Clouds smothered the moonlight, and the Budalawa Mountains sank into ink.
Wyatt lay hidden between boulders on a slanted slope, staring down at the mouth of the valley. At the edge of his vision, a huge machine column was creeping closer.
Red beams, violet beams—different scan modes strobed through the gorge, sweeping nearer and nearer.
Before long, more than six hundred units had turned the valley into a lattice of light. Above them, four frigates dropped broad, circular spotlights that drifted over the formation like slow moons.
Wyatt didn’t move. He might as well have been another rock.
Inside his core, it was the opposite. Every step the ground units took, every meter of drift in the air, every pivot of a sensor head, every angle of every scanning beam became a flood of data—and his mind tore through it at full speed.
Seconds later he had the best entry point.
He didn’t take it.
He waited for Hyena, on the opposite ridge, to give him his opening.
About a minute passed.
A sudden clatter erupted from the far slope—stone on stone in a sharp, frantic burst. Every head in the valley snapped toward it. Thick beams stabbed across, and a carrier swung a searchlight down—
Only to reveal a rock the size of a human head tumbling harmlessly into the dark.
Rockslides weren’t rare out here. Still, a dozen Punishers peeled off to investigate.
While everyone watched the wrong hillside, Wyatt moved.
Five seconds. Maybe six. That was all it took for him to slip from cover, cross the dead ground, and clamp himself to the underside of the nearest Bloodthirster, magnet-locks kissing its chassis.
The Bloodthirster halted. Its turret snapped left, then right.
A heartbeat later, it resumed its march.
No one reacted. Not in time.
Wyatt’s own threat level, however, spiked hard.
Phantom Forge had patched its units. A firewall—built for him.
It wasn’t enough to stop him from taking control, but it forced him to spend an extra three to five seconds cracking the lock. In a firefight, three seconds was a lifetime.
Just now, the Bloodthirster had nearly managed to broadcast a warning to nearby units. It had come close. Too close.
Plan A was dead.
He couldn’t dive into the swarm and hop from unit to unit like before. Not with the firewall delays, not with the fifteen-meter spacing. That would just get him pinned and shredded.
So he pivoted.
Plan B.
Using the natural roll of the slope, Wyatt steered the Bloodthirster toward a Bigfoot without looking suspicious. Once the Bigfoot drifted within ten meters, he took it too.
The takeover made the Bigfoot twitch. The hulking machine lurched, almost losing its footing on the incline, sending gravel skittering down the hillside.
Instant attention.
Punishers swooped in and washed the area in light. Exilers trudged over to check the Bigfoot’s balance.
Wyatt forced the Bigfoot to stand steady. He let them approach.
At the same time, he rotated the Bloodthirster’s turret as if lining up a shot on the Bigfoot—like this was a routine safety check.
Really, he was mapping bodies. Angles. Gaps. Who could see what, and when.
When the distribution finally clicked into place, he struck.
The Bigfoot’s arms snapped up. Four 25mm cannons roared, and its back-mounted anti-air rockets lit in a rush, fire-trails spearing into the low-hovering Punishers.
They were too close together. Too low. Too late.
Several detonated midair. The rest spiraled down in burning pieces.
The Bloodthirster fired next.
A red beam swept across the slope with no warning. The Exilers closest to the Bigfoot came apart in an instant—metal and limbs and molten fragments scattering through the scan-light.
The formation exploded into chaos.
Nearby units opened up and surged inward. Above, more Punishers dove in—along with several Razorwhale fighters. Higher still, the frigates and the carrier began to pivot, bringing their guns to bear.
Wyatt was already moving.
Shield in one hand, blade in the other, he sprinted straight at a Rampager. He cut down an Exiler and a Firecaller on the way in. He dodged two savage slashes—and then he hijacked the three-meter giant.
The Bigfoot and Bloodthirster were already dying under concentrated fire. Their job was done.
Wyatt’s new body, the Rampager, was caught in the broad spotlight a frigate threw down. Enemy units formed a ring around him, keeping distance—everyone suddenly cautious.
Then the ring tried to erase him.
Fire came in like a wall.
The Rampager absorbed it—four seconds of borrowed time—before it collapsed.
But in those four seconds, the giant did something no one expected.
It grabbed Wyatt and hurled him skyward.
Wyatt shot up like a shell. A hovering Razorwhale tried to bank away, realized too late it couldn’t.
He caught the wing, swung up, and landed hard on the fighter’s back.
Control snapped into his grip.
That Razorwhale had been the target all along.
Among Plando’s small fighters, the Razorwhale was the largest, with the highest payload. Its standard phase-prism lasers were murder in a crowd.
With the fighter stolen, Wyatt rolled its underwing mounts.
Eight slim beams lanced out and raked the Punishers around him.
The missile bays rotated open. Sixty-four missiles sat ready—Wyatt kept one.
He dumped the rest in a blind storm, no locks, no finesse—just volume, just panic, just space-making.
Then he pitched the nose due south and ran.
The ground answered with a net of fire—tracers and beams crisscrossing the air where he’d been.
Explosions blossomed across rock and sky, hammering the mountains with sound.
From the carrier, Ghost Bee fighters poured out in a swarm, and the four frigates accelerated after him, firing as they closed.
Missile locks stacked on his HUD. Dozens of Punishers and more Razorwhales chased.
But his fighter was twenty tons lighter now, faster and far more agile.
He skimmed the ridgelines to break ground fire. A string of incoming missiles stayed glued to his tail, so he scattered decoy flares in sheets—detonations popping behind him like thunderflowers.
Wyatt pressed the Razorwhale harder. The air screamed. The fighter crept toward the sound barrier.
He looked back.
Punishers. Fighters. Frigates. The carrier—everything was coming. Of course it was. Once Phantom Forge realized he’d slipped the leash, it wasn’t going to let go.
His decoys were burning fast. Missiles kept coming in waves.
And then the Ghost Bees arrived.
They were faster than Razorwhales, small and vicious and absurdly nimble. Spike-laser darts fell like violent rain, stitching the Razorwhale’s hull.
Wyatt dodged until the sky was nothing but angles, but the pattern was too dense.
The fighter took hits. Sparks burst. New holes opened in the skin.
He fired back with phase-prism beams, but the Ghost Bees were too quick, too tight, too hard to pin.
The Razorwhale shuddered, wobbling under the swarm. Wyatt pushed it anyway, willing it not to break apart—not yet.
Four minutes. Maybe five.
One more ridge.
And then the “turtle-shell nest” came into view at last, squatting in a valley like a domed scar over the earth.
The Razorwhale, trailing smoke, surged over it.
Wyatt opened the bay and dropped his final missile.