Tanlon’s second jump lasted four hours total. He was not sure if he preferred the slow grind of Paradise or the quick and blinding defense of the vault world, but the four hours passed by in flashes of deathly green light and blurs of screaming men.

It had started like the last jump, the ship’s kalxons blaring and flashing, hundreds of men funneled through a jump portal, but instead of sand and Screamers, his eye had met a vast skyline of steel and dark clouds. Silver ships, some sleek as needles and others as bulbous as a heel blister, slid through the air and cast glowing bolts of plasma down at the anti air defenses firing at them from below. From just a few hundred feet away, Tanlon observed one of these alien attack ships slag an auto turret. Men and metal melted, so fast that the fabric the gunners wore did not even have time to catch fire, and the whole contraption and crew were reduced to a molted pile of gurp.

There was no time to gawk at the ships and vast canyons of metal valleys, Commissars started shouting orders and the mix of stormtroopers and Vanguard troopers were ushered to drainage canals large enough to hold oceans of water in their depths. Yet instead of a calm, blue sea, a boiling froth of flesh and metal congregated down the rusted slopes and charged from the other side.

The few hundred troopers had been given one task, make sure the stormtrooper regiment they were augmenting had enough ammo at any time. That was easier said than done.

Tanlon did not hear the order, perhaps it was not needed, since every Imperial position at once started unloading into the cyborg abominations crawling across the canal. Most of them were meaty things with three legs and no eyes. Whip like tendrils flailed around and spat green flame that dropped men dead at a touch, yet it did not burn their skin. The alien tide ebbed and flowed, cast back and forth by the steely determination of Paradise’s veterans. When the last tripod bent underneath a hail of lead and collapsed into a deflated puddle of gore, there was at last silence.

Distant echos of ships crashing and bombs detonating thrummed their ears, but the ringing squeals of mouthless horrors and dying men had thankfully ceased. Yet they held the line they were given.

Through the labyrinthine corridors of the vault world, past machines centuries old and caverns yawning with unspoken threat of hidden monsters, the inhuman yowls of the mutant alien abominations echoed their bloodlust for human prey.

Skirmishes came and went. The enemy’s attacks became less frequent and the troopers started to think themselves invincible with every new tripod that fell. Yet hindsight showed that their arrogance blinded them to reality: the enemy had only been probing them thus far. Tanlon knew that something was up when he noticed a pair of Commissars standing in the back and whispering to one another. They kept staring at the time on their equipment and then looking up toward the sky. Tanlon joined them in their vigil of the stars and was one of the first to notice a new one wink into existence.

There was hardly time to nudge someone and point it out, since the star's light intensified and revealed that it was no star at all.

When the sky split apart and reality turned on its head, Tanlon had a glimpse of eternity screaming from the heavens. Another ship, larger than any other that he had seen so far, tore through the sky and pressed down onto the small men beneath it. Every trooper thought that they were about to be crushed by this vessel whose length could have been measure in miles, but it stopped short of their total annihilation by a few thousand feet and hovered in the air.

It was as smooth as the other ships had been, if somewhat larger by a magnitude of degrees. There were no openings or turrets that they saw, just silver metal that gleamed in opposition to the gun metal gray of the vault world and its grim inhabitants.

“Friggen throne and stars above, by my mother’s vat pod and father’s eyes, look at that thing!”

Tanlon chuckled, in the still moment that precariously hung in the balance of their lives leading up to the present, it was the memory of Mad cursing up and down a storm that stuck out the most to him. Perhaps he remembered that human moment the most since his own mind had blanked in terror at the ship’s arrival. He had seen jump ships, and those were huge goliaths, but the thing had to have been the size of a small moon.

And man was the inheritor of the universe? How could he be when slavering aliens could build such horrendous weapons and ships of war? It was more like man was the whipping boy of the universe’s gamut of villains than the hero of this galactic story. Defeatist thoughts kept to himself, Tanlon had stood by the rest of his comrades and watched as the alien ship finally made its move. The undercarriage of the giant sphere shifted and opened into a cavernous hole that revealed naught but the yawning mouth of a void of darkness. Yet from that nothingness, they came.

Tripods rained from the sky, some of them ten, twenty, thirty feet tall, but the biggest of them was a monstrosity that sent a shockwave rippling through the ground beneath them when it landed. Unlike the others, it had mouths, all over its body, and it used them to rattle a bone chilling cry that made every trooper’s ears ring from the force.

Tanlon stared at it only for a moment before he started running back toward the ammo depot for more ammunition. The Vanguard troopers had designed a system where they passed the needed ammunition in relays to one another so that it could get to the Stormtroopers and the gun emplacements as quick as it could. Ignoring the new sounds of panic and gunfire, coupled with the stomping of hundreds of Tripods bearing down on their position, Tanlon got half way to the ammo depot and found his relay partner, Snell. There were no words exchanged, just a quick passing of a box of machine gun rounds and the other trooper started jogging back toward the rear. Tanlon briefly envied that he couldn’t be the one on that side of the relay, but there wasn’t much he could do except his duty.

Since the vault world had a human safe atmosphere and temperature, unlike Paradise, there had been no need to give the troopers chemicals that would let their bodies adapt to the alien conditions, and as a result, Tanlon sweated. He could feel the sweat, down his neck, in his trousers, sliming into every uncomfortable crevice and threatening to chaffe him if he kept his mad dashing going, yet he had no choice. The whine of gauss cannons firing and roar of machine guns faded into the background as he kept his back and forth motions going, and though their volume threatened to burst his ear drums, he prayed their choir would never cease, lest in their silence the enemy would overwhelm them.

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When he came scrambling back with what felt like the millionth box of ammunition, the Titan Tripod had fallen. Its mouths had ceased roaring and now spilled waterfalls of green fluid from its death flow. Even giants fell when enough missiles were poured into them apparently, but the alien advance surged in their droves of smaller units. One twenty footer Tripod had reached the stormtrooper position Tanlon was resupplying and even as the machine gun poured lead into the beast, it shrugged off the bullets and kept coming.

“We need that ammo!” A stormtrooper by the gun emplacement waved toward Tanlon and the young trooper started to run towards him, but the whiplike motion of the tripod aiming a gun at the end of one of its tendrils made him pause and that hesitation saved his life.

A green flash, like the light of a camera, momentarily blinded Tanlon, but when his vision cleared, the Tripod was still advancing, but the stormtroopers at the machine gun position were rolling on the ground by their weapon, but not making any noise. Thinking that they had been blinded or something, Tanlon sprinted toward the machine gun nest and reloaded the weapon. In the short span of five seconds the tripod was literally right over him, the shadow of its girth temporarily made shade that blocked out the sun.

Tanlon kicked the lock on the machine gun and forced its barrel to swivel upward and at the tripod. He had never pressed a firing stud so tight and did not let go as the barrel fired a close range stream of bullets into the spongy alien body. The tentacles it tried to grasp Tanlon with met the fury of thousands of rounds per minute and were shredded to wet pieces. Yet it still stood and seemingly shrugged off Tanlon’s desperate defense with immovable determination.

“Die you filthy alien scum!” Tanlon’s arms went numb from the thrumming gun and he thought of nothing but continuing to press that stud. The eyeless beast made a noise for the first time, a heavy groan born from deep in its torso and tree trunk legs buckled beneath it. With the sound of tons of meat thudding on the ground, the tripod collapsed in a pile of bent limbs and split skin that spilled out its green cybernetic guts.

Drenched in alien gore, but not crushed by its fall, Tanlon staggered back from the machine gun and whooped in joy. It was then that he noticed the fallen stormtroopers on the ground again. One had stopped his motion, but the other, the one who had called to him, was still seizing with jerking movements. Tanlon took a knee by his comrade and spoke.

“Easy brother, easy. What’s happening, need some water?”

Tanlon had no medical training other than the basics from the academy, so his first instinct was to pry the other man’s helmet off and get some air and water on him. When he took the stormtrooper’s mask off, Tanlon dropped it in shock.

The mask came off with some resistance and a sick peeling sound that was revealed to be a chunk of the stormtrooper’s forehead skin coming off with the mask. The rest of his face was splotched with crimson and white color, blistered and cracked. Eyes that might have once been green were now translucently shining with the instant burn of exposure to a light brighter than a million suns and when he tried to speak, the stormtrooper gagged and kicked his legs. Words devolved to blood vessels in his throat bursting and the other man’s last moments in Tanlon’s arms were of choking on his own blood before he went limp and died.

Victory turned to ash in Tanlon’s mouth and he held the dead man for another moment, the sounds of aliens stomping and their defense line breaking was momentarily just noiseless din. It was the cracking of a trumpet, electronically boosted, that took him out of his shock. Every man knew what it meant, he’d heard it before on the slopes of Paradise. Retreat.

Again?

How often would they be pressed to the brink? How many men had to die vomiting their own blood or torn to shreds by Yabanchi claws? Dark thoughts such as those flickered in Tanlon’s mind, but his training carried his feet toward the direction of his comrades. Philosophizing about the unfairness of life could be better done another day, but for now this one had enough of its own share of troubles.

Tanlon joined a stream of stormtroopers and Vanguard, every man kept his head despite their retreat, but panic hovered in the air, threatening to overtake them at any second. Commissar voices scrawled over the chaos and the black coated men directed where they should go. He had long ago decided he did not like those leather adorned goons, but their presence comforted him, if only because he instinctively knew that they would not have stayed if it was a hopeless situation. Yet why did they have the men leaving their weapon placements? Surely staying would have inflicted more casualties on the enemy?

The answer came when they were led into another artificial valley of pipes and generators. The stormtroopers and Vanguard took up their guns and waited for the horde of tripods to overtake them, but Tanlon was close enough to a commissar in the front to hear him mutter into a comm, “We are in position. Send in the next wave.”

A wave was not a good enough description for the tsunami that took the oncoming Tripods from multiple directions. Vanguard troopers, thousands of them, poured from innumerable exits and holes in the metal valley. They fell in droves, burned away by the Tripods' boiling plasma and heat rays, but for every one that fell, two more took his place and the sheer amount of dart grenades and small arms fire halted the alien advance.

Simultaneously, the alien ship overhead started to float back up toward the sky. Red flowers of explosions bloomed on its surface and Tanlon saw that its austere silver surface was now marred with jagged black scars from heavy defense cannons that had been pouring into it. Like a star it kept going up into the sky, until even the small light of its escape into the upper atmosphere winked away. The enemy was retreating.

The last Tripod finally died with men streaming around its legs like ants and when it collapsed, a chant was taken up by the multitude of newcomers who had pulled their rears out of the fire.

“Forward, Imperial Vanguard!”

Tanlon cracked a smile and took up the chant and even the stormtroopers joined in. The Empire won again.

Only one man among the thousands did not cheer. He was near Tanlon, though his friend did not recognize him under all his armor. Haylock listened to the celebration of his comrades and could only feel the hate boiling in his heart. What reason did they have to cheer another day of life, when the truth was they were better off dead? No one else knew the truth except for the Commissars watching over them, but Haylock promised himself that one day the truth would come to the light and he would set his brothers free.

The urge to grab Tanlon and tell him everything he knew suddenly seized him, but the madness only passed for a moment before it faded. The truth would only serve to imprison that cheerful soul in the same miry prison he was in.

“Live Tanlon, live.” Haylock whispered and stalked away from his unaware friend. “Our time is coming soon.”