Fifteen Lashes
The woman had felt each of those fifteen lashes dig into her skin and muscles. The executor, one of the cadet commissars, had been anything but slacking in his task.…
On Auru One
Segmentum ObscuraNachmund SectorAgriworld Auru OneAurun 22nd Regiment, Imperial Guard Trooper Dwyer rolled the filter of his tabac stick between his fingertips, before bringing it to his lips. He patted his camo…
Happy Birthday, Sergeant Corde!
How many years? To look at the lines on her face you’d think it had been at least a decade, but that’s not what the chronometer said. She stuck to numbers she could trust.
Home Sickness
Recalled to Yujua. Those three words spread through the camp like wildfire. Pak can see it in the men’s faces. Wonder. Relief. Six years of war in the green fields…
The Way Back to the Garden
We’re all going back home one way or another, preferably the same way we’ve all come to be here. I spend my days walking, have been for a while now.…
Breach Point
++ FOUR MINUTES OXYGEN REMAINING ++The mechanical voice grated in her ears, heard only by her. Artificial and sterile.Trooper Ginny Csilter drifted lazily in the null-gravity. Around her, a twisted,…
Ouroboros
Henrik stepped into the cave and looked around. The Guardsman’s dim stab-light revealed scratch-marks on the walls and bones of past explorers on the floor. The air carried a trace…
Twenty Seconds of His Wrath
The Psalm of Reloading was nearly drowned out by the numbing roar and cacophony of squeals and scrapes endemic to the amber-lit bowels of a war machine. Ceaseless combat had taken a toll on the crew, but their focus couldn’t waver; Tigris Maxima’s machine spirit was a fickle, volatile beast.
Deadline
‘Sixty seconds,’ the lieutenant spoke over the vox. ‘Sixty?’ I said to Obed, my loader. ‘Until the next wave,’ he stared at me aghast. The next wave out of how…
The Burden of Command
It occurred to Nilla, while her eyes detailed the sky above and the seemingly unique and ever expanding cloud, that maybe, this planet did not have any other kind of…