By the time any information can be verified, the prisoner could simply say that the situation had changed or that he wasn’t aware of the full-picture, or similar evasive but possibly true deflections.

  Unfortunately, reliable information took time to gather, and we were out of that. We weren’t in the middle of a battle, and we couldn’t see it yet, but we knew it was coming soon. How soon was anyone’s guess, though.

  Larsen hadn’t gotten her wish to interrogate Davian and since he definitely had life-long injuries getting anything out of him would take even longer than normal. It frustrated me, and likely Larsen as well, but this wasn’t our jurisdiction, hell he wasn’t even really our prisoner, he was Lilith’s, or maybe Eric’s.

  It was almost comical how Davian had gone from condescending and cruel to a stammering, pleading mess, but I’d seen similar changes before. Everyone has their pressure points, their breaking point, no matter how well-trained you might consider yourself. Tough, burly men afraid of nothing would sob and beg if you hit them in the right places. Meanwhile the tiniest butterfly of a man would say nothing, even if you brought him to an inch of his life, until you went after someone he cared about.

  The way he had been interrogated wasn’t the most interesting thing on my mind though. The methods had been slightly novel, but they were ultimately just magical analogues for techniques I’d already practiced and understood well. No, what was interesting to me was what Davian had said. I had no reason to assume he was lying, but no reason to assume he was being entirely truthful either. Even so, what we’d learned had me more eager than ever to acquire some serious firepower.

  Lilith walked us back to the gateway and though to her I’m sure we were silent, internally it was a different matter.

  “That was so fucked up.” Chen declared.

  “No one said you had to stay.” I told him, already dreading the conversation to come.

  To me, it wasn’t a big deal. I wouldn’t say it was normal, but nothing outrageous. I’d seen worse, done worse, and likely would again before my time was done; I was desensitised, to put it bluntly. To my relatively green Marines though, it was likely more brutality than they’d witnessed in their entire lives and they could likely sense the difference between us.

  It was one thing to kill and maim in combat. It was quite another to do it as a form of torture to get information.

  “Seriously, fucked up!” Chen repeated.

  “I’ve got to agree with Chen.” Larsen said. “That was disgusting.”

  “I can see intellectually, how it would be necessary, but there have to be better ways to approach things.” Carver said this with an air of regret, one I shared with him.

  “There are.” I confirmed.

  “Then what gives?” Chen scoffed. “Why not use them?”

  “Likely because it wouldn’t have done any good.” Carver said.

  “Actually, no. Probably because we don’t have the time. A proper interrogation can take days, weeks, even months. Considering we’re already coming up on our one week deadline tomorrow, I don’t think Lilith has the time to spend, which means neither do we.”

  They grumbled some more at that, and pestered me with a few more questions, even asking me what unit I served with to know what all the things did, but I shut them down. I was sure they wouldn’t forget, but I’d rather save it for later when we weren’t on the clock.

  “Now’s not the time. I know it’s not part of the plan, Carver, but I need you to work on some ways to maximise our firepower with what we have. Don’t think about equipping an army, just the four of us, and only for a few days, at that. If we’re all still alive past then… well, we can worry about if whatever you come up with becomes standard-issue or not.”

  “You believe what he said then?” Carver asked. “Giant bugs?”

  “It’s not any crazier than a live vampire, is it?”

  “You still haven’t shown me that.” He pointed out.

  “Oh, right. Proc, edit and upload encounter with the vampire to the tactical network.”

  My implant queried me to make sure it had the right person, for want of a better term, and I confirmed it did.

  Chen was the first to speak up. “Holy shit! That thing’s more pissed than my cat when I come back from deployment. How was it?”

  “What do you mean, ‘how was it’? It wanted to eat me.” I scoffed.

  “Eat you? You know, that sounds a lot more like a zombie than a vampire. I’m pretty sure I saw exactly this in Killing Field.”

  “Look, I don’t care what the hell it’s called!” I snapped. “It wanted to eat me and now it’s dead.”

  “I’m just saying…” Chen trailed off.

  I sighed. “Yeah, I know, sorry.” I yearned to blow off some steam, or decompress. The tension had been building with the gauntlet we’d been put through and I needed some form of stress relief. I didn’t know if punching bags existed out here but that would go on the list for fabrication if they didn’t.

  Silence settled over our group for a few long moments and I took the opportunity to shatter it with a “God, I need a drink. Anyone have a flask?”

  Various replies in the negative just made me more convinced that finding a local tavern after this mess calmed down was a good idea.

  Contrary to popular belief, almost no ship in the navy was ‘dry’. Marines and engineers had discreet distilleries and stashes, and while it was never openly acknowledged it was also understood that it would be overlooked, so long as things didn’t get out of hand.

  All of that was to say that I was damned frustrated none of us had been in a position to swipe a few bottles of the good stuff, or even just bootleg liquor, before our ship went down.

  “Alright, let me run through the summary, just so we’re on the same page.” I pulled up the file my proc had written up on the interrogation.

  It wasn’t much, barely half a dozen scraps of information, nothing like a real intel brief, but I didn’t let it bother me. It was more than we’d had to go on before.

  “There’s some kind of nest buried the near the city from an ancient war. Apparently the whole thing went dormant a long time ago. It’s kind of like a production facility, a factory, where new bugs are pumped out and raw materials are brought to be processed.”

  “Do you think he was telling the truth?” Larsen asked.

  “About which part?” I asked.

  “Well, take your pick. The bugs themselves, or the nest underground?”

  “Probably, he said they’ll burrow up from underground and attack the city. We’re just fortunate they can’t tunnel up directly and have to go through the walls.”

  “What’s up with that, anyway? If they don’t think they’re going to come up underneath the city, why not just use those some protections on the walls?”

  “Hell if I know, probably some limitation of the runes or something.” I shrugged. “Hey, Larsen, you good to grab a couple squads of locals and start instructing them? I want to go check on Eric.”

  “Can I take Chen with me?”

  “Sure. Carver, you’re with me.” I ordered.

  “What? Why?” He asked, glaring grumpily at the floor ahead of him.

  “Oh, don’t be such a baby. You’ll find it fun, Eric can school you on magic and runes.”

  “Fine.” He muttered something about models and fabrication, but I ignored him, I was used to his idiosyncrasies by now.

  “Good. Larsen, get to work. Eric should be at their ‘Halls of Healing’, wherever that is.”

  We walked along, making small talk and cracking jokes, but we certainly didn’t take our time. We had work to do. We’d mapped the way before, so finding our way to the gateway that transported us to the city above from Wolfport’s underground complex was an easy affair.

  Fortunately, the chamber had a pair of mages flanking the doorway inside, the vacant archway looked to be more than merely decorative, but I had no way to know its purpose. Some kind of protective shield, more than likely, similar to the blast doors on our ships.

  I stopped by one of the mages at the door.

  “Can you get us to the surface? We have some urgent business.”

  “Aye, my lord, step into the gate.” The mage drawled, a woman with a harsh accent. It reminded me of Irish, or perhaps the thicker Australian accent. It didn’t really have a direct comparison.

  “There’s no need for that. We’re not nobles.” I protested, raising a hand.

  “We actually work for a living.” Larsen said from behind me.

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  The woman laughed, pausing in her movements briefly to respond. “Fair enough. Come on you lot.” She waved us forward.

  I’d spent some time in Australia, the parts of it a mere Staff Sergeant was allowed to visit anyway, and I’d gotten some practice at deciphering strong accents. Hers was certainly that.

  I examined the mage as she walked into the gate room ahead of us. She was clad in a kind of chainmail and plate hybrid, some parts providing flexibility and freedom of movement and others being rigid hard steel, or some magical equivalent to steel. It was an intriguing design, not that disimilar to our own in design. I’d not seen it before, but it made me wonder if it was a recent advancement, inspired by our own form-fitting armour or if there had always been such skilled armourers in the city. Maybe my unwillingness to believe these people could have built armour like that on their own was just my vanity speaking. They weren’t simple, or stupid, but their level of advancement was something I hadn’t really pinned down. I expected it was more complicated than I knew; our own level of advancement was, after all.

  We made it to the gate and arrayed ourselves in a typical formation, each one of us taking a quarter-slice of the pie. It had quickly become second nature and I wagered none of us liked the idea of instantly being transported into a killbox where we all had our back to someone, even if they were allies.

  A flash of viridescent light blazed from the space we occupied, just for a moment. When it faded, we were back in the familiar gateway room on the surface. A mage came up to me almost immediately. Their shoulder flash was adorned with the same green of the gateway’s light, a pair of silver crossed lightning bolts was the only real distinguishing feature. They were clad in the same form-fitting chainmail-plate armour as the other mages were below.

  “My lord, I am Captain Talyndral Aendroth, assigned to you for the duration of Lord Wintersbane’s recovery.” He was a stern man, but fragments of excitement and anticipation could be seen in his eyes.

  Even if he was a temporary liaison while Eric recovered I was glad he wasn’t a stodgy old stick with no sense of humor, and that he didn’t have one up his ass. Either would’ve made him a pain to deal with.

  “Wintersbane?” Carver asked.

  "Eric Wintersbane.” Aendroth supplied.

  “Ah, right. How is he doing?” I asked.

  Carver cleared his throat. “Why don’t we walk and talk?”

  I nodded and we began to walk outside the gate room and make our way over to our slice of the Military Quarter.

  Aendroth’s expression darkened when I went to continue our conversation. “Not well. You managed to save his life, but his legs were too badly damaged, it is highly unlikely he will ever walk again. His Gift is still intact, thankfully, but if not for your actions his fate would’ve been far worse. I believe he said something about metallic healing dust?”

  Carver groaned. “Metallic healing dust? Really?”

  “It’s not that far off.” Chen argued.

  “Sure, and your head isn’t that far off a rock.” Carver said dourly.

  “Hey. I’m at least a very hard rock!” Chen laughed good-naturedly as our compound came into sight.

  “I said your head, not you.” Carver replied.

  Aendroth looked at Chen, then back at me questioningly.

  “Yes, they’re always like this.” I said to him.

  Aendroth looked into our little compound which other than a few new squat, boxy buildings didn’t really have anything new to see.

  “I’ll be nearby, and the guards will know how to reach me if I’m not. I assume you don’t wish to be disturbed?”

  “You know what, Aendroth?” I asked. “I think we could use your help. We’ve got a lot of weapons to hand out but we need to make sure the men who get them have a brain and aren’t… how can I put it?”

  “Uneducated fools?”

  “Sure. I was going to say pencil-pushing dumbasses, but that works.”

  “How does pushing a pencil relate to—“

  “Not important. It’s just an expression.”

  “Of incompetence?”

  “Among other things.” I nodded.

  We walked over the escape pod, and the three shoulder-high boxes flanking each side of our pod gave me the most palpable sense of euphoria I’d ever had. I had to restrain myself from running and bending down to where I could see freshly loaded and stacked magazines waiting in the output tray.

  “Carver, do you have anything bulletproof to shoot at?”

  “You’re not saying…”

  “Well, we might as well test them here. Don’t want to cause a panic at an unfamiliar sound in the middle of a battle.”

  “What? Why? How does that even—I think they’d already be panicked by that point. You know, from all the blood, and the screaming and dying?”

  “Fair point.” I shrugged. “I don’t feel like walking all the way to the edge of the city just to test them though.”

  Carver sighed, and walked inside the pod, dragging out a box on wheels. It was made of a hard, green polymer. An easy to produce material that didn’t take much except some silicon and other cheap materials, all things we had in excess.

  The top panel of the container raised on hydraulics and the bottom of the container came with it, revealing a rack of stock standard-issue rifles, muzzles tilted to the sky at forty-five degrees. All told, twenty-four rifles were ready and waiting.

  I turned to Aendroth. “How fast can you find me twenty-four men? At least two should be good leaders. I’m going to divvy them up into separate squads and then explain the plan.”

  “Calling it a ‘plan’ is generous.” Carver snorted.

  “Well, a loose guide, then?” I shot back.

  “I can have them here in a quarter of an hour. If you’ll excuse me?” He asked.

  I nodded, and he ran up to a section of the battlements before tapping one man on his shoulder. Together, the two of them ran through one of the open portcullises, deeper into the bustling military zone.

  A few minutes later someone else took up the vacant position on the battlements. A few minutes after that, twenty-five men filed through into the mostly empty space and came to stand in front of us in a loose mob, with Aendroth at the front. Many of them were unabashedly curious, eyes searching out the buildings behind us, and raking over each one of us as they look over our equipment.

  “Are you always so efficient?” Larsen asked.

  Aendroth grinned. “It wasn’t hard to find volunteers. Everyone is quite eager to see what you can do. We only know that the High Commander has considerable respect for you and that Lord Wintersbane was very impressed with your armour and weapons. There have already been rumors of course, but nothing substantiated.”

  I considered his words for a few moments before raising my voice.

  “Alright, all of you, listen up! Take a weapon from the container and grip it by the carry handle.” I raised my weapon up and with one hand on the grip, I used the other to tap the carry handle. “That’s here. Don’t touch anything else, don’t fiddle with anything else, don’t play with anything else. If you do, you’re in deep shit.”

  I began passing out the weapons. They didn’t have any slings attached like older pre-augmenting armour weapons, though. That would’ve been an optional add-on we hadn’t bothered to fabricate, so the men in front of me would just have to make do.

  I immediately took to calling them a militia simply because they weren’t really recruits seeing as how they hadn’t yet been recruited and they weren’t really soldiers in my eyes since we hadn’t trained them yet. I was planning on it though. If after the current crisis blew over there were any left alive I’d see about training them up and recruiting them.

  “After this battle, we’ll be providing proper training and begin recruiting, for now, just listen closely!”

  I caught Carver wheeling out a large smart screen from the corner of my eye, or well, from my augmented equivalent anyway.

  “Ah, good.” I waved him over and he wheeled the thing over next to me. It was already booted up so I just linked into its processor and projected the rifle’s maintenance diagrams onto the screen. It was dry, and probably not ideal for this exact scenario but I just needed some kind of visual aid.

  “Alright, this here is the dangerous end of the weapon!” I roared. “Tiny bits of metal come out at very fast speeds and they will absolutely ruin your day, so treat this weapon with respect! There are four rules to using these weapons that you must follow at all time.” I zoomed the diagram in on the muzzle of the rifle on-screen and cued up a few slow-mo shots of it firing.

  “Number one, never point a gun at anything you are not willing to destroy. Two, always keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire.” I swapped the simulation over to show the trigger being pulled back as the simulated weapon fired. “Know your target and what’s behind it. These bits of metal, or ‘bullets’ will penetrate what you hit and can and will destroy things behind it. That means people, dogs, or buildings, if you aren't careful."

  The technical manual for my rifle wasn’t just a manual but actually a whole program that could simulate the rifle’s operation, maintenance and such. Usually it didn’t see much use outside of certain specific scenarios but it was an amazing tool when trying to educate people who’d never even heard of a firearm before.

  One man raised his hand.

  “You there, the great big tree of a man, what is it?” I pointed to one of the men at the back of the loose throng of militia.

  “How dangerous are these weapons, really?” He called out.

  I grinned beneath my helmet. “I’m glad you asked.”

  I played a simulation of a single shot begin fired at a ballistic dummy. The reaction was predictable. Wide eyes, a few sceptical looks, some confusion at what they were being shown.

  I finished taking them through the basics of the weapon; how to safety it, how to hold, carry and store it, and of course, how to fire it.

  “Anyone here a mage? Can you do barriers?”

  Several of them raised their hands.

  “All of you, come over here.” I motioned them to stand near the pod. While the entrance wasn’t covered, the bare hull would do nicely for an impromptu backstop.

  “Right here, give me the strongest barrier you four can make, about the size of a plate.” I watched as they gathered on my left shoulder in a line and raised their hands and a shimmering wall of force appeared in front of us, then one more, then two more. I stepped back.

  “Alright, clear my line of fire. I don’t want to accidentally hit any of you.” I watched as they stepped away a little to give me a clean shot.

  “Going hot! Test fire in three…” I raised my rifle to my shoulder, placing the digital firing reticle right on the shield.

  “Uh, Edward, this seems like a really dumb idea.” Larsen said.

  “You mean a really cool idea.” Chen corrected.

  “Two…”

  “No, a dumb idea. Edward. Don’t—” She insisted.

  “One.” I stroked the trigger and felt the trigger cross a familiar divide.

  On semi-auto it lacked its usual prolonged roar, but the split-second crack ripped through the air as the deafening report filled the world with thunder. The vibrations could be felt by the men as more than a few stepped back in response. Those of us in armour were used to such feelings and none of it translated through a sealed suit anyway.

  A wave of sharp echoes rolled off the stone around us, as though we were cocooned inside of a megaphone through which an explosion was directed. The air vibrated with a kind of dirty, powerful energy. There was no intention in it, it was just raw, barely directed power.

  To my brain, it was an almost an afterthought to process the reactions of the men around me, or the actual impact of the bullet. That sound stuck with me, even though I’d heard it hundreds of thousands of times before. I tracked the impact of the bullet, and as expected, the metal hull of the escape pod hadn’t allowed the bullet to penetrate.

  It had been close though. Escape pods were heavily armoured to deal with bits of debris and long-term wear and tear over years, or even decades, in case those onboard were forced into using the stasis pods as we were. All that was to say, the divot in the hull as I walked up to examine my handiwork was wrong.

  Not wrong as in ‘not supposed to be there’ but wrong as in it suggested a ricochet. I frowned, and a mental nudge at my suit computer highlighted the round immediately. It had lodged itself nearly half a metre into a stone wall over on one side of our little complex.

  “Shit!”

  “I told you, you idiot!”

  “LETS GO!!!”

  I tuned out the disturbed murmurs, my team’s exclamations and especially Chen’s triumphant whooping.

  “Now, as you can see…” I walked over and picked up one of the mages who’d stumbled to the floor. Pulling him upright, I swept my eyes over the rest of the men. “These weapons are not to be trifled with.”

  In truth, I had no idea how strong the combined strength of those defensive shields had been, but it probably got my point across.

  A brisk stride put me at the wall and I stood next to the impact of the now severely mangled bullet. “This is but a fraction of the power of the weapons you now hold. I’ll not bore you with every scrap of information about their use, but I will be making sure you aren’t going to accidentally obliterate a baker’s oven, his entire home and his family. I think that’s only prudent, yes?”

  They regained their composure admirably quickly, most of them standing at attention, or some variation of such a stance. We spent the rest of the daylight instructing the men on the use of the weapons, handing out six magazines per person. We even took the time to familiarise them with live-fire exercises, though after that first experience I made sure to do it outside the city, using discarded armour, blocks of stone and anything else we could find as targets. In future, I expected things wouldn’t be quite so haphazardly slapped together, but I’d grown used to the chaos of unpreparedness a long time ago. It was something of an old friend, unwelcome, but not unfamiliar.

  Eventually, I shucked my armour and threw myself unceremoniously into one of the racks in the barracks, letting the soft whir of the air filtration system lull me to sleep. The world outside seemed so far away in the dark, cool atmosphere of the barracks.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect later, even having been there for an interrogation of someone who’d been privy to orchestrating the coming conflict. The idea of an ancient scourge of bugs entombed inside the planet by ancient magics during an apocalypse was just too fantastic, too unbelievable. Even despite all the wonders I’d already processed and categorised in a cold and mechanical fashion, I don’t think I really understood. Still, I was hopeful that I’d come to understand appreciate all the danger and wonder this world had to offer, given enough time.

  Come morning, I’d soon learn just how little my hope really meant in the face of the things August could bring to bear.