Chapter 1
In the harsh weather of the Globi Desert, Wei Xu fought for his life against the sandstorms that never seemed to stop.
He grimaced as grit ground into his clothes for the third time that morning. "No matter how many times I do this, I just can't get used to it," he muttered.
Wei Xu was on a mission to recover a military exosuit left behind during the UCSA invasion years ago. He still didn't understand why the Patriot faction was so fanatical about old, rusted UCSA hardware. Against ECA defenses and active protection systems, UCSA-era weapons were almost useless — useful only for fighting other scavenger factions. Yet the Patriots had become the top dogs in the forbidden zone by making the most of whatever relics they could salvage.
Wei Xu didn't care about their ideology. He only cared about getting the mission done and earning access to the inner forbidden zones.
He tapped his wrist PDA and opened the navigation app. After the wars, most networks had collapsed, but a handful of factions and loose coalitions had managed to restore fragments of the grid. Major energy installations — distant dams, solar arrays, wind farms — had been spared during the nuclear war and were repaired. Satellites still orbited, and some international researchers had pooled resources to bring navigation systems back online. ECA's Beidou constellation, of course, ran without interruption; the ECA's autonomous maintenance bots had kept their systems pristine. The problem: only people with ECA IDs could access many of those systems. Attempts to crack them had ended disastrously when a faction tried to seize one of the ECA's Tiangong mechs and was wiped out.
A movement in the corner of his eye snapped him back to the present. Wei Xu crouched and squinted through the whipping sand: an Ash Baron patrol vehicle crested a dune.
"Shit."
He crouched lower, hood drawn tight. The Patriots had given him a camouflage ghillie suit for the mission — civilian-grade tech augmented the way everyone had learned to augment it in this new world. If he didn't move, the vehicle's AI and IR arrays shouldn't pick him up.
The desert made the whole job worse. He wasn't used to the heat or the sand digging into every seam of his clothing, and the high-tech suit only made him sweat more. A mask sealed his face and goggles narrowed his vision to a grey tunnel. The patrol rolled on and disappeared behind a dune; visibility was terrible in the storm. Wei Xu let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding — if not for the storm, he knew the vehicle would have seen him.
Getting lost in thought behind enemy lines was the last thing Wei Xu needed right now. But as the saying goes, old habits die hard.
The map on his PDA showed the approximate location of the crashed transport aircraft. He pushed through two dunes and found a chasm where a UCSA VTOL lay half-buried, its hull cracked and blackened. Whoever had been piloting it had tried to use the storm to mask their radar signature, but they hadn't escaped.
'The suit is probably inside the aircraft, but I don't see any openings,' Wei Xu thought.
He rigged a rappelling point on an outcrop and descended. The chasm was only thirty to forty meters deep. At the bottom, he picked his way over rusted scrap and scavenged parts — the sort of metal the Ash Baron's men favored. The VTOL had clearly been tampered with; weld marks and pried panels told a story of hopeful looters who'd left in frustration.
"Fuck. The Ash Baron probably got to the exosuit first."
Failure was not an option. The Patriots' missions were rare, and gaining access to the inner zones was the only way to reach the hospitals and medical tech that might save his mother. She needed treatment he couldn't provide. He had tried to cross the ECA defenses alone before and had been discovered by autonomous sentries, leaving a scar on his lower back; the blind spots were everything now. The Patriots controlled the northern blind spot, Ash Baron the southern, and the third was a no-go because of lingering radiation from the UCSA's last desperate operations.
Wei Xu approached the aircraft carefully, checking for traps. He peeled open a warped hatch; the door stuck at first, then gave with a groan. Inside, half-buried beneath cords and tarps, sat the exosuit.
It looked defeated. Once sleek, it was now a frame of rust and faded paint. The hydraulics were corroded but intact enough to move. Angular titanium plates ringed the chassis like the jaws of a machine-built beast. At the center of its backplate lay the chest housing for a micro-fusion cell — the UCSA Mark IV — though the socket looked empty and oxidized.
Wei Xu ran a quick diagnostic with his wrist device. Weapons were inert. Hydraulics held, but not for sustained exertion. The electronic suite — most importantly the IFF and optics — were salvageable. Obvious crude welds marked corners on the suit, giving it an even more gritty look.
Someone clearly was hoping to restore the suit but gave up midway through the restoration.
"Hopefully the frame is stable enough to accept the power cell."
Wei Xu had to try. He fed a Patriot-issued military fuel cell into the exosuit's port and waited. The suit coughed, thrummed, then began to boot.
"Initiating OS boot process."
"Boot successful."
Relief hammered through him as he synced his wristwatch to the suit's neural link. The connection was clumsy at first, dirty with old data and corrupted drivers, but it held. The exosuit's servos spasmed, then found their cadence. It was clunky, rusty, and slow after decades of neglect, but it moved.
He began to climb out of the chasm, the suit's servos helping him scale the cliff face; the rope he used before was not needed. While he worked, he patched the IFF and updated the target-recognition module where the Patriots' software would allow; the radar was too old for full compatibility, so that update failed.
Near the top, as he threw a mechanical hand over the lip, a faint rumble reached him from behind.
Boom.
Darkness slammed into him. Pain flooded his skull; his ears were ringing. For a heartbeat he had no sense of direction. Then the world returned in shards: wind, metal, the distant yells of figures he couldn't yet place.
He had fallen into a trap.
{End}