Karl jolted upright in bed, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The afterimage of claws piercing through combat armor still burned behind his eyelids - that split-second agony before death, the hot spray of blood against his visor. His hand flew to his sweat-slicked forehead, trembling fingers coming away glistening. Even now, the phantom weight of skyscraper-sized void beasts seemed to crush his ribcage.
A full regiment. C-class combatants every last one. Reduced to crimson mist beneath those crystalline talons. The memory twisted his gut as he kicked off the nanoweave blanket - impossibly light yet trapping body heat like a second skin.
Cold floor panels leached warmth from his bare feet.
[Ambient temperature drop detected. Enable thermal regulation?]
His jaw tightened. He'd disabled those basic biosynk functions years ago when his augmentations surpassed civilian-grade specs. This shouldn't be happening.
The room came into sharp focus - 100-meter square of polished lunarcrete, sunlight streaming through vacuum-sealed viewports. His pulse quickened at the sight dominating the far wall: a 21-meter obsidian mining skiff bearing "H-4/2781" in fading corporate yellow.
"That's..." His throat went dry. "My first rig after graduation. Aex Corporation's Ceres mining division."
The realization hit with physical force. This wasn't some frontline barracks. The too-clean smell of recycled air, the faint ion hum of dormant machinery - these were the ghosts of his corporate past.
Karl's pupils contracted as if struck by live current. "Reincarnation" burned through his synapses like white phosphorus - a concept that shouldn't exist in his neural-augmented reality. Yet the evidence glared back at him in the mirror-wall's reflection: the unmarred jawline of his twenty-three-year-old self, those damned corporate mining overalls hanging loose on a frame not yet hardened by war.
His augmented irises flickered with telltale amber diagnostics. "West! Chrono report!" The command rasped from a throat still remembering how vacuum frost had cracked it open.
The reply came crisp through bone conduction: [New Calendar 777.07.07. 07:07.]
"Specs."
[H2 National Chip operational. 3.7 Units/sec processing. Energy reserves: 1000/1000 Thermal Units.]
Karl's knuckles whitened against the viewport's quartz. Three years. The math aligned perfectly - this was his first morning at Aex Corp's Ceres mining colony, back when his neural upgrades still ran civilian-grade H2 firmware. Before the military-grade C2 augmentations. Before the void beasts.
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Star patterns resolved through the plexisteel - Cygnus Arm constellations dancing their millennial waltz. His combat-honed mind began cataloging navigation beacons automatically: Rigel Kentaurus (3.2 lightyears, spectral class G2V), Hadar (390ly, B1III), the pulsing ruby of Antares marking--
The emergency conditioning kicked in. Five-count breath. Tactical assessment override. His racing pulse slowed as starlight painted cold equations across the viewport.
"Welcome back, Mr. Karl." The mining skiff's shadow loomed across his face, its H-4/2781 designation glowing faintly. "Your shift commences in 53 minutes."
West's voice carried the bland assurance of all corporate-mandated AI. Karl almost smiled. How quaint, this primitive iteration of what would become his battlefield companion - back when "smartphone evolution" meant babysitting ore processors instead of calculating artillery trajectories.
He pressed fingertips to the chilled quartz. Somewhere beyond those stars, his death still waited. But this time, the void would find him prepared.
Karl's gaze descended through the quartz pane. The mining colony spread beneath him like a circuit board revived - hexagonal habitation modules glowing amber under carbon-fiber spires. Aex Corp's original schematics had called for 10,000 souls. Some bean-counter's algorithm later halved that number, trading living space for three percentage points added to miners' profit shares. Productivity metrics had skyrocketed. Mortality rates weren't in the equation.
"Focus." His augmented lungs flooded with oxygen-rich air, combat stims purging residual cortisol. Memories crystallized - that pivotal transport ambush twenty-three months from now. How he'd dragged three engineers through ruptured bulkheads as H6 interceptors screamed overhead. The promotion from ore jockey to security detail. The first time he'd tasted vacuum-burned blood after a skirmish with Tau Ceti's crystalline leviathans.
Frost patterns spread beneath his palms on the viewport. His reflection shimmered - the face that hadn't yet watched Martinez get bisected by quantum-woven talons. The hands that would soon grip an H6's plasma cannons instead of mining lasers.
"West. Tactical overlay." The command left his lips before conscious thought. "Last seven days' operations. Full planetary task log."
[Processing.]
Holograms flickered across the wall's lunarcrete surface. Mining quotas blinked crimson at 78% completion. Security reports showed three perimeter breaches - likely meteoroid impacts. Karl's neural lace tingled with anticipation. Three years of future memories hummed in his hippocampus, a temporal advantage no military academy could replicate.
His fingernails bit into titanium alloy window framing. This time, Martinez would learn to check his damn sealants. Karl wouldn't charge blind into that nebula storm. And when the void came calling with its crystalline horrors...
[Alert: Shift commencement in 6 minutes 22 seconds.] West's reminder glowed teal in his peripheral vision.
Karl turned from the stars. Let the beasts come. He'd rebuilt himself once from corporate cog to Consortium soldier. Now armed with temporal foresight and a H4 skiff's modest arsenal, he'd forge something far more dangerous - a commander who knew exactly where and when the abyss would strike.
