The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices collin miners, Lupus Umbras, and Emmpty Extra.
Operative Lolan.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
The silence of the Horizon's crash site slowly faded into the ambient, rustling sounds of the alien forest as wind blew through it, and Mark, along with his three Elite Guards, put distance between themselves and the graveyard. They moved through the dense, vibrant emerald and burgundy foliage with a steady, ground-eating jog, their boots crunching rhythmically against the dense underbrush.
Despite the sheer physical exertion of navigating the treacherous, uneven terrain of the northern foothills, none of them was breathing hard. The enhancements pumping through Mark's veins processed oxygen with terrifying efficiency, and the towering super soldiers at his flanks moved with the tireless, fluid grace of apex predators.
But while his body was operating flawlessly, Mark's mind was churning. He replayed the scene at the cargo ramp back at the Shepherd, remembering the wide, terrified eyes of the civilians, the tense, white-knuckled grips of Juan's surviving mercenaries, and the absolute, instinctual dread that had washed over the crowd when the fully armed infantry had materialized.
Mark reached up and tapped his earpiece. "Marcos. Open an encrypted comms channel. Link Valerius, Titus, and Octavia here with me, and patch in Lucius, Aurelia, Cassius, and Severus back at the camp."
"Channel secured, Mark. All Elites are on the line," Marcos replied smoothly.
"Commander," Cassius's calm, icy voice crackled over the comms. "The Perimeter is secure. The Peacekeepers are maintaining a three-hundred-meter radius. Civilians are actively engaged in construction. What is your status?"
"Crash site is a total loss. No survivors," Mark reported grimly, ducking under a massive, low-hanging burgundy branch. "But I think we have a more pressing issue. They aren't buying the cryo-stasis story. It bought us time to prevent an immediate panic, but the mercenaries have enough combat experience to recognize that your operational capabilities and physical augmentations far exceed standard corporate or military profiles."
"They looked at us like we were monsters," Octavia added from Mark's left, her massive Railgun easily balanced on her shoulder.
"In a way, we are," Severus's deep voice resonated over the link. "We are weapons forged for a war they cannot comprehend."
"Correct," Mark replied, his pace quickening as the adrenaline of a new strategy took hold. "But we can't build a functional society if half the population thinks I'm some rogue warlord who spent the last decade cloning a private army in the bowels of my ship. Paranoia breeds dissent, and dissent breeds mutiny. If we want them to trust us, we need to give them a narrative they can actually digest."
"A lie, you mean," Titus grunted from the rear.
"How about a myth?" Mark corrected smoothly. "A myth constructed from enough jagged pieces of the truth that it bleeds when they touch it. We need a cover story for your origins. Something that explains your physical size, your absolute discipline, and the sheer lethality of your armor, while simultaneously making you sympathetic."
"We should make it something that is close to the truth," Aurelia suggested over the comms, the sound of a pneumatic drill echoing faintly in the background of her audio feed. "We are war machines in human flesh, sent to the corners of the universe to die for causes that ultimately chewed us up and spat us out. The specifics of our individual timelines may differ, but the core tragedy remains the same. Use that."
Mark's eyes narrowed as the gears in his mind began to grind. He thought about the geopolitical landscape of the universe he now inhabited. The two massive superpowers constantly locked in a brutal cold war for resources and territory: The Volnar Intergalactic Coalition and the Imperial Union of Celestine.
"Think about the enemy," Mark said aloud, piecing the narrative together on the fly. "The Vickies. From my knowledge while in the Navy, there were reports of the VIC deploying hyper-advanced, surgical automatons. They deployed elite combat drones and highly lethal Simulacrum strike teams. Both sides utilize robots and Simulacrums, sure, but since the VIC isn't profit-driven and actually advances its technology, there is a technological edge that makes their individual units incredibly tough to crack. A single VIC heavy unit can slaughter a regular human infantry platoon."
"Flesh against superior steel," Octavia noted clinically. "A battle of attrition that the flesh eventually loses."
"Exactly," Mark nodded. "The IUC relies heavily on human armies and corporate mercenaries to hold its ground. So, how does the IUC counter elite, unfeeling mechanized strike teams without entirely bankrupting their core worlds?"
"They don't build better machines," Lucius's voice chimed in, catching onto the thread. "They build better humans."
"Human experimentation," Titus let out a low whistle. "It's a classic. Every corrupt empire in every story eventually dips its hands into the genetic cookie jar."
"We'll call it the Obsidian Genesis Initiative," Mark declared, the name rolling off his tongue with ominous weight. "The OGI for short. A top-secret IUC military program designed to create an army of genetically enhanced super soldiers capable of tearing VIC combat droids and advanced Simulacrums apart with their bare hands."
"If it was an Imperial program, the civilians will ask why they've never heard of it," Valerius pointed out pragmatically.
"Because it was deeply illegal and morally bankrupt," Mark countered smoothly. "To ensure absolute psychological conditioning and prevent the subjects from having any lingering attachments to the civilian world, the IUC didn't use volunteer soldiers."
"They used orphans," Cassius finished, the sniper's voice chillingly quiet. "Nothing garners public sympathy faster than a stolen childhood."
"It's a brutal narrative, Commander," Severus noted.
"Yeah," Mark said, his jaw tightening as he bounded over a ten-foot ravine. "The story goes like this: You were all surviving orphans pulled from border-world colonies that the VIC had decimated. The IUC took you in, stripped you of your names, and subjected you to years of agonizing biological augmentations, gene-weaving, and hypno-indoctrination. There used to be hundreds of you."
"What happened to the rest?" Octavia asked, fully invested in the lore they were weaving.
"Died at the hands of the Vickies," Mark replied grimly. "The IUC treated you like expendable assets, throwing you into the meat grinder. You were sent on impossible suicide missions, dropped behind enemy lines to sabotage factory worlds and break sieges against elite mechanized units that regular infantry couldn't handle. You won their battles, but the attrition rate was catastrophic. Until just a handful of you remained, and times had calmed."
"A failed investment," Valerius surmised, understanding the ruthless corporate logic of the IUC perfectly. "When the numbers dwindled, and the aggression of the VIC faded, the program was no longer cost-effective to maintain."
"Exactly," Mark nodded. "The Empire saw the remaining elites as a failure. You were too expensive to maintain, too dangerous to integrate into regular society, and too valuable to simply execute. So, they swept the Obsidian Genesis Initiative under the rug and threw the surviving super soldiers into deep cryo-sleep, locking you away in a black-site vault to be forgotten."
"And where do you fit into all of this, Commander?" Aurelia asked.
"I was your commanding officer," Mark said, the lie fitting perfectly with his current role. "I was one of the first successful subjects. But the hypno-indoctrination didn't fully take hold of me. I retained my humanity. When I realized they were going to put you all on ice, I broke out. I escaped the IUC's grasp, forged a new identity for myself as 'Mark Shephard', and spent years operating in the shadows, using my skills to amass resources."
Mark leaped over a massive, moss-covered log, his red and black armor gleaming in the dappled sunlight. "By some miracle, I tracked down the black-site facility, broke in, rescued my remaining brothers and sisters, and loaded your cryo-pods onto the Shepherd. That's why I was so desperate to find a planet outside of corporate control and completely off the grid of Empire space. I was looking for a sanctuary. A place where my people would no longer be hunted by the IUC or the VIC, where you could finally wake up and live your lives in peace."
"It frames us as victims of the same Imperial machine that the refugees are fleeing," Lucius noted, his tactical mind analyzing the psychological impact. "It instantly aligns our motivations with theirs. We aren't their corporate overlords, but their fellow survivors."
"It also explains why we're armed to the teeth and why we follow your orders with absolute loyalty," Valerius added. "You aren't just a captain. You are our savior. Our older brother."
"But what about the Peacekeepers?" Cassius asked over the link. "The seventy infantrymen. They don't look like genetically modified giants."
"They are the support staff," Mark replied without missing a beat. "Sympathetic IUC scientists, mechanics, and loyalist infantry who helped me orchestrate the breakout. They chose to abandon their lives in the Empire to help us escape, acting as our handlers and our vanguard."
"It's a masterpiece of a myth, Commander," Valerius said, genuine respect bleeding into his deep voice. "It gives us humanity."
"And a purpose," Mark added. "And the best part is the pivot. The civilians will wonder why, if we just wanted to live in peace, we are suddenly acting like a standing army. The answer is House Volanti. After the ambush we suffered at their hands on our way to Aurelius, we realized that running was not going to be an option. The ambush proved that living peacefully, even in unconquered space, is nothing but a naive dream of a desperate group. If we want peace, we have to build a fortress... and we have to be ready to bleed for it."
"Copy that, Commander," Cassius confirmed. "We will disseminate the foundational elements to the Peacekeepers to ensure story continuity."
A few moments later, the dense tree line began to thin, the shadows giving way to the bright, bleeding light of the three setting red suns.
Mark, Valerius, Titus, and Octavia burst through the final line of foliage and came to a dead halt at the edge of the clearing.
The transformation that had occurred over the last hour was absolutely staggering.
When Mark had left, the area had been a chaotic, muddy crash site filled with weeping refugees. Now, it looked like the booming epicenter of a nascent civilization.
Hovering ten feet above the dark, compacted soil on thick, interlocking steel-composite grid frames were five fully constructed modular homes. They were perfectly aligned, creating the very first street of their new city. The sheer speed of the three 3x3-meter nanoprinters was terrifying to behold. Even from a distance, Mark could see the blinding white flashes of the machines effortlessly extruding new eight-inch-thick wall modules.
The entire camp was working in unified harmony. The Spider-drones darted through the air while carrying heavy roof panels. The Peacekeepers were seamlessly integrated into the civilian workforce, operating pneumatic sealers and guiding Kenjiro's towering industrial loader mech as it drove foundation pylons deep into the earth.
Beneath the elevated homes, in the cool shade provided by the massive steel frames, children were running and playing in the purple grass, their laughter echoing clearly across the basin. Sister Elara had set up a fully functional triage and rationing center near the Shepherd, dispensing food and water to the sweating, smiling workers. Life was already progressing.
"I guess we won't have to worry about dissent anymore," Valerius observed quietly, his visor panning across the scene. "They are already building."
"Then let's go help them," Mark said, a genuine smile touching his lips.
By the time nightfall finally claimed the Trisolis Rubrae System eight hours later, the landscape of the clearing had been entirely rewritten.
However, "night" on this alien world was not the pitch-black, suffocating void they had expected. Because the system was a trinary star system, the ambient light was entirely different. Even after the three ruby suns dipped below the towering western mountain range, the sky transitioned into a deep, luminous twilight blue. The planet's two massive, pale moons rose high above the canopy, acting as brilliant orbital mirrors that bathed the entire basin in a soft, silvery glow. Visibility was surprisingly high, casting long, ethereal shadows across the purple grass.
In that silvery light, the sheer scale of their labor was breathtaking.
Seventy-five elevated modular homes now stood in perfect, symmetrical rows, forming a massive, interlocking grid. The raised foundations created a sprawling network of covered walkways beneath the houses, protecting the ground from potential flooding and offering shaded avenues for the colonists to navigate. The identical structures, complete with polarized glass windows and heavily insulated walls, looked like an impenetrable frontier outpost hovering above the dirt.
Outside, the camp was illuminated by a network of heavy-duty, portable floodlights and makeshift light posts that had been wired to the Shepherd's reactor. Thick, heavily insulated power cables snaked through the purple grass, connecting the frigate's reactor directly to the grid of the seventy-five new homes, pumping steady electricity into the modules. It was an effective, temporary fix. Once the immediate housing situation was covered, Mark fully planned on creating a dedicated, high-yield power generation point to free up the ship.
The heavy thud of the nanoprinters had finally ceased to allow the machines to cool, but the camp was still buzzing with activity.
With roughly nine hundred and thirty people to shelter, the logistics were tight, but meticulously organized. The camp's demographics had settled into five distinct groups.
About five hundred of the survivors were families, mothers, fathers, and children who had fled corporate debt and poverty.
Another hundred and ninety were the hardened Vanguard mercenaries under Juan's command.
Then there was Mark's own faction of eighty: the seventy Peacekeepers, the seven Elite Guards, and Mark, Kenjiro, and Lyra.
Fifty-five of the refugees were the camp's most vulnerable: fifty orphans watched over by their dedicated caretakers, Sister Elara, Father Michael, and three other nuns.
The remaining hundred and five colonists were simply individuals, unattached mechanics, teachers, engineers, laborers, and dreamers looking for a better life.
The civilian captains and the Peacekeeper squad leaders had efficiently coordinated the sleeping arrangements. The orphans and their caretakers had all opted to return to the Shepherd, utilizing the newly constructed, heavy-duty steel staircase that Kenjiro and the Elites had bolted to the frigate's suspended cargo ramp.
The remaining colonists packed into the seventy-five modular homes. It was undeniably cramped, averaging about twelve people per two-to-three-bedroom module, but after 2 months of travel, being ambushed, and almost freezing or suffocating to death, the crowded warmth of a solid, electrically powered, insulated room felt like absolute luxury.
Around a massive, crackling bonfire built in the center of the newly formed "town square," a large crowd of mercenaries, freighter captains, and curious civilians had gathered. They were eating their hot MREs, passing canteens of purified water, and resting their aching muscles.
As Mark stepped into the flickering orange light of the bonfire, the low murmur of the exhausted crowd began to die down. The seven Elite Guards and a dozen heavily armed Peacekeepers formed a loose, protective semi-circle behind him, their sheer size and presence casting long shadows across the grass.
Mark looked over the battered, soot-stained faces of the people, of his people. He held up a hand, calling for silence.
"Before we speak of the future," Mark's voice rang out, deep and carrying a profound, anchoring weight, "I believe that it is crucial to honor the cost that allowed us to be here today."
The flickering firelight reflected in the eyes of the refugees as they stilled, the realization of what Mark was doing settling heavily over the square.
"We stand on the soil of Rubrae I because of the sacrifices of those who are not here to see it," Mark continued, his gaze sweeping over the Vanguard mercenaries and the civilian flight crews alike. "We lost good men and women in the freezing dark of the void. We lost fierce defenders when House Volanti ambushed our fleet, tearing our ships apart. And today, we lost the brave crew of the Horizon, who rode a dying ship into a mountain so that the rest of us could have a chance to build."
Mark paused, letting the silence stretch out, acknowledging the empty spaces in the crowd where friends, spouses, and comrades should have been standing.
"Three hundred and fifty-four people," Mark stated, his voice tightening with a fierce, quiet grief. "Three hundred and fifty-four souls who bled for this dirt. We will not forget them. We will not let their sacrifice be a footnote in our history. They bought us this sanctuary with their lives, and to respect the dead, I ask that we take a moment of silence for our fallen."
The camp bowed its head. Hardened mercenaries squeezed their eyes shut. Mothers held their children tight. For a long, unbroken minute, the only sound in the entire basin was the crackle of the bonfire and the gentle rustling of the alien leaves in the night wind. The vigil was a collective release of the terror and grief they had all been bottling up for weeks.
"May their souls find peace," Mark finally whispered, breaking the silence.
"May their souls find peace," the crowd echoed back softly.
Mark let out a slow breath, his expression hardening. He gestured to the towering, silent forms of Valerius, Titus, Octavia, and the other Elites standing behind him.
"Many of you have been asking where these soldiers came from," Mark addressed the crowd, meeting their curious, lingering gazes. "You want to know why they are so big, why they are so armed, and why I kept them hidden. The truth is, I hid them because the IUC wants them dead."
With a low, somber tone, Mark spun the tale of the Obsidian Genesis Initiative. He told them about the VIC's highly lethal mechanized strike forces and the IUC's desperate, morally bankrupt human experimentation to counter them. He spoke of stolen childhoods, agonizing genetic augmentations, and the brutal suicide missions that had whittled hundreds of heroes down to a mere handful.
He pitched it perfectly, injecting his own genuine, burning hatred for the Empire's corporate ruthlessness into the fiction. He described the betrayal of the cryo-vault, his own escape as Mark Shephard, and the desperate, years-long shadow war to find his brothers and sisters and bring them to a world where they wouldn't be used as disposable weapons against superior alien steel.
"We didn't want to fight anymore," Mark said, his voice raw with conviction. "We just wanted a patch of dirt where the Empire couldn't find us. Where my people could wake up and learn how to be human again. But House Volanti took that choice away from us. When they ambushed our fleet, when they slaughtered three hundred and fifty-four of our people, they reminded us of a harsh truth."
Mark looked back at the towering, silent forms of his Elite Guards. "Living peacefully in this universe is a naive dream of a desperate group. There are wolves in this universe, and they will always come for the sheep. So, we are going to build a fortress. And my brothers and sisters... the Peacekeepers, the Elites... they will be the wall that stands between you and the dark."
The silence that followed was profound.
The emotional weight of the vigil, immediately followed by the tragic story of the OGI, hit the exhausted refugees right where it hurt. The civilians, already traumatized and mourning their own dead, looked at the towering, heavily armored super soldiers not with fear, but with deep, resonant empathy. They saw kindred spirits, victims of the same crushing Imperial machine that had forced them to flee into the uncharted void.
A few feet away, Juan and his surviving mercenaries sat on crates of ammunition. These were hardened men and women who had bled for corporate syndicates and seen the dark underbelly of the IUC firsthand. They knew exactly how the Empire chewed up soldiers and spat out the bones.
Juan stood up slowly, holding his canteen. He looked directly at Valerius, his eyes filled with absolute, professional respect. The mercenary commander raised his canteen in a silent toast, and a dozen heavily scarred fighters followed suit, giving firm, solemn nods of solidarity to the augmented super soldiers.
The tension was utterly broken. The myth had become reality, cemented by the blood of the fallen.
As the camp began to settle in for the night, the sheer momentum of their survival refused to completely halt. While the vast majority of the colonists retreated into the warm, crowded modules to sleep, a dedicated night shift formed.
A group of about fifty civilian volunteers, mostly mechanics, structural engineers, and laborers who were running on pure adrenaline, stepped forward. They were joined by the entire contingent of seventy Peacekeeper Infantrymen, who had spent the daylight hours acting strictly as perimeter lookouts and were completely fresh for physical labor.
They intended to work through the night, preparing the next staging area and leveling more dirt for the morning's printing cycle.
Mark watched from the deep shadows of the Shepherd's ruined nose as the night shift organized under the harsh glare of the floodlights. He checked the time on his internal HUD. It was past midnight.
He turned away from the light, slipping quietly into the deep, absolute shadows of the dense alien tree line bordering the southern edge of the clearing. He walked until the noise of the camp faded into a dull hum, and the canopy completely blocked out the silvery light of the twin moons.
He was entirely alone.
Mark closed his eyes and mentally accessed his spatial inventory. He needed raw materials to keep the printers fed for a long time of continuous construction, and he couldn't afford to have them bottlenecked by supply shortages.
With a thought, Mark summoned a massive deposit.
The air in front of him violently tore open, and a localized gravitational shockwave rippled through the trees. Two hundred perfectly organized, 2x2-meter cubes of raw industrial materials materialized out of thin air. Stacked two layers high and occupying a precise twenty-by-twenty-meter footprint, the mass of the shipment of solid blocks of composite alloys, refined copper, thermal insulation, and base polymers, slammed into the alien dirt with a deafening, earth-shaking THOOM.
The ground physically shuddered beneath Mark's boots, causing him to smile grimly. That would keep the printers fed. But the three 3x3-meter machines weren't enough. Not for what he had planned.
Mark turned and jogged back toward the Shepherd, bypassing the illuminated work zones. He went up the steel staircase to the cargo bay and moved deep into the brightly lit, tilted hold.
Resting in the darkest, untouched corners of the hold were some of his most prized possessions: the massive 8x8-meter and the god-like 25x25-meter nanoprinters.
Moving these behemoths conventionally would require disassembly that could possibly cause critical damage to their components.
But Mark didn't need a mech to move them.
He walked up to the 8x8-meter machine, placed his armored hand against its cold, metallic surface, and simply thought the word Store. The massive machine instantly vanished into his inventory. He walked over to the gargantuan 25x25-meter printer, which was about the size of a small warehouse, and repeated the process.
With his inventory loaded, Mark exited the Shepherd and walked roughly half a mile east, far outside the reach of the camp's floodlights and well beyond the perimeter the Peacekeepers were currently patrolling.
He found a wide, naturally flat expanse of purple grass bathed only in the pale light of the moons and summoned the two massive printers. The machines materialized, dropping into the dirt with a heavy impact.
Mark stood back, his hands on his hips, analyzing the massive, curvilinear shapes of the printers. They looked like massive octagons with smoothed, curving edges, designed perfectly to distribute thermal energy. But they had one major flaw: they were entirely static. If Mark wanted to build an actual city, he couldn't have Kenjiro dragging these behemoths across the dirt with a loader mech every time they needed to change grids. They needed to be mobile.
Mark started the feeding process with materials he had summoned from his inventory, a dark red glow emanating from them as materials began to be sucked into it. After a while of feeding them, he pinged his Elite Guards, and within minutes, Valerius, Titus, Octavia, Cassius, Lucius, Aurelia, and Severus emerged silently from the tree line, followed closely by twenty blue-glowing spider-drones summoned by Marcos.
"What's the play, Commander?" Titus asked, staring up at the 25-meter behemoth.
"We're going to make these things have the ability to move," Mark said.
Mark walked over to the newly summoned 8x8-meter printer, keyed the external console, and input a highly specific, custom schematic he and Marcos had drafted when they were still on Mechanicus.
He ordered the printer to fabricate a set of massive, heavy-duty mobility rigs composed of advanced, airless wheels featuring a shock-absorbing honeycomb structure designed to handle extreme weight over uneven terrain, powered by independent, high-torque hydraulic drive motors.
Crucially, Mark also programmed the fabrication of four massive balancing arms, hydraulic outriggers akin to the stabilizing legs used on deep-core mining rigs and crane trucks. These arms would deploy outward and bite deep into the dirt, lifting the printers slightly off their wheels to provide an absolutely level, unshakable foundation during the delicate molecular printing process, preventing the top-heavy machines from tipping over.
The 8x8 printer roared to life, a blinding flash of white light illuminating the dark clearing.
It took a total of two hours for the machine to fabricate the massive, scaled-up wheel sets and hydraulic outriggers required to support the sheer mass of the 25x25-meter behemoth.
Watching the printers at work amazed the seven Elite Guards whose universes never possessed such technology. These machines didn't use enclosed chambers or sealed vats. They operated more like localized dimensional portals. Raw materials were fed directly into the rear of the curvo-circular chassis. Once processed on a molecular level, the fully formed structures smoothly extruded out of the flat, glowing forward plane. To support the immense weight of the fabrications, an integrated, heavy-duty conveyor belt structure extended from the machine's base, catching the manufactured components and smoothly rolling them forward as they materialized.
Under the silvery moonlight, Mark and the seven Elite Guards essentially functioned as human heavy-lifters. Waiting at the end of the printer's conveyor belt, they used their raw, augmented strength, combined with the tether assistance of the twenty spider-drones, to grip the massive, multi-ton airless wheels and thick hydraulic arms the moment they rolled off the line, hauling the steel down into the purple grass.
They crawled beneath the unpowered 25-meter printer, their armor scraping against the alien dirt. For three grueling hours, they physically bolted, welded, and integrated the mobility rigs to the reinforced undercarriage of the colossal machine. They worked in perfect, silent coordination, moving tons of steel by hand.
When the final bolt was torqued, Mark crawled out from under the machine, wiping grease from his visor. He pulled a localized control tablet from his tactical belt and synced it to the newly installed drive motors.
Mark thumbed the joystick.
With a deep, vibrating hum, the massive airless wheels engaged. The 25x25-meter printer, a building-sized piece of hyper-advanced alien technology, slowly rolled forward across the grass, responding perfectly to his remote commands. Mark guided the behemoth to the center of the perfectly flat clearing, then pressed the secondary deployment toggle.
The four massive hydraulic outriggers swung outward from the chassis. With a hiss, the thick steel feet slammed down into the purple grass, biting deep into the dirt and lifting the entire multi-ton printer a few inches off its wheels, locking it into a perfectly stable, unshakeable firing position.
"Beautiful," Mark breathed, watching the colossal machine settle.
He turned back to the 8x8 printer. They had the rest of the night ahead of them. They needed to feed the massive 25-meter printer its first diet of raw materials, and they needed to print and assemble the exact same mobility rigs for the 8x8-meter printer and the three 3x3-meter printers back at camp, a much faster job given the pieces were smaller and easier to manipulate.
---
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