‘Nothing makes you feel worse than failing a child,’ Alcatraz says as evac airships lift off from various strongpoints, down into the bodies and destruction.
I’m barely listening. There’s another mutilated Reaper nailed to a pole in the centre of an ash-caked courtyard. Only, this one’s arm is jutting outwards, pointing east.
Directions.
The skull and lightning bolts on his chest indicate he’s part of the Space Battalion: Reapers who’ve been in orbital combat and boarded enemy spacecraft. His name is Paz Viska. I’ve never spoken to him, but I know he’s been missing for weeks. I get the feeling I’m about to find out why.
We go east to another tortured Reaper. And another. And another. Each one with an arm strung up and nailed to the post to point in the same direction. Until we reach a bombed-out garrison holding a rusted cage dangling from the ceiling. Inside are Reapers, so mangled they’re barely recognisable. And with it is a video transmission; a Harvester with a scrambled voice explaining that since we’ve been scavenging their weapons and tech to learn their strategies, so in turn they’re going to take the one thing we have that they don’t.
Stormtech.
There’s video footage of them vivisecting Reapers and subjecting them to horrific experiments. Learning how it alters and strengthens our biology for the battlefield. Testing how much strain our bodies can take. How the stormtech responds to torture. How Reapers respond to unimaginable pain and horror. Showing us how they’re going to keep capturing Reapers and pulling them apart for their little studies, including us.
Ratchet stumbles sideways and just gets his helmet off before he pukes all around his boots. I’m doing likewise, heaving next to him.
‘What they were doing to him,’ Ratchet half-growls, half sobs.
‘I know, man,’ I say.
‘We’re in a nightmare,’ Cable says from behind us.
It’s more than that. This is horror beyond everything else. This is the squirming, evil rot hiding beneath the skin of civilisation, devouring and consuming everything good and right that’s ever happened in the universe.
Ratchet turns to me. ‘Don’t ever let that happen to me,’ he pants, his bloodshot eyes darting back and forth.
I squeeze his shoulder. ‘I’ll kill them all before I let them touch you. I swear.’
‘No matter what,’ Ratchet says.
‘No matter what.’ Cable helps me to my feet while Myra and Alcatraz help Ratchet.
‘Even if you have to put a bullet in my brain, you don’t let them take me,’ Ratchet says, putting his helmet back on.
Alcatraz gets right up in Ratchet’s face, their visors knocking together. ‘Don’t you ever say that again.’
‘I’ll die before I end up like that,’ Ratchet snarls back.
‘We start thinking like that, we’re already dead. They’ve already won.’ He taps his commslink. ‘Why do you think they sent this transmission to every Reaper and Harmony outpost on the planet? They want us to give up. They want us so scared we forget to rely on each other. We don’t let this trip us up. We use it. We turn it against them.’ He looks at each of us in turn. ‘You hear me?’
That’s the thing about war. It’s a hurricane of chaos. It’s volatile. With every operation, we don’t know what horrors we’re going to find or who’s going to make it out alive again.
In this hellscape of horrors, this overwhelming darkness, there’s only one thing anchoring you to sanity. The men and women standing by your side, facing it with you. More than that, we’re each other’s hope of surviving. Harvest knows that. So they try to go for the heart.
One by one, we nod an affirmative to Alcatraz’s question, giving the Reaper gesture with a sincerity that didn’t previously exist, and we start to free the murdered Reapers.
When we’re not in the field, we’re training for it in the state-of-the-art gravity gymnasium and the training VR, pushing our stormtech-fused bodies as hard as we can. First we weight-train in gravity chambers, then with hand-to-hand combat, and finally the worst part: pushing our metabolisms and stamina with a test of endurance, submerging ourselves in pools of icy water. Everyone else does the required ninety seconds, but Ratchet bets he can beat me by a full minute. I’m stupid enough to take him up on it. Six minutes later, I drag myself shivering from the tank while the rest of the fireteam laughs. Ratchet grins at me through the glass and lasts eight and a half minutes, just to prove he can.
His pale body is almost purple with cold when he finally climbs out, grinning. ‘What’s the matter, Fukasawa? Can’t handle a bit of chill?’
‘How the hell can you do that?’ I manage through still-chattering teeth.
‘He was raised by wolves,’ Myra calls.
When Ratchet turns his back on me, I shove him into the tank. He splutters and thrashes while the rest of the fireteam laughs.
‘He’s going to get you back for that,’ Alcatraz says.
‘He can try,’ I say.
Alcatraz shakes his head. ‘Oh, he will.’
I turn to see Ratchet launching himself out of the pool. He slams me to the ground and starts punching with frozen fists. My fireteam cheers as I try to wrestle him into a lock. He punches me in the armpit, reaches around to grab a fistful of my hair. My scalp burns as he jerks my head back, digging his knee into the base of my spine, his fingertips scrabbling and clawing at my eyes, going for the kill.
I’ve got no reservations about doing the same. Teeth gritted, I slam the back of my head into his nose. He gasps as I drive my elbow into his stomach, right below his ribs. His grip weakens and I tear free, flip myself over, chopping a strike at his throat to daze him as I wrap my arms around his body, crushing his arms
