She reached the hatch and looked for the manual override. The panel was bent, the lever buried under a slab of torn plating, but she could see the mechanism. She braced her feet, set her shoulder, and pushed. The panel gave, inch by inch, until the latch clicked and the hatch dropped away.

Outside: darkness, except for the spill of firelight from the broken hull and a distant, shifting glow at the edge of the horizon. The air was cold, biting through the sweat that now soaked her undersuit. She tasted ozone, and something older—like the wind off a glacier.

It was the blue of an old bruise, shot through with a line of gold at the edge. A few hard points of light—stars or satellites—pierced the twilight. The only movement was the slow spiral of smoke from the shuttle’s wreck.

She pushed herself up, knelt at the lip of the hatch, and scanned the desert.

At first, she saw nothing. Then, at the edge of her vision, a line of motion: figures, low and fast, darting between the dunes. They moved in coordinated bursts, one group flanking as the others advanced. She counted six, then twelve, then lost the rest in the haze.

Jäger. Not the reedy scouts, but the heavy hitters—shoulders hunched, weapons already drawn. They carried no lights, needing none, and moved with the certainty of things bred for perfect predation.

Mana’s pulse thumped. The painkillers made the world soft at the edges, but the sight of the Jäger was a needle of clarity. They weren’t here to salvage the shuttle. They were here for her.

She crouched lower, using the hull as cover, and watched the Jäger as they advanced. They moved with a patience that bordered on arrogance, spreading out to encircle the wreck. The lead unit paused, scanned the air, then gestured—a silent command, executed instantly.

Mana knew the routine. They would close in, drive her out, then sweep for survivors. If she waited, she’d be boxed and finished inside the ruined ship. If she ran, they’d chase, and every meter would get her further from the only defensible ground she had.

She weighed her options. None of them were good.

The Jäger were closer now, maybe a hundred meters out, their bodies blending with the night. Mana focused on the lead: taller than the rest, moving with a gait she recognized from a dozen battles. The Weapon-Touched. She had killed its brother on the ice moon; now it was here, to finish the cycle.

She wiped her mouth again, felt the wetness on her palm.

The sand drifted in, cold and smooth, as the first Jäger crested the dune.

“Come on,” she said.

And waited.

The first sign of morning was a line of cobalt fire burning above the dunes. Mana squinted into the wind, eyes dry as old paint, every blink scraping. The crash had buried the shuttle’s nose in sand, tilting the cockpit up and exposing the hull’s jagged underbelly to the oncoming threat. In the new light, everything looked like memory—shadows deep enough to drown in, the world reduced to a set of simple choices.

She crouched behind the blown hatch, checking her arsenal one final time: the high-velocity Nexus-7 pistol steady in her palm, its weight familiar as bone; the Kestrel shotgun strapped across her back, loaded with flechette rounds that would shred Jäger armor at close range; her MP-90 submachine gun and AR-17 assault rifle secured at her sides. Her fingers brushed the katana's hilt—ancient technology among the new—then traced the contours of the two plasma grenades on her belt, their cores humming with contained destruction. The painkillers had faded, leaving her with a raw clarity that cataloged every wound, every labored breath, then dismissed them all. There was no time for negotiation with pain.

The Jäger advanced in formation, three pairs moving fast and low while a third group circled wide. In the predawn, their armor picked up the sand’s blue, the effect making them ghosts flickering at the edge of vision.

Mana watched them move, heart tapping a slow, three-beat ritual against her ribs. Between breaths, her fingers found the seam at her hip—three traces right, three traces left—the motion automatic between volleys. She checked the power to the shuttle's port-side turret—dead, at first, then flickering to life as she bypassed the primary with a jury-rigged tangle of wires. The console smoked, but the trigger interface chirped, a sickly green. Her hand returned to the weapon, then back to the seam, tracing the familiar pattern that had steadied her since childhood.

The first pair of Jäger reached the shuttle’s shadow, crawling up the slope in a double flank. Mana let them close, counting the seconds, then keyed the port turret. The recoil was instant—shoulder-jarring, a spray of tungsten shards that caught the lead Jäger in the midsection and tore it open like wet fruit. The partner dove left, rolled, and popped up with weapon drawn, but the turret tracked and finished the job, carving a line of holes from hip to head.

The second wave responded with feral speed. They charged the breach, moving as a knot. The first in line took the brunt, body jerking as the turret’s fire walked up its chest. The two behind used the corpse as a shield, pushing through the hail of metal until they reached the edge of the hatch. Mana let the turret stall, then ducked and fired her sidearm at the closest. The first shot went wild, but the second hit the visor, fracturing it with a powdery bloom. The Jäger recoiled, blinded for a second, and the third tried to haul it back. She finished both with another volley from the pistol, rounds slapping through the exposed neck seams.

The flanking group on the far side of the wreck made their move—coming in tight along the hull’s underside, using the shuttle’s own shadow as cover. Mana killed the port-side feed and rerouted what was left of the battery to the starboard. The relay clicked, a dry sound like bones in a box, and the console’s lights shifted to a jaundiced yellow.

She swung the turret, guessed at the lead, and fired.

The first round missed; the second caught the laggard, shredding its leg below the knee. The others broke formation, one climbing the hull, the other darting for the open cockpit above. Mana tracked the one on the hull, lined up the shot, but the circuit fried. A line of sparks jumped across the console, singing her knuckles and filling the air with burnt plastic.

She dropped the dead console, turned to the open air, and saw the last of the Jäger on the hull above—crouched, weapon poised, faceplate catching the blue dawn in a mirror of steel. Mana ducked as it fired, the round screaming past her cheek and blowing a hole in the aft wall. She rolled, using the momentum to grab a shard of metal from the deck, and flung it at the enemy. The shard caught the Jäger in the thigh, and the pause gave her time to raise the pistol and put two rounds into its center mass.

It slumped forward, dropping into the hatch in a deadman’s fall. Mana caught it by the arm, let it tumble past her, and watched it thud into the sand below.

A shadow moved at the edge of her vision, and Mana twisted, pistol raised.

Three shapes poured through the breach: two upright, one low and fast, a streak of blue-black in the morning haze. Mana fired the pistol point-blank, the round shattering a visor and lodging deep enough to paint the face behind it red. The body spasmed, twitched, and blocked the hatch for two seconds—long enough for her to turn the gun on the second, catch it mid-leap. She emptied the rest of the magazine as the Jäger landed inside the shuttle, each round chewing up armor, ricocheting in the coffin-sized compartment, fragments singing off the bulkhead and stinging her exposed skin.

Click. Empty.

The second Jäger kept coming. It powered through the impact, trailing blood and shotgunned ceramic from cracked plating. Its hands found her forearm—metal on bone, crushing pressure. She drove her forehead into the faceplate: a crack, then a blossom of powder, and the Jäger reeled. She let the pistol drop, grabbed the shotgun with her off hand, and thumbed the charge.

The third had already entered—closing the angle, silent and precise. Mana was off balance, blood and sweat in one eye, but she cycled the shotgun and fired from the hip. The flechette load spread at close range, catching the rush in the upper chest and vaporizing exposed synth muscle and fabric. The blast knocked the Jäger back into the sand, where it convulsed, tried to rise, then stilled.

The second was slower now, its grip on her wrist now, but her own grip on the shotgun even tighter. She rammed the barrel up under its chin and pulled the trigger. The shot cored the helmet, flush to the hilt; she squeezed twice more, fragmentation rounds turning the skull’s contents to mist.

The recoil wrench nearly ripped the weapon from her hand. She lost it, felt the stock slip away as the force threw both her and the Jäger backward. They rolled together—her knee finding the wounded enemy's diaphragm, pinning it. She drew her MP-90 one-handed, jammed the muzzle under what was left of the jaw, and fired.

The MP bucked, emptying half a mag in two seconds. The rounds slammed through the Jäger’s skull in a tight spiral, stitching the deck plates behind in blue-black blood. The body thrashed, spasmed; her wrist twisted with the recoil, but she held it there, bracing the gun with the crumpled shoulder of her other arm.

The mechanism in the MP-90 jammed, the battered frame catching and refusing to cycle. She yanked the side lever, expecting it to snap, and it did—the internal catch gone, the weapon now locked in full auto, chewing through the rest of the mag in a stutter of heat and noise.

The Jäger’s head dissolved, spraying her helmet with a froth of bone and ceramic.

The instant the weapon ran dry, Mana dropped it and scrabbled for the next: her sidearm, then the katana, but her hands were slick and numb, fingers barely able to close. She reached for a plasma grenade but her fingers betrayed her, the first grenade skidding across the floor before she could prime it. The second, she managed to thumb the activator as five more Jäger swarmed the breach, stomping over their own dead like the loss meant nothing.

The first of them fell onto her—no combat preamble, just a two-handed swing that hammered her low against the bulkhead. Mana's vision spot-flickered to white. She let her body go limp, then snapped into motion when the pressure relented: she headbutted up, shoving her face into the soft plate under the Jäger's jaw, and used the leverage to rip the spent shotgun from its sling. The butt of the weapon crashed into the Jäger's temple, buying just a fraction of space. She groped for her MP-90, brought it up, and jammed the entire muzzle into the soft, pulsing network behind the Jäger’s armor gorget.

She squeezed and didn’t let go. The mechanism—already half-melted by the last run—ran wild. Bullets streamed through the Jäger’s neck and into the second attacker lined up behind. Synthetic tissue and something like midnight blue blood burst against the back of her hand, coating her sleeve in a tacky, iridescent film.

Mana twisted the MP into the wound and let the entire magazine dump in an orgy of recoil and shrieking metal. The Jäger thrashed, pinning her, but the rounds poured through, chewing up both it and the next in line. The wall behind buckled with the force. The spent receiver whined with a dying whimper, then locked, slide open and smoking.

Five more Jäger, their movements a logic puzzle of aggression and feint, each staggered to exploit her exhaustion. Mana dropped the ruined submachine gun, seized the live plasma grenade from the deck, and crammed it deep into the ruined under-jaw of the third Jäger as it bore down on her. Before the thing could react, she jammed its own muzzle into its gut and levered up, using the rod of the weapon as a handle. The detonation timer was a hair trigger.

The blue-white light filled the world, baking everything in a sudden, skin-stripping heat. The shock wave sheared the edge from the corridor, vaporizing the first two Jäger and slamming the next three off their feet. The force threw Mana back, slamming her into the ragged, sparking edge of the hatch. She rolled with it, protected by instinct and the few remaining unbroken plates in her suit, then popped upright as the smoke and dust blossomed outward.

The last trio advanced into the maelstrom, bodies shredded but operational, their eyes burning with a cold, mechanistic focus. Mana went primal—silent, close, nothing left but the ritual of movement. She abandoned the guns, drew the katana, and felt the neural memory of the blade surge up her arm. The first Jäger swung low; she fainted left, took the arm at the bicep, then reversed grip and drove the blade up under the chin. The second arced in from behind, caught by a blind parry that left mana's knuckles raw and bleeding, the bones in her hand popping with the effort. The blade sliced in and out, not stopping, never stopping. The third tried to flank, but she pivoted, dropping low, and cut its leg clean at the joint, then finished it with a hissing sweep that set the helmet spinning off into the darkness.

Three dead in two seconds, but already more were climbing through, relentless and precise. Mana reversed the katana grip and stepped into the breach, shoving the corpse of the nearest Jäger ahead to scatter the others.

For a heartbeat, everything stilled. The world narrowed to her breath, the blue line of the katana, and the eye-sting of her own sweat. In that moment, a memory surfaced: Fox, his voice calm and low, teaching her how to fight not as human but as pure intent—“Don’t give them time to think.”

She didn’t.