Because there’s no way off this planet.
And now that the adrenaline’s fading, the implications settle like ash in my bones.
I’m alone.
No Trident backup. No relay to the Coalition. No distress signal strong enough to punch through time and space. I’m a soldier stranded in history, surrounded by people who wouldn’t understand a damn word of my native tongue even if I carved it into their foreheads.
“Rychne,” I mutter to the field, to the sky, to the unlistening ghosts of my past. “You better figure something out. Fast.”
Then I fall onto my back, staring up at the clouds rolling in like bruises across the heavens.
And for the first time in years, I think I might actually be afraid.
The first words out of my mouth as Richard—the fabricated human disguise stitched together by nanotech and guesswork—are not exactly inspiring.
“Greetings, fellow... Earthling. I too enjoy breathing air and engaging in recreational... lawncare.”
I scowl. The voice modulation still feels too high, nasally and clipped. Not at all like the basso snarl I’m used to. It sounds like someone stuffed gravel into a suit and told it to sell insurance.
I try again, pacing in a slow circle around the ruin of my ship.
“Hello. I am Richard. I am a tax person. I collect, uh, numbers. From humans. For the IRS.”
“No.”
That sounds like an admission of guilt. Probably the sort of thing that gets you locked in one of those rectangular rolling cages they call cars and driven off to a penal colony or strip mall.
I huff, frustrated, and adjust the pitch on my vocalizer. A subtle shift this time, lower, raspier. Less alien-trying-too-hard-to-be-friend and more man-who-would-spend-silent-hours-in-a-hardware-store-aisle.
“Hello,” I repeat, cautiously. “I am a person. A normal one. I pay bills and consume bread.”
Better. Not great. But passable.
I pull up the translation matrix on my compad and scroll through local speech samples collected from unsecured Wi-Fi signals in the area. So much slang. So many idioms. I cross-reference a phrase that appears frequently—“don’t @ me, bro”—and find myself utterly baffled. Apparently, direct confrontation involves invoking a symbolic ‘at’ sign, which holds social weight among their peer groups?
No.
I’ll skip that one.
Behind me, the wreck hisses as a final gout of coolant spews from a ruptured coil and evaporates into the sun.
I’ve already hidden the worst of it—dragged debris into a nearby collapsed barn at the edge of a weed-choked clearing. The structure’s rotting timbers barely held up under the load of a starfighter’s fractured remains, but the darkness inside swallows the reflective hull plating well enough. Loose boards, a busted combine harvester, and piles of rusted tools make for excellent camouflage. Primitive, but functional.
The few functioning sensor beacons I salvaged are now repurposed—mounted on rake handles, wedged into tractor axles, disguised beneath old oil cans and corroded paint buckets. They'll trigger a silent alert if anyone stumbles too close to the barn. If someonedoesfind it...
Well.
I’ve still got two plasma slugs left.
I wipe grime from my brow and stagger upright. The suit itches. Not literally—my body is still red and scaled beneath this human projection—but mentally. It’s a bad fit. I feel compacted, like I’ve been folded into myself. The joints don’t move right. The stride’s off. I’ve adjusted it four times, and I still walk like a malfunctioning exosuit.
I start down the path toward the town I glimpsed earlier.
Each step is a throb of pain. My burned arm is wrapped tightly in synthwrap beneath the illusion. From the outside, I appear perfectly fine—just a slightly disheveled man in dark pants, boots, and a sweat-stained t-shirt. But inside? I’m boiling.
The air smells...wild. Fresh-cut grass. Diesel. A hint of old manure. There are birds singing again, infuriatingly cheerful, flitting from treetop to power line. I see squirrels—actual squirrels—chasing each other like idiots through the underbrush. No thermal tags, no microchips. Just raw, unfiltered wildlife.
The absurdity of it all prickles under my skin.
