The orbital stasis pod blazed a scintillating, fiery trail across a sky of dust. Among the heavens, the planet's violent summer sun glinted off the pod's surface in a blinding white sheen. As the internal temperature skyrocketed to three hundred degrees Fahrenheit, the lone warrior inside awoke.

          She was neither above, below nor equal to those who could only exist beneath her perseverance. She neither hated her enemies nor loved her allies, and she asked for no allegiance.

          The stasis pod jostled in the dusty, dense atmosphere. It shot down toward the desert world below with such speed that its last layers of heat absorbing paint blistered and peeled away. In seconds, the inside of the stasis pod became a blast furnace; the outer hull began to melt and exposed a glowing metal crash cage.

          She saw fire crawl across the tiny shockproof glass of her gold visor. Even beneath the JAW-1221 combat armor's crystallized ceramic plates, inertial-dampening gels and the bulletproof under suit, the intense heat still scalded her skin.

          A moment later, she felt the retro rockets thunder beneath the stasis pod--a violent explosion that shook her teeth and sent cold lightning straight up her feet.

          The flaming stasis pod smashed into the barren desert at two hundred kilometers an hour. It crashed and skidded through the sand, then buckled and disintegrated into an ugly shower of glittering red hot metal.

          Injured as she was, consciousness struck through her mind like a lightning bolt. Instinct reasserted itself, thought patterns connected--and she burst free from a mountain of steel and sand.

          She ripped the protective crash cage apart, plowed a path through the wreckage and then gasped, a sound more like the drawn whimper of a child as she dragged a full breath through the tactical suit's air filters.

          She opened her eyes, and the first thing she saw was a blast of jaundiced sunlight under a sky of dust. She rose to her feet. She then limped away from the wreckage as fast as she could, keeping her profile as low as possible so the Acolyte strain of the plague would not see her.

          Since the struggle began seven years ago, the humans that survived had toiled to gather a network of intel on the biological threat. Their attempts to understand as they fought the plague were futile, and as far as they knew, it didn't matter if they did.

           The enemy never spoke, and they were numerous as they were ferocious. That was all the humans needed to know that this was a war of attrition, a genocide.

          To stay on track with the evacuation plan, she reviewed her tactical situation. Fifteen minutes ago, she was in cryostorage aboard the Coalition vessel NSC Solstice. The Solstice, commanded by Captain Wilkes, was one of three large assault carriers sent to retake the planet.

          The instant the Coalition vessels arrived, however, all hell broke loose. The cruisers walked into an entire armada of Locrix--bulbous large bioships that dwarfed at least two assault carriers.

          Too outnumbered to fight an enemy that could heal physical damage, the Coalition vessels lost the fight in minutes. While commanders and officers soon abandoned ship in their Raven drop ships, they shunted her from the Solstice while she was inside her stasis pod.

          After enduring the fiery ride to the surface below, the next logical step was to regroup and gather what numbers they had before the plague found them scattered across the desert world.

          She sprinted toward the rally point. As she ran, the ground began to rumble. She heard the heavy roar of something big burning up in the atmosphere. The sky heated to a dull red glow, and an amber comet streaked from the horizon.

          A starship was about to crash.

          The fallen vessel sliced through the dusty clouds like a knife. The sky before it exploded into orange borealis and spilled across the heavens. Her heads-up display identified the Solstice, marked each Raven drop ship as it perilously disembarked from the disintegrating ship.

          Seconds later, the Solstice exploded into a cascade of flaming debris. A blinding gash of light slit the sky as it arched over the desert and disappeared beyond the horizon. She now charged at full speed, ripping the desert on either side.

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