Army of the Immortals

The last thing Sergeant Alex Rein saw was a blinding green streak of plasma turning Corporal Gibson into a charred silhouette. The last thing he felt was an unbearable heat piercing his armor and boiling his flesh. His last thought was his daughter's name: Lilia.

And then… cold.

He opened his eyes. The air smelled of ozone and sterility. Alex was lying on a hard platform. His body was encased in a thin, ice-like crystalline shell. It cracked with a dry snap, shattering into radiant dust. He sat up, instinctively checking his limbs. Intact. Completely intact.

Next to him, another man was rising from an identical cocoon. A perfect copy of himself, down to the last scar above his eyebrow. The same primal terror and disorientation swam in the double's eyes.

In the silence of his flagship's bridge, "The Relentless," Marshal Vance observed not the battlefield, but streams of pure data. The holographic projection before him showed not explosions, but columns of numbers. The red "Losses" column grew steadily, but the blue "Active Combat Units" column grew twice as fast. It was the symphony of the Attrition Doctrine, and Vance was its conductor.

"Sector Gamma-9, Sergeant Rein's unit has sustained one hundred percent losses," reported a faceless adjutant. "The assimilation process was successful. Twenty new Echoes are operational. The sector's combat capability has been restored and increased."

Vance nodded, his face an impassive mask. "Continue the advance. The enemy must be exhausted by dawn."

The adjutant silently departed. Left alone, Vance closed his eyes for a moment. The symphony of numbers in his head was replaced by a cacophony of death screams. His own death screams. He slowly ran a finger along the edge of the console. There was nothing on the smooth metal, but in his memory, twenty-seven notches were carved there. Twenty-seven deaths he could never forget. He would have given all his power and the entire Hegemony fleet to erase just one of them. But instead, he was forced to bestow this horror upon others. Millions of others.

"It is a resource," he repeated to himself like a mantra. "Not people. A resource." But one of the twenty-seven voices in his head laughed sardonically.

"Forking Protocol initiated," a lifeless voice announced from the speakers. "Combat Unit GR44, proceed to sector three. Combat Unit GR13, sector five."

Following assimilation, the new Echoes were pale and shaking before being hooked up to the compulsory cooling systems.

Before them on the battlefield, where hell had just raged, lay what was left of Alex's body. Mangled armor and blackened flesh were slowly being consumed by a bluish crystalline growth—the Omni-Corp "Aura" nano-hive greedily devouring material for the next replication.

Alex—or, as he was now called, Combat Unit GR44—looked down at his hands. He remembered death. He remembered the agony. And that memory was now as inseparable a part of him as his own name.

Two weeks later, on the scorched moon of Xanthi-4, Alex's squad was ambushed. But the fire was strange. There was no plasma, no explosions. Only flashes of cold, blue light. The soldiers around him froze as if turning into statues and fell to the regolith with a dull thud.

When the radiance enveloped him, his muscles seized. He collapsed, completely paralyzed but conscious. He saw soldiers in different armor approaching him, bearing the Coalition emblem on their shoulders. One of them knelt beside him, his helmet retracting into his collar. He wasn't a soldier. A middle-aged man with tired but intelligent eyes.

"Sergeant Alex Rein," he said, checking the data on his wrist tablet. "Or, to be precise, Combat Unit GR44. Welcome."

---

The alert signal reached Vance in his private quarters. Red—the highest priority. He strode to the holo-projector.

"Marshal, we have a breach," the head of security reported. "Combat Unit GR44, Sergeant Rein, has been captured by Coalition forces on Xanthi-4. An unknown non-lethal weapon was used. He's alive. And they have him."

Vance's face turned to ice. Alive. That was worse than dead. The dead were statistics. The living in enemy hands were a catastrophe. It was the "Aura" technology, available for study. A weakness the Coalition would dissect with pleasure.

"Purge Protocol," Vance ordered, his voice ringing with restrained fury. "Deploy the GR13 Legion."

"There is one detail, sir," the officer added cautiously. "Combat Unit GR13, his double, is in the same sector. He has undergone accelerated adaptation. His performance metrics are ideal."

A shadow of a cruel smile touched Vance's lips. Poetic irony. "Even better. No one knows the target's weaknesses better than he does himself. Send him. The order is to retrieve or erase. No exceptions. Let brother bring brother oblivion."

---

Alex awoke not in a cell, but in a bright medical laboratory. He was strapped to a cot, but the restraints were soft. The man who had captured him—Dr. Aris Thorne, as he introduced himself—sat opposite him, drinking coffee.

"I'm not going to ask for your access codes, Sergeant," Thorne began calmly. "I want to talk to you."

"I am Sergeant Alex Rein, Combat Unit GR44. According to Hegemony Protocol 12-C, I am only required to provide my name, rank, and code number," Alex replied monotonously.

Thorne sighed heavily. The response was as predictable as the local sunrise. He had seen it dozens of times on recordings. He was trying to understand the basic protocols of these beings. It was obvious they had their "Prime Directives": 1. Uphold the authority of the Hegemony. 2. Eliminate enemy targets. 3. Preserve the replication technology. But did they have, as in the old legends of cyborgs, a secret fourth directive? It was useless. Direct dialogue with the program would yield no results. He needed to find a crack in the wall. To appeal not to the protocol, but to the ghost of the man inside.

Thorne set his cup down.

"Alright, Combat Unit GR44," he said, intentionally using the impersonal designation. "Then I want to ask something else. Do you remember her?"

A holographic image appeared on the wall. A laughing girl of about five with two blonde pigtails.

Lilia.

Alex's heart, recreated by nanomachines, froze for a moment.

"This is a forbidden psychological pressure tactic," Alex hissed, repeating the memorized phrases.

"This is a photograph of your daughter, Alex," Thorne corrected gently. "They don't just copy your body. They copy your love for her. Your memory. And your pain. You are not a soldier. You are the greatest victim of this war. They stole your death from you, the one thing that truly belongs to every living being."

Thorne spoke for hours. He explained that his weapon, the "Suppressor," didn't kill but only temporarily disabled the "Aura." He said that he considered the Echoes not enemies, but prisoners of their own technology. He asserted that somewhere in this tangle of memory and nanomachines, the real Alex Rein still lived.

Alex listened, and the ice of his military conditioning slowly cracked. For the first time in these nightmarish weeks, someone was speaking to him not as "Combat Unit GR44," but as a person.

Sirens suddenly wailed, flooding the white room with red light.

"They're here," Thorne said, unstrapping Alex's restraints. "Your… rescuers. Evac shuttle is on the roof. You have a choice, Alex. Go back to them and become cannon fodder again, dying and regenerating until nothing but an empty shell is left of you. Or come with me."

A battle was already raging in the corridor. Alex, unarmed, ran behind the doctor. In the doorway of the airlock leading to the landing pad, he saw him. A soldier in Hegemony armor. With his face. But the eyes… the eyes were empty. As cold as the space between stars.

"Combat Unit GR13," the double said in a flat, emotionless voice, raising his rifle. His gaze coldly assessed the situation. "Combat Unit GR44 is compromised. Order 209: liquidation of the defective copy."

"I'm not just a copy! We have a daughter! Lilia! You have to remember!" Alex cried out, seeing the rifle barrel aim at the wounded Coalition soldier.

"Memories are a tactical nuisance," Combat Unit GR13 replied indifferently, his aim settling on the wounded man. "The protocol requires eliminating all uncontrolled variables first. He is a variable. After him, you."

In that moment, Alex understood everything. He saw his future in those empty eyes. A future where there was no Lilia, no laughter, no pain, no love. Only protocols and variables.

"No!" he screamed.

Thorne was pulling him toward the shuttle, but Alex broke free. He threw himself not at his double, but between him and the wounded soldier. Combat Unit GR13 froze for an instant, his programming unable to process such an irrational act.

"You are me!" Alex yelled, looking into the face of his killer, his brother, his curse. "Remember!"

That second of hesitation cost Combat Unit GR13 everything. Seizing the moment, Dr. Thorne fired his pistol, and the paralyzer charge struck the double in the chest. He collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut.

Alex, breathing heavily, ran to the shuttle ramp. The doors closed behind him, cutting off the sounds of battle. The shuttle ascended into the sky, leaving behind a scorched moon and an army that did not know how to die.

Aris Thorne walked over and stood beside him, looking through the viewport.

"What now?" he asked.

Alex looked at his hands. They were the hands of a soldier, the hands of a killer. But now, for the first time in a long time, he felt they were his own.

"Now," he said quietly, a long-forgotten humanity cutting through his voice. "I want to remember my real name."

---

The report lay on Vance's desk, cold and final. Mission failed. Combat Unit GR44 had escaped with Dr. Thorne. Combat Unit GR13 had been captured. The loss of two units and, worse, a precedent.

The Marshal stood by the massive armored glass of "The Relentless," gazing at the scattering of distant stars. His reflection, old and infinitely weary, stared back at him. He thought of Alex Rein. Of the rookie who had just experienced his first death. Who was supposed to become a cog in his perfect war machine. But he had broken the mold.

A quiet whisper echoed in the silence of the command bridge. It was Vance's own voice, but he was not speaking to his adjutants, but to the ghosts standing behind his shoulder.

"He made it," the marshal whispered. "One of them… actually got out."

There was no anger in his voice. No joy either. Only a note of boundless surprise and, perhaps, a sliver of something he had not felt in a very long time. Envy.

He turned away from his reflection. A new, unknown variable had appeared in his mathematically precise equation of war. A ghost who had found freedom. And Marshal Kaelen Vance, the most powerful and the most imprisoned man in the galaxy, for the first time in many years, did not know how to solve it.