I can't point to where it all went wrong.

Maybe it was wrong all along.

----

The Phaeron shuddered violently, the jarring seizure of a bird trying to fly on a crippled wing. The ship rolled hard to one side, and the starboard engine screamed loud enough for Dagin to hear it over the chaos inside the cargo hold. He clung onto the red canvas strap that was his only support, valiantly struggling not to be sick as the lumbering craft shook harder with each moment.

“What's going on?”

He could not even hear his own voice over the chaos in the cargo hold. Packed to capacity with refugees, the bay was stifling with muggy air that tasted of sweat and rust. The panicked, stumbling masses were bathed in pulsing red light from the overhead warning lights, and they formed a mosaic of screaming, clinging humanity trying to keep themselves from being tossed about by the flight.

The screaming from the starboard engine intensified, and suddenly silenced with a tremendous crack that sent a new tremor through the ship. There were no windows in the hold, but the lurching in Dagin's stomach told him they were slipping out of the sky. Back towards the ground. Back towards the fighting, the riots, and the knowledge that his world had less than a month left before it was devoured by an angry purple-red sky.

He closed his eyes, and dug his fingers into the canvas strap. Someone grabbed onto his leg to steady themselves, and he did not even bother to kick them away. Gravity bent towards the back of the cargo hold, and a collective wail rose from the cramped refugees as the nose of the ship began to point down and the craft start accelerating back towards the planet's surface.

Somewhere outside the dying vessel, millions of colonists were sailing away from the doomed planet and the storm approaching it. But Dagin, and the poor, unfortunate beings on the ship with him, would have to face it .

++ALERT//17.5/321++

The message flashed across Gabriel's eyepiece in piercing blue, transmitted in staccato bursts from one of the hovering Firefly drones skimming through the forest ahead of him. He stopped instinctively, lowering to one knee and disappearing into the underbrush of the forest. His lips barely moved as he whispered into the radio wire wrapped tight against his cheek.

“Contact front. Three twenty meters.”

A series of acknowledging clicks echoed through his headset, and he tapped twice on the control pad mounted on his right forearm. The device remained dark: he had disabled the lights long ago, when both he and his drones had been re-tasked from a cozy chemical engineer position to his new purpose. They were hunters now, and would never return to their daily routine of geometric flights over bland fields of terraformed crops. There were some days that he missed it, but there were many things he missed since the Maelstrom had appeared.

A firm growl clawed its way over the radio net. “Shell scouts. Raub, Grannan, run the center. Stay in cover.”

Two other shapes, in the same drab green, muddied uniform as Gabriel, darted past him in the forest. They kept their bodies low, running in a half-crouch, with their weapons angled down to deflect the thorny brush with the blocky, armored barrel. Gabriel shook his head as the two vanished into the darkness of the forest ahead. He had known both of those men for the whole ten years he had been part of Epirian, but these days he barely recognized them.

These days he barely recognized himself.

“Gabe, put the birds high and get ready to make dinner.”

Gabriel clicked his thumb and middle finger together twice, and the drones began to slowly drift upwards in wide circles, clear of the enemy contact. As they broke through the green canopy, Gabriel could not help but think of vultures circling over doomed prey. He tore himself from the visual metaphor, and sent a single click over the radio.

The forest seemed to fall into a deathly silence around them. Not for lack of sound, but because they were all waiting for the only sound they cared about. The Chief did not keep them waiting long.

“Cook 'em.”

The Firefly drones shrieked with an unearthly whine as their spinning fans rocketed them downwards through the upper reaches of the forest. Gabriel mentally ticked off three seconds, and mashed a sliding control all the way forwards. In the distance, the forest lit up as all three drones dumped their incendiary clingfire payloads over the enemy line, and kicked the sticky mass to life with an lingering dusting of phosphorus. The woods erupted into chaos up ahead, as bright energy weapons fire tore through the trees in a vain attempt to track the drones.

“Crack 'em.”

The forest shuddered with the synchronized booms of gunfire, in perfect rhythmn, as Raub and Grannon opened fire with their heavy rifles. The light drumroll of automatic fire joined them a second later, as the drones spent their remaining clingfire and switched to rapid light rounds.

Morbid curiosity took over, and despite knowing better, Gabriel switched his eyepiece over to drone FL-2's visual feed. Instantly, his view of the forest dropped away and was replaced by the blur of branches and leaves, illuminated in twisting shadows by the raging fire. The drone, locked into a pre-programmed rudimentary attack pattern, was circling the enemy troops at high speed, pelting their armored forms with suppressive fire. Caught between the drones, the soldiers' precision shots from cover in the woods, and blinded by the firestorm that threatened to cook them alive, the enemy formation fell apart.

A burning branch fell past Gabriel's view, revealing an armored form through the break in the flames. The soldier, a Karist zealot, whirled around heedless of the fire licking at his blackened boots, and sent two brilliant bolts searing towards the drone. The bird jolted to one side as the energy beam sheared off one of the driving fans, and the view feed froze in front of Gabriel's eyes just as a solid round screamed out of the woods and struck the zealot in the side of his mask. Blood, bone, and armor froze in a unified, twisting mass that flickered unrelentingly before his eyes as endless error message scrolled in his peripheral.

Gabriel slapped blindly at the controls, clearing the haunting image and swiping away the list of red text that signified the end of that drone's service life. He closed his eyes, took a slow breath, and again cursed himself for ever wanting a glimpse of the action. The eyepiece dimmed, and he opened his eyes to find Chief Vernal standing before him. A towering man in weathered green armor, Chief was a man torn from an Epirian recruitment office. His eyes peered out ferociously from beneath a dull green cap bearing the triumphant 'E' of the Corporation. A Karist mask, with its distinctive three-holed eye, was mounted proudly on his left shoulder: a trophy of some past victory that his men would never dare ask about. He spoke with a growl that mixed anger, authority, and hunger into one.

“Assessment, Gabe.”

Gabriel gulped a bit of air, steadying himself from the disorientation of returning to his own body and blinking away the afterimage of the dead zealot. “Bird needs repairs, Chief. Raub and Grannan had the situation locked down. Shells cooked and cracked.”

“Good enough. We got enough bits in the mule for the birds?”

The bot handler hesitated, running through a mental list of the remaining supplies. It was a short list. “Negative, Chief. Going to need some wiring, a recharge station, and some spare plating couldn't hurt.”

Vernal grunted, glancing over his shoulder back to where the clingfire was burning a swath through the forest. It would burn out eventually, they never bothered to contain them. There was little point to rescuing a forest on a doomed planet. “What about that wreck we passed on the way in?”

“The Phaeron. Went down last week, survivors set up camp. Probably burying their heads before the skies go crazy.”

“Right, get us a track there.” The big man snatched up his rifle, tucking it into the crook of his arm and staring off into the woods. His eyes narrowed, as if somehow able to pierce the foliage and see straight through to where the ragtag group of crash survivors waited for their doom. A wry smirk dared cross the jagged landscape of his face. “We'll resupply. And we'll hit the Shells when they come to get converts.”