Contact
CHAPTER 1 — CONTACT
CASSIAN’S POV
“If the mission sounds simple, it usually means someone forgot to mention the part where we die.”
— Rook
The creature sinks its teeth into Kane’s shoulder a fraction of a second before I blow its skull apart.
Blood splashes across my visor. Warm, thick, almost black beneath the green glow of the scanner.
“Bastard,” Kane growls.
I fire again. Not because I need to — half the creature’s head is already smeared across the wall behind it — but because I learned a long time ago that dead things have an annoying habit of not staying dead.
The electromagnetic round punches through its jaw. Blue light flashes through translucent flesh, and the nearly three-meter-long body convulses before collapsing on top of Kane.
“For fuck’s sake, Cap!” His voice detonates in my earpiece as he tries to shove the corpse off himself.
I look at the creature’s six limbs. Then at Kane.
“I think it likes you.”
“Then you take it.”
“Not my type.”
“Because it’s still breathing?”
“Was breathing.”
Rook laughs somewhere behind me. “Standards, Captain. Glad to see we still have some.”
Kane finally rolls the thing off him. Its body hits wet concrete with the heavy slap of a butchered carcass dropped onto a table. The smell reaches me a second later — blood, wet earth, and the sickly sweetness of degraded genetic tissue. My suit’s filtration system reacts instantly, but not fast enough. The metallic taste reaches my tongue.
I know it well. Everything’s blood smells almost the same once you cut it open.
Around us, the street settles back into its usual quiet — the kind that isn’t really quiet at all, just noise the ear has learned to stop counting. Somewhere behind the tree line, something small screams once and goes silent. A support beam three buildings down groans under its own weight, the sound rolling flat across the open square before it fades. None of us reacts. If it isn’t shooting at you, it doesn’t exist.
“Bite?” I ask.
Kane rotates his shoulder. The black armor is scratched down to the ceramic layer, but it held.
“Didn’t penetrate.”
“Shame,” Rook says. “We could’ve voted on whether to amputate before or after dinner.”
“After,” Silas says. “I don’t like working on an empty stomach.”
Kane raises his middle finger. That tells me he’s fine.
I wipe my visor with the back of my glove. The blood smears into a dark film before the smart surface begins breaking it down chemically — organic molecules separating, shrinking into black filaments, vanishing toward the edge of the mask. Two seconds, and the visor turns clear again.
The ruins of the city stretch out in front of me. Or what’s left of it.
Towers rise toward the sky like broken ribs. Some are sheared clean in half. Others lean into one another and have remained that way, suspended in impossible balance, bound together by vines as thick as my arm. Blue light pulses through shattered windows — bioluminescence. Nothing good glows on its own outside the walls anymore.
The wind pushes ash down the boulevard. I hear it hiss over my armor and feel it strike my helmet in fine bursts. Beneath the gray layer lie the shells of old vehicles, bleached bones, and fragments of metal swallowed by vegetation decades ago.
Seventy kilometers behind us, people live beneath climate-controlled domes. The Medical Institute rebuilds organs in a matter of hours. Military Command can turn a building into a glowing stain from orbit. I’m carrying enough technology on my body to have once been worth more than an entire city.
And out here, beyond the walls, a plant can dissolve your hand if you touch it.
Nobody ever tells you that’s how progress ends up looking.
The line between the two worlds isn’t a wall so much as a decision — the moment Command stopped considering a stretch of ground worth holding. Everything past that line got left to itself, and the ground answered by growing teeth.
I raise my wrist. The black band activates before I touch it. I feel the faint vibration first, transmitted directly through the bone. Then a circle of light opens above my skin and expands into a three-dimensional map.
Five white dots. Us.
One red. The target.
DISTANCE: 2.7 KM SIGNATURE: CONFIRMED
The capsule. The reason five of Military Command’s most expensive soldiers have been sent into a red zone to recover a box no one thought we needed to know anything about.
Contents unknown. Origin classified. Dimensions unknown. Absolute priority. Recover intact. That’s it. A joint order signed by Military Command and the Medical Institute — two organizations that can’t even agree on how much oxygen a citizen should be allowed to consume in a day.
But when it comes to this capsule, they are in perfect agreement.
That bothers me more than the mutants.
“Two point seven,” I say.
Rook whistles softly. “Wonderful. We go in, grab the mystery box, get out. Dinner by eight.”
“You said that three hours ago,” Silas reminds him.
“And I still believe it.”
“You also said the sector would be clean.”
“That was a professional estimate.”
Kane kicks the corpse beside him. “Professional, huh? Your estimate just tried to eat my shoulder.”
“It didn’t eat you.”
“It tried.”
“Can’t condemn an animal for poor taste.”
Two clicks sound in my earpiece. I stop. The others go silent instantly. I don’t have to ask.
Dax stands twenty meters ahead of us, nearly invisible beside the rusted shell of a civilian transport. Two fingers raised.
Movement.
The humor disappears — that’s what I like about them. They can joke about amputating one of us, and a second later, we become a single weapon.
I close my fist. That’s all.
Rook vanishes to the right. Silas holds center. Kane raises his assault cannon and takes the left flank. Dax disappears into the ruins before I even see him move.
I advance. I don’t need to tell them anything. We stopped needing words years ago.
A shadow crosses the third floor of the building ahead. Too fast. Another. Then three.
My wrist band vibrates against the bone.
UNCATALOGUED BIOLOGICAL FORMS.
“Uncatalogued,” Rook says.
“I see it.”
“I like ‘uncatalogued.’”
“I know.”
“Means the Medical Institute made something else it doesn’t want to tell us about.”
Silas exhales. “Or nature did.”
Rook laughs. “Nature gave up on us a long time ago, Doc.”
Silas isn’t a doctor. Not anymore. But before the military turned him into one of us, he spent enough years inside Institute laboratories for the nickname to stick.
The shadow appears again. This time I see the limbs. Four — no, six.
“Contact.”
The wall explodes. The creatures come through the concrete. The first one launches straight at me. I see the mouth before I see the eyes — two rows of teeth, gray skin stretched over a frame built too long, extra joints. The front limbs end in hooked claws that spark against the asphalt when it lands.
I fire. The weapon’s recoil slams into my shoulder. Familiar. Almost comforting.
The round punches into its chest. Flesh opens. A hot spray coats my forearm. The creature twists in midair, but another comes over it.
“Seven!” Dax shouts.
“Twelve,” Silas corrects him.
“Eighteen,” Rook says.
Kane laughs. “Anyone bidding higher?”
I look up. The building façade moves.
No. The creatures on it are moving. Dozens.
Thirty, maybe more, clinging to the vertical face of a structure that shouldn’t have held their weight, limbs finding purchase in cracks too thin to see from this distance. The whole wall looked like it was breathing.
“Thirty-one,” I say.
A beat of silence.
“He always has to win,” Rook mutters.
Then hell breaks loose.
***
Three minutes later, the boulevard is full of corpses.
An arm that doesn’t belong to any of us twitches beside my boot. I nudge it with the toe. The fingers curl.
“Still alive,” Silas says.
“Not for long.”
I step down. Bone gives under the reinforced sole with a wet crack.
Rook pulls his blade out of the last creature’s throat.
“Thirty-two.”
“Thirty-one,” I say.
“That one over there was breathing.”
“It was half dead.”
“There are no half-points in the rules.”
“There are no rules.”
He considers that.
“Then I have thirty-two.”
Dax lowers his weapon. Blood is running down the left side of his neck. I notice before he does.
“Dax.”
He touches his skin. Looks at the red on his glove.
“Not mine.”
Silas is already beside him.
“Let me decide that.”
“Romantic.”
“Shut up.”
He scans Dax’s neck. Green light passes over the skin.
“Superficial. Foreign blood.”
“See?” Dax says.
Silas runs the scanner over the spot once more.
“Still ugly.”
“You can’t fix that.”
Silas pats his cheek.
“Medicine has limits.”
I look at them. Just for a moment. Kane. Rook. Silas. Dax.
Eleven years together. Seventy-three operations. I’ve lost count of the wounds, the failed extractions, the nights spent with one of our blood on the others’ hands. Times one of us held an artery closed with his fingers while another kept firing. I pulled a bullet out of Rook’s lung with pliers. Kane carried me nearly eight kilometers with my femur jutting through my thigh. Silas brought Dax back twice — though Dax insists the second time doesn’t count, because he was only dead for forty-seven seconds.
To Command, we’re Special Unit Viper-5. To the Medical Institute, we’re five augmented organisms, obscenely expensive and valuable enough to be repaired. To the rest of the military, we’re the bastards they send where everyone else fails to come back.
And to me—
I stop the thought. Four men covered in blood, organs, and ash, joking in the middle of a street full of bodies. That’s all Captain Cassian Vale needs. He doesn’t have more complicated words for his men.
Twenty years ago, we probably would’ve been considered sick. Now we get medals.
I can’t remember the last time the death of someone I didn’t know made me feel anything. That should probably bother me.
It doesn’t.
There’s a version of the report I’ll file tonight that reads engagement resolved, zero unit casualties, minor equipment degradation. Command will read it in ten seconds and move on. It won’t say that Rook counts kills out loud because it’s the only way he keeps from thinking about anything else mid-fight. It won’t say Silas checks each of us twice as often as protocol requires, because somewhere in eleven years of patching us up, he stopped believing statistics applied to people he actually knew. The report never says any of that. It isn’t built to.
I raise my wrist.
2.1 KM.
“Move.”
We move.
The signal doesn’t stay that clean for long.
