We’re all running on borrowed time. Our bodies just refuse to accept it.
Reapers prowl the battlefield in a daze. Saws glinting as some try to remove their teammates from the smoking shells of their armour. Others just staring off into the distance, like there’s an answer out there somewhere.
There’s a commotion beyond the edge of the concrete runway. I frown and scrape off the ledge I’m sitting on, crunch across the spent ammo and broken ordnance. A massive Reaper in armour is stumbling around a muddy clearing piled with the dead. Shovel-like hands twitching by his sides. He’s got post-war cravings. He – or his stormtech – doesn’t want to let the adrenaline high go, desperate to find a way to reclaim it. It’s a feeling I know very well.
Out of nowhere, the Reaper turns and smashes a fellow Reaper across the head. His neck bends at an unnatural angle as he crashes down, dead before he splashes across the mud. My mouth goes dry as he kills another. And another. A Drop Trooper puts up a good fight, but the Reaper knocks him to the mud and kicks him in the side of the head until he stops moving.
He’s massacring his own side.
As one, Ghost and a dozen other Reapers run down the muddy slope towards him. When we get closer, my heart drops and lands soggily at the bottom of my guts.
It’s Cable.
Ratchet tries to calm him. But the man who carried that refugee girl for twenty kilometres slams his fist into Ratchet’s chest, throwing him back into the mud. Ratchet’s head cracks against a stone. Gasps and yells ripple along the crowd. Cable reaches down and grabs Ratchet by the neck and lifts him back up. Ratchet’s legs thrashing as Cable tries to choke the life out of him.
He freezes.
Because Alcatraz has a pistol pressed up against his forehead.
The sticky circuitry inside Cable reconfigures. Reassesses the threat to his life against the lure of the high. I see his eyes uncloud. He drops Ratchet to the ground.
‘You’re my brother,’ Alcatraz shouts into the pouring rain. More Reapers are gathering. Lightning glints off their armour and faceplates. ‘But I will not let you do this. I won’t let you kill us. I won’t let you betray yourself.’
I swallow. We swore we’d protect each other from whatever the planet threw at us.
I never thought that could include each other.
‘Don’t make me do it, Cable,’ Alcatraz begs. His trigger-hand shakes. ‘Please. Don’t do it.’
Horror curdles over Cable’s face as the realisation hammers home. He sees the broken bodies of the men he called brothers. Only hours ago, he fought with them. Now he looks down at the dripping blood coating his hands, feels the stormtech swirling in his system, hungry for more. The same stormtech swirling inside me, inside all of us.
He reaches out to Ratchet. Ratchet scuttles backwards, his chest heaving, his throat red and eyes bloodshot. Cable freezes. His hand drops. Ratchet watches it drop and looks up at his friend with fear and trepidation. Cable blinks long and hard, delaying reality for one more second. Stares at the gun against his head.
All he wanted to do was find a home and a family after his had been destroyed. A place he could feel at peace in his heart. Feel safe.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ Cable whispers.
‘I know,’ Alcatraz says.
‘I never wanted to. I never … I couldn’t … I don’t—’
‘I know.’
‘Tell them for me. Tell them I fought to the end.’
‘I will,’ Alcatraz says. A tear trickles down his cheek. ‘You’re my brother, always. To dirt and dust.’
‘To dust and dirt,’ Cable repeats. He steps back. Watching with big, gentle eyes, the gathered Reapers around him. Knowing they can’t unsee what he’s done. That he can’t undo what’s been done. Instead he crosses his arms in the Reaper salute and takes a long look at the fireteam he fought and bled and laughed with. He turns and walks away.
I try to follow him, but Alcatraz and Myra grab me. ‘Let me go!’ I roar.
‘It’s what he wants,’ Alcatraz whispers.
‘It’s not right,’ I say. Alcatraz yanks me back. ‘It’s not right.’
‘His last choice, Vakov. Let him have it.’
Tears fog my eyes as Cable sinks to his knees in the middle of the field, watched by thousands of Reapers. Tears trickle down his cheeks, drip down his chin. He tilts his face up to the howling dark, into the pouring rain of his homeplanet. As if searching for an exit, an escape in the cloudy sky somewhere.
When he doesn’t find one, my friend sticks his service pistol under his chin and pulls the trigger.
We bury Cable by the cliffs facing the mountain valley, sloping down to curving hills and sweeping grasslands. We bury him in his armour, next to the Reapers he killed. We agree not to remember him in his final moments, but to honour his courage and sacrifice. He was a Reaper until the very end.
We’ve all seen the alien monstrosity fused for ever into our bodies for what it really is. The stormtech gives us wings, but takes the sky away. It’ll help us survive this war, but at what cost? Will I even recognise myself at the end? The things we’ve done, the things we’re going to have to do.
Harmony got the soldiers they wanted. In exchange, we’re going to be fighting an unending war of our own. Hell of a price to pay.
I’m sitting by the edge of the cliff with the rest of Ghost. Dawn’s beginning to claw its way across the sky. Shavings of light slip over the windswept mountains and rocky hills.
‘I wish he could have seen this,’ Myra says.
Tears bead in Ratchet’s eyes. ‘If I hadn’t backed away, if I told him it was okay, maybe he’d—’
‘No. No,’ I tell him. ‘This isn’t on you. It’s on them. It’s on this stuff inside us.’
‘We’ve got a choice, don’t we? All of us.’
