User Guide

8
9
Your lessons. Yes, you remember how you sat with
the other children on the training ground of your
birthworld, listening to Old Kantele as he lectured in
his rasping whisper ... There are only three foes wor-
thy of our mettle, young ones. The Starwolf, who
favor swiftness and dar-
ing. The Diamond Sword,
who weave strategies of
shadow and steel. And
the Blood Eagle, butchers
who laugh in the face
of fire...
Minerva swoops up on a
blue trail of phosphores-
cence and fires a brace of
grenades at the myrmi-
don. The Blood Eagle
warrior leaps ponderous-
ly aside, but the grenades’
staccato explosion swats
him away like a broken
doll and hammers you
back a few steps. A
Blood Eagle hoplite
scores Minerva with a
laser as she descends
onto the hillside. An
instant later, you regain your balance and hose the
bastard down with your minigun. The Blood Eagle
staggers under the incandescent hail and falls as
your flechettes finally penetrate and find meat to
explode in. You have marked your first kill, and you
scream in triumph, but there’s no pleasure in it. The
stench of blood and ozone and burnt flesh fills you
instead.
It is better to die than suffer capture by the Blood
Eagle, you once told your father’s sister years ago.
She looked into your eyes serenely and replied,
Ayia! Fear is their weapon, true. But you are of the
Children of the Phoenix, the first tribe, the eldest
tribe, the pure ones sprung from the Blessed
Harabec himself, hero of the Cybrid Wars, savior of
humanity. Such knowledge will spur you above fear.
A couple of laser pulses hit you in the back, searing
even through the shield aura, and you grunt in pain,
but the armor holds. You look over your shoulder
and trigger your flight pack to thrust you into that
indifferent blue sky. Another bolt scorches a fur-
row in the ground under you, and you vector
toward the sniper, a female hoplite, emptying the
Telamonian at her as she tries to maintain cover in
the rocks of the hilltop. A bellyful of fear gives your
hands speed as you let the useless minigun snap
back to standby on the warharness while you pull
up your plascannon. The Blood Eagle raises her
longrifle too late as you drop directly onto her and
crash a boot into her faceplate. The next instant, you
unload white-hot plasma into her at point-blank
range. You can’t even hear her scream under the
roar of the flames.
Minigun. Longrifle. Disker. Grenade launcher.
Blaster. Hellshot. Lascarbine. Hawktorps.
Plascannon. Sword. Shockchain. Knife. Tetrahook.
Club. Hand. Foot. Teeth. You’ve trained with all
these weapons since you were old enough to walk,
and their use is now deeply instinctive for you. Still,
you remember your father’s words to you upon
Presentation after your received the Dragon Marks
of adulthood: Your life, too, is a weapon.
You land on your belly and skid down a slope in a
dry cloud of dirt, through charred patches where
blaster bolts scored the ground. Two Blood Eagle
peltasts snipe at you, first one, then the other, as you
scramble to reload the minigun with a second
ammo canister. Your shield aura won’t hold much
longer, and you’re bleeding from a half-dozen
minor wounds. The flamer is lost, dropped by the
smouldering remains of your last kill. Come on!
you pray. You’ve done this hundreds of times
before, under fire, underwater, in the dark -- all in
training -- but now your fingers can’t get a good
grip on the canister. Then you fetch up against a
rock and the ammo’s gone. Dust is everywhere. A
hyper-vee round whangs off your cuirass, and you
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