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1

Aiden

My jaw and paws are clenched. I watch as Luther maneuvers his titanic mecha, Bastille, around the epicenter: a swirling, primordial pit of purple light that connects our world to an alternate. We, to all purposes, consider that place Hell. They came from that world--the Tier: demon-beasts of the apocalypse that have eradicated nearly all life on Earth.

One of them is stalking around Luther as I watch through a live feed holo-monitor. It's the most terrifying one I've ever seen, monstrous in size and on all other accounts, and it emerged from the epicenter just as Luther and Rudy began their work. It was like it knew we were coming to close the portal, shut the door on it for good like we had others. It also didn't look pleased about it.

The epicenter here in Emerald Bluff is one of 42 others spread all across the globe. It appeared along with all of the rest when I was just a five year-old kit. The Tier soon emerged and began devouring every living soul they could get to--my parents and older sister included. Luther Kendrick, the commanding general of project GESTALT, rescued me from nearly being eaten alive. He adopted me, and I regained a family. He's my father, and his son Rudy is my brother.

And my brother tends to do stupid things.

The mission was a simple one in theory: convene at the Emerald Buff site, deploy the GESTALT, and commence in collapsing the portal. Everything was going smoothly until Luther and Rudy began the closing procedures. Then the Tier appeared out of the portal like the Kraken from a whirlpool. It knocked Rudy and his GESTALT away from the portal and then singled out Luther. It hasn't attacked yet, but I can sense its malevolent intent. It's stopped moving now and is just glaring from a distance at Luther and Bastille. Rudy desperately wants to fight the thing, but...I've never seen a Tier like this.

Rudy's radio crackles. "...Dad, I can do it! Just let me..."

And things suddenly turn toward disaster.

"No, Rudy, return to the carrier! Now!"

"But, Dad! I can hep!"

I make out Rudy piloting his GESTALT toward the portal again. He then opens fire and peppers the monster with rounds. The Tier then shifts. It glows and a ball of light coalesces at its mouth. Then there's the popping radio again. Interference. Red lights and alarms. Kelly's fingers tap across holographic control boards in a blur. Her eyes are wide. The screen goes fuzzy but I can still see. Rudy approaches more, and I stop breathing. His insolence stills my lungs.

And then a catastrophic explosion pierces the carrier's armor plating. White noise follows.

We're jarred to the left and I crack my knees against the steel floor. Why did we convene so close to the epicenter? Kelly yells something and pulls herself back into her seat, but I can't hear over the sirens. I squint at the sound, but I can't look away from the holo-monitor.

I can't see Bastille. There is just burning city and rubble towers; concrete webbed like cracked glass; sparks and smoke spew from a gaping crater. The hole swallows nearly twenty blocks that were whole (for the most part) a moment ago. Smoke clears and, suddenly, I see him. What remains of Luther's GESTALT is dead-center, and it isn't moving. The fuselage is blasted open, metal jagged like shark teeth around the heart of the enormous machine. One of its arms is in a grotesque bend behind its head, the other is torn off. Its legs are blown off and spread open with something dark trickling down them that isn't oil. The monster stands nearby, a black hulk with strange blue marks pulsing across its body, reptilian maw crooked--smirking.

Then the image is too much. It isn't like we haven't lost pilots before, but that isn't just any pilot. He's my dad...

My stomach writhes and my heart aches. This shouldn't have happened. Kelly's talking but I still can't hear. I read her lips, though, and it's just one word over and over.

No, no, no, no, no.

Everything is chaos. The radio pops in and out of words and static noise between the alarms. Kelly twists a knob and they soften, but she still screams even though I can hear her now. "I've lost all contact with Luther and Bastille! Transmissions have ceased!"

I steel myself and frown, still on my knees, my white tail between my legs. I can feel the carrier trembling beneath me. I do the same because this is what the end of the world is like, but it's isn't fear that causes me to shake, no. Kelly works furiously in an attempt to get Luther back. It all feels hopeless.

"DAD!" The carrier shakes harder, and Rudy's voice does as well. The thing out there roars, elated that it took out Luther: the world's last hope. Ours, too. "YOU FUCKING KILLED MY FATHER! YOU'RE DEAD!"

I push myself up and look at the holo-monitor again. It's cut with lines of interference, but Kelly slaps it hard and it clears.

"What's Rudy's current position?" I ask, my throat tight.

There are tears in the ermine's eyes, not of fear, but of rage.

"He was blown away by the blast. Right now he's a mile away from the target and circling. Speed is 189; emergence levels are at," her eyes clench, "They're pushing 200 percent and climbing. He's lost it. If Sleipnir merges with him at that rate of potential..."

"Stupid," I say. "Give me a visual."

She cuts to a cockpit view of Rudy's GESTALT, and the husky's face is contorted in an expression of agony and rage as he pilots the machine. He's unblinking and bathed in red light, but I still see the tears. He doesn't realize we're watching. He'd be outraged if he knew we'd seen him cry, especially given the circumstances.

Control your emotions, Luther used to warn. Otherwise you're a puppet of chaos in a five-ton death machine. Lose yourself and life is lost because of you.

I watch Rudy, and the truth of Luther's words ring true. And we do not need to lose anyone else.

"Cut to Emerald," I say as I turn away and push Rudy's image out of my mind. Kelly flinches and wipes her nose, and then she taps the holographic screen and flicks it to the left, sending an identical glowing screen floating through space toward me. It hovers in my grasp when I reach for it, tangible but intangible, capable but hindered by limitation, a true marvel and blunder of technological advancement much like the GESTALT. But, no, the sentient machines aren't to blame: it's the pilots--not all of them--but most of them. I tap the screen before me. "Open emergency communication: codename Emerald atPriority 1."

The screen, now neon green, pulses. It beeps, and dots dance across it as it attempts contact. It succeeds and chimes, and then Lee's face appears there. Like me, Luther adopted Lee when we found him nearly starving to death in the old ruins of the city. From what we gathered by the decapitated bodies of smaller classes of Tier littered around his hideout, and the old long-sword he wouldn't let go of, he'd been able to kill the monsters _without_a GESTALT. The sword, he'd said, was his uncle's.

In the screen, the shepherd's eyes are shining and I know it's all he can do to keep from crying, too, like Kelly and Rudy. Luther had him keep a high position away from the action until he was needed, so he'd seen everything. He'd seen it all and hadn't been able to do a thing, which I understood. I also understood what he wanted to do, and, now that Luther was...

"Aiden," Lee says. His ears fall back and he grimaces. "I mean, Lieutenant General Clemmons..."

"Don't call me that," I say. I've never been one for titles; they are too differentiating, setting one higher than others. Luther had been the same way. I'd taken after him in a lot of ways. He was my father, too, after all. Like Rudy, I wished to weep for his fall, I wished to sob because--like always--my adoptive brother didn't listen to him and he took the bullet for it. I wished Rudy wasn't so selfish. I wished to beat him senseless...

Breathe, breathe, breathe. Don't lose it, at least not now. Now there was only avenging to be done. Rescuing. Finish the mission.

We had to close the portal. Luther's orders were poignant. He felt something was coming and we had to lock it out. Judging from this new, powerful Tier, he'd been right.

I look hard into Lee's projected eyes, and he doesn't need my words to know what to do. I give them regardless. "For Luther's sake, finish this mission. There are to be no more casualties except the death of that Tier. Kill it and collapse the portal with Rudy's assistance immediately. Afterward we'll proceed with the...recovery of Luther and Bastille's remains." I can't help but choke on those words. "Am I clear?"

Lee nods, ever clear. "I'm sorry, Aiden."

"Just go. That's an order."

And he does, because he actually listens to his superiors...which I am now, because my father's dead.

Lee

My GESTALT--Arcnight--is an armor class. She's in vehicle mode at the moment: a sport bike. When I first met her she reminded me of a Ducati 1098, but she's a machine, a mind, all her own. Her green and silver plating is near impenetrable, flexible in certain spots, but unrelenting. I close communications with Aiden and punch her instrument panel in anger and discover just how unrelenting she is the hard way. She chirps in alarm through my headset, but I only give her a brief moment of thought.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, Rudy! He's such a...a...DAMN! I can't believe this! Why couldn't he have listened for once? Why did Luther take that hit for him? Why?!

I know the answer, though. It's because Rudy is...was...his son.

I'm straddled across Arc on top of a ruined, eight-story office building. I force myself to look toward where Luther fell. There's only smoke and the Tier in the distance. Dust billows off to the left, a mile and a half away where highway thirty-two circles before heading back into town. Rudy's skirting around to the Tier's back at about 200 mph. I'm facing the monster (a hulking, reptilian thing nearly twenty feet tall) and my enraged friend must know that. He wants to hit it simultaneously. I shake my head. The wind blows in my face and I smell burning plastic and Neuro-wire; a whiff of something acidic--like a cracked battery and lemon juice--means that the core of Luther's GESTALT was pierced. That meant radiation was spilling out. A tiny voice in the back of my mind hopes the general was killed by the Tier's blast. Otherwise he was being burned alive from the inside out...

Don't think that; it's not fair. He didn't deserve this.

Regardless, I have orders. As Aiden wished, I'll finish this for our general's sake, so no tears fall. I control my thoughts for now, which is more difficult than anything I've ever had to do. But, staring out across the smoldering remains of downtown Emerald Bluff (a place I wished to never see again) I know that my thoughts are the least of my troubles. In retrospect, anything other than the Tier invasion is the least of everyones troubles. We're at war. We're fighting for our lives, and lives have been lost. Hardly anyone was left after the Purge--just us lucky ones born with the Sync genome that allowed us to pilot GESTALTs: one-fourth the population, we've determined.

There's an explosion. The building I'm perched atop rocks as it takes the blast-wave.

"Ballistic missile fire and erratic activity at the epicenter, Emerald", Arc says."Red Sleipnir has engaged the Tier without awaiting our assistance."

"Shit," I say. Of course Rudy's jumped the gun. Of_course._ "Has Sleipnir emerged yet?"

"No. And I'm still detecting mergence fluctuations from Bastille..."

_ _ "What!? Aiden said they weren't picking up anything!"

"Perhaps the sensors on the carrier were damaged by the backlash from the Tier's attack. Luther is still synced. Bastille didn't forcibly eject his pilot's consciousness, so they are both still functioning. I've been attempting contact with them, but their communications must have been damaged as I've had no success. Still..."

Luther survived! "We've got to go."

Arc powers up and her alien energy passes between us, through us, and makes my fur stand on end for a moment. I pull my matte-black helmet down and it form-fits to my skull, and then I clutch Arc's handle bars and gun it, spinning her rear tire to whip her around. She trembles as we reach the opposite side of the rooftop and I once again spin her about. I rev her engine and vibrations ricochet up my spine. I can just see the head of the Tier, a mile away, as it pokes up over the far side of the building. Is it smirking?

"Something's not right," My GESTALT and I say simultaneously.

And we rocket off the roof. We hit the ground running eighty and dodge around debris. I contact Aiden when Arc reaches 150 and takes control of herself (at that speed my reflexes, as sharp as they are, mean nothing when everything's a blur). He is relieved to hear Luther is still alive, but he's just as skeptical as we are. He believes Luther's up to something, which is more than likely.

"Still, something's not right_,"_ he says. "Hurry."

_ _ So we do. Arc reaches 200 mph and her emergence energy spikes. She can read my thoughts, and she knows when I'm about to initiate a sync. At 250 mph our consciousnesses merge, and at 300 my GESTALT's true form wraps protectively about me.

I am a knight, and she is my armor, my sword, and my shield.

Rudy

"You're gonna die, you son of a bitch!"

Blood pounds in my ears. The tears I'm shedding and the red light in my cockpit are nearly blinding me, but the red I'm seeing (the redness of rage), keeps me from stopping. I can't give up. The Tier took out my father, the most powerful GESTALT pilot on the face of planet Earth, and even though I know I don't stand a chance I can't give up. I owe my dad, my general, too much to let him down.

But I have already let him down...

"Rudy, the Tier is gathering energy into itself again," Sleipner warns through my headset.

I see the monster crouching down. It's the ugliest thing I've ever seen; even more grotesque than the other Tiers our team has eradicated. It's much too long tail whips behind it and clips the tops from high-rises that--somehow--hadn't been demolished already. It looks right at us as we speed toward it, Godzilla-like maw open, and blue markings pulse rapidly across its body. Its six eyes begin to light up. It flexes its haunches.

"Rudy, I highly recommend that we..."

_ _ I ignore Sleipner. "Fuck you," I growl at the Tier. It's mocking me, I know it is. "I'm sending you straight to alien hell."

I focus. The red lights in my cockpit begin to strobe. Sleipner's massive engine roars and my insides quiver. I feel the energy welling up. The panoramic windshield, laced with live-screen notifications (mpg, temperature, power levels, contacts, gps location) flickers and numbers begin to tick up rapidly. I still see the Tier--it's smirking at me.

"BASTARD!"

Sliepner's vehicle mode is that of a car. If I had to think of one to compare it to from before the Purge, I'd say a Mustang Boss 302...if it had a baby with a German Leopard 2A7 tank. He's seen me through the thick of battle and thins of loneliness when I had no one else to talk with. He's not just a vehicle, but part of me, and I'm a part of him. We're a team and we always have been, but right now--as he warns me that synching could possibly kill us both with mergence levels pushing 250 percent--I block him out. I don't care if I die. And I'm not going to sync. I don't have to.

The Tier shifts suddenly and whips its head upward. Its markings flash white-hot, and then a ball of energy (like the one that hit my father) coalesces in front of its gaping mouth. It pulses and flickers like a tiny blue sun. An alarm begins to sound. "Warning" blares across my windshield in blinding letters. I grit my teeth, grip the wheel tight, and hit the gas, velocity increasing so much that my body's pressed hard against my seat as we rocket straight at the monster. Sleipner screams something through my headset, but all I hear is a roar of noises, like an F-5 tornado meshed with a crashing train.

I flip a switch and feel Sleipner's suspension lower. The steering wheel in my paws clicks as I switch seamlessly into battle-function, and it wraps like gauntlets around my forearms and fingers. I flex my digits like I'm baring my claws, and steam whips across the windshield as my GESTALT's front transforms; machinations split and fuse until it's jagged and sharp like the tip of a rocket. I flick a finger and the sharp edges up front spark into a neon glow: energy blades. We're a living spear, and I have my target.

"Rudy, we'll never reach the Tier before it fires..."

"Faster." We speed up.

"Rudy!"

_ _ "FASTER." The world is a blur. Only the Tier before me retains its ugly shape.

WARNING, WARNING, WARNING.

_ _ And I'm blinded for an instant, the rush of noise in my ears blasted into nothing but an ear-splitting squeal. I'm distracted and Sleipner takes over. He veers to the right, but it's too late. I see the Tier's beam of energy as it shoots toward us in slow motion, and I know we can't avoid it.

I can only gasp.

But the beam doesn't hit us. Relief washes like a tide over me, and shame rises in my stomach like bile. I look toward the Tier in time to see an emerald green blur as it pounces backward after having socked the beast right in the face and thrown off its aim. Instead of slicing me in two, the beam rockets off into the horizon, annihilating whatever it comes into contact with and sizzling the very air.

"Lee!"

Sleipner grinds to a halt, kicking up a tide of dirt and debris. Lee, merged with Arc, flits around the monster's feet delivering blows to known weak-points. His armor class GESTALT is small in comparison to the Tier, only ten feet tall as compared to its twenty-something, but she's agile and durable and Lee pilots her like they were born from the same womb. He's got his force-shield and energy lance armed, utilizing both defense and long reach to combat the creature. He smacks the Tier across the face once more and then leaps directly beneath it. His lance, made of pure green energy, is hefted and he fires a blast right where the monster's junk would be if they were capable of breeding. It roars and stomps around, though, so it felt something. Lee darts away to a safer distance.

The alarms in my cockpit die down and the redness fades. I'm already gunning it again, though, as my live-screen receives a contact from both Lee and Aiden. The latter, I know, is going to tear me a new asshole. Woefully, I accept the calls. Both Lee and Aiden's faces pop up on my windshield; Lee's is contorted and sweaty while Aiden's is terrifyingly placid. The arctic fox, my adopted brother, looks right into my eyes and I feel a chill tremor through my ribs. His face used to be so soft, much like his body was, but post-Purge life has carved him into a sharp and muscular man of the apocalypse. His gaze cuts like a knife. I realize that, despite my past objections, my father made Aiden his successor for a reason.

Blushing from embarrassment and fear, a feral whine escapes me. "Aiden, I..."

"Silence," he commands, grey eyes livid but unblinking. His black nose twitches, muzzle rippling like he's about to snarl, but he doesn't. Lee breathes hard and grunts from the other screen, but I can't look away from my brother. I just can't. "You're a fool, Rudolph, a goddamn idiot," he growls, deep voice causing my ears to droop. "Just look at what's happened because you're so fucking impatient. You acted selfishly and put the lives of your team at risk, and..." I swallow as the fox steps back from the camera; his white fur becomes dull like shadowed snow. "You disobeyed the general's direct orders, Rudolph. That's a punishable offense..."

Sleipner remains silent throughout my talking-down, and--without me realizing--he's taken control of himself and worked his way around the perimeter of the epicenter, the Tier in the middle still in battle with Lee. There's a hiss, and "Gatling gun now armed" blinks on the live-screen.

I can't think straight. My head feels like it's stuffed with cotton.

"I'm sorry," is all I can manage to say, to both Aiden and to my father's memory. Tears fill my eyes and I look into my brother's projected face. "It's my fault."

Lee roars and Sleipner increases in speed. My GESTALT fires his Gatling gun and draws closer to the Tier. I want to tell him to disengage. I don't feel like fighting anymore. Aiden's crushed me.

"I'm glad you realize you're at fault," my brother says. He turns his back on me, and I make out Kelly before him working at her control center. "The general is alive," he says suddenly. I nearly cry out in shock. "Get him out of there immediately. Kill that Tier. Close the portal." He turns back around and I notice the muscles in his crossed arms twitching. "Am I clear, Private Kendrick?"

My face pinches as I can't stop smiling. The tears flow again I'm so overwhelmed. "Yes."

"Control yourself," Aiden orders. "And 'yes' _what,_Private?"

"Yes, sir!"

Aiden nods and I catch him grinning, too. "Save him, brother."

"I will, brother."

Sleipner stops firing and I focus. I watch the mergence level indicator jump down to safe-levels and my body surges with energy. It fills me up and bursts in my stomach; it tingles through my limbs and rivals ecstasy. I close my eyes but Sleipner's console still glows through my eyelids.

"I'm coming, dad."

And my GESTALT and I become one.