Mathias’s ragged breathing echoed in the silence that stretched between me and AI615. The walls of the ship floated the sounds of burning forest. Would crack as flame consumed the world around them. From inside of the ship, the flame sounded like a soft roar.

My body was in pieces, hanging from a hammerhead. A fleet of starfish mechs crawled around it like dozens of mechanical spiders.

Matias vomited on Octavius’s corpse.

“Status. Repair estimation.”

My display plate had shattered. I could see it through AI615’s cameras. Broken glass was missing from the cover, the image displaying red lines and unintelligible garbage.

“Ship diagnostics paused. Hostiles incoming.”

“Situation brief.”

“Multiple unknown hostiles incoming. Terrain unknown. Time till arrival: 2 minutes.”

With a mental command, I disengaged from the hammerhead. The fleet of starfish mix would transport me instead. The neck headed down the dark hallway as a cat into the feeds. 2 other mechs had come online since the crash. Diagnostics sent over network reporting missing limbs and heavily damaged exoskeletons, but their basic actuators and motor functions would still work.

As well as their weapons.

We were lucky to have gotten as much time as we had training in the dungeons. I hoped it was enough. But without telemetric data of our enemies, it was unknown what kind of situation we were approaching. Hope was unreliable. I could only trust in data.

From inside of the mech’s feeds I could see that the side of the ship open wide into a burning forest, turned earth thrown about the landscape devastated by our arrival. Where therehad once been a verdant forest was now wildfire trees stretching far beyond what our Mexican sees power into the sky. The broken forms of toppled trees carried fire with them farther into the forest. Between the wild calls of animals, the smoke, and the flurry of destruction brought about by the ship’s arrival, almost all sensor data was pragmatically valueless.

All we could do was wait.

The most broken mechs took to the front line, 1 of the SHIELDWALL mechs missing the arm that held its sword entirely. They weren’t able to fully seal the entrance. Broken mechs filled the hangar, nothing more than piles of rubble.

Mathias stared at his hands beside me. Moping.

“I’m just like him.”

“You are nothing like him.” AI615 said.

What monsters lived in this forest? Would they be able to pry apart super alloys? Would they be able to melt steel?

The HAMMERHEAD’s assembled behind the front line of the shield walls, ready for combat.

“Ship diagnostic at 60%.” said AI 615. “Heavy damage to weapon systems. One cannon operational.”

“But I killed him.”

“You killed to protect someone else.” AI 615 replied. “30 seconds until contact.”

“Prepare for preemptive strike.” I said.

“Targets identified. Feed 35, 170°. Locking on. Not all targets have heat signature.”

Mathias stared at the blood covering his hands.

I knew it before she even said anything. I saw the ping come across the relay.

“Failure in last main cannon.”

For a moment, I could almost insist that I heard fear in AI615’s voice. But we didn’t feel dread. We assessed situations took the best possible action. The hammerheads calibrated their shots based on the location of the incoming hostiles but to them by AI615.

As the forest continued burning, the view in front of them was little more than a cloud of smoke and dust. But they didn’t need to see anything. They had the exact location, provided by data more accurate than human eyes — or mechanical sensors — could ever be, aggregated from a half dozen sources.

Beams of neon light shot to the cloud of black smoke and dust. And they shot true — the light revealed the forms approaching the ship. But the plasma passed right through two of them. And they didn’t stop. The third, however, the plasma curved around, scoring the forest and carving a gouge out of the earth.

It made a sound that was something like a Winnie in something like a roar. And then the three of them charged, moving directly at our two remaining shield walls. The first to arrive was ephemeral, almost like a cloud. It became less opaque as the one armed shield wall swung at it; the blade passed through without harming it. The three HAMMERHEAD’s concentrated their fire.

Three beams of heated plasma pinned the monster to the shield walls shield, super heating the metal until it glowed.

The monster screamed, becoming opaque, and then its blood erupted out of it, turning into steam, and then it stopped screaming.

There is a crunch of metal. I lost contact with one of the shield walls. Looking through the HAMMERHEAD’s feeds as they observe the situation, I saw that one of the Qilin had ripped off his head. The monster’s body was reflective metal light of the fires outside dancing across the glossy skin. The shield wall’s head was at the mouth. But that wasn’t enough to kill one of our mechs. No, its claws had done that. Huge and serrated, they were almost as long as swords, with a dark metallic sheen to them.

Hydraulic fluid drip from them. But I didn’t think an injection injury was going to kill it soon enough to remove the monsters invading our ship. It tore through the magic of solid composite alloys like it was paper, leaving a jagged tear in the next torso. It stood on its hind legs, roaring, as if to intimidate us. The noise came out muffled by the head of the mech in its mouth.

The hammerheads open fire again, concentrating on the open mouth of the monster where it showed off the score from its kill. The monster tried to dodge, to back away, but it was too late. It had glowed like super-heated metal collapsed to the ground in a heap.

The third monster ran away. Without hesitation, I ordered the hammerheads to give chase following it. Their shots cut through the underbrush and burning forest. But if they did it, it wasn’t enough.

The monster was gone.

“Significant resources required to repair ship. In our current state, leaving atmosphere will be impossible.” AI 615 said.

I felt something inside of me, something odd. It was heavy like a weight, resting inside of my chest. I scheduled myself for diagnostics.

“Query: possibility of in atmosphere relocation?”

“Significant repairs required to thrusters for flight. Ship frame broken into three pieces. Suggestion: begin deployment of resource extraction and refinery facilities.”

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