The world stopped shaking, but the Red Vulture did not. A final, agonized shudder ran through its Adamantine frame before it settled into an unnerving, canted stillness. The deafening roar of the quake was replaced by a symphony of malfunctions: the frantic, low hum of system alarms, the hiss of a compromised hydraulic line, and the intermittent flicker of the emergency luminescent strips, painting the infantry compartment in staccato strokes of red and ghostly white.
Dust, fine and grey, sifted from conduit joints, filling the air with the taste of powdered concrete and ozone. It was the smell of a violated tomb.
Chen Feng was moving before his conscious mind had fully processed the silence. Four centuries of technological advancement, and the soldier’s instinct to secure a perimeter was timeless. He unstrapped from his acceleration couch, grabbed his from its rack, and slammed a hand against the rear hatch control panel. His gloved finger stabbed the release button. Nothing. He slammed the manual override lever. It didn’t budge.
“The hatch is jammed solid,” he reported, his voice tight.
From the cockpit, Flora’s voice crackled over the internal comm, laced with a new layer of urgent static. “Do not attempt egress. Structural integrity of the surrounding terrain is unknown. External environment is un-assessed. A rash exposure is tactically unwise.”
“We’re sitting ducks in here,” Chen shot back, but he stopped his assault on the hatch.
A new sound joined the chorus of distress—the whine of straining servos and the crunch of armored fists on plasteel. Alina was at the internal passage that connected their compartment to the cockpit. The hatch was sealed tight, its status rune glowing a stubborn, malevolent red.
“! The passage hatch is jammed!” she snarled, driving her fist into the reinforced door. The impact echoed through the confined space. “Flora! Can you override from your side?”
“Negative, Feldwebel. The internal locks are non-responsive. I am isolated.”
“There’s the overhead,” Chen said, his eyes darting to the war compartment hatch (it leads to the turret) in the ceiling. He braced himself on a cargo handle and pushed. The hatch groaned in protest but refused to yield. He put his full weight into it, muscles straining against the unyielding metal. With a final, grunting effort, he gave up, dropping back to the deck with a curse. “Fuck. Everything’s locked down.”
A moment of heavy silence followed, broken only by the drip-drip-drip of a leaking fluid and the frantic beating of two hearts.
Then, Flora’s voice returned, its synthetic calm a stark contrast to their physical entrapment. “Preliminary damage diagnosis complete. Multiple stress fractures detected in the primary hull structure. I am isolated in the cockpit. You are isolated in the infantry compartment.” A deliberate pause, a millisecond of processing to select the most accurate term. “We have become... three separate prisoners.”
Time stretched, measured in breaths and the relentless flicker of the lights. They were entombed. Then, a new sound—a distant, metallic screech from the direction of the cockpit, followed by a heavy thud.
A moment later, Flora’s voice returned, this time slightly muffled, emanating from the external speaker. “I have extricated myself via the cockpit emergency hatch. I am now outside. I will attempt an external override of the rear hatch locking mechanism.”
Chen leaned close to the internal comm panel, his voice low and urgent. “Flora, be careful. We don’t know what’s still standing out there. Or what’s fallen.”
Alina, meanwhile, had returned to the internal passage hatch. She didn’t punch it this time, but delivered a furious, frustrated kick to its base, the impact a dull, final-sounding thud.
“The connecting passage between the infantry compartment and cockpit is also non-functional?” Flora’s voice came through, laced with static from outside. A beat of analysis. “...This is sub-optimal. This suggests potential further torsional damage.”
“You think?” Alina muttered under her breath, slumping against the cold bulkhead.
The initial rush of adrenaline began to recede. Then Alina Ludwig suddenly stopped her pacing. With a suddenly realization, she reaches for the weapon racks.
"’Old China,’ check the ammo!"
Chen instantly turned with a seasoned soldier’s resolve. “On it.”
He reached the internal munition storage, disengaged the blast gates——somehow they are still operable——and rummaged through the small munitions: 10mm HE rounds, the 3cm autocannon shells, smart grenades, and energy cells. Luckily, none of them were damaged except the containers themselves, which Chen had to remove the metallic gates entirely to ensure quick future access.
“They are fine, Feldwebel.” He reported with a hoarse voice.
“Check the backup 3D printer, Flora would want that, I know her.” She didn't wait for a reply.
Chen Feng tapped on the tertiary tactical panel, “System self-diagnostic suggests no system hardware damage. Won’t fiddle the softwares, least Flora wants my head for messing her schematics.”
Alina paced the pathetic two steps the compartment allows. "Check the water chip integrity. I want a percentage."
Chen looked down and tapped his wrist display. "Ninety-nine point three. Normal wear."
Alina—Chen Feng had the distinct impression she was seizing some kind of opportunity, her voice barked from her vox-grilles. "And the point seven? Where did it go? A leak? A microfracture?"
He replied: "Statistical noise. Possibly the wearing of normal equipment uses. That chip is one and half years old. All subsystems nominal."
Alina continued her pacing, her movements are sharp, frustrated, and wasteful of energy. "Medical supplies. Rations. I want a full inventory. Now."
Chen Feng signed under his breath. He dropped to his knees, prod open the floor tiles and lift open the floor lockers. His eyes scanned the illuminated supply crates. "Medkit, sealed and unused... all are within expiration dates. Vitamin and mineral pills, checked. Cooking utensils, all intact. Rations... we have three full years of nutrient bricks in there. Why did we pack for a siege?"
Alina jabs a finger. "Don't you dare question protocol! We are buried in a tomb and it's your fault! You and Flora and your 'statistically probable' tunnel!"
Chen Feng feigned surprise. “Huh?”
From the external speaker, Flora's voice, laced with static, interjected with cold logic. "Feldwebel, the decision to utilize the tunnel was a squad consensus based on the highest probability of mission success at the time. The seismic event was an unforeseeable variable with a probability of less than 0.01%. Assigning blame is an illogical and inefficient use of cognitive resources."
"Shut up! Just shut up about logic!" Alina glared at the stuck-shut hatch, as if she could glare through it at Flora "We should have taken the shot at Teodulo! We had a strategic imperative!"
Chen didn't look at her; his gaze fixed on the flickering emergency light above the jammed hatch. "We'd be dead. And so would our cause."
Alina: "This is about ! If we had taken the fight to Teodulo like I wanted, we wouldn't be buried in this grave! We'd be something! Instead, we listened to ." Her helmet swiveled to him, the blank visor accusing.
Chen looked up, his eyes hollow with fatigue in the dim red light. "I just want to keep you alive."
"That's not a principle, it's an excuse for cowardice!" She slammed a gauntleted fist against a storage locker, the echoing loudly. "You'd rather brood over your dead world than fight for a living one! You're not just 400 years old; you're a relic of a selfish, capitalist era!"
"I was being honest," Chen said, his voice low and steady, a stark contrast to her metallic screech. "I want you, me, and Flora to see tomorrow. There's no law, new or old, that says that's a crime. And for the record, I'm twenty-eight."
"You are risk-averse!" she spat, jabbing a finger at him . "It's in your pre-Revolutionary DNA! You calculate lives like a banker calculates money!"
Chen produced a bitter, tired smirk, a ghost of an expression in the gloom. "Better than get ourselves killed just to validate the sanctity of some bible verses."
"How dare you—!" Alina's voice cracked, raw with fury.
Flora's voice, synthetically calm, cut through the tension. "Correction: The Republic Manifesto is a socio-political treatise, not a theological text."
"It's a ," Chen said, the word a quiet, final verdict. He finally lift himself off the Adamantine floor, standing. His movements weary. "And a book is never worth a human life. I won't gamble your lives— of our lives—on 'ideological purity.' My century had a rule," he continued, his tone dropping into that grim, lecturing cadence she dreaded. "The second someone starts talking about spending or eradicating human lives to uphold some philosophical law, you run. That's the red flag for totalitarianism."
Alina fell silent for a moment, her chest heaving. When she spoke again, her voice was dangerously quiet, dripping with sarcastic pity. It was condescending, bitter, and venomous.
"What a beautiful, heroic society that must have been. My most sincere condolences for your loss."
Chen grinned. He looked away, muttering in through gritted teeth, soft and sardonic even despite his building rage and displeasure. "I want the Soldier’s Union to hear what you just said when we get a signal. You wouldn't even have the money to hire an attorney, ."
Flora, ever literal, chimed in. "Correction: We do not use money to acquire attorneys for Union courts, Obergefreiter."
Alina stopped dead. The unfamiliar, guttural Mandarin syllables——felt like a physical blow. In her rage-impeded mind, she registered it as a deep, archaic slur she couldn't even comprehend. "Zheng-... what?" Her voice was a whisper of pure, incandescent rage. "What did you just call me? Is that a derogatory term? Was that some kind of ancient curse? FUCK YOU—"
She lunged at him, not to punch, but to grab his chest plate. Chen, tired, doesn't fight back, just shifts his weight. She shoves him, he stumbles back against the bulkhead, and her own momentum, combined with a sudden, violent cramp in her gut, makes her double over with a sharp, pained gasp.
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For a long moment, the only sound was her ragged, staticky breathing through the vox-grille. The violent motion had been the final flare of the adrenaline that had sustained her. Now, as the fury evaporated, it left a vacuum—and into that vacuum rushed a cold, clammy awareness of her own body. The cramp in her gut wasn't from the shove; it was deeper, more insistent. A dull, pressing urgency that had been building beneath the layers of stress and armor now announced itself, impossible to ignore.
Chen saw the shift in Alina first. Her armored form, which had been a statue of furious energy, grew stiff. She shifted her weight uncomfortably, her movements becoming tight, restricted.
Finally, she turned to him. The fierce, defiant Feldwebel was gone. In her place was a young woman, her voice stripped of all authority and filled with a raw, unprecedented humiliation that was audible even through her helmet's vox-grilles.
“Chen Feng...” she began, the words forced out as if they were physically painful. “I... I need to... go to the bathroom.”
Chen stared at her helmeted visage for a second, the absurdity of the situation crashing down upon him. Here they were, trapped in a multi-ton marvel of 25th-century engineering, possibly surrounded by enemies and geological chaos, and the most immediate crisis was one as old as humanity itself. He uttered a single, heartfelt word.
“Fuck.”
He moved quickly, his own discomfort forgotten in the face of hers. He rummaged in a nearby storage locker, finding an empty, thick plastic supply bag. He wordlessly held it out to her. Then, without a word of instruction, he grabbed a large, silver thermal blanket from an emergency kit, shook it out, and wrapped it completely around himself, from head to toe and turned to face the armored wall of the compartment and shrunk into the corner, making himself as small and inconspicuous as possible.
Alina’s voice was a shaky whisper, laced with shame and defensive anger. “Don’t look!”
“Absolutely not looking,” his voice was muffled under the blanket.
“Close your eyes!”
“They’re already closed.”
“For fuck’s sake, close your ears too!”
“Anatomical construction does not permit it,” came the flat, factual reply.
The next few minutes were a special kind of hell. The acoustics of the metal box amplified every small, unavoidable sound into a glaring proclamation of indignity. The rustle of combat gear being adjusted, the faint click of armor seals being loosened.
When it was over, the silence was heavier than before. Chen heard the rustle of Alina re-securing her gear. But instead of the matter-of-fact handling of the situation he expected, the tension in the compartment snapped.
He heard a sharp, frustrated sound—a half-groan, half-snarl that was pure, undiluted vexation. Then, her voice erupted, raw and lashing out, devoid of any logic, seeking only a target for the massive shame, mission stress, and physical exhaustion that had just reached their boiling point.
“Do you fucking look down on me now?” she spat, the words vibrating with fury.
Chen remained silent under his blanket, a statue of silver foil.
“You think you’re so strong, don’t you?” she continued, her voice rising. “An ancient man from a feudal-capitalist era, have you always looked down on women soldiers? Is that it? You think we’re weak? That we don’t belong here?”
He could hear her pacing the short length of the compartment, her armored boots clanging on the deck.
“In your time, were women just supposed to stay home and be pretty?! You think I’m ridiculous now, don’t you? A fucking joke, pissing in a bag in a broken tin can!”
Chen endured it for a few more seconds, letting the baseless, emotional shrapnel ricochet around him. Then, with a sudden, violent motion, he threw off the thermal blanket. His face was not contorted in anger, but was a mask of profound, bone-deep exhaustion and a cold, clear-eyed intensity. His voice, when it came, was not loud, but it cut through her tirade like a mono-knife, sharp and absolute.
“I don’t have the fucking energy to look down on you.”
The words hit. She stopped mid-pace, her helmet swiveling to face him.
He held her gaze, his eyes boring into her reflective visor. “You know perfectly well how well you’ve done yourself.”
The accusation in his voice wasn't the one she expected. It wasn't an accusation of weakness, but of ingratitude—toward herself. It shattered her excuse for venting, dismantling the strawman she had built and forcing her to confront the naked vulnerability beneath. All the fury drained from her in an instant, leaving a vast, hollow silence. She didn’t slump; she seemed to deflate, her armored shoulders sagging as she turned and collapsed back into her commander’s seat, staring blankly at the grimy deck plates between her boots.
The dead silence that followed was broken by the sound of salvation—the screech of tearing metal and the purposeful whir of hydraulic tools from outside.
With a final, deafening crack, the rear hatch was forcibly pried open. Dim, dust-choked daylight and a wave of relatively fresh, if acrid, air flooded into the foul compartment, a stark and welcome contrast.
Warrant Officer Flora Rosenkrantz stood silhouetted in the doorway, a hydraulic jack in one hand. Her helmet tilted, her optic sensors scanning the interior, taking in the scene: the flickering lights, the dust, the two silent, seated soldiers, and the potent, lingering odor.
Completely ignoring the palpable emotional wreckage, her synthesized voice, flat and clear, delivered its signature query into the stillness.
“Query: Did someone perish in here? Why does it smell so foul?”
Chen Feng was on his feet in an instant. “What’s the external situation?” he asked, his voice forcefully normal as he stepped forward, deliberately placing his body between Flora and a mortifyingly still Alina. In the same fluid motion, he snatched the offending plastoid bag from where it sat by Alina’s feet, his movement casual, as if disposing of routine trash. “Is the vehicle still mobile?”
Flora’s helmet tilted the other way, processing the non-sequitur but accepting the shift to tactical data. “Affirmative. The ‘Red Vulture’ is structurally sound for travel. The torsion to the hull is not critical. However,” she added, her sensors still faintly whirring as she scanned the interior one more time, “all major systems are functional, but it will be wise to stop and perform a brief maintenance before we proceed. The structural integrity has been... compromised.”
The air outside was a physical presence—a thick, gritty soup of suspended dust that coated their armor and caught in their throats. The deafening roar of the quake had been replaced by an even more profound silence, a vacuum of sound that felt heavy and watchful. It was the quiet of a world holding its breath, or one that had just died.
Flora, already interfaced with an external terminal on the ’s scarred hull, was the first to break the stillness. Her synthesized voice cut through the dusty haze, delivering a verdict as sterile and absolute as the desolation around them.
“Initial geological assessment complete,” she stated. “The terrain has undergone a catastrophic reconfiguration. Previous maps are obsolete.”
The words were simple, but their meaning was vast. Chen Feng’s eyes swept across the horizon, and the scale of it hit him with a nearly physical force. This was not damage; it was a re-forging. The world he had briefly known was gone. Hills they had skirted hours before were now sheer, crumbling cliffs. A nearby river had been choked and diverted, its waters now carving a frantic, muddy path through the ruins of the jungle. The twisted, phosphorescent flora of the radiated forest was either flattened into pulp or wrenched into grotesque, skeletal shapes against the grey sky. It was a raw, newborn wasteland, awe-inspiring in its utter indifference.
Back at the IFV, the atmosphere was thick with more than just dust. Flora’s hands danced across the terminal, her efforts punctuated by the frustrated flicker of holographic maps that bloomed above the projector. They were patchworks of static and blank, terrifying voids.
“Signal quality is critically degraded,” she reported, her tone that of a scientist stating an inconvenient result. “Subsurface scanning is ineffective due to seismic debris and altered mineral composition. I am attempting to re-construct terrain mappings, but data loss is approximately sixty-eight percent.”
Chen Feng tore his gaze from the apocalyptic vista, his 21st-century mind latching onto a primitive solution. “Can we climb a high point?” he asked, gesturing towards a nearby ridge that seemed to have been thrust upwards by the planet’s convulsions. “Get a direct visual. In my day, high ground wasn’t just an advantage; it was the first thing you looked for.”
Flora paused for a micro-second, processing the archaic suggestion against her library of modern tactical doctrine. “Acknowledged. Elevated positioning would reduce signal attenuation through particulate matter and geological strata. Calculated efficiency increase for cartography: thirty-one percent.” A necessary caveat followed. “Con: risk of exposure to hostile sensors increases by twelve percent.”
The decision fell to the silent commander. Alina had been methodically running a diagnostic on the vehicle’s tracks, her movements precise but lacking their usual forceful energy. She did not look at Chen Feng when she spoke, her voice quieter than usual, stripped of its fiery dogma but firm with resolve.
“Do it. We’re blind down here.” She finally straightened, her helmeted gaze fixed on the vehicle’s hull. “I’ll stay with the vehicle. Basic maintenance and setting up a perimeter warning system.” Only then did she add, the order directed at both of them, but feeling particularly weighted for one. “Don’t take unnecessary risks.”
It was a clear, logical division of labor. But beneath the practicality lay a quiet understanding. She was re-engaging with her command out of duty, but she was also creating the physical distance she desperately needed to reassemble the pieces of her shattered composure away from Chen Feng’s unsettlingly perceptive gaze.
The climb was a brutal slog through a world still settling its bones. The newly formed ridge was a treacherous slope of loose scree and fractured rock that shifted under their weight. The air remained thick with fine, grey dust, coating the lenses of their helmets and turning the weak sunlight into a diffuse, sickly glow.
Flora moved with unwavering precision, her armored boots finding purchase where none seemed to exist. Her voice, by contrast, was a calm, measured monotone in Chen’s ear.
“Seismic analysis confirms the hypocentre was in the Southern Himalayan zone. Tectonic plate shift, consistent with long-term stress models. The main quake registered an estimated 9.7 on the Richter scale.”
Chen Feng, breathing heavily as he hauled himself up another crumbling ledge, let out a low, involuntary grunt. “Wow. Impressive.”
Flora stopped. She turned her helmet towards him, the motion unnervingly precise. Her voice, usually flat, gained a rare, sharp edge of reproof. “What do you mean by ‘wow’? Do you have any idea of the catastrophic loss of human life this event signifies? Entire arcologies, population centers... Show some empathy, please.”
Chen didn’t stop climbing. He shrugged, the gesture almost lost in the bulk of his armor and the effort of the ascent. His fatalism was a well-worn shield, polished by centuries of loss. “Empathy doesn’t un-bury cities,” he replied, his voice tight with exertion. “It just slows you down.”
They reached the summit in silence after that. The vista was a panoramic portrait of oblivion. Flora immediately knelt, deploying her long-range scanners and a compact, spike-like comms relay with fluid, unhurried movements born of endless drilling. Chen, meanwhile, unlatched the housing for a “Rabe”-type reconnaissance drone. With a soft pneumatic hiss, the matte-black quadrotor was airborne, its near-silent rotors a whisper in the dead, dust-choked air.
The drone feed flickered to life on Chen’s wrist-mounted tactical display, a window into the devastation below. He panned the camera slowly over the scarred valleys, the image jittery as the drone navigated thermal updrafts and lingering dust clouds. It was a landscape of utter defeat.
Then he leaned in, his finger stabbing the zoom control. “Flora. Look.”
The image stabilized, focusing on a ragged line of figures picking their way through a graveyard of flattened, mutated trees. They moved with the desperate, furtive gait of the hunted—men, women, a few older children, their clothes little more than tattered rags, their faces gaunt with hunger and shock.
“Zooming,” Flora confirmed, her tone flat as her own systems locked onto the feed.
Chen enhanced the resolution further, the camera focusing on the wrist of a gaunt man helping a woman over a fallen log. A distinctive corporate logo—a stylized, predatory bird encircled by a chain—was visible on a grimy plastic bracelet. “That’s Teodulo’s mark. They’re his ‘human assets.’” The realization dawned, cold and clear. “They’ve escaped.”
A moment of heavy silence stretched over the comms, filled only by the hum of electronics. The implication was staggering.
“The earthquake…” Chen murmured, thinking aloud, his voice low and analytical. “It must have shattered his compound. Or the chaos from that downed ‘Stormfang’ did. His security is probably in disarray, distracted by a mass breakout.”
His gaze drifted from the display, down the unstable slope towards the distant valley floor. The was a dark speck, and beside it, a tiny, colored dot—Alina. He saw her not just as a soldier, but as a commander whose spirit had been systematically battered. First, the bitter retreat that betrayed her ideals. Then, the helpless witness to a massacre that mocked those ideals. Finally, the raw, human humiliation in the infantry compartment that stripped her of her command aura. The revolutionary fire in her had been guttered, leaving cold ashes of duty and shame.
And in that moment, an idea crystallized in his mind. It was cold, calculating, a tactical assessment of enemy weakness and an opportunity for disruption. But beneath the calculus, a strange, nascent spark of something else flickered. This disaster wasn't just an obstacle; it was a catalyst. A chance to strike a tangible blow against a slaver, to weaponize the chaos against their enemy, and to save people—not in the abstract, ideological sense, but right here, right now. It was a mission she could in. It was the kind of clear, righteous, immediate action that could re-ignite her dimmed passion, that could pull their entire team out of the grim fatalism that had begun to consume them.
Chen Feng turned from the drone display, his expression hidden behind his helmet but his posture shifting from observer to instigator.
“Flora,” he said, his voice losing its detached edge and gaining a new, purposeful intensity. “Pack up the gear. We need to talk to the Feldwebel.” He looked back towards the speck that was Alina, then to the desperate figures on his screen. “I have a proposal.”
