The sky was a blackish purple bruise, filled with banks of swollen storm clouds that dragged heavy coils of rain across the barren plains. Crashing thunder echoed off the distant mountains and rolled away into gritty rumbles. The cold, bitter wind smelled of dirt, and for a moment it dispelled the thick stench of rotting flesh that rose from the hastily excavated pit in front of Venekan Army Trooper Genek Maleska.

Wind-whipped dust stung his face. He lowered his goggles and lifted his face mask, both of which became caked with a mix of brown dust and chalky lime powder from the pit. Maleska could barely see an arm’s length in front of his face, but he heard the growl of the excavator’s engine as it revved up. He listened to its heavy treads grind forward then stop. A moment later the ground shook as the gigantic industrial vehicle filled a quarter of the pit with fresh-dug black earth.

The falling load of dirt kicked up its own gust of wind and blew most of the lime off the overlapped rows of X’Mari corpses that lined the bottom of the pit, four layers deep.

Maleska coughed. He felt his chest tighten and knew he was moments away from a second taste of his breakfast. He planted the butt of his rifle on the ground as he dropped to his knees and pulled his face mask down and out of the way.

His vomiting didn’t last long. The acidic bile burned in the back of his throat. He licked his teeth and spat twice to expel the sour taste from his mouth. He lifted his arm to sleeve the flecks of food and spittle from his mouth and chin, but he stopped as he saw that his uniform was shrouded from head to toe in a thick coat of dust. He put his mask back on.

Another load of dirt made a trembling impact in the grave pit. Then the sky darkened as if a giant black curtain had been pulled across it. A loud clap of thunder was followed by a scattered fall of fat raindrops sweeping in from the plains. The sky broke in a sheeting, heavy downpour. The dust coating his uniform turned to mud and washed away in slow, dirty rivulets, revealing the gray-green patterns of his camouflage fatigues.

The excavator work lights snapped on. The huge machine pushed another mound of soil into the pit. The other piles of dirt began to gradually melt away as muddy flash-floods. As another segment of the pit was filled in, he looked down at the rain-cleansed faces of the dead X’Maris. Their midnight-blue skin and coppery hair lay tangled together, their bodies intertwined like broken, tragic sculpture.

He removed his goggles, mask, and helmet and let the rain wash over him as he pulled his light-blue fingers through his silvery hair. He hoped that the war would end soon, so he could go home and be a civilian again.

A fiery streak sliced through the canopy of storm clouds and blazed across the sky, passing over his squad and racing toward the horizon. Work halted as the two dozen Venekan soldiers scrambled to the northeast edge of the ridge to watch the burning object make planetfall. It had almost reached the horizon when it hit the ground and was swallowed into the perfect darkness of the mist-swept landscape.

“Radio!” Maleska shouted. His radioman jogged over to him and handed him the digital two-way handset. Maleska pressed the secure-frequency switch. “Sync-Com, this is Five-Nine Jazim, over,” he said. He stared into the darkness, in the direction of the fallen fireball, while he waited for Synchronized Command to respond. A few seconds later, a tinny, digitally processed voice squawked back over the radio.

“Five-Nine Jazim, Sync-Com. Go ahead.”

“Sync-Com,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “we’ve sighted an unidentified aerial object traveling north-northeast over our position. Estimate touch-down approximately eighty-five tiliks from our current location. Please advise, over.” Raindrops pelted his helmet with a rapid-fire deluge for several long seconds while he awaited Sync-Com’s answer.

“Five-Nine Jazim, hold your present location for dust-off. Twenty-third Mech Lance’ll lift you out of there as soon as the storm breaks. You’ll help them recon the UAO crash site. Over.”

“Sync-Com, we confirm, holding for dust-off and recon. Five-Nine Jazim out.” He stowed the digital radio handset in the radioman’s backpack. The rest of the soldiers were still gathered at the edge of the ridge, staring into the rain while trading rumors, guesses, and wagers among themselves.

“Snap to!” he barked. The soldiers turned to face him and straightened to full attention. He prowled in front of the men, his bootsteps splashing in the broad puddles that were growing steadily larger and deeper. “As soon as this storm breaks, we’re being lifted out,” he said. “Norlin, get back on that excavator and fill this in before it turns into a lake. Everyone else, standard cleanup and perimeter watch. Move out!” The squad scrambled back into action.

Maleska watched the excavator push another wet heap of dirt into the last uncovered segment of the X’Mari mass grave. As the dark-blue faces of the dead vanished beneath a tide of mud, the young noncom feared that the object he’d just watched fall from the sky had been a Venekan military aircraft—one whose crew and ordnance were now in enemy hands.

He glanced at his watch and sighed. Sunrise was more than an hour away, and he could already tell this was going to be a very long day.

Ganag crept forward in the pouring rain, fearful of the strange and smoldering tube-shaped object that had just gouged a ragged wound across the Kelvanthan Plain and come to a stop here at the base of the Scorla Hills. The X’Mari teenager kept his rifle aimed squarely at the object as he moved closer to it.

His cautious footfalls were all but inaudible through the pattering white noise of the storm. From behind him, the beams of his two friends’ handlights crisscrossed in tight formation as they lit his path, casting mirror-twin shadows of his gangly adolescent body in front of his feet.

He knelt beside the battered, black object and held his hand above its surface. No heat radiated from it. He touched its cool, slick wet surface and ran his hand along it, feeling its scuffs, cracks, and other points of damage. Resting his rifle against it, he leaned closer to study the emblem etched onto its flat top surface. He had never seen anything like it, not on any flag of the world.

“I don’t think it’s Venekan,” he said over his shoulder.

“Whose is it, then?” Lerec said, his voice quavering. Ganag wondered whether Lerec was too young to be in the field. Most of the scouts had been at least fourteen years old before they picked up weapons. Lerec was only twelve. The boy had insisted that he was ready and had gone out of his way to prove he could shoot, run, and spot as well as the older scouts. Now, less than ten days later, the kid was losing his water during his first real field patrol.

Ganag traced the lines of the round-edged, triangular emblem with his dark-blue fingertip as he considered Lerec’s question. “I don’t know,” he said a few seconds later. “I’ve never seen this crest in any of the books. And I’ve never heard of a missile that could navigate without fins.”

“I wouldn’t call what it did ‘navigating,’ ” said Shikorn, who was fifteen, just one year younger than Ganag. “If you ask me, I’d say it fell.” Shikorn had a point; the object’s descent had been very erratic.

Ganag was about to ask Shikorn for the radio when he heard the sound of truck engines approaching from inside the Scorla Pass. Without a word, the three boys scrambled to cover behind a nearby cluster of scrub bushes. They pressed themselves against the ground and held their breath as four trucks emerged from the pass and drove directly toward the fallen object. The mud-spattered vehicles’ headlight beams, dimmed by slashing rain, swept over the trio as the trucks passed by.

The vehicles came to a stop in a circle around the object. With the engines still running, the drivers and passengers got out. Even in the stormy darkness, Ganag was certain that all of them were X’Maris. Then the leader emerged from behind the far truck. Ganag recognized him as Hakona, a war chief of the X’Mari Resistance. Ganag tapped Shikorn, who nodded his confirmation. The two youths stood up and pulled Lerec to his feet along with them. Ganag called out to the group of adults.

“Friendlies,” Ganag said. “Scout Team Kalon.”

The X’Mari adults aimed their rifles at the three boys. “Sector code word,” one of the men said.

“Vashon-zelif,” Ganag said. The adults lowered their weapons. Hakona walked toward the three scouts.

“Have you seen anyone else near here?” Hakona said.

Ganag shook his head. “No, sir. We only just got here ourselves, a few minutes after we saw it hit.”

“Everybody in the zilam hemisphere saw it hit,” Hakona said. “We need to get it to a safe location before the Venekans get here. Help us put it on the flatbed.”

Hakona stomped on the accelerator pedal with such force that he almost expected the corroded floor of his vehicle to crumble under his feet. Every bump and divot in the road made the speeding flatbed truck rattle like a child’s toy.

He glanced at the cracked mirror on his door. The other three vehicles of his convoy were close behind him, keeping pace and following his lead, down to every curve he fishtailed through at unsafe speeds. He couldn’t yet see the gray light of predawn, but he felt it coming.

The downpour had ceased a few minutes earlier, making the roads a bit easier to see. He and the other drivers in his convoy had turned off their trucks’ headlights and activated their night-vision goggles. He hated the monochromatic gray-green displays’ hypnotic quality, and he struggled to remain focused on the twists and turns of the Scorla Pass.

He heard the first explosion come from behind his vehicle. The glare from the blast flared his light-intensifying goggles to blinding white. As he tore them away from his face, a second explosion transformed his vehicle’s few remaining windows into stinging glass projectiles.

The heat of the blast shriveled his short, ragged hair and filled the cab with an acrid stench. By the time the third explosion rocked the narrow canyon of the Scorla Pass, he was aware of nothing except the dizzying sensation that the laws of gravity had been suspended.

The wind screamed through the open side doors of the jumpjet, its constant roar drowned out by the high-frequency screech of the jet aircraft’s engines, which became even more deafening as the afterburners kicked in.

A seam of sky along the horizon began to show a hint of gray, a harbinger of the new day. Maleska crouched in front of the open side door, watching the ragged landscape of the Scorla Hills blur past beneath the wings.

Seated in the darkened main compartment of the broad-bodied jumpjet, their backs pressed against its gunmetal-gray walls, were his motley-looking soldiers. Most of them kept their rifles clutched between their knees, barrels up and safeties on. Norlin, a short-timer who everyone could tell was all but burned out after spending too long in country, slumped in his harness, mouth hanging open to give his snoring free rein. The young footman’s rifle was laid like a bridge across his knees, the barrel pointing toward the rear of the troop compartment.

The jumpjet banked hard to the left, and Maleska tightened his grip on the rappelling harness over his head. A sharp hiss preceded the release of a volley of missiles from the jumpjet’s wings. Their smoky exhaust trails snaked inside the troop compartment, and the soldiers awoke to the bitter stench of spent chemical propellants, which made Maleska cough. Over his own hacking gasps, he heard the dull reports of the missiles striking their targets on the ground below.

The troop compartment’s ruby-hued lights clicked on. The engines whined as the pilots fired the braking thrusters. The outer engines rotated into a takeoff-and-landing configuration, and the jumpjet began a quick, vertical descent.

The co-pilot’s voice crackled inside Maleska’s helmet headset. “Snap to,” he said. “Insertion in twenty seconds.”

Maleska looked at his squad. “Snap to!” he said, shouting over the engine noise. “Weapons hot. Two by two, standard cover. Search and secure. Yellik, left point. I’ve got right point.”

The jumpjet touched down with a heavy, jarring bump.

“Move out!” Maleska said as he hopped out of the jumpjet through its right-side door, half of his twenty-four-man squad behind him, the other half following his second in command, Senior Footman Yellik, out its left side.

Maleska landed on his feet with practiced ease. His boots sank into the soft, muddy ground. He lowered himself into a crouched posture, weapon held level and aimed forward. Moving out of the way of the footmen who followed behind him, he dropped to one knee and scanned the perimeter through his rifle’s targeting sight. There was no sign of movement on either side of the road ahead, or from the overturned burning vehicles that lay in the middle of the narrow, high-walled mountain pass. He looked back and saw all his footmen assembled behind him in proper cover formation. Glancing beneath the jumpjet, he could tell from the arrangement of feet on the other side that Yellik and his team were also ready.

He keyed his headset mic. “Tikrun Seven, Five-Nine Jazim. I’ve got boots on the ground, and I’m moving to secure the site, over.”

“Five-Nine Jazim, Tikrun Seven,” the jumpjet co-pilot said, his voice rendered scratchy and mechanized by Maleska’s headset receiver. “Acknowledged. Standing by for dust-off. Tikrun Seven out.”

Maleska led his squad forward toward the fiery wreckage of the four trucks. The soldiers’ steps made small squelching noises as they traversed the muddy road. Inside the shattered and bent vehicles, groups of four to six corpses lay in heaps, charred almost beyond recognition by the searing heat of the Venekan “sky cutters,” small missile-delivered munitions that relied on scorching temperatures and thousands of deadly shrapnel-like projectiles to quickly neutralize enemy personnel.

Maleska marveled at the obviously overwhelming firepower that the jumpjet had unleashed against the small ground convoy. Beneath the mangled vehicles, the thin crust of pavement that had long ago been laid over this neglected road was now molten and glistening behind curtains of heat radiation.

The point squads reached the convoy’s lead vehicle, a flatbed truck that had been flipped upside-down and rear-end-forward by the impact of the blasts that had erupted behind it. It was the only vehicle that did not appear to have been directly targeted by the aerial barrage. The road here was not melted but was spider-webbed with fresh fissures that emanated from the fiery debris behind it.

Yellik glanced inside the vehicle and aimed his weapon into the cab. The air was split by the angry buzz of his assault rifle. Maleska shielded his eyes from the incandescent muzzle-flash. Seconds later, Yellik eyed his handiwork and signaled all clear to Maleska, who keyed his mic.

“Tikrun Seven, Five-Nine Jazim. Site secured, over.”

“Five-Nine Jazim, Tikrun Seven. Acknowledged, site secure. Relaying to Sync-Com. Tikrun Seven out.”

Maleska kneeled beside the overturned vehicle and glanced beneath it. Secured to the flatbed was an oblong shape wrapped in a dark tarpaulin. He looked over his shoulder and snapped his fingers a few times in quick succession to get his squad’s attention. “Norlin, Pillo. Crawl under and cut whatever that is free. Get it out here so I can see it.”

With sour-tempered grumbling, the two enlisted men wriggled under the flatbed and began cutting the heavy cables that secured the object to the flatbed. Maleska stood off to one side and kept his expression neutral to mask his growing impatience.

Several minutes later, while the two men were still working, a trio of Venekan jumpjets landed down the road, behind Tikrun Seven. Three squads quickly debarked from the jumpjets and fanned out in either direction, far behind and far in front of the secured site. Following them up to Maleska and the wrecked flatbed was an officer whom Maleska recognized only by virtue of his rank and a few surprisingly accurate overheard descriptions: his division leader, Commander Zila.

Zila was a career officer whose face looked like it had been hewn from the mountains of Zankethi and tempered in the fires of combat. He had a reputation for never accepting defeat in battle, and he was rumored to be nurturing lofty political ambitions. Maleska didn’t believe that a high-ranking officer like Zila would leave the safety of Sync-Com headquarters and set foot inside X’Mar unless there was something critically important going on—something that would require the commander’s personal attention.

Zila strode up to Maleska and spoke through clenched, sepia-tinted teeth with a voice like a rasping saw.

“As soon as your men cut the truck’s cargo free, I want them back on the jumper,” Zila said. “But you stay here.”

“Yes, sir,” Maleska said with a nod. He turned as he heard the sound of the truck’s cargo falling free of its bonds and thudding to the ground beneath the truck. A few seconds later, Norlin and Pillo, now coated in mud and grease, pushed the cylindrical, shrouded object out from under the truck, rolling it ahead of them. As soon as it rolled free of the truck, it slipped away from them and began to roll toward the side of the road. Zila stopped it by planting his heel on it, like a conquering hero. Norlin and Pillo, still down on their bellies in front of him, stared up at him in awe.

“Get up,” Maleska said, his voice sharp. “Yellik, take the squad back to the jumper, double time.” Yellik snapped Maleska a quick salute, then barked orders at the rest of the squad as he herded them back into Tikrun Seven.

Zila watched them pile into the aircraft. As soon as the jumpjet door slid closed, he turned to Maleska. “Cut that cover off of it,” he said. Maleska drew his utility knife and sliced the tarpaulin off the object.

The shredded fabric fell away to reveal an ordinary fuel drum—rusted, pockmarked with holes, and emptier than the promises of a politician. Beside him, Zila made a sound that was somewhere between a grunt and a growl.

As the sky overhead turned a bleak, hopeless shade of gray, Maleska’s long day became just a little bit longer.

Ganag kneeled in the stern of the long, narrow skiff and slowly paddled it downstream. The skiff sat dangerously low in the water, which threatened to wash over the gunwales and swamp the small boat if Ganag tried to paddle too quickly. In the prow of the skiff, Lerec and Shikorn lay back-to-back, sleeping fitfully beneath a thin, shared blanket of moth-eaten fabric.

The object from the sky was in the middle of the skiff, between Ganag and his friends. It was concealed beneath thick, gray sheets and sacks marked as grain but filled with feathers.

Ganag knew that Hakona and his officers were dead. He had seen the Venekan aircraft streak toward the Scorla Pass, and he’d heard the muffled explosions echoing off the hills. Just like that, every adult Ganag and his friends had known was gone.

Now it was up to them to carry this strange prize to safety—to the last bastion of the X’Mari Resistance.

Ganag stopped paddling for a moment and unfolded his map, which rustled in a frigid breeze that signaled the early onset of winter. This stream would carry him to the Ulom River within half a day. From there, he had only to let the current carry him and the skiff downriver. Once on the river proper, they would hide during the daytime and move only at night.

If we’re lucky and careful, he thought, we might reach the Resistance in four days. He forced himself not to consider what would happen if the Venekans learned that it was to him and his friends that Hakona had entrusted the object.

The first reddish rays of dawn snuck over the horizon and slashed between the war-ravaged hills of northern X’Mar. Ganag tucked his map inside his shirt and resumed paddling with quiet resolve toward his destination.