Mars, Sol System - D-12 Mining Outpost, "The Scar"
The Martian dust tasted like iron and regret. Kaine Lokison spat a glob of rust-colored phlegm onto the scree, the acidic tang of recycled air from his suit's vents doing little to cleanse the palate. The "Scar" lived up to its name—a deep, ugly gash across the Hellas Basin, rich in the only thing that mattered in the new age: Godshard residue.
His boots crunched on the loose regolith as he approached the blown airlock of Outpost Gamma. The client, a nervy middleman for the Martian Guild, had promised a simple in-and-out: retrieve a sealed crate from a decommissioned lab, no questions asked. The pay in Creds was good. The real payment, a vials of mid-grade Stabilizer to keep his own chaotic biology from tearing itself apart, was even better.
"Fenrir, scan the perimeter," he muttered, the sub-vocal mic picking up the command.
A dry, synthesized voice filled his helmet. "Scanning. Life signs: negative. Ambient radiation: 0.3 Sieverts and climbing. Structural integrity of the main facility: poor. Your continued presence is statistically unwise."
"Since when have I been wise?" Kaine grinned, a hollow expression behind his visor. The Fenrir system was his one heirloom, an AI housed in a worn necklace—a stylized tree of life that felt warm against his chest. Its sarcasm was the closest thing he had to company most days.
He stepped through the twisted alloy doorway. The lab was a graveyard of pre-Collapse tech, now just skeletons of consoles under a thick layer of dust and ice. In the center sat his prize: a reinforced carbon-fiber crate, stamped with the faded logo of OlympCorp—a lightning bolt encircled by laurels.
"Bingo."
As he moved to secure the crate, a low-frequency tremor shook the ground. Not geological. Thoom. Thoom. Rhythmic. Metallic.
"Fenrir?"
"Multiple high-yield energy signatures approaching. Origin... overhead. Reading IFF tags: Olympian Peacekeeper Legion, 'Hounds of Zeus' Battalion."
"Shit." Kaine's grin vanished. Peacekeepers this deep in a derelict zone meant only one thing: a purge. He grabbed the crate's handle, his enhanced musculature—a cocktail of black-market gene-mods from a dozen back-alley surgeons—making it light. He moved for a rear vent shaft he'd scoped earlier.
He was almost there when the main doors exploded inwards.
Light flooded the dark lab, not the weak Martian sun, but the blinding white of high-intensity lumens mounted on powered armor. Three figures strode in, eight feet tall in hulking ceramite plates emblazoned with the OlympCorp sigil. Their helmets were stylized like the snarling maws of wolves. Real Hounds.
Behind them, herded by two more troopers, was a group of maybe twenty people in tattered mining gear. Civilians. Their faces were etched with pure terror.
One Peacekeeper, his pauldrons marked with a single crimson stripe, stepped forward. His voice boomed through an external vox, cold and devoid of humanity. "By the decree of the Skyfather, this sector is quarantined. Exposure to unlicensed Godshard particulate carries the risk of genetic deviancy. For the purity of the human strain and the stability of the Accord, cleansing is mandated."
A miner, a grizzled man with a faded tattoo on his cheek, stumbled forward, hands raised. "Please! We just got caught in the collapse! We're clean! We have family in Ares City!"
The Lead Hound didn't even look at him. He raised a gauntleted fist. Energy crackled, coalescing into a blade of pure, humming plasma. "The gene-pool must be preserved. Contamination is a mercy to cut away."
The plasma blade descended.
Kaine's body moved before his mind could engage. It was a stupid, suicidal impulse he thought he'd buried years ago. He dropped the crate, his hand snapping to the heavy pistol at his thigh. The gun wasn't standard issue—it was a modified rail-pistol, ugly and brutal.
He fired.
The hyper-velocity slug didn't pierce the Hound's armor, but it struck the plasma gauntlet with a deafening CLANG, deflecting the blade. It seared into the floor by the miner's feet, melting the rock.
All lumens swiveled to him.
"Identify yourself, deviate," the Lead Hound's voice was now a focused, murderous monotone.
"Just a guy who hates bad manners," Kaine said, his voice projected through his helmet's speaker, laced with a bravado he didn't feel. Inside, his heart was a jackhammer. Fool. You're a smuggler, not a hero.
"Analysis: Three Mark V 'Myrmidon' Class combat suits. Your small arms have a 0.2% chance of penetration. Suggested course: Flee. Now." Fenrir's voice was urgent.
The Lead Hound gestured. "Secondary contaminant. Engage."
The two other Hounds raised their rifles. Not projectile weapons. Gene-Locks. Weapons designed not to kill, but to trigger catastrophic, violent unraveling in anyone with unregulated genetic modifications.
They fired.
Twin beams of coruscating energy lanced out. Kaine dove behind a gutted mainframe console. The beams hit, and the console didn't explode—it warped, the metal screaming as if in pain, its molecular structure violently rewritten.
A shard of molten plating spun out, piercing his environmental suit's thigh with a hiss. Pain, white-hot and sharp, lanced through him. He could feel the wet warmth of his own blood filling his suit's leg.
"Target isolated. Execute full purge, then sterilize the deviants." The Lead Hound turned back to the petrified miners.
No.
The thought was clear, cold. It wasn't about nobility. It was about the look on the grizzled miner's face. The same look he'd seen in the mirror for twelve years, since the day his own world burned. Helplessness.
As the Hounds leveled their Gene-Locks at the crying civilians, something in Kaine's mind… snapped.
Not psychologically. Literally.
A pain, utterly alien and profound, erupted behind his eyes. It was as if a vault in the core of his being, sealed shut since childhood, had been violently wrenched open. His vision swam, then changed.
Overlaying the real world, he saw streams of luminous, intricate code. They flowed from the Hounds' armor, from their weapons, complex and brutal algorithms of force and destruction. But he saw more. Around the miners, he saw fainter, flickering strands—simple, fragile biological code. Human baseline.
And around the Lead Hound, he saw a dense, pulsating knot of brilliant, arrogant data. A genetic signature. Powerful. Ordered. Familiar.
A name surfaced from the pain, seared into his subconscious: Ares, Sub-Type: War-Monger, Grade B-.
A command syntax followed, unbidden, as instinctive as breathing. A logic gate opened in his mind.
>COMPILE? [Y/N]
He had no idea what it meant. He had no choice. Blood loss was making him lightheaded. The Hound's finger tightened on the trigger.
Yes.
>COMPILING... SOURCE: ARES (FRAGMENT). INTEGRATING... WARNING: HOST STABILITY INSUFFICIENT.
Agony, a thousand times worse, consumed him. Every cell felt like it was being disassembled and forged anew in a furnace. A raw, red heat flooded his veins, burning away the pain from his leg, replacing it with a thrumming, terrifying power. A growl, not entirely his own, tore from his throat.
His vision cleared. The world was sharper, clearer. He could hear the whine of the Hounds' power cores, smell the ozone from their weapons, see the minute twitch in the Lead Hound's trigger finger.
Time seemed to slow.
Kaine moved.
He didn't run. He pounced. The push from his injured leg should have sent him sprawling. Instead, it launched him across twenty feet of lab like a missile. It was speed born of pure, undiluted battle-instinct. He didn't think about the trajectory, the angle. His body just knew.
The Hound firing at the miners was his target. Kaine's rail-pistol was gone. His hands would have to do.
He collided with the eight-foot-tall armored giant not with technique, but with the brutal, uncompromising force of a meteor. The ceramite plate on the Hound's rifle arm cracked with a sound like a mountain breaking. The Gene-Lock spun away, firing a wild beam into the ceiling.
Kaine landed in a crouch, his injured leg screaming in protest under the new, violent strain. The heat in his blood was already receding, the "compiled" power fading as fast as it came, leaving behind a hollow, bone-deep exhaustion and a fresh, sharper agony in his skull.
The Lead Hound stared, his head tilting slowly. "Genetic compilation... without a Chamber. Deviant. Aberration." His voice held a new, chilling note. Not just procedural duty. Interest. "Priority Alpha. The gene-thief will be taken alive. The rest... cleanse."
The remaining Hound turned his rifle from the miners toward Kaine. The Lead Hound himself took a step forward, his plasma blade reigniting with a vengeful shriek.
Kaine's mind raced, the strange code-vision flickering and dying. He was weaponless, bleeding, and the god-like strength was gone. The miners were frozen, staring at him as if he were another monster.
Then, a new voice cut through the static in his comms. Crisp, female, and fiercely calm. "Unidentified freighter, this is independent vessel Athena's Owl. I am detecting a Class-3 biological hazard alert and unauthorized Peacekeeper signatures at your location. I have a fast-evac shuttle on standby. If you wish to live, make for the eastern cargo ramp. Now."
A way out. For him? For them?
The Lead Hound lunged, plasma blade carving a molten arc through the air towards Kaine's head.
He had a second to decide: die a stupid hero, or live to fight another day with a debt to a mysterious stranger and the terrifying new ghost in his own DNA.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, Kaine chose. He shoved the nearest miner towards the rear vent. "GO! All of you, MOVE!"
As he turned to follow, the plasma blade's heat seared the air where his neck had been. A glancing blow from the Hound's fist caught his shoulder plate, shattering it and spinning him around.
He stumbled into the dark vent shaft after the last miner, the shouts of the Hounds and the scream of cutting torches following him. In the pitch black, the only light came from the cracked faceplate of his helmet and the warm, urgent glow of the pendant against his chest.
>COMPILATION SEQUENCE INCOMPLETE. HOST INTEGRITY: 67%. SOURCE CODE [ARES-FRAGMENT] CORRUPTED. DATA ARCHIVED.
>NEW DIRECTIVE DETECTED: SURVIVE.
As he ran, the ghost of his father's voice, long forgotten, echoed in the new, aching hollow of his mind: "Kaine... don't trust the gods..."
The game had changed. He was no longer just a smuggler. He was a variable. And Olympus had just taken notice.