Everyone is starting to settle in, we’ve been here for four standard days, eight local ones. Juno, Thomas, and Evelyn have been spending a lot of time together, Liam and Cicero have been entertaining themselves, and I’ve been bouncing back and forth between them. Right now, we’re all here in the living room, Cicero suggested we play a drinking game so here we are an hour in. There’s seven of us now, Cicero picked up a companion named Alex at a club we went to. She must really like him too, as she waived her regular fee and I’ve never heard of a companion doing such a thing.

Evelyn stands up across the table, she’s been paying for all the food and drinks the past few days, in an effort to make Cicero like her more I believe. She starts walking downstairs to the kitchen, or probably her room.

‘I need to talk to you in private,’ she comms me from downstairs. I wonder what it could be about, she seems to be doing just fine.

I get up, a little tipsy, I’ve been losing this game more often than not. I slowly walk downstairs after Evelyn. She’s sitting down at the dining table; I walk over and sit down next to her.

“What is it, what’s wrong?” I ask.

“I’ve been thinking about how to tell you this for a day or two now. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, but someone planted a locator on you. I believe that it was Alex, as it’s routed to report to her company. I didn’t want you to think I was snooping, but I feel like this is too important to sit on any longer.”

This is news to me and concerning for several reasons. First being that Alex planted a locator, and second that Evelyn was able to not only detect it but find where it was reporting to.

“How do you know there’s a locator on me? They’re designed to be very discrete in my experience.” I ask.

“My job at Sequel was in cyber-security, this kind of thing was a routine check. I was only looking at your signals because I wanted to see if we were compromised after the mess with Frontier. I’m sorry for not letting you know or asking you.”

“Okay, good to know, I’m glad that you told me, we need to deal with this situation,” I say.

Something big explodes upstairs. A real explosion, the kind that would level any normal sized house. I immediately stand and run to the stairs.

“Gabriel, come here, you’re drunk, and that’s real trouble up there. You need a stimulant!” Evelyn yells. She’s right, my world is spinning after standing up so quickly. But why would Evelyn have a stimulant on her. She runs over to me and sticks me with something; moments later I am wide awake. My eyes feel as if they are glued open, and my heart is pumping a million kilometers an hour.

“Thank you.” I tell her.

I run upstairs, and look around, there’s a huge hole in the side of the house, and everyone is huddled behind one of the main walls across the room. A look out to the right, through the front glass wall shows the field full of fully armed militants and three fully equipped warships. What the hell is happening here? As that thought runs through my head, I reach down to handle this with my relic, and to my absolute horror it is not on my belt.

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“Come here! Quickly, downstairs!” I yell to everyone. I have no idea why whoever is outside stopped attacking us, but my guess is that it won’t last long. They all run over and as they do, Alex splits away from the group and sprints out of the hole in the wall. Of course, the whole thing was a sting setup, probably from Frontier. Alex probably swiped the relic while I was drunk, right before the strike force got here. Damn it, I should have been more careful.

One by one everyone files downstairs. It doesn’t take long after Alex gets clear that I see the next projectile launch off the middle warship. I sprint down the stairs, just as the rocket explodes. Fire pools down, setting the stairs on fire, and likely everything else upstairs.

Everyone keeps going down levels, past the gym and I can’t see them anymore. All except for Evelyn, she’s still with me here on in the kitchen, as the walls start to catch fire.

“Gabriel, I can handle this. I can make this all go away, you might not like my methods, but I can fix this. I just need you to ask me, I won’t do anything unless you ask me to,” she says. She must be losing it; I can’t imagine what she could be talking about, but whatever it is it can’t hurt.

“Okay Evelyn, do what you have to do, but come on we need to get downstairs, Thomas probably has a way out somehow,” I say.

She turns around and runs up the stairs, the stairs that are on fire. As she runs up the stairs, the fire dies out, I have no idea how. I follow her up the stairs, I have to get her downstairs, she is a lunatic if she thinks she can do anything about what’s going on out there.

“Evelyn, stop! What are you doing? We have to get downstairs!” I yell. I’m at the edge of the staircase and she’s standing in what was a living room moments ago.

“I’m tired of running, I’m not running anymore!” she yells back.

I can see the army that’s parked outside of the house from where I am on the steps. Suddenly, the warships go dark, stabilizers turn off, and they start falling, all at once. I look to my left at Evelyn, confused and a little terrified, because as I do, blue and purple rings appear around her arms, the kind of rings you see around a high-powered plasma railgun before it fires. She takes a step forward into the frame of the door, kneels, and a moment later the rings pulse. My ears pop and ring, the entire field in front of her, the field that just a moment ago was dark and littered with soldiers, is now obliterated, the ground black and charred, plasma burnt. The fields outside a two-hundred-meter radius are ablaze. It is a scene from hell, The fields are on fire for at least a kilometer in the direction of the blast, outside of the zone of immediate impact.

The militants that were on the edges of the blast that weren’t turned to ash are screaming in agony as various parts of them burn away. It looks like the entire house was surrounded, because militants are starting to file around from the other side of the house, laying down plasma and live fire. The metal bullets from the live fire rounds don’t make it to her, they get about two meters from her and rocket back in the other direction, you can see them slow and reverse course. The slower plasma rounds fly past her as she moves at a speed I have never seen a human move. When there is a momentary gap in the plasma rounds, the rings around her arms pulse once more, one in each direction. These blasts are not spread out like the first one, they each have about five degrees of spread, however, they leave nothing in their wake, they light up the night sky and leave cylindrical cutouts on the tops of the hills where the militants were encamped.

Evelyn, seemly satisfied with the damage she’s inflicted on whoever these people were, walks out into the field, the ground beneath her feet cooling and steaming behind her. She walks about twenty meters out into the crater and bends over to pick something up, my relic I think from the glare as she raises it up towards the sky. The air above the crater is shimmering from the heat of the blast, making my view of Evelyn shimmer and waver.

What have we gotten ourselves into?

She walks back to the decimated house, up to me, where I am still laying on the stairs. She holds out my sword. The rings around her arms shimmering like the air above the crater, slowly dimming.

“I believe this is yours,” she says.