The squad leader's rifle hummed, the crimson targeting beam painting Valkha’s collarbone. Jargal struck sideways, lunging across the deck. He shoved Valkha behind a stack of rusted coolant sleeves just as a discharge of superheated gas tore through the air where she had stood, vaporizing the alloy casing with an acidic hiss. “Stay down, girl!” Jargal barked. He owed her his survival in the lower hold, and he paid debts with violence. The six figures advanced, magnetic clamps thudding against iron plates. As red emergency flashes cut the haze, Jargal tracked their true frames: squat utility walkers normally reserved for shifting cargo containers, their cockpits reinforced with bolted slag-shields and their hydraulic arms refitted with stubby pulse emitters. “Compliance is mandatory, Cadets. Resist and be erased,” the squad leader’s vocalizer grated. Another volley spat from the loaders' muzzles, chewing through the overhead girders in a shower of white sparks. Boiling rage prickled under Jargal's skin. He scanned the bay, spotting a pair of heavy cutting-burners racked on an iron dolly nearby, their nozzles cold but plumbed into pressurized fuel canisters. “I’ll show you mandatory.” Jargal gripped the twin burner handles. His Night-Viper Qi flared down his forearms, running through the brass fittings to ignite the pilot arcs into narrow, screaming lances of cyan fire. He ducked under an incoming pneumatic fist, feeling the displaced draft graze his scalp. Instead of hacking wildly, he aligned his twin flames along the rig's chassis seams. His martial discipline sought the fracture line in every dense shell. The loader's chassis was welded sheet, stiffened by pins. Qi guided the burners straight toward the main hinge pins. The right tip stabbed the loader's rotary knee joint. Metal hissed and peeled backward, exposing synthetic tendons and grease lines. Jargal drove the left flame through the pivot bolt, severing the linkage in a spray of scorching oil. The rig collapsed onto its stump. Pivoting on his heel, Jargal deflected an erratic blast with an angled burst of his right tool, then drove both tips straight into the machine's primary spinal cable. *SSSSSS-CRACK!* Circuits shorted into dead slag, and the second walker crashed lifelessly against the bulkhead. Valkha stared from behind the coolant stacks. No cadet fought like this; he was dissecting mechanical frames by hand as though peeling fish bone from meat. The squad leader barked into the unit channel: “Spread out! Suppression grid, deploy!” The remaining rigs fanned across the bay, unspooling electrified containment wire between their extended arms. Jargal sliced through the third walker's hip assembly with a sweeping horizontal arc, but the charged lattice closed in, filling the air with the smell of scorched ozone. “Jargal! Valkha!” Tarkhan’s voice rasped across the wall-mounted intercom, shaking with panic. “The central hub is overrun! The swarm breached the outer ring... the station shields are dropping!” Static hissed as the speaker died. Jargal held his stance, the charged wires barely two paces away. The garrison was crumbling around them. Survival meant taking the squad lead alive to extract the command codes. Snarling, Jargal drove forward. He crossed his cutting tips and swept them outward, severing the high-voltage tether with an explosive pop of discharged current. Sparks pelted his cheeks as he vaulted through the gap. He closed on the squad leader's rig. Rather than shattering the leg joints, he drove a burner point into the cockpit hinge seam, twisting the molten metal until the latch sheared. Hydraulics screamed as the hatch tore free. Jargal grabbed the pilot's chest harness, hauling him clear and slamming him onto the grating. The two remaining walkers halted, their targeting optics twitching without active orders. Valkha scooped up a fallen guard's slug-carbine, aiming at the remaining machines. “What now?” she shouted. Jargal dropped down and tore the lead guard's shattered helmet away. Beneath the cracked polymer, the skull had been hollowed out. A glistening, grey-green parasite throbbed inside the bone cavity, its fibrous cilia rooted directly into the neck vertebrae and control jacks. The tissue shuddered. From its open throat issued a wet, rattling hiss: “Do not… trust… the smiling shadow…” Jargal went rigid. The timbre was identical to the vocal logs left in his bunk's hidden recorder. The corpse whose life he had inherited had not been buried in the lower levels; it had been harvested into this.

The Viper's Fangs