Diaz

Marching everywhere on foot was one of the things that had defined his military service. It was expected that soldiers wouldn't always have transport available. It kept them fit; got them used to carrying and wearing their gear too. It was also dreadfully dull. Diaz savored every boring minute of it, right up until he saw something walking towards them.

A cluster of men, women and a child wearing naught but skin or the odd set of stained scrubs. Every one of them had their heads shaved bald, unhealed surgical cuts running the perimeter of their skulls. They were thin, half-starved wretches who lacked the bloated mid-sections common to victims of actual starvation.

Diaz could tell something was wrong with them as soon as he saw them, maybe even sooner than that. He could almost feel it in the air like a fetid breeze that hadn't quite reached him yet. They were human but so much less too. Their presence cut right through his damaged suit and bored a hole in him that left him cold.

He stopped dead, releasing his grip on Nye to draw up his rifle. He struggled to raise the weapon in his remaining arm, not with intent to fire on them but to deter them. A show of force. The display was pathetic. His arm shook and trembled as though his rifle was some massive cannon, when it even bothered attempting to heed his commands at all.

Prior to fixing their gaze upon him, those people appeared to be nothing more than sleepwalkers out for a mindless stroll. Every organ on their face was red-rimmed and sunken; some were so entrenched that they seemed hollowed out or missing. As soon as one locked a glance on him, the rest lolled their heads on boneless necks. The sight made him want to curl up and die. He was fatally enraptured by them, like a rodent lured with poisoned food. They robbed the life from him as surely as watching his friends perish without reason in a pointless war long ago.

Princess wandered into his field of view and he couldn't breathe a word of warning to her. He couldn't speak at all. A chill creeping dread made his arm drop back to his side and his knees buckle. The world was such a distant, fading place. The strength to stand failed him but the impact of his fall never came— if it did, he never felt it.

All he felt was cold.

Something moved through his dimming vision as the closest of those people reached out to embrace Princess. He couldn't bring himself to care. Neither could she. She must have been as powerless as he was. In the face of apathy, everything was so pointless. The creeping cold made it all so bleak and nonsensically difficult. Why expend energy he didn't have?

Release us. We're dying. Join us. Make us whole again. Help us. End us. Save us.

Fingers trailing sparks drifted upwards against the encroaching darkness questing up to caress Princess. It was akin yet unlike bubbles rising through invisible cold water that drained around him. A far wave rocks him where he lies and soft burst flashes in a line. Another thump, closer and fainter. Princess's blank visor reached his uncaring mind. Her helmet was expressionless, her body still where it lay beside him.

Another flash. The spell loosens its grip. Pain races back first— never gone, only forgotten. Groggy reason stumbles in next.

His gun.

The enemy.

He clutches for the trigger, robbed of his strength he can't fire. A six-pound trigger was the heaviest thing in the world. The very tip of his finger couldn't manage the endeavor.

Princess's visor twitches, her neck convulsing like an electrified corpse. She writhes in agony, arching her back so fiercely it seemed she wanted to fold herself.

A wash of red flames, then Jhordan's hulking suit falls to the ground wreathed in smoldering fire that clings to the metal.

His rifle kicks in a hand he cannot feel.

The world gains substance around the edges. The stench of burning flesh and scorched metal reach him with the howls of women beyond agony. Whatever was killing them was something more than just pain.

Hand trembling, Diaz commands unfeeling fingers to drag his rifle closer, millimeter by millimeter. Otherworldly screaming tings the hall grey on black with colors he can't begin to understand. From where he lays, the void flies past him at uncountable speeds. His senses are cross-wired; he can feel the blackness, see the scent of hollow, and smell the sound of closing death. He squeezes the trigger again, grasping it tight around the taste of suffering.

The spell shatters.

Reality hit him like a railgun and sent his sight spinning while his senses fought for dominance. Something was burning, his suit was holed again and the smoke was inside. The stench too. Burning polymer and meat and hair.

He pulls his sputtering rifle in an arc, using his own waxing strength as much as the minuscule recoil to make a scythe of lead at ankle height. His enemies drop, splayed bolts of lightning and drunken ribbons of flame lashing forth to consume him.

The heat washes over him, jetting inside his armor wherever it finds an opening. Cinders of burnt hair light on his cheek and across his chest. He burns.

A flood of power courses through his suit, playing further havoc on his failing systems. Lightning courses through his veins, muscles seizing together against his will. Agony claims his mind, erasing every thought except two.

My gun.

The enemy.

His coiling muscles send another scythe of murderous lead across their ranks. They've fallen bodily into his fire sweep. The arcane assault falters in wake of a psychic barrage loosed from their deaths.

He felt the bullets ripping into him, bones shattered while flesh tore away and life-water wept free. These were nothing new to him, but the magnitude of it was overwhelming.

It forces his heart out of rhythm into massive pounding blows seconds apart. He was drowning in his own blood; his skin was a mass of exploding tearing heat.

It ended with some tiny scrap of light within him going out seven times over, a sensation for which he had only one reference. He was dying on the table for the first time all over again. And again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

His rifle clacked empty, locked in his perceived death throes. His suit shuddered, dying around him as shock and something more claimed him for those few seconds it took for the flames to truly catch. Small fires flared up, galvanizing him to action and were soon extinguished. Without them, he may have just lain there and succumbed. To what, he didn't know.

The religious might class this as a crisis of faith, but Diaz had never subscribed to any doctrine that had chanced his way. He'd known plenty who sworn by miracles and divine intervention for every string of luck they saw. Some soldiers even prayed in the middle of combat. He'd always been too busy staying alive to waste time on anything else. He was tempted to now, but he didn't know what to do. Was it just talking to the air?

"What the hell did they do to me?" He croaked, expelling wispy black smoke with every word. His mind and body now back in sync.

Whatever weapon had hit him got into his mind and drained his will to fight. It wasn't unlike getting hammered by artillery for weeks on end. You got tired. You got desperate. You wanted it to stop. But this had been worse. It made him want to give up. To go quietly for his final march in the dark. That wasn't something he could face unshaken.

"AI and Magic, of bleeding course. Just a milk run and here I am fighting the spookiest shite mankind ever made. Next, I bet I'll get rolled by a Brownie or a fecking Leprechaun!"

His suit gave no reply, save to twitch around him. He could feel its pain more so than usual as it shut down in a halting palsy.

"Come on buddy, stay with me!"

The fires were out, and he moved to kindle what little life his suit still had— that mystery something he had felt die with his enemies' husks. Could machines have that spark too? There had been times when he swore they might have now that he looked back. Could magic snuff those too? His suit gave no answers as his hands raced, its life fading as quickly as he could bolster it.

"Are they all like that? Dead on their feet. Is that the price of magic?"

He'd heard stories, the idle banter that filled any fighting force outside of active combat. Wizards who could kill hundreds with a word. Warlocks that brought monsters, like the Eldritch's Winged Screamers, into the world with a few funny gestures. He'd even heard of some grand master something or other who was supposed to bring the dead back to life. He always figured it was empty words, like the guys who claimed to know celebrities and supermodels between the sheets.

Now that he'd had a taste of witchfire, those stories took a whole new light. Were they all true? If even one in ten were, the galaxy was much larger than it seemed. Was this what it felt like when man first learned they could leave their own sun? That they could go forth into a galaxy so vast and strange.

So alien.

It was too much to focus on right now, but the thoughts blazed in his mind. He'd only heard about White Light from old action flicks and bot war propaganda before Nye had mentioned it. How much of it was real? How much of the galaxy had he actually seen? Maybe one percent of where humans had been before and none of where they haven't.

In the five years he'd been star-hopping with mercs, he was constantly learning that he knew sweet shite all about everything. Aliens were real and most were none too friendly. Magic was real and it was hidden away by people like the Client. Humanity had so many external threats, but they couldn't stop killing each other for scraps of their old glory. It was his home planet all over again on a galactic scale.

His suit came to, coughing alarms and flashing warnings to him. They had both tasted sorcery but the war plate had fared worse than him. Neither were in good shape. With the most immediate problems fixed, he moved to the holes in his armor's not-so-self-sealing skin. Integrity attended, he moved on to his own weeping holes and lastly, his burns. Nothing life-threatening yet, but he'd be slower on the draw. He rose in small jerking motions, the first to come to, or at least the first to get moving. Or the sole survivor, again.

"Get up!" He growled from distorted speakers. "We need to keep moving."

More fires erupted inside his armor, power systems discharging their unregulated capacitors across his flesh body. He paused, slumped against a wall to suppress the new round of blazes, making sure all were well and truly out before he tried moving again.

His suit spasmed around him while he worked. Without being strapped in, it was a dangerous affair. His war plate wasn't renowned for its gentle touch; getting crushed between a bit less than four tons of writhing metal wasn't any safer on the inside than out. Getting locked back in proved to be equally painful, his inner harness clamping down on fresh burns and scabbed cuts. The worst of his suits problems abated, having spent their feeble charges, so he pressed on.

Diaz groped and spasmed and twisted until he had a fresh rail magazine in hand. In a fight, he'd have been killed ten times over before he got it loaded and the empty stowed. Out of habit, he reached for another Xi-mag, but he was spent. Hiding amidst the starved magazines, he spotted an empty pistol with splintered grips. If he got desperate enough, he might try throwing it like Shores had.

Rifle awkwardly cradled in the crook of his lone arm, he staggers upright, surveying the spoils of battle. Just another pile of dead civilians to the untrained eye, nothing he hadn't seen a dozen times before. There didn't seem to be any more nearby but he took no confidence in that.

Death had released the freaks of whatever it was that made them so alien. The broken bodies arrayed before him were the waste of a flawed medic. Their flesh was marred in many small ways, speaking more to cruel surgeries than reckless accidents. His eyes found the slain child and a grim smile found his lips. What sort of monster kills children without remorse?

"Get up! Let's move!" No one stirred. Jhordan first, she gave them the best fighting strength.

"Self-designate Nye, will die without immediate medical attention." His suit groaned through distorted speakers.

"Ghost?" Diaz asked, instantly reaching for the soot-covered first aid kit mag-locked on his thigh.

"Correct."

"I'll handle it."

"Allow me to assist you."

Nye's suit was face down where he'd dumped it. He was expecting a pool of blood but her holes were plugged. If she was still bleeding, her suit would be waste deep in it when he tried to pull her out. An empirical can of blood soup. He gave a grim chuckle and went straight for the med panel, flashing his IFF and triggering a blow off. As an afterthought, he rolled her face up.

She was fading, her words barely more than a whisper. Foreign sounds he'd heard a million times, muttered in a tongue he'd never learned. She was delirious, weakly begging for life. In the silence around him, her voice was a roaring hush. Just like the rest you've killed.

"Crunching numbers won't-" Diaz started.

"I can give you finer motor control and keep your movements steady. I can make your suit as precise as a surgeon, but I will need to integrate with your suit fully to do so."

Nye's plates were swelling around her and getting ready for their blow off. Under ideal circumstances, it would take minutes for her to properly detach from and climb out of her suit. Now it would happen in a few painful seconds.

The catch was once they were blown, a suit needed a total rebuild before the mechanical muscles and nerves would function. The armor was no better than a very expensive funerary cocoon in that state. It would hold air and keep her warm if it was still able to, but without plates or shields, it was fatally exposed. He'd been about to blow his own.

If Ghost wanted to kill them all, it wouldn't get a better chance.

"Can you save her?" Diaz asked.

"That is-"

"Yes or no?" Ghost was silent for a moment.

"Yes, I can save her life."

"Do it. How long will it take to get in my armor?"

"Already done."

Diaz flexed his arm and found it to be true. It was like his suit was in perfect condition— better than perfect. When he moved his flesh body, his armored one responded almost instantly; there was no dead zone of force, no quarter-second delay, no watching his plate move in his peripheries.

He could feel his gauntlet's fingers. The resistance was similar to a thick glove but the sensation was like his own digits. His air feeds shifted subtly, then he felt a gust across his skin as Nye's suit puffed outward. His visual display blurred for an instant, then all the battle damage was wiped from his eyes like a cloth over glass. It was amazing.

"I'll be damned." Diaz breathed. "Any chance you know combat first aid?"

"It was deemed a highly usefu-"

"Yes or no?"

"Yes."

A sound similar to twinned twenty-one gun salutes blasted through the halls, and a literal ton of heavy layered plates blew off the armor first, falling away from Nye. The suit's skin, usually a continuous unbroken layer of scaly leaf-shaped plates over hexagonal mesh, looked more like a fatty candle half-melted under the sun. Under the skin, inhuman metal ribs flared outwards, tearing a fault line at the exposed sternum and advertising the suit's fleshy innards.

Gripped as she was within the inner harness, it looked like some archaic torture device leaving only parts of her blood-splattered skin and torn body glove visible. Then the harness recoiled from her, ripping off fresh scabs and hardened chunks of suit sealant foam. Dried blood flung itself free, lazily drifting through the light faux gravity. Fresh life water was a second behind it, spurting bursts gushing the ruby liquid weakly.

Diaz dove to apply pressure. Ghost stopped him short. He leaned into his suit, pushing his muscles against their metal counterparts.

"What are you doing!?" Diaz bellowed.

"You would have crushed her. Do not resist me, please."

"Wha-" Then his arm was moving against him.

His whole suit thrashed around him. It was like some horrible malfunction, except it was doing everything right. Gauze and crimps for the bleeding, moist wrap for the intestines that amateurs always tried to push back in. Ghost even answered his questions and told him what it would be doing next. It was as if he had gained his footing on a turbulent flight instead of free-falling through a hurricane.

Diaz was present but removed. He was watching someone else from the operating room theater, even though he could feel his own hand slick with blood. Nye was slim by anyone's standards but watching Ghost treat her sundered abs—the texture of live innards against his gauntlet—dredged up unhappy tactile memories.

Nye was slightly older than him, but her body had none of the wear which years of war had graced him with. Where her skin wasn't covered with blood, it was a waxy imitation of her normal rich tawny hues. An ancestry and childhood from a planet with a good star made her something of an oddity amongst their band of mercenaries. Her prominent brown eyes kept trying to look down no matter how many times he warned against it, but with only one hand, he couldn't stop her from seeing the damage. She croaked something about ugly scars.

"Every scar is a story." He said. He had scores, if not hundreds of stories on his own fair skin.

"Always hoped… You'd be the… Rearrange my guts." She tried to laugh at her own joke, but the muscle wasn't there to manage it. She flashed a smile that had no right to be there.

"Stop talking." Diaz growled.

"Never… Marry… Now."

"Shut up." He hissed. Nye's smile faded, and her almond-shaped eyes started drifting shut. "Hang on! I'll save you!"

"I know… You will." Mercifully, she passed out again. The hint of a smile remained on her peaceful, gore-splattered face.

"Ghost. You need to-"

"Your input is not required." Ghost politely stated. "I am capable of prolonging her death by several hours with the supplies on hand." Diaz tried to drag his focus anywhere else, but Ghost kept his suit's eyes locked on Nye.

"Why do I always have to watch everyone else die?" Diaz asked.

"She will live with proper medical treatment in a timely fashion."

Diaz blinked away the gathering mist of his eyes and saw it through. Nye was as well off as she could be with the gear they had on hand. He didn't see Ghost botch anything, and though it hurt his pride to admit, it had done a far better job than he could have even if he had blown off his own armor. It was frustrating and humbling in equal measures. But Nye was better off because of it. Sometimes you need to get out of the way and let the best person for the job handle it.

"Thank you." Diaz said once Nye's suit had resealed itself in an ugly mass of discharged foam.

"Is your reaction a typical one for humans?" Ghost asked.

"No. Nye's special."

"How so?"

"I've done… There was a war and I…" Diaz steeled himself with a sigh and a chuckle as bitterly hollow as his soul. "When I was a kid, I killed a lot of people like her for the wrong reasons. I still think… She reminds me of… I'm no good." He could only shake his head as his words failed him. "It's complicated."

"Many things are." Ghost stated sagely, then after a moment. "Would you like me to evacuate your suit?"

"That's probably for the best. Let's keep this between us, kay?"

"Acknowledged, now departing." Just like that, Diaz was left alone again. His suit shifted and twitched as it returned to being a worn piece of gear instead of an extension of his body. It was like adrenaline fading from his body after a fight had ended, leaving him tired and heavy and drained.

With Nye attended to, Diaz slid her shell of a suit against the wall and moved onto Jhordan. With her antiquated armor he couldn't do much; he didn't know where the readouts and med ports were. Knocking and repeated questioning seemed to do the trick; it got her writhing and talking, if nothing else. He took that to mean she wasn't likely to die in there.

Smoke was curling from her suit's new holes. He could almost smell the acrid reek of burning flesh off smoldering bodies, both deceased and living. He gave his head a shake, hid behind a morose, vacant smile and focused on Jhordan.

Her murmured questions gradually grew more forceful with every repetition, otherwise he would have been worried she might actually be delirious and bleeding out— grasping at the big memories that kept people going. He couldn't do anything for her, but he stayed with Jhordan long enough for her to realize who she was talking to and silence herself. If power armor could blush, she'd have glowed. She set to task getting her own suit up and moving, constantly shaking her head like she was trying to loose a bad dream. He understood the feeling.

Princess came to screaming a scream no living being should have been capable of making. He'd heard plenty of death cries—some might say too many—but this one still set his nerves raw like he'd been opened up and had a rusty wire brush taken to his spine. Diaz was unspeakably relieved when one of his suit's ears cut out and the shriek lessened. Her cry lasted longer than it had any right to, longer than her lungs should have been able to sustain. An echo of it lingered in his mind even after Princess was finally forced to draw a breath.

When she was done, it was still a long time coming before she could or would speak. She was rattled; it tinged her voice with hysteria barely contained. Ghost remained quiet on the outside. If it was comforting Princess, he couldn't see it happening.

"What happened?" She finally whispered.

"Magic, or something so advanced I can't tell the difference. Maybe a new AI-powered weapon that gets in your head and… Does something." Diaz grit his teeth, searching for something worthwhile to report.

"Heh, yeah." Princess bitterly snorted.

"I couldn't fight it," Diaz added. "I couldn't even warn you when you walked past me." He couldn't do anything. It was pathetic.

"The last thing I did was throw you aside when those… things, tried to grab you." Jhordan said. Princess sat solemnly, hugging her knees close to her chest.

"People." She said.

"What?" Diaz asked.

"Those things were people."