Prologue - Marlow
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you walked into a bar on a space ark drifting somewhere between the Moon and Mars, and at one of the tables sat a war veteran with a bottle older than half the ship?
The bar swayed gently with the whole structure. Beyond the panoramic viewport there was nothing but black emptiness and tiny points of light — ships docking with the ring. Above the counter, a tired neon sign flickered, crackling softly as if it were arguing with its own existence. In the background, the air-conditioning hummed, and the low growl of the reactors could be felt more in your bones than heard with your ears.
Sit down.
Yeah, I’m talking to you.
Sit down and pour yourself something strong.
Name’s Marlow.
You don’t have to remember it.
Names don’t live long in this world... though mine somehow keeps dragging itself around.
The table cracked when he set the bottle down. Glass rang like an old funeral bell. Somewhere to the left, someone knocked over a metal stool, but nobody even turned around. They were all too tired or too drunk.
An old label. From before the corporate mergers. The fact that it survived at all was already a miracle.
Now listen carefully.
This story isn’t light.
And it begins where most people never want to end up —
in the mines, where a man breathes dust and dies in silence.
That’s where I met a boy named Kay.
Back then, I didn’t know that kid would one day be on the lips of half the system.
He looked ahead with a faint smile.
Before the world caught fire.
Before steel could become human.
Before the cosmos began to burn.
Because wherever metal meets blood, war is always born.
He lights a cigarette. The spark from the cheap lighter flashes in his eyes and in the metal of the bar. The smoke smells like burned cables.
See... people like to say the world broke yesterday.
No.
It had been breaking for a long time.
Quietly.
Like rust no one notices until the whole structure finally gives way.
Earth...
I say that word like the name of an old lover who later slid a knife between my ribs.
Everyone keeps saying it’s our cradle, our home.
But the truth is simpler.
Earth is a company now.
The whole planet is one giant corporation.
And you’re an employee.
Not a citizen.
An employee, with an ID in a database, a market value, and an apartment about the size of the place where you sometimes go to take a shit.
A window?
No.
A monitor with a view.
You want the ocean — you pay.
Mountains — you pay more.
The sky?
Premium package.
A laugh tears itself out of his throat.
Empty.
Your job is chosen by an algorithm.
AI looks at your genes, your family history, and decides whether you end up in an office... or in a mine.
If your health fails, the system writes you off as a cost.
You wake up.
You work.
You eat synthetic crap.
You go to sleep.
And the next day, you do it all again.
And the media?
The media are like a parrot.
They repeat whatever someone higher up feeds them.
All so you don’t look up at the sky...
at the ships leaving the planet.
Because everyone wants to escape.
The nearest escape is the Moon.
Heh.
The Moon...
It’s Earth.
Just with less gravity and even less hope.
A cage with holes in the surface.
You work twelve hours in mines full of titanium, tritium, and other treasures the corporations gulp down like holy water.
You come back to the barracks like an old robot.
And lunar dust...
it doesn’t wash off in the shower.
It eats into your skin.
Into your lungs.
Into your sleep.
But there is one thing.
On the Moon, nobody asks who you used to be.
A prince.
A mechanic.
A bum.
Everyone is tired.
Everyone is lonely.
And everyone just wants to survive until the next shift.
The Moon is a filter.
It lets through only those who know how to survive...
or those whom war is going to need later.
That’s where people like Kay end up.
Young.
Stubborn.
Still believing hard work can change something.
He laughs dryly.
And then they discover the truth.
The Moon isn’t the beginning.
It’s a filter.
A machine that checks whether you’re hard enough.
Ash falls onto the tabletop.
And if you make it through the filter...
you end up in places like Delta.
Delta is a graveyard of colonial ships.
Great hulks that once helped colonize Mars.
The war came faster than the plans for using them.
So someone connected them into a ring.
And suddenly, it became a city.
A city of loners.
Former mech pilots.
Scrappers.
Engineers with opinions of their own.
Mothers with children.
People who had nowhere to return to and nowhere left to go.
On Delta, nobody asks where you’re from.
They only ask:
What can you do?
And if you say nothing...
they ask:
Do you want to learn?
Delta lives off what nobody else wants.
Scrap.
Smuggled equipment.
Repairs on ships no one else will touch.
People.
But like every graveyard...
Delta sometimes wakes things that should have stayed dead.
Marlow’s laugh is short and bitter.
Ever since Delta bought the luxury liner BUKSZPAN and became a trade buffer between Mars and Earth...
Earth looks at it like a junkyard where money can be made.
Mars looks at it like a place where trade can happen without the Federation.
And Delta looks at both of them like two drunk uncles fighting over an inheritance.
Mars...
Mars is another story.
Mars is not a colony.
Mars is home.
But before it became one...
it burned for five years.
Domes cracked like eggs when a fox gets into the coop.
Mechs melted red sand beneath their feet.
Children slept in oxygen masks.
Mars was a slaughterhouse.
And the worst part?
The war wasn’t started by soldiers.
It was started by accountants, the moment they learned the value of neuryte.
And accountants always count blood as a percentage of investment.
He leans over the table.
Dorian Valerius...
an engineer who saw that the domes weren’t cracking because of mistakes, but because of greed.
He united Mars.
And declared a monarchy, because someone had to hold that world together by the throat.
Mars survived.
New domes.
New cities.
A new generation.
Martians are no longer Earthborn.
They are Martians.
And they have their princess.
Layra.
Beautiful...
but built from an alloy harder than titanium.
Back then, nobody knew yet that her name would become a curse to half the Federation fleet.
Marlow leans closer. The neon cuts his face into strips of light and shadow.
Now Earth, the Moon, Delta, and Mars are staring at one another like a bunch of drunken brothers who forgot who started the fight.
And in the middle of all that...
there are people like Kay and Layra.
People who still believe you can live a normal life.
He smiles sadly.
You can’t.
In this world, nobody is normal.
We’re all broken.
Some of us just hide it better.
He raises the bottle.
The glass catches the starlight beyond the viewport.
Now listen carefully.
I’ll say this only once.
I was there.
I saw it...
when the cosmos began to burn.
When a metal demon with a human heart looked into the eyes of a Martian princess...
and that was when I understood one thing.
The war everyone remembers...
hadn’t even begun yet.
