AstraVantis

He shivered. The cold up here got into everything.

A wide hallway stretched before him, its floor made of a lightweight composite and coated with a gritty finish for traction. It felt odd, like walking on dried sand, Ashiro Taki decided, trying not to drag his feet and rip his paper slippers; they were one-size-fits-all and did a poor job of staying on. The slippers matched the outfit, also paper, its stiff folds doing little more than cover his naked body.

He shivered again, the tremors lasting a little longer this time.

Kavi and Xio walked beside him, holding hands, no longer worried about who noticed. Ashiro wished Anya could have been with him; she was up here somewhere, assisting with one of the surgeries. Most of the procedures were performed with robotics, though doctors stood by in case. They had been told this during the briefing earlier in the day, and not much else. At this point, whatever upgrades each was receiving were classified—Ashiro wasn’t even sure he’d been told everything he was getting.

It didn’t matter. Not really. He and his friends were about to become elite, badass super soldiers. If these new upgrades were anything like what he’d already gotten, he’d take whatever they were offering.

“Are we still sure about this?” It was Xio. She’d been second-guessing her decision even as she signed on the dotted line before boarding the rocket.

“I wasn’t sure about it in the first place,” grumbled Kavi.

“A little late for that now, isn’t it?” quipped Ashiro.

“It’s never too late,” Xio shot back. “I could walk out’a here right now if I wanted to.”

They walked in silence for a moment, the hallway echoing with the sound of their shuffling feet and crinkling outfits.

“I’m not sure that’s true,” Kavi said darkly. He’d been quiet since the mission briefing before the ride up.

“It’s a hell of a view,” said Xio, tugging at the useless robe as it chafed against her bare skin.

The corridor was flanked on either side by operating rooms, arranged one after another, a dozen or more on each side. The interiors were filled with medical equipment, surgical robots hanging from the ceiling like glistening metal spiders waiting for victims.

The exterior walls were made of transparent composite set between heavy metal framework. Beyond were breathtaking views of Earth; they were on the corporation’s orbital space station—a staging platform for the Moon. The naked sun shone brightly through the unfiltered vacuum, framed by a billion stars suspended in the endless void of space.

The Moon’s gray surface arced beneath, pockmarked and scarred by the mining operations of the Hakko Ichiu Corporation and others. Domed cities were connected by networks of high-speed rail and utility runs. From this height, it looked clean and high-tech—exciting even. Ashiro had been here before; he knew better.

During their training, none of them paid much attention to who or what was behind it all. If Ashiro had thought about it even briefly, he would have assumed it was some vague part of the government, training them to become the next enforcers for the streets of Base City.

During a briefing for the next phase of their service, it was revealed that they weren’t working for the government at all but for a massive corporation, one of several that dominated the political and economic landscape.

The Hakko Ichiu Corporation ran and paid for their training. Ashiro couldn’t think of a time when he didn’t know that name—from products and services to infrastructure and organization, it seemed involved in every aspect of society; apparently, they even had mining operations on the Moon.

When Kavi had learned Hakko Ichiu was behind their training, he’d nearly quit. Coming from the Scrape, he didn’t trust governments, but he hated the corporations.

It was easy to point out how irrelevant it was. Why should they care who signed their paychecks? With these upgrades, they would become something special: super soldiers. Nobody could take that away from them. From now on, life would be different; they would breathe the rarefied air of the elite.

None of them had ever experienced privilege. It was worth the slight realignment of their personal moral standards. Besides, corporations and governments—it was all the same to them.

They had questioned why the upgrades were being done in orbit, when weight was measured in grams, and every inch of real estate was precious. Surely it would have been more cost-effective to do the operations back on Earth, and weren’t corporations all about the bottom line?

Ashiro knew why, though he chose not to share it with his friends—they had enough to worry about. On the Moon, and by extension the orbital station, the Hakko Ichiu Corporation wasn’t bound by Earth’s laws or ethics. Up here, they made the rules.

Attendants waited at the doors of each operating theater. Each wore the same uniform and mirrored glasses against the sun’s glare, anonymous behind them.

As they passed, Xio peeled away from the group and was ushered toward an operating theater. She glanced back at Kavi and squeezed his hand.

“I guess this is it.” She sounded small and afraid.

“You’ll do great,” Kavi offered. “We all will.” His voice lacked conviction—he was terrified.

Kavi and Ashiro slowed as Xio was led into the room. The attendant removed her gown without a thought for privacy. She looked back at them, her strong, tattooed body laid bare—Ashiro knew it was taking everything she had not to run.

Kavi was selected next. His room layout differed from Xio’s; the equipment chosen to accommodate his specific upgrades.

“Have fun,” he said to Ashiro with a wink as he surrendered his robe. If he pretended not to worry, maybe he would believe it.

When they’d signed up for military service, each came to the decision in their own way. Kavi’d been running from his past in the Scrape, Xio yearned to prove herself in a family where love was an award for success, and Ashiro—well, it was join up or die on the streets of Base City.

Ashiro continued on, now walking by himself. He busied his mind with the distracting view. The Moon’s surface looked inviting from up here, like powder smoothed over by a wandering hand, leaving valleys and mountains, finger pokes for craters. He couldn’t quite place their position, though he believed they were closer to AstraVantis than Halcyon Prime. The Moon kept one face toward Earth, always the same side. Halcyon Prime was positioned at the lunar terminator, balanced between light and dark. That was where he’d last seen his brother, Kaito.

Would he still be there? Bigger opportunities awaited in AstraVantis.

The platoon was headed to AstraVantis after the upgrades and a short recovery. Crime syndicates had the run of the Moon—that was the briefing, anyway. Mines sitting idle, shipments going missing, supply lines back to Earth drying up. And profits, of course, were down.

Ashiro and the rest of the troops were being sent to put down this criminal faction. They weren’t there for discipline or to take prisoners. A successful mission meant eradicating the criminal element once and for all.

Ashiro knew Kaito was there, doing what he did. Hell, he might well be the one they were after. How would he handle it—could he actually go after his own brother?