The bridge has become a hellish mix of shouting and open-air comm windows and smoke and the smell of cooked meat. There are several sorceresses sprawled across the floor, their blood impossibly vibrant under the stark red emergency lighting; a medic moves between them and the 'kasters who are still at their posts, the walking wounded sitting at ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Maya raises her chin ( Read more... )

"To hell with the markers!"

Maya Antares doesn't dream, but as she wakes -- there are voices, disconcertingly familiar; snatches of something that isn't civil or quiet enough to be called 'conversation,' that she can't quite place.

"They'll leave you here to die!"There's smoke in her lungs, in the back of her throat; she coughs, and her jaw ( Read more... )

" ALEXANDRA!The war room is silent ( Read more... )

(Perfect clarity. Frightening clarity.

I stood in a wasteland. It was)

A ruin.

A graveyard.

A battlefield.

Colossal monuments of steel all around; fallen, twisted up, tangled up in each other under a thick blanket of snow til it is impossible to tell where one stops and another begins.

No bodies.

(It was as if some cruel god had been ( Read more... )

Maya steps out of the chow line, a tray of nondescript 'food' (mostly gray and brown shapeless lumps) in her hands. She scans the crowded galley for a moment, looking across tables of troopers and sorceresses -- most either sitting too quietly or laughing too loudly, and looking far, far too young -- for a familiar shock of red hair ( Read more... )

Maya stands in front of the massive windows in Skymarshall Urik Antares's office, overlooking the frozen, burning city that swallowed her best friend. Everything is snow and ash and black smoke, with occasional bright points of fire; the clouds -- what clouds can be seen, above the smoke -- seem to threaten snow ( Read more... )

TO: CENTRAL COMMAND
FROM: SKYMARSHALL URIK ANTARES, COMMANDING OFFICER: R.S.S. KONSTANTINOV

FIELD REPORT: THE WAR IN NOKGORKAAFTER SUSTAINED AERIAL AND ARTILLERY BOMBARDMENT, AIR SUPERIORITY HAS BEEN ATTAINED BY SKYFURNACE DETACHMENTS OVER THE CITY'S RECOGNIZED NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN HOSTILE DISTRICTS. AS ORDERED, THE FLEET HAS SUCCESSFULLY ( Read more... )

The briefing room is quiet and still, as is the entirety of the RSS Konstantinov ( Read more... )