The main doors rupture inward with a concussive blast that rattles my teeth.
Armored figures surge through the smoke.
Vakutan build—broad, scaled, imposing—but something about the way they move unsettles me. Their rifles come up in perfect unison, energy capacitors whining faintly before discharging in bright, lethal bursts.
The first shot takes a technician through the chest.
She collapses without a sound, her body hitting the floor with a wet, hollow thud that echoes in the cavernous atrium.
Screams erupt.
The air fills with the acrid scent of ionized plasma and the copper tang of blood.
“Run!” someone shouts beside me.
I move before I fully register that I’ve decided to.
Boots pound against metal steps as I take the side staircase two at a time, the railing vibrating beneath my grip. Below me, the atrium transforms into controlled slaughter, the armored troops advancing in disciplined lanes, their fire precise, economical, almost dispassionate.
This is not chaos.
This is choreography.
I reach the upper catwalk and drop low behind the railing, peering down through the gaps.
One of the soldiers turns slightly as he fires, and for a fraction of a second his helmet HUD display flickers.
The biometric tag hovering near his armor glitches.
Species: Vakutan?—
Null.
Encrypted string.
Then back again.
My breath catches.
Vakutan biometrics do not glitch.
Their neural signatures are as stable as their redundant organs.
Another soldier moves into view.
The same flicker.
Half a second.
Wrong.
“This isn’t them,” I whisper.
The containment field hum shifts pitch, dropping lower, then cutting out entirely, and the sudden absence of that constant vibration leaves my ears ringing.
Through the panoramic window, the shimmer vanishes.
Beyond it, figures surge forward from the wilderness—prisoners, driven and desperate.
