Chapter 3
RYCHNE
Smoke curls in lazy tendrils above me, stinging my eyes, my nostrils, the back of my throat where taste and pain collide like bitter lovers. I lie in a tangle of twisted alloy and shattered conduit, sprawled belly-down across the half-melted ribcage of my own ship, and everything hurts.
My breather mask is broken. One side of it hisses a soft, rhythmic death-rattle into my left ear, leaking compressed air in wet, choking pulses.
It’s like being kissed by a dying serpent.
Every inhale burns. The acrid tang of scorched plastic and seared circuit board coats the back of my tongue.
I turn my head slightly, and agony blooms down my spine like a second sunrise.
I grunt, or try to. The sound that comes out is more whimper than war cry. I immediately hate myself for it.
The pain is... operatic. Not a clean, sterile kind of injury—a slash here, a cracked bone there.
No, this is the slow, relentless symphony of nerve endings unraveling beneath a dozen layers of trauma.
My ribs feel like shattered glass tucked beneath my skin.
Something wet and warm leaks under my armor near my hip.
My left arm... I don’t want to look at my left arm.
But I do.
And I wish I hadn’t.
The skin—what little isn’t covered by the buckled remains of my gauntlet—is blackened.
The scales are curled back in some places, revealing the gray subdermal layers beneath.
Burned. Deep. My forearm’s a tapestry of ruin, from elbow to palm.
The scent—oh, gods, the scent—is wrong. Too organic. Too... cooked.
Vakutan physiology is tough. We’re bred for war, for endurance, for surviving what kills most species three times over. But this?
This is going to take time.
I reach for the emergency medseal pack on my belt and almost scream.
I manage to drag it free with my good hand, teeth gritted, vision swimming in and out of black static.
The synthfoam inside stings like acid as I slap it onto the wound, but it knits fast, flooding the tissues with numbing agents and coagulants. Better. Not good. But better.
I sit up slowly, groaning as my back complains with every vertebral segment.
The cockpit is a grave. My grave. The panels are slagged beyond recognition.
The AI core—what’s left of it—sits in the middle of a melted crater, one eye still flickering dimly like a child’s nightlight refusing to surrender.
Sparks leap from exposed wiring overhead, cascading down like fireflies in mourning.
The jump drive is... well, calling it a drive at this point is generous.
It looks like someone fed it into an industrial compactor and then microwaved the remains for flavor.
The outer shell is ruptured, the primary and tertiary coils fused into a lopsided mess of glassy black metal and dead energy.
It smells ruined—ozone, insulation, the sour stench of burned fusion gel and liquefied neutronium.
I put a hand on it anyway. Just in case.
No pulse.
No hum.
Dead.
“Damn you,” I whisper in Vakutan. “You brought me across the stars, and now you die here, on this backwater ball of mud and meat?”
No response.
Just silence, smoke, and the gentle hiss of dying systems.
The power core is cracked. I can see the fracture line running straight through the casing, a jagged fault line like the ones that tore up the Gaelin moons.
Any more stress and it’ll blow a hole through this hillside big enough to cook a cow.
Which, judging by the faint bovine odor on the wind, might be considered a war crime here.
I drag myself out of the cockpit, every movement scraping against the ragged edge of pain.
My boots hit dirt—real dirt. Earth. Not the sterilized gravel of a Coalition base or the glass plains of Thunari Prime.
This is organic. Loamy. Moisture-rich. It squelches slightly underfoot, giving way in that uniquely human way that makes me feel suddenly too heavy, too sharp-edged, too wrong.
The air tastes... thick. Not just breathable—lush. I inhale deeply, lungs burning, but the oxygen hits like a drug. It's not recycled. Not stripped of smell and spirit. This air has character. It carries hints of pollen, grass, a trace of something tangy and metallic on the breeze.
A field stretches out before me—green as envy, stitched with the golds and rusts of midsummer.
The horizon rises and falls in soft, rolling bluffs, and somewhere below, I hear the faint growl of ground transports—cars, I think they’re called.
I know the word. I’ve studied ancient Terran files.
But the reality of it is louder than I expected. Clunkier.
I’m really here.
Earth.
Year 2025.
Centuries out of sync, marooned in a place where humanity still watches reality television and thinks suborbital flight is cutting-edge tech.
I stagger down the incline toward a nearby patch of shade, dragging my burned arm close against my chest. The world tilts slightly on its axis—not the planet’s fault, just my own equilibrium trying to reconcile gravity with trauma.
I pass a shattered wing segment from the Starfighter embedded nose-first in the hillside like a warning.
From up here, I can see rooftops below—small structures, squat and unassuming, painted in soft pastels and earth tones. One of them has a huge red bottle mounted on its roof, which I refuse to investigate until I’ve had at least sixteen hours of unconsciousness and a drink.
I’m not dead.
But I might as well be.
Because there’s no way off this planet.
And now that the adrenaline’s fading, the implications settle like ash in my bones.
I’m alone.
No Trident backup. No relay to the Coalition. No distress signal strong enough to punch through time and space. I’m a soldier stranded in history, surrounded by people who wouldn’t understand a damn word of my native tongue even if I carved it into their foreheads.
“Rychne,” I mutter to the field, to the sky, to the unlistening ghosts of my past. “You better figure something out. Fast.”
Then I fall onto my back, staring up at the clouds rolling in like bruises across the heavens.
And for the first time in years, I think I might actually be afraid.
The first words out of my mouth as Richard—the fabricated human disguise stitched together by nanotech and guesswork—are not exactly inspiring.
“Greetings, fellow... Earthling. I too enjoy breathing air and engaging in recreational... lawncare.”
I scowl. The voice modulation still feels too high, nasally and clipped. Not at all like the basso snarl I’m used to. It sounds like someone stuffed gravel into a suit and told it to sell insurance.
I try again, pacing in a slow circle around the ruin of my ship.
“Hello. I am Richard. I am a tax person. I collect, uh, numbers. From humans. For the IRS.”
“No.”
That sounds like an admission of guilt. Probably the sort of thing that gets you locked in one of those rectangular rolling cages they call cars and driven off to a penal colony or strip mall.
I huff, frustrated, and adjust the pitch on my vocalizer. A subtle shift this time, lower, raspier. Less alien-trying-too-hard-to-be-friend and more man-who-would-spend-silent-hours-in-a-hardware-store-aisle.
“Hello,” I repeat, cautiously. “I am a person. A normal one. I pay bills and consume bread.”
Better. Not great. But passable.
I pull up the translation matrix on my compad and scroll through local speech samples collected from unsecured Wi-Fi signals in the area.
So much slang. So many idioms. I cross-reference a phrase that appears frequently—“don’t @ me, bro”—and find myself utterly baffled.
Apparently, direct confrontation involves invoking a symbolic ‘at’ sign, which holds social weight among their peer groups?
No.
I’ll skip that one.
Behind me, the wreck hisses as a final gout of coolant spews from a ruptured coil and evaporates into the sun.
I’ve already hidden the worst of it—dragged debris into a nearby collapsed barn at the edge of a weed-choked clearing.
The structure’s rotting timbers barely held up under the load of a starfighter’s fractured remains, but the darkness inside swallows the reflective hull plating well enough.
Loose boards, a busted combine harvester, and piles of rusted tools make for excellent camouflage. Primitive, but functional.
The few functioning sensor beacons I salvaged are now repurposed—mounted on rake handles, wedged into tractor axles, disguised beneath old oil cans and corroded paint buckets. They'll trigger a silent alert if anyone stumbles too close to the barn. If someone does find it...
Well.
I’ve still got two plasma slugs left.
I wipe grime from my brow and stagger upright.
The suit itches. Not literally—my body is still red and scaled beneath this human projection—but mentally.
It’s a bad fit. I feel compacted, like I’ve been folded into myself.
The joints don’t move right. The stride’s off.
I’ve adjusted it four times, and I still walk like a malfunctioning exosuit.
I start down the path toward the town I glimpsed earlier.
Each step is a throb of pain. My burned arm is wrapped tightly in synthwrap beneath the illusion. From the outside, I appear perfectly fine—just a slightly disheveled man in dark pants, boots, and a sweat-stained t-shirt. But inside? I’m boiling.
The air smells... wild. Fresh-cut grass.
Diesel. A hint of old manure. There are birds singing again, infuriatingly cheerful, flitting from treetop to power line.
I see squirrels—actual squirrels—chasing each other like idiots through the underbrush.
No thermal tags, no microchips. Just raw, unfiltered wildlife.
The absurdity of it all prickles under my skin.
No drones, patrol bots, or gunfire echoing from a neighboring quadrant. This place is silent in the way of forgotten ruins and bedtime stories. Too peaceful, safe.
It’s suspicious.
I reach a split-rail fence that looks like it’s been slowly eaten by the sun and time. Beyond it, a gravel access road winds through the trees, and I follow it—limping, stiff, head on a swivel. Every car that zips past in the distance sounds like an incoming fighter until I force myself to breathe.
Focus.
Priorities.
I whisper them aloud like a prayer.
“Parts. Weapons. Food.”
My stomach growls then, like it’s agreeing emphatically. It’s been at least twelve hours since I injected a nutrient cartridge. And my metabolism—especially while healing—is nothing short of predatory.
But parts come first.
This town... Collinsville, if I remember the signage correctly.
.. must have salvage. I saw a junkyard on my scan.
Maybe a mechanic’s shop. I need something that can stabilize my power matrix, and I need it now.
If the drive core degrades any further, it’ll cascade into thermal collapse and then nothing in this county’s going to survive.
The gravel road ends at pavement, and suddenly I’m walking past tidy suburban lawns with flags and flamingos. Children’s toys are scattered across front yards. One man across the street is hosing off his sidewalk for reasons I cannot begin to understand. He nods politely at me.
I nod back.
“Hello,” I try. “I am person. Enjoy... hose protocol.”
He frowns slightly.
I keep walking.
A woman jogs past with a leash in one hand and earbuds in her ears. She barely glances my way. I must be blending in better than I thought.
Soon, the neighborhood thins and shops begin to appear—strip malls, delis, a tire shop with an enormous inflatable bear on the roof. The bear is... disquieting. Its smile is too wide. Its eyes track the wind.
I turn away before it curses me.
And there it is.
Across the intersection—a dingy sign that reads “Collinsville Auto Parts & Salvage.” A warehouse squatting beside an open lot filled with the skeletons of cars, rusted and sunburnt.
Perfect.
I mutter to myself as I cross the street, sidestepping a plastic bag that dances across the asphalt like a drunken ghost.
“Let’s find something that doesn’t explode. For once.”
And just like that, Richard begins his mission.
Hungry. Burned. Undercover.
And already, weirdly, starting to hate shoes.