Suspended in the guts of the armored hauler, the cargo bay was a windowless iron coffin that hummed with a low, bone-shaking frequency Jack felt deep in his molars.
He sat on the low metal bench, shivering in the thin paper-mesh shorts from processing; his bare thighs clung to the cold, ribbed iron, and his raw feet were tucked tight beneath him to avoid the heavy boots of the other conscripts crammed into the narrow aisle.
The air was freezing and stale, thick with the sour smell of recycled oxygen, static prickle, and the sharp chemical tang of the cheap antiseptic gel the technician had slapped over the raw brand on his collarbone.
In the near-pitch darkness, his numb fingers fumbled with the stiff grey-issue clothing.
Bracing one shoulder against the vibrating bulkhead, he managed to guide his freezing legs into the coarse trousers, the rough seams scraping like gravel against his skin.
His fingers were stiff, near-useless.
He found the armholes of the heavy grey shirt, working his left arm through, then carefully ducked his head into the neck opening, keeping his right forearm pressed tight against his stomach, hidden, always hidden.
As the collar dragged over his shoulder, the coarse fabric caught on the edge of the fresh brand.
A white-hot needle of pain flared across his collarbone.
He bit his lower lip until he tasted copper, forcing his breath to slow as he pulled the shirt down.
To his left, the compact woman sat flat-footed and perfectly rigid, her heels locked against the floor weld, her dark eyes darting toward the overhead escape hatch every time the vehicle lurched.
She watched the steel seams as if waiting for a standard civilian release valve, her hands gripping her knees until her knuckles went white.
To his right, a long-limbed figure was cursing under his breath, trying to force a bare heel into a stiff synthetic boot.
A violent lurch shuddered through the chassis as the hauler hit a deep basalt rut.
The cabin swung sideways, throwing Jack’s shoulder hard into the long-limbed draftee’s ribs.
Both of them grabbed the underside of the bench to stabilize themselves, their fingers slipping on cold, grease-slicked iron.
The man grunted and spat onto the floor grate, the wet sound cutting through the engine’s dull roar.
In the amber glow of the emergency strip, his face was a landscape of sharp, cynical angles.
He wore his oversized grey jacket loose, unzipped, hanging off one shoulder as if he had been dressed by an officer who could not be bothered to check the fit.
He raised a hand in a slow, mockery of a salute.
“First-class transit,” he muttered, his voice a dry, gravelly rasp.
“The draft office promised a window seat, but I suppose the climate control makes up for it.”
Jack said nothing.
He pulled his feet further back under the bench, his arms folded across his chest.
His left palm covered the stinging brand, while his right forearm remained tucked beneath his left elbow.
The man tilted his head, squinting through the shifting amber shadows.
He nudged Jack’s unlaced boot with his own half-bound toe.
“You planning to wear those, or is the barefoot-in-the-ash look the new fashion in the outer sectors?”
Jack kept his eyes fixed on the dirty steel floor grid between them.
A thin, grey powder of volcanic dust had settled in the corners, carried in on the heels of the guards.
He counted the welds on the nearest floor plate: seven, then eight.
Never trust a factory weld, Nolan’s voice drifted back to him from some half-collapsed substation in East Industrial.
If they are rushed, the seam folds under three atmospheres of pressure.
Jack stared at the eighth weld.
It was uneven, the slag left unground.
Standard military fabrication; cheap, fast, built to move disposable bodies.
“Tough crowd,” the man murmured.
From Jack’s left, the compact woman shifted.
Her voice cut through the engine rattle, sharp as a sheared piece of sheet metal.
“Keep your boots on your side of the weld.”
The man’s grin widened.
He looked past Jack, his eyes finding her in the dim amber light.
“Apologies, sister. I didn’t realize I was violating your personal airspace.”
“There is barely enough oxygen in this hold to keep us from suffocating,” she said, her voice flat.
“I don’t need your legs taking up my leverage.”
He let out a dry chuckle, withdrawing his foot with an exaggerated slowness that made the movement a performance.
Slumping back against the bulkhead, his shoulder rubbed against the silent conscript on his other side; the man did not move, did not blink, staring straight ahead like a corpse.
The metal made a dry clink against his zipper.
“Not whatever string of serial numbers they stamped on my chart.”
The woman studied him for a long, quiet second, her dark eyes unblinking, assessing the loose jacket and his careless posture.
Then she said, “Kayla Reyes-Thorn. Aldric Agricultural.”
Her voice carried the gravelly, dry-throat edge of the eastern plains.
It was not a hand offered in friendship; it was a surveyor’s stake driven into the dirt.
Jack watched them silently.
His eyes mapped the structural ribs of the hold.
Six meters long.
Three wide.
Twelve support arches between the rear hydraulic ramp and the forward bulkhead partition.
The spaces between them were mathematically uniform.
He could see where the secondary conduit lines had been hastily bolted over the structural ribs, bypassing the main harness entirely.
It was a rush job.
If the hauler took an impact from the side, the whole frame would fold inward like an empty oil tin.
Vance tilted his head, his eyes tracking the fresh brand on Jack’s collarbone.
The skin around it was angry and swollen, the machine-etched characters still wet with the cheap, yellowed antiseptic gel.
“TC-17-BR,” Vance read, his voice dropping to a low murmur beneath the hum of the drivetrain.
He leaned sideways, resting his forearm on his knee to bring his face closer to Jack’s shoulder line.
“Transit District Seventeen. That is New Chicago. Industrial East, isn’t it?”
Jack’s jaw tightened.
The muscle in his cheek twitched.
He felt the heat radiating from the brand, the sting of the open wound against his rough new shirt.
“You planning on answering to a parts-manifest code,” Vance asked, “or is there a name left under that haircut?”
Jack did not answer.
“He’s a salvage kid,” Vance said, more to himself than to Kayla.
He pointed a finger at Jack’s hands.
“Look at the knuckles. Scarred from copper-stripping. And he sits with his weight forward, ready to dive under a bench if the ceiling starts to buckle. You only learn that posture in the old municipal sectors.”
Vance leaned back, a bitter, genuine grin touching his mouth.
“Don’t worry, friend. I pulled my first live copper lead out of a flooded substation in District Nine when I was twelve. I know the look.”
Vance looked past Jack toward Kayla.
“So. Aldric Agricultural. What was the pitch they gave you? The great patriotic call? Defending the colony’s breadbasket?”
“They didn’t give a pitch,” Kayla said, her eyes narrowing as she watched the ceiling.
“A drone dropped the notice in our dry-well intake. We had three hours to pack. They said our water allocation was being diverted to the central military districts anyway, so there was no point in keeping the irrigation crews on the payroll.”
“The old starve-and-harvest trick,” Vance said.
His chuckle was dry, hollow.
“They cut off your life-support, wait for the crops to rot, then draft the survivors and call it civic duty.”
“We built those wells,” Kayla said, her voice dropping into a low, dangerous register.
“We held the Eastern canal together with scrap wire and sheer grit while your city politicians were selling our filtration parts to the corporate districts. Don’t talk to me about civic duty.”
“I am not a politician, sister,” Vance said, his voice hardening slightly.
“I am the guy who was buying those stolen parts on the black market to keep my own sector’s heat from shutting off in the winter.”
The tension in the air was thickening, turning hot and sharp in the freezing hold.
Jack could feel it: the small-animal panic of people trapped in a steel box, looking for someone to tear apart.
“The drive assembly is straining,” Jack said.
His voice was low, flat, carrying the gravel of a throat that had not seen water in a day.
Both of them stopped, turning their heads toward him.
“What?” Vance asked.
Jack pointed a finger toward the vibrating floor plates. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“The planetary gears. The pitch is climbing through the third torque range. The transmission housing is rattling because the grade is increasing. We are climbing the upper sulfur flats.”
Vance sat up straighter, his lazy slouch vanishing as he listened.
The deep, grinding groan of the drivetrain was audible through the iron floor, a mechanical strain that vibrated up through their boots.
“The flats are the only stretch on this ridge with a fifteen-degree incline,” Jack added quietly.
“We will be at the secondary gates in three minutes.”
Vance stared at him, a slow appreciation cutting through his cynical mask.
“You really are a scavenger. You don’t just dismantle them; you read the teeth.”
Jack did not confirm it.
He simply reached down, grabbed his stiff synthetic boots, and slid his freezing feet into the unyielding material.
The stiff synthetic collar bit into his raw ankles as he pulled the laces tight, knotting them with quick, practiced loops.
Vance leaned in closer, his voice dropping below the rattle of the drive gears.
“I am Vance. And you?”
Jack hesitated.
He had spent the last twelve hours repeating his full name silently in his head like a mantra to keep from losing it to the processing machines: My name is Jack Calloway.
My name is Jack Calloway.
Hearing someone say even half of his name aloud felt dangerous and real, a tiny piece of ground claimed in the dark.
“Jack,” he said.
Vance’s grin was small, genuine.
“Jack. Good. Solid.”
Kayla watched them, her shoulders dropping by a fraction.
Her gaze no longer slid past Jack; she looked at him with a quiet, guarded solemnity.
“Good to meet you, Jack,” Vance murmured.
Hearing the name aloud, even just half of it, hit Jack with a strange, cold jolt.
In this freezing iron box, under the lens of the ceiling-mounted surveillance cameras, it felt like an act of quiet, dangerous sabotage.
Beneath the skin of his right wrist, a thin, icy thread of sensation pulled tight.
It was a wrong feeling, a sudden seam of frost along the bone.
Jack tensed, his survival instincts screaming, wondering if the hidden mechanism was reacting to his own racing pulse or if it was merely his imagination playing tricks on him in the dark.
He forced his fingers to loosen, taking a slow, steady breath until the icy feeling faded back into the background.
A violent hiss of hydraulic pressure cut through the engine’s roar as the hauler’s air brakes engaged.
The vehicle shuddered, its massive tires grinding to a heavy, final stop.
The engine idled down to a guttural, low-frequency thrum that vibrated through Jack’s teeth.
For a long, tense moment, there was only the sound of thirty people holding their breath in the amber gloom.
Then the locking bolts of the heavy rear ramp began to grind.
It was a brutal, screeching sound; the slow retraction of massive steel teeth from their sockets.
The pressure seal blew with a sharp, explosive hiss, and a wave of freezing, sulfur-stinking air rushed into the cabin, burning Jack’s throat.
The ramp lowered.
Blinding light flooded the hold.
It was a harsh, yellow-white glare, filtered through thick volcanic ash and toxic haze.
Jack squinted, raising a hand to shield his eyes as the cold wind whipped into the hold, carrying the dry, mineral smell of pulverized rock.
Beyond the ramp, the inner training blocks of the Bastion rose like a brutalist fortress of dark, poured concrete; a massive complex designed not to defend against an external enemy, but to crush the spirits of those held within.
Its sheer, soot-stained walls were scarred with deep seismic joints, squatted low and permanent against the desolate grey ash flats.
And there, standing perfectly still in the blinding yellow haze, was a single figure.
He was broad-shouldered and imposing, his posture rigid, his hands clasped behind his back.
Unlike the recruits, he did not shield his eyes from the wind or the biting ash.
He wore the heavy, dark grey-green uniform of the Colonial Defense Force, immaculate and unblemished despite the grit blowing across the flats.
His face was weathered and hard, carved by years of chemical winds, and his pale, nearly colorless eyes swept across the cargo hold with the cold, dispassionate assessment of a slaughterhouse inspector.
Across his chest, a yellow name tape stood out against the dark fabric: KOVAC.
Jack’s fingers tightened around the edge of the iron bench.
The quiet, private sanctuary of the transport was over; the machine had them now.