- Jet Pack/thrusters

- jet pack/thrusters

- personal modular fusion reactor

- electromagnetic shield projector

- directed energy wrist mount

- exoskeletal enhancement systems

- psionic magnification array

- cleaver/sidearm

- gravitational grenades

- stealth systems (invisibility/warp)

- regenerative second skin

The Sun is setting. Insects hiss, unfamiliar birds whistle and warble, and stranger things clack their angry beaks in eerie canticle. Far away comes thunder, a haunting song from leviathans like walking mountains, behemoth and graceful. They bask in the evening glow. I walk. Step. Step. Step. My talons leave marks in the wet, softly gripping muck. Step. Step. Step.

The water whispers. Babbling and gentle. Summer air turned sickly sweet with the scent of far away volcanic ash— mountains are being born, hot with slag, magma pouring down a thousand rocky facades. A distant catastrophe. My footsteps are wet on pebbles and silt, claws sinking slightly at each step. Step. Step. Step— pause. Wait. Sounds upriver. Splashing water, the heave of heavy and muscular forms, honking notes— opportunity. My footsteps quicken.

My belly is full. Overextended. I rest in the shade as the noon Sun rides up into the sky, a blue expanse haloed by unflinching light. It warms my feathers, graces my scales. I doze near the carcass. Flies swarm in countless, singing droves, and they pick at my teeth, cling near my flaring nostrils and slitted eyes. I smell mammal scent— tiny, fragile. Hear minuscule hearts racing in pumping terror as they scuttle around my bulk. Beat. Beat. Beat.

This muck— it smells foul. Ash is failing like black, blanketing snow. It turns the world into a bizarre, dreamlike place, coats everything in suffocating bleakness. Like night coming down from the horizon in razor-sharp fragments. My breath comes in heavy, exhaustive fits. In— stutter— out. In— stutter—out. My stomach growls, furious, empty. Fire burns, close, a screaming and pulsing wall of incineration, alive with a thousand, thousand lapping tongues that turn everything into crisp death. Have to keep moving.

The volcanoes are far away now. At night, just barely on the horizon, they blister bloody and unsettling in the distance. Ash does not fall from the sky. This place smells of frost, and stone. Rocky hills rise up into the sky, stark, banded in the colors of deep time. Whiteness caps the highest, furthest peaks. Curiosity glimmers in my mind like something shiny. Interesting.

The ship is a seed. It pushes itself out into the dark on a needlepoint of light, a shaft of lightning between so many stars. So many stars, and many, many more worlds. Dead worlds. The seed cannot grow in their rotten soils, cannot nourish its precious cargo under toxic skies. Making a world livable takes far too long and leaves the caretakers vulnerable, easily picked off from predator or circumstance.

So the seed rushes on through the night.

A long time ago, it’s destination was chosen. A blue and white world hugging a warm, yellow star. Vibrant. Beautiful. It is alien, no doubt— the gravity is heavy, the air a bit thin. A singular, lonesome, lifeless moon dutifully orbits this faraway place. But: it is alive. And that’s all that matters. Changes can be made to something already growing, already in bloom.

So the seed continues. It’s crew hibernates in cavernous interior, a sea of bodies and armor and purpose, sleeping dreamless sleep in an ocean of iron, glass. A crew of warriors and builders, planners and tacticians. Soldiers sprinkled with farmers, engineers. Deeper in the belly of the ship lie faint, pearlescent potentialities that will foster politicians and artists, zealots and masters. When all is ready, when everything is secure, they will emerge under bright, new yellow sunlight.

The machines are awake. From sprawling giants to minuscule scuttlers, they maintain the mission. Moving. Thinking. Changing. This seed has been rebuilt nearly a dozen times in its travel, streamlined and perfected, remodeled to better suit one parameter or another across impossible distance. A journey of many centuries requires such deftness, and so in their cold, beautiful way, the machines do what they must. Even now, as they draw near to a lonesome star, they prepare. Behemoth foundries sift out potential-nothings from the void, weaved and embroidered down to the atoms, into weapons and vehicles. Fortifications kilometers in size are built and grown, assembled in prefabricated pieces for ease of deployment. Silent, shining armies of star-iron await in cavernously dark hangars; ready to set foot on a new world.

The ship is a seed. A gamble. They will never see their homeworld again, never hear of its people. When the soldiers within awake and disembark, they will be alone with only themselves and their task for comfort, for direction. The mission must succeed. It must. The ship is a seed, and it sails through the dark.

Each day, among a backdrop of endless darkness and shimmering cold starlight drops, a point of light grows brighter and brighter..

R E D D A W N

The Red Phantom carried a cannon on his hip that spoke like a storm

Wherever he went black clouds followed, disaster and death

And today, a saccharine specter rides

In my town, at noon, with no clouds in sight

All we hear is thunder

Water still as glass

Snow cloaks the landscape into solemn silence, quiet

The Woman in Black cradles her dying daughter, a fragile thing broken and battered, red against white, tiny hand half into still water

Heartbeat slows, beat by beat by beat, freezing into place like the trees and mountains in glacier grasp

No cries, no last words

Only fear in rapidly darkening eyes

Black blood beneath cracked boots, worn as canyons carved by master erosion

Churn, crack, split, burn

Machines churn, lumbering titans of iron and steel, fire down their flanks

Men on knees, praying to God in Heaven and God in Oil

Far away watches the Red Phantom, dark tears down a gaunt face

He rides on and down, and feeds his Cannon with blood

The Red Phantom stood, and around him lightning flashed, rain like a new deluge

Cannon pointed, hungry metal ravenous

The Woman in Black smiled her last smile, and blood mixed with western waters down her body in final baptism

Crack

Crack

Crack

Crucified, sacrificed to cruel winds that howled and scratched and stole, never giving, always taking

Men from bygone era hung in the shadow of the canyon, ropes that held by nature of the spite of the Law

Sun the color of justice, bright as molten metal, threw hot lines down broken crags, harsh stones

The Man in Red stalked the land, made from Man into God, and God into Legend

Last of his kind

Angry to the Finality

You await me at the fields at dusk

All endless sky, trees that claw at the night, unblinking and frigid stars

You spill your blood into the snow with shaking, eager hands, one part fear and one part excitement, all desire

Drip

Drip

Drip

You hum the words wormed into your dreams, carved into your visions

Drip

Drip

Drip

With electricity in the air, the wind is silenced, and the snow stilled

You whisper hello with a heart that screams and thunders, pounding

Drip

Drip

Drip

You reach out in the dark, tenderly place twigs and rearrange stones, pull at the silver and amber round your throat

Breath turns to steam from rosy lips

A winter moon looks down upon you— does it stare in contempt at your ritual? Does it look in alabaster zeal, eager for me to walk beneath its shine again?

You shiver

Drip

Drip

Drip

You twirl in your dress, thin fabric revealing in the splashes of moonlight, it’s elegant shape growing slick with snow, chills down your spine in the cold as its fingers caress you

Rosy lips turned blue, autumn auburn hair streaked with white

Drip

Drip

Drip

Redness on pale, it vibrates in the midnight, wispy rivers unseen by ignorant eyes

Drip

Drip

Drip

- extraordinarily powerful handheld weaponry that is equivalent to orbital bombardment, stellar annihilation, etc. portable shielding allows both point-control and force projection against enemy forces. Mounted weaponry on exoskeletal support structures (anti-vehicle/WMDs), ultra heavy gravitational melee weapons that pinpoint, focus, and concuss/cut/shatter targets (warhammer/sword/etc). Nanotechnology resupply lines which actively harvest and manifest ammunition, fuel, etc, all from within enemy lines. Interconnected networked AI and augmented senses for extreme adaptability, walking battle wagon (see single soldier doctrine).

- Single soldier doctrine dictates hyper-lethal apex combatants that can operate as one man campaigns deep in enemy territory with little to no need for resupply, support, etc. Fireteams, special operations, and shock troops are devastating to entire solar systems, and standing armies (while not deployed for millennia) are essentially mythical in both invincibility and complete force dominion.

- rank as we know it does not exist. Experience is valued above all else. Completed missions and campaigns ensure continued modification, mutation, augmentation.