The venerable Chinook was starting to circle. Internal head speakers came active, and Warren Vester could hear the commander call out, “Coming up to the edge of Sector 1. Get ready to haul ass, newbs.”

  The helicopter’s wheels settled on the ground, and every squad member jumped out. Commander Muller was last and thumped the metallic door on his way out. Despite the rotor noises and the heavy noise-canceling gear, the sound must have been carried as the helicopter immediately lifted and turned back, heading toward Portland.

  Warren looked at the helicopter departing. Along with the blazing Vaskanson logo, the faded Stars and Stripes flag still stood proud. A modern one, even though the Chinook itself predated the Impact. 13 stripes for the original Colonies. 13 white stars for the living States, and 37 black stars for the dead.

  Muller’s assistant, whose name Warren had already forgotten, started unfolding the communication gear. A sat phone – whose price probably exceeded that of the surplus Chinook – and computer laptops came out of the pile of boxes he had personally pulled from the helicopter. Warren caught a glimpse of a greenish glow coming from the man’s chest under his shirt. He hadn’t seen anything on the way, but any of the actual ground ops would be Cored, of course.

  “OK, listen up. You got a briefing back at HQ, so I’ll be short. I know you’re good. We washed out 9 out of 10 of the applicant intake, and you’re the ones we didn’t. You’re though, you’re raring to go, and you don’t just eat snakes, but you drink from the fangs for the seasoning.”

  “But here, you’re noobs. You are not the lowest of the low; you are below the lowest. You’re Mundanes. It doesn’t matter how big your balls are; you’ll die shortly.”

  “Now, Vaskanson Incursions Inc. could have outfitted you. But here’s the stark truth. Out of 4 newbies we bring here, only one is good enough to consider bringing back again. At the price of the lowest Cores, that’s three too many.”

  He snorted.

  “I remember how stupid the student debt bubble was getting before Impact. So nobody is going to give you a Core unless we’re certain you can earn it back. And I’m the one who makes that decision. And here’s what wasn’t in your briefing. I’ll make that decision tomorrow.”

  He pointed out the southeast.

  “Half a mile away from here begins the Tier 1 sector of Portland. You’ll know when we’re in. Everyone knows, even you Mundanes.”

  “Tier 1 is the easy mode. Even if your guns don’t work, you can stab a local animal, and it will bleed and die on you. You don’t even have to push that knife too deep.”

  “Our objective is a small known chunk. Yellow-white Impactor. It’s 7 miles in. Once we’re there, we’re going to make a perimeter and hunt as many Impact Beasts as we find. We camp for the night, and at noon, we haul ass back to here, where Mr Mobel here will be waiting for us.”

  “And here’s the thing. I will pass the best of you, and I will pass as many as we found Cores, minus one. That Core covers – barely – the cost of this mission for Vaskanson. We find just one Core; you all get handed your final paycheck for the month, and you’re out. We find five Cores. I pick the best four of you, and you’re in, and the rest are out. And you don’t get a chance again, at least with Vaskanson.”

  Warren exchanged incredulous looks with the guy next to him.

  “What the fuck?”

  Warren remembered the name… Giorgio Gomez. Italian mother, Cuban father. Both dead in the Impact, back when Giorgio was a teen on holiday with an aunt in Seattle.

  “That’s sick,” remarked Warren.

  “Yea. And stupid. We’re supposed to be a team in the Perimeter. Now, half of those guys will be sabotaging the rest to make sure they’re the ones on top.”

  “I noticed that Muller didn’t say how he judged the best.”

  Gomez frowned.

  “You’re right. So… if you want to sabotage, I guess you also need to be sure you’re not caught.”

  Warren noticed that the idea of sabotage was the first one that Gomez had.

  As the twenty-strong team started out, Warren distanced himself slowly and unobtrusively from Gomez. If the guy wanted to start with sabotage, being implicated, even by mistake, would be a bad idea. He let himself fall a bit until he caught up with Marcus Fintaler and Natalia “Nat” Serpinski. The two were rumored to be an item, which sounded plausible as they were almost always together. But, more importantly, Warren thought those were the smart ones.

  Warren knew by now most of his current buddies. Muller hadn’t exaggerated when he said that 90% of them had been already washed out. Most of those, Warren didn’t remember – except for a tall girl who had been roughly manhandled and pulled screaming from class. But the ones that made it through the two months of testing and training? Yea. He knew at least who they were.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  Every month, outfits like Vaskanson Incursions got nearly a thousand youngsters like Warren applying. They started by throwing out 2 out of 3 by looks alone. Nobody was fat in the post-Impact USA, but if you weren’t fit and healthy-looking, you got laughed in the face for thinking about Zone Running.

  Then, Warren faced physical and psychological tests. Vaskanson paid minimum wage – which these days wasn’t even enough to avoid starving – but you could live in their barracks, and 80% of the applicants chose to, just like Warren.

  Every test was simple: pass/fail. Those who failed one got paid precisely, to the hour, how much they were owed and shown the door. The training was also pass/fail, but you only failed by being stupid, usually by not asking the question before its answer bit you in the ass.

  Warren had not expected this training session, their first in the Zone, to be a test rather than an exercise.

  “Hey, Marcus? What do you make of this Core hunt?”

  The pair remained silent for a few seconds before Natalia started.

  “It’s a group test. You don’t pass on your own. You pass if your group manages to pass you.”

  “But why would the group work to make…”

  “Because Muller won’t pass anyone until we’re out. So you don’t even know if you are going to make it out,” replied Marcus.

  Warren bit his lip.

  “No timeframe, no criteria.”

  Nat opined, “Yea. My guess is that if some of us can work together and hunt efficiently, they’re the ones who pass. I'm pretty sure the lone wolves who want to find their Core and celebrate will wash out. Even if they do find a Core.”

  “Want to team up?”

  “Sure, why not? But it depends on how Muller will organize the perimeter hunt.”

  “If you’re right, he’ll make teams.”

  Marcus laughed, “And those who are saddled with stupid ones will curse him.”

  The border into the Zone… was immediately obvious when you crossed it. Back after the meteoroids fell, few understood what happened. But when you knew what was happening, you could feel a slight flush coming out from nowhere, and you knew you’d crossed into your first Sector of the Zone. The flush feeling was assumed to be your body starting to react against the presence of Essence, even in highly dilute form.

  Starting from now, Warren was slowly getting poisoned. In a couple of days, he’d start getting sick. In a week, he’d die unless he got out of the Zone and let the Essence bleed out from his body.

  Warren risked a quick look toward Commander Muller. Unlike the rest of the team, Muller wasn’t worried about Essence poisoning. Under the shirt, a small reddish glow served as a reminder that Muller had a Core. The Core would let him draw in Essence, store it, and use it to enhance his performance on the field. With the Core embedded in his chest, Essence poisoning was a non-issue… as were most of a Mundane’s health problems.

  Warren wondered how many Cores like Muller’s they could get. Well, not precisely like Muller… if the briefing was accurate, they were hunting low-value Cores, earth/metal tier 1. But even a low-value Core sold for 20k new dollars, the re-evaluated dollar after galloping inflation had crushed over 99% of the value of the pre-impact ones.

  Their trip seemed uneventful. There was even a kind of a trail. Warren wondered how many training sessions like this one had been over the same path. They probably did one every few weeks.

  “That’s a nice trail,” he remarked to his companions.

  “Yea. That worries me a bit,” said Nat.

  Catching his inquiring look, she added, “If they do this often, then the number of Impact Beasts with a Core around will not be high. Overhunting and all that.”

  Marcus felt obliged to reply, “Nobody knows exactly how the Core attachment process works. For all we know, new Cores might sprout a day after we leave.”

  “And you think they wouldn’t notice and start farming the same locations over and over again. Come on,” replied Nat.

  Warren added, “Well, even if the local fauna form Cores quickly, overhunting would still deplete the beast population.”

  “We’ll see what Muller has to say.”

  “If he tells us.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  “There it is, newbs. Our target.”

  Coming out of the forested area was a surprise. There was a classic Washington-state forest and then, suddenly, a sparse grassy plains. But what was surprising – at least for the newbies – was the large crater in the middle of that plains.

  It was maybe half a mile in radius. A circular sloped depression, with glassy rock, barely weathered by a decade… and in the middle, a small yellow-white boulder. From the distance, it was barely visible. A 5, maybe 6-foot chunk of crystalline rock that looked like it had been placed there in the middle of the crater.

  Of course, that wasn’t the case. Like the rest of the Impactors, that small rock had come out of space. The meteoroid shower came with ample warning. A NASA probe headed to the Jupiter system encountered the rock swarm and got mauled. Various telescopes were pointed to figure out what happened and could spot a bunch of shiny rocks.

  After a tense two weeks where sensationalist headlines were predicting Death from the Skies, various astronomers came repeatedly to explain that the largest rocks spotted in the swarm were less than 40 feet wide, nearly half the size of Chelyabinsk’s meteor. None of them was supposed even to hit the ground, and we would have the best and most impressive meteor shower out of season. Once enough precision was obtained to determine that the swarm would mainly fall over central and northern America, the USA and Canada pulled out the barbecues, stocked on beer, and prepared for the biggest spectacle of the decade.

  Unfortunately for the USA, all of Central America north of Colombia, a significant chunk of Canada, and lots of countries bordering the shores of the Pacific and the Atlantic, the meteors decided that the law of physics didn’t apply and punched through the atmosphere without even braking and slammed all over a large oval centered not too far from another, more famous and far older crater.

  The rock in front of them was one of those Impactors. Four hundred million dead in the Impact itself, and half a billion dead in the chaos that followed the largest catastrophe mankind had ever suffered. And then, that Impactor released Essence over the area, and changed every rule of the world.

  “Ok. No one tries to sneak a closer look. If you haven’t noticed, even moss doesn’t grow in the crater. That’s because the chunk here pours Essence. If you have a Core, like me, you can get closer, at least until your Core starts to overflow. Then I’ll die like you Mundanes. Plants can’t move out, so they don’t even grow.”

  Commander Muller added, “I have a tier 4 Core. I could stay a couple of minutes there, but it’s useless anyway. You can’t break a chunk of Magite, and even a small boulder like this weighs more like fifty tons rather than the one ton you’d expect from the size.”

  He pointed out to an area with much shorter grass than the rest. Nat smiled, vindicated.

  “See. There’s the regular camp area. Now, I’m sure Muller does this all the time.”