Spark Raiders

  Han Yang

  Copyright © 2026 by Royal Guard Publishing LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  1. The Cost of Forever

  2. Gravity's Betrayal

  3. The Blood of Rivals

  4. The Currency of Survival

  5. The Spider in the High Tower

  6. The Acid Rain

  7. The Tourist Trap

  8. The Fire and the Void

  9. The Golden Cage

  10. The Rhythm of the Void

  11. The Art of Aggressive Negotiations

  12. The Solitary Night

  13. The Longest Night

  14. The Echo of Silver

  15. The Ghost of Atlantis

  16. The Titan's Grave

  17. The Quiet Before the Storm

  18. The Ironclad and the Wraith

  19. The Cradle of Greed

  20. The Scavenger's Banquet

  21. The Merchant of Scales

  22. The Blueprint of Dreams

  23. Tides of Temptation

  24. The Shattered Geography

  25. The Silence of Giants

  26. The Shadow's Harvest

  27. The Majesty of the Skies

  28. The Tide of New Blood

  29. The Salt and the Sorrow

  30. The Ghost in the Machine

  31. The Symbiosis of Shadows

  32. The Drums of War

  33. The Covenant of Blood and Starlight

  34. The Eye of the Storm

  35. Napalm in the Morning

  36. Old Dogs and Old Tricks

  Afterwords

  The Story So Far:

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  Chapter 1

  The Cost of Forever

  In the forty-second century, the cure for death is not a miracle of divine intervention, but a biological narcotic that costs three million credits a gram. Only the rich can afford it, and only the foolish face the dangers of collecting it.

  The stale air inside the orientation auditorium on the space station tasted of recycled carbon and the sour, metallic tang of fear, radiating from a hundred desperate souls who had gathered in the hope of riches. A flickering holographic projector hummed in the center of the room, casting a ghostly, rotating image of a creature that looked like a nightmare sculpted from chitin and hate, its multiple eyes glowing with a malevolent crimson hue that tracked the recruits sitting in the darkened rows.

  The instructor, a man whose face was a road map of scars and bad decisions, pointed a laser grid at the beast’s serrated mandibles with a hand that was more cybernetic prosthetic than flesh and bone.

  "This is a wandering Dread-Stalker, and it’s the reason seventy percent of you won’t make it back to the high-orbit extraction drones alive," the instructor bellowed, his voice amplified by the room’s acoustics to rattle the teeth of the front row and vibrate the sternums of those in the back. "It has thermal vision capable of spotting a warm body through three meters of dense foliage, skin that can deflect standard kinetic rounds as if they were raindrops, and a neurotoxic saliva that will liquefy your internal organs before your brain even registers the pain of the impact."

  Damien shifted his weight in the cramped, uncomfortable plastic seat, his eyes scanning the room’s perimeter and the exits rather than the terrifying image hovering above the stage.

  As a former Lieutenant in the Coalition Marines, he’d spent a decade fighting alongside the reptilian Saurians in dense jungles. Combat in thick foliage was awful, and based on his research, he knew that while the Dread-Stalker was dangerous, it was actually one of the more manageable threats on the surface of Wesley—if you kept your wits about you.

  Beside him, Parker was methodically cleaning his fingernails with the edge of a jagged combat knife, looking like he was waiting for a delayed public hover shuttle rather than discussing his potential demise at the hands of an alien monstrosity.

  The black man came from the slums of Mars, never letting his origins or struggles define him. He was professional, calm under fire, and lethal at a level most soldiers only dreamed about.

  "The jungle of Wesley is a chaotic, layered hellscape where the canopy height correlates directly with your chance of dying a violent death," the instructor continued, cycling the hologram to show a sprawling cross-section of the forest that revealed the terrifying verticality of the ecosystem. "The taller the trees, the older the growth, which means more monsters, but significantly higher chance of finding Spark, creating a risk-to-reward ratio that has killed better men than any of you."

  The image shifted again, this time displaying a small, unassuming globule of iridescent, violet matter nestled in the crook of a mossy tree root, pulsing with a faint, rhythmic light that mimicked a heartbeat.

  A collective gasp rippled through the room, the sound of raw, unfiltered greed momentarily overpowering the smell of terror that permeated the recycled air. This was the Spark, the single most valuable substance in the known universe, the physical manifestation of eternity. The thing that the human race had spent millennia searching for.

  "This little blob of glowing slime is the only thing in the galaxy that stops the clock, but ten grams of the top-tier refined stuff only buys one year of life for the consumer," the instructor said, his voice dropping to a reverent whisper that seemed practiced for maximum psychological impact on the impressionable minds before him. "The ultra-wealthy on Terra Prime will pay any price to keep the reaper away for another twelve months, which means the demand never ends, and neither does the need for bodies to be thrown into the grinder to extract it."

  The instructor tapped a command key on his wrist, and the hologram zoomed in to show a simulated raider extracting the substance using a complex, delicate procedure.

  "But you don't just grab it with your hands like you are picking berries in a garden. The Spark is highly unstable when removed from its host substrate and reacts violently to biological contact. You will use the grav-siphon integrated into your suit's left gauntlet to pull it free without touching it, suspending it in a localized anti-gravity field.”

  He showed off the sleek raider suits that were part metal, part breathable material to allow for ease of use. A HUD overlaid a facemask on the helmet with a collection device on the right wrist.

  In the display, the suit wearers had heavy plasma and sniper rifles. Both were a bit outdated but functional. Damien understood that the high mortality rate meant the gear would be a bit older to shift losses.

  “Once airborne, you have exactly six seconds to deposit it into a pressurized stasis canister before the chemical bonds destabilize. If you take seven seconds, it evaporates into worthless gas and you lose a fortune. If you touch it with your bare skin, it accelerates your cellular regeneration uncontrollably until you become a shapeless, tumorous mass of rapidly dividing flesh. Do not touch the merchandise if you value your life."

  These words caused an excited stir among the hopeful recruits. Damien felt a wave of remorse as he watched their joyful whispers. Most of them wouldn’t last very long, fools to even brave the mission. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why there were adverts on every surface to join the Spark Raider ranks.

  "Three billion credits buys a lot of whiskey and bad decisions, doesn't it?" Parker mumbled, finally looking up from his knife to inspect the shimmering violet image with a calculating gleam in his eyes. "I reckon we only need about half a gram to retire to a moon where the gravity is low and the drinks are free for the rest of our unnatural lives."

  "You have to survive the drop before you can even think about spending the money on cheap booze and cheaper thrills," Damien whispered back, keeping his voice low enough to avoid the instructor’s glare but loud enough to check Parker’s overconfidence. "And that's assuming Ultimate Industries doesn't dock our pay for the compressed air in our gliders and the nutrient paste we eat on the way down."

  The instructor raised a hand, only quieting half the recruits.

  "Your tech may fail you down there, your batteries may die, and your scanners will get partially confused by the spore clouds that blanket the lower levels," the instructor shouted, snapping the recruits back to attention with the crack of a baton against the metal podium. "When the lights go out, you better have some primal survival instincts, or you’re just canned meat for the fauna that have been hunting on this world for a million years."

  The briefing dragged on for another hour, detailing the grim mechanics of their insertion and retrieval. Unlike a standard military drop, raiders were not fired in armored pods that would crush the delicate canopy; instead, they free-fell from the stratosphere in thermal suits, deploying glide wings to navigate the violent atmospheric storms that ravaged the upper atmosphere.

  "Now, let's talk about getting home," the instructor said, the hologram shifting to show a balloon shooting up through the trees. "The atmosphere is clear, but the canopy is a prison. To get out, you have to find a break in the leaves, inflate your rapid-ascent balloon, and ride it to the drone layer. Sounds easy? It isn't."

  The hologram showed a raider waiting by an inflating balloon, only to be swarmed by ground predators before he could lift off.
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  "The inflation process emits a high-frequency hiss that acts like a dinner bell for the local fauna. But… It is the best process to not harm the trees that create the Spark. Make no mistake, the Spark is worth more than you are.”

  Damien snickered, not even questioning this fact.

  The image shifted to break down the parts of the extraction balloon. “You have to defend your position for sixty seconds while the bag fills. If you launch too early, you’ll inflate at an angle and never breach the canopy. If you wait too long, you get overrun. The greatest danger isn't the sky; it's being a sitting duck on the ground while you pray for buoyancy with your attention directed at the mechanisms for flight."

  A nervous hand went up in the third row, attached to a young man who looked like he hadn't yet started shaving. "Sir, what happens if our balloon snags on the way up?"

  The instructor stared at the kid for a long, uncomfortable silence before answering. "Then you cut the line, fall back into the jungle, and hope you have enough ammo to wait for a rescue that probably isn't coming. But! There are Spark Raiders from the other corps—and ours—who die. Their backpacks are not consumed, so you can find one or ten. Whatever happens in that jungle, stays in that jungle.” He sucked in a deep breath. “Understood?” The recruits nodded. “Next question."

  There were no other questions.

  When the lights finally flared back on, blindingly bright after the dimness of the presentation, the room was buzzing with a manic energy. It was the adrenaline of potential wealth warring with the cold reality of likely death, creating a palpable tension in the air.

  Damien and Parker stood simultaneously, their movements synchronized by years of service, both as Lieutenants, towering over the assortment of ex-military washouts and desperate debtors that made up the rest of the intake group. They moved with a fluid grace, cutting through the crowd like sharks navigating a school of slow-moving fish, their eyes already adjusting to the harsh illumination.

  The double doors hissed open, releasing them into the blinding white corridor of the administration sector, where the air was cooler and smelled faintly of antiseptic, a stark contrast to the humidity of the auditorium. The walls were lined with digital propaganda posters showing heroic raiders returning with canisters of Spark, smiling beneath headlines about early retirement and generational wealth.

  "So, did that pep talk make you want to run home to mommy, or are we still doing this?" Parker asked, stretching his arms over his head and hearing his spine crack in three different places with a sound like dry branches breaking.

  "Mommy didn't raise a quitter, she raised a delightful sociopath with a penchant for high-risk investments and heavy ordinance," Damien replied, stepping up to a biometric kiosk and placing his palm against the scanning plate to initiate the login sequence. "Besides, I already spent the advance on that new kinetic shielding module for my suit, so I'm committed to at least one drop." After spending long enough fighting in various wars, they’d decided it was finally time to leave the army and get rich.

  The kiosk chirped happily as it accepted Damien’s identity, instantly pulling up a liability waiver that was seventy pages long and written in dense, predatory legalese. He scrolled to the bottom without reading a single word, knowing that it essentially said Ultimate Industries owned his corpse if he died, and his soul if he lived to collect a paycheck. The screen flashed a prompt asking for his beneficiary in the event of catastrophic life termination.

  "You know, uh, I heard that the Northern Sector has trees reaching four thousand feet into the sky," Parker said, leaning against the wall and tapping his own screen with a rhythmic, impatient finger as he bypassed the safety warnings. "That deep down, the sun never touches the ground. Rumor has it that the Spark glows like streetlights in a sprawling city, just waiting for someone to pick it up."

  "The Northern Sector is a meat grinder, Parker, and everyone knows it, which is why the payout is higher," Damien countered, finalizing his signature and waiting for the machine to dispense his drop clearance tokens. "We stick to the equatorial band for now. The trees are smaller, only two thousand feet, but the drop trajectory is cleaner and the atmospheric interference is lower."

  "Fair point; I do prefer to see the thing that kills me before it rips my head off my shoulders," Parker conceded, grabbing his tokens and flipping one into the air before snatching it back with a blur of motion. "Let's head to the armory and pack our chutes before the logistics officer tries to give us the patched ones from the last batch of casualties."

  Damien snorted. “At least if we come up empty with Spark, we can loot. The surface is littered with the foolish and the items they brought with them.”

  They walked down the long, transparent tube that connected the admin block to the launch bays, the floor vibrating gently beneath their boots from the constant activity of the station. To their left, the massive viewport looked down upon the planet Wesley, a swirling ball of violent green clouds and atmospheric turbulence that hid the horrors below.

  From this height, the planet looked beautiful, a jewel of emerald and jade, but Damien knew it was a poisoned chalice. Raiders could be seen as tiny specks dropping from the bay, their glide wings snapping open against the gale-force winds as they plummeted toward the cloud layer.

  "It looks peaceful from up here, doesn't it?" Damien mused, staring out at the planet while his hand unconsciously drifted to the pistol holstered at his hip, a phantom reflex from the war. "You almost forget that everything down there has evolved specifically to murder us and consume our biomass."

  "That's the deception of nature, my friend: pretty on the outside, deadly in the middle." Parker laughed, clapping Damien on the shoulder and steering him toward the heavy blast doors of the armory. "Kind of like that waitress you dated on Neptune, the one with the cybernetic eye that could record your conversations."

  "She was a spy for the rebellion, Parker, and you know it," Damien corrected, a faint smile touching his lips at the memory. "But she made a hell of a synthetic martini."

  The armory was a cavernous, industrial cathedral of violence, filled with rows of high-tech weaponry and armor racks that stretched up to the vaulted ceiling.

  Techs in grease-stained jumpsuits ran back and forth, pushing grav-sleds loaded with ammunition crates and inspecting the tightly packed extraction balloons that were a raider's only ticket home. The noise was deafening, a cacophony of hydraulic whines, clattering metal, and the shouting of orders that echoed off the reinforced bulkheads.

  They approached the distribution counter, where a logistics officer with a robotic eye and a permanent scowl was checking inventory on a datapad. He looked up as they approached, his mechanical eye zooming in to scan their ID badges.

  "Name and rank," the officer grunted, not bothering to look them in the face.

  "Damien, Contractor ID 77-Alpha, and Parker, Contractor ID 77-Bravo," Damien replied, leaning against the counter with practiced ease. "We're here for the Centurion packages, and don't try to give us the MK-IIIs, we paid for the upgrade."

  The officer grunted again, tapping a command into his console. "MK-IVs are authorized. You boys know how to pilot these things, or do I need to get a tech to hold your hand?"

  "We drove Titans during the Siege of Antares," Parker said, his voice dropping an octave to match the officer's gruffness. "I think we can handle a walking forklift."

  The officer’s human eye narrowed, but he nodded in respect. "Bay Four. Your gear is prepped. Try to bring it back in one piece. The deposit doesn't cover total disintegration."

  They moved to Bay Four, where two hulking suits of armor stood suspended in maintenance racks. These were the standard-issue 'Centurion' MK-IV exoskeletons, industrial-grade survival tanks designed to turn a human into a walking fortress. They even featured the ability to smell the natural surroundings, filtered through the visor.

  They weren't the sleek, custom rigs Damien had used in the Marines, which were designed for speed and stealth; these were brutes, built for crushing power and environmental resistance.

  "Check the hydraulics on the legs," Damien shouted over the din of a nearby welding torch, moving toward his assigned locker and punching in the code. "The MK-IV boosts lifting capacity by four hundred percent, which we'll need if we have to pry open a beast's jaws, but the servo-actuators tend to jam in high humidity if you don't grease them."