BANDITS ON MARS

 

To LIVE and DIE on MARS

VOL I BANDITS ON MARS

Chapter 2: “Vol I Bandits on Mars”

The security saucer was faster than anything Lumo had seen in the Corona system's official fleet. That’s what private security money paid for. It ate the distance between them in three heartbeats, its belly-mounted plasma cannon already cycling blue.

Ren's voice crackled through the bandit channel, tight with Spanish. Nos dieron, guey.

The flash came from the Neptune V's starboard stabilizer—not an explosion, but an unraveling. The digiton particles holding the hull together began screaming in frequencies only Lumo could hear. He felt it behind his eyes first, then in his marrow, the master menu tearing at his concentration like a dog with a rat.

He was the Neptune V. Every bulkhead, every faulty wire, every glitching energy field—they were all extensions of his fractured consciousness. When the security saucer's second shot carved through the aft section, it carved through him. White static flooded his vision. Somewhere, someone was screaming. It might have been him.

Ari stood in the open hatch, the wind whipping his mullet across his face. The gold chain around his neck caught the smog-light and threw it back in dirty rainbows.

"Open fire!" he shouted. A declaration.

Three of the bandits raised their hands, fingers twitching as their Heart Menus blazed to life. A concentrated volley of plasma bolts streaked from their palms, stitching across the dark haze toward the security saucer. The pursuing vehicle juked left—smooth, surgical, wrong.

Then Fozi moved.

The ox-man's massive fist punched through the Neptune V's interior wall like it was wet paper. His arm extended into the rushing slipstream, and from his palm erupted a cannon—not carried, but summoned, a heavy-bore digiton projector that materialized from his Menu in a shower of golden light. He fired.

The blast caught the security saucer's forward shield. The barrier rippled, fractured, held.

Inside the pursuing vehicle, four figures tracked the hit with cold precision. The tan one didn't blink, just watched the Neptune V's shield signature dip into critical. The olive-skinned one thought a single pulse across the security channel—target, Year 64 Neptune V, black, damaged—his lips never moving. The one with the ponytail traced his finger across a tactical overlay, plotting the bandits' likely escape.

And the Cannis—bipedal, humanoid, his snout twitching at the scent of ionized air—grinned with too many teeth.

Pursue, he thought. The word landed in his crew's skulls like a blade. Driver, engage tractor beam.

The security saucer surged forward, plasma cannon recharging, its crew already tasting the bounty.

ACTIVATE WEAPONS CONNECTION

The three of them were dying.

Not in the poetic way. In the way that left teeth loose and vision swimming and the taste of copper thick on the tongue. Lumo felt it in his marrow—the digiton rot spreading through Ari's nervous system like black mold, Fozi's burgundy fur glitching gray at the edges, Ren's telepathic signature sputtering like a drowning man's last transmission.

They hadn't even won yet.

The security saucer's tractor beam pressed down like a god's thumb. The Neptune V screamed somewhere above them, its hull peeling back in slow-motion strips. They'd be paste in thirty seconds. Fifteen if the saucer's second gun cycled online.

Lumo's right eye twitched. SAIPAN glitched across his vision in seven shifting colors, each one screaming for a command he couldn't form.

Weapons Connection. Tier 3. Palmlock protocol.

The knowledge came from nowhere. Or somewhere. A splinter of himself that had already lived this moment, died in it, sent the answer back through the static.

"Palms," he choked out.

Ari's head snapped toward him. Blood dripped from his nostril. "What?"

"Your palm. My palm. Ren's palm." Lumo's arm shot out, fingers splayed. "Touch. Now."

The tractor beam flexed. The saucer above them pulsed violet, its crew adjusting power distribution for the final squeeze.

Ari didn't argue. He never argued when the words sounded like that—like Lumo had already seen the ending and was just reading the script. His calloused hand slapped against Lumo's.

Ren's grey fingers wrapped over both.

WEAPONS CONNECTION: ACTIVE

The beam that erupted from their joined palms was the bluntest response. A three-part argument aimed at the universe itself: that ship should not be here. That tractor beam should not hold. Those four hunters inside should feel this.

White-gold fire lanced upward. It hit the saucer's belly and stuck, chewing through the shield in fractal patterns. The tractor beam stuttered—just for a second—but a second was all Ari needed to kick the Neptune V's thrusters back online.

Above them, the Cannis inside the saucer snarled something about recalibration.

Below them, Lumo's SAIPAN system began to dissolve.

Colors bled across his vision—red bleeding into blue bleeding into yellow bleeding into white. His menu fractured into a kaleidoscope of corrupted glyphs. A glitch crawled up his arm like a second skin made of static.

SAIPAN STATUS: UNSTABLE

Lumo hit the deck. Hard.

"Blue!" Ari's voice came from the wrong direction. Or Lumo was facing the wrong way. Tunnel looked like a painting someone smeared.

"I'm fine."

"You're glitching."

"The system's glitching." Lumo's mouth tasted like burnt wire. "I'm just here."

Ren's voice cut through the static in their heads: The beam worked. We're moving.

Ship's tearing apart, Lumo shot back. Can't see shit.

Look at me.

Why?

Because I'm not glitching. Use what works.

The Neptune V clawed upward. Below, the security crew yelled about pursuit vectors. Above, something that might have been sky.

Ari grabbed Lumo's collar. Hauled him up. "You see anything?"

Lumo's four eyes fixed on a patch of darkness. Maybe clear air. Maybe not.

"Freedom." Pause. "I think."

"You think?"

"I'm also seeing a giant squid made of numbers. So maybe shut up and let me focus."

Ari laughed. Blood came out. Didn't care.

"That's my Blue."

The SAIPAN didn't break.

It came apart at the seams.

Lumo felt it happen behind his four eyes—the master menu of the security detail, the Cannis, bleeding into his own like two frequencies eating each other. His vision went chromatic. Colors he'd never coded flashed across his retinal display: amber, vermilion, a shade of purple that tasted like burning. The glitch crawled up his optic nerve and nested behind his skull.

Then the security saucer's tractor beam came back online.

"Shit," Ari said. "Shit, shit—"

The beam was a pale green lance, hungry and precise. It caught the back edge of the Neptune V's hull and held. The saucer lurched backward, its engines screaming against the pull. But the beam was layered—a secondary field lashing out, snaking into the bandits' ship, finding something soft.

The old Asian banker was still sitting low on the floor with his hands bound in digiton static. His bulbous eyes went wide. His indigo tunic snapped in the wind as the tractor beam took him around the chest and yanked.

He didn't scream. Just gasped—a dry, papery sound—as he was ripped off his feet and dragged across the gap between ships. The security saucer's boarding hatch zapped open. The banker sailed through it like a fish on a line.

Lumo couldn't stop it. His Menu was a war zone, the Cannis's security protocols fighting his SAIPAN for control of his own nervous system. He saw the old man land hard on the security vessel's deck, saw the tan operative catch him by the collar, saw the Cannis grin with all those teeth.

The tractor beam released the Neptune V.

Ari didn't wait. He slammed the throttle forward, and the bandits' saucer shot into the smog like a scalded animal. Lumo collapsed against the bulkhead, his four eyes still glitching, still seeing double—the banker's face, the Cannis's teeth, the amber-and-vermilion scramble of two Menus dying together.

Behind them, the security saucer banked hard and followed.

“Get these fucking flies off our necks!”

Ari’s voice cut through the chaos, raw and commanding. Fozi didn’t hesitate. His massive fist punched through the Neptune V’s interior wall, and from his palm erupted a cannon—not carried, but summoned, a heavy-bore digiton projector materializing in a shower of golden light.

He fired.

The blast wasn’t aimed at the guards. It was aimed through the SAIPAN SYSTEM, Lumo’s chromatic combat algorithm humming in Fozi’s bones. The cannon glitched—skipped three frames of reality—and the energy lanced into Lumo instead.

The Xerran went stiff. His four eyes rolled back. Colors cascaded across his cobalt skin—red bleeding into blue bleeding into yellow bleeding into white—like he’d been electrocuted from the inside out. He hit the deck, rigid as a board, flashing through spectrums that didn’t exist in nature.

“Shit!” Ari was at his side in a heartbeat, hands hovering over Lumo’s twitching form. His Menu blazed to life, fingers swiping through diagnostics, but the SAIPAN’s corruption had locked him out. No healing tools. No stabilizers. Just Lumo’s body seizing beneath him, the air smelling of burnt copper and static.

“Stay with me, Blue.” Ari grabbed his friend’s jaw, forced those flickering eyes to focus. “Transfer the master menu. The ship. Give it to me. I’ll keep you alive. Just stay conscious long enough to—“

Lumo’s mouth opened. Static poured out instead of words.

Then the security vehicle caught up.

The guards didn’t brake. They jumped—launched themselves through their own hull’s shimmering walls with Olympic athleticism, clearing the gap between ships in a single, impossible bound. Four of them. Tan, olive, ponytailed. And the Cannis, his snout wrinkling at the scent of ionized air.

They landed inside the Neptune V on their feet, weapons already cycling, boots hitting the deck with synchronized thuds.

The Bandits had nowhere to run.

The bandits didn't wait. They never did.

Ren moved first, phasing through the security guard’s plasma burst like it was morning mist. His Grey Martian form flowed around the shot, reappeared inside the guard’s guard. The decapitation was clean. Surgical. The head hit the deck with a wet thunk.

Then the body kept fighting.

The neck didn’t bleed. It fizzed. Digiton particles swarmed from the wound like angry hornets, knitting flesh and bone and data into a new head. Same face. Same empty eyes. The guard blinked once, twice, and raised its weapon again.

“Mierda,” Ren pulsed.

Ari didn’t have time to process. The Cannis lunged—all teeth and too many joints, its snout wrinkling at the scent of ionized air. Ari’s fist, wrapped in explosive-packed Hite energy, came up for the killing blow.

The Cannis smiled.

Then it wasn’t there. Not gone—changed. Its form collapsed into a shimmering condensate, programmable matter flowing like liquid mercury around Ari’s punch. The fist passed through empty static. The Cannis flowed around him, reformed behind him, and grinned.

“What the hell?” Ari breathed.

Fozi stared. Ren’s black eyes went wide. None of them had seen anything like it. This wasn't menu combat. This was something else. Something new.

BANDITS ON MARS

The SAIPAN red mode crossed like a bad splice. Lumo felt it more than saw it—the chromatic shift behind his four eyes, the sudden copper taste flooding his mouth. Red meant rage. Red meant the leash came off.

It hit the guards first.

The tan one's plasma rifle stuttered mid-fire, the barrel glowing cherry before vomiting a sustained stream that carved through a support column. Not aiming. Just feeding. The olive-skinned one's eyes rolled back, his jaw unhinging in a silent scream as raw digiton energy vented from his palms in uncontrolled arcs. The one with the ponytail—a wiry man with a sharp, angular face—laughed a dry, mechanical sound and began phasing through solid matter at random, flickering between realities like a corrupted file.

The Cannis just grew.

Muscle tore through tactical armor. Bone lengthened, joints popping in wet percussion. His snout peeled back from teeth now the length of daggers.

"The glitch," Lumo said, watching his own Menu spiral into corruption, "it's spreading. They're getting a boost. An infinite boost. They'll burn out in about four minutes but until then—"

Ari caught a plasma-enhanced fist to the jaw, rebounded off a wall, and came up grinning with blood in his teeth. "Then we hold four minutes."

"Easy for you to say," Ren pulsed, his telepathic voice dry as Martian dust. "You're not the one who has to listen to this."

The mental channel flooded with psychic criticism—a chorus of bandit voices dissecting Lumo's creation like a bad meal.

—menus look like a toddler designed them—

—phases in and out like a cheap hologram—

—my abuela's glass eye had better resolution—

Fozi's massive fist caught a guard in the chest, the impact sounding like a meteor strike. "They're not wrong."

"Shut up," Lumo muttered.

The ponytailed guard flickered back into existence behind Ren, his hand already phasing through the Grey Martian's chest. Ren dissolved before he could grip, reforming three meters left.

"Glitchy," the man observed, his voice flat.

"You're glitchy," Ren corrected. "He's just constructed."

A plasma bolt went wide. Then another. The guards moved now with the jerky, overclocked grace of machines running too hot, their attacks overlapping, canceling each other out. The tan one shot the olive one in the shoulder. The Cannis bit through his own lip, spraying black blood.

"They're losing coherence," Lumo said.

"They're losing minds," Ari corrected, ducking a wild swing. "There's nothing in there anymore."

Lumo watched the Cannis try to calculate a tactical retreat—watched the calculation stutter, glitch, then dissolve into a frothing charge directly into Fozi's waiting fist.

"Brain-dead," Lumo said, the realization settling cold in his chest. "They're just drones. Artificial intelligence running on pure instinct. No strategy. No self-preservation. Just kill."

Ren, floating above the chaos, pulsed an observation laced with dark amusement. "So they're you, then. Before coffee."

Lumo opened his mouth to retort.

Ren's psychic voice cut him off—a different channel, a different tone. Words bleeding from Spanish into English the way he did when the joke was too sharp for one language:

"Yo funciono con puro instinto también."

I function on pure instinct as well.

Then SAIPAN glitched.

Not the system—the word. It bloomed in Lumo’s vision like a bruise, seven shifting colors bleeding into each other, each shade screaming for attention. His right eye twitched. The transmission came from nowhere. Or somewhere he hadn’t been yet.

“SAIPAN is ready to pair… connected!”

The voice was a Japanese woman’s, polite and utterly wrong, like a customer-service AI reading a death sentence. It went straight into Fozi’s skull. The ox-man’s burgundy fur bristled, his four nostrils flaring as the protocol settled into his bones like a second skeleton.

Then he went on his blitz.

No warning. No roar. Just movement—massive, impossible, physics-defying movement. His claws caught the first guard across the chest, tearing through tactical armor like wet paper. Ribs snapped. The man folded, hit the deck, and lay still.

For half a second.

Then the digitons swarmed. Golden, hungry, efficient. They poured from the guard’s wound like angry hornets, knitting flesh and bone and data into a new whole. He blinked, stood up, raised his weapon.

Fozi didn’t wait. His fist came down on the guard’s skull—crack—the sound of a ceramic plate shattering. The head caved. Blood and something darker sprayed across the Neptune V’s bulkhead.

The guard kept fighting.

Ari’s punch-bombs cratered chests. The explosive-packed Hite energy detonated inside rib cages, turning organs to slurry. The guards fell. They always fell. And then the healing kicked in—cheap, brutal, subscription-based regeneration that pulled them back from the edge of death again and again.

Ren’s light discs scythed through three of them at the waist. Torsos hit the deck. Legs kept walking. The Grey Martian pulsed a telepathic curse, but the discs were already reforming, already slicing, already failing to stick.

One guard’s head rolled. Fozi had torn it clean off, the spine still trailing like a wet rope. The body caught the head mid-roll, held it to the stump, and the digitons fused it back in place.

The bandits had no healing tool. Just their ripped clothes, and even those had been patched so many times the fabric barely held. A repair tool sat in Ari’s pocket—stolen, glitching, good for mending tears in the physical, not the flesh. Every blow the bandits landed, they bled for. Every guard they dropped, stood back up. The damage was massive and mounting. Lumo’s four eyes tracked the math: attack points insufficient, enemy regeneration off the charts, their own health bars flickering into the red.

The situation was getting desperate.

“Fozi!” Ari shouted, ducking a plasma bolt. “Aim for the subscription port! The neck!”

The ox-man adjusted. His claw found the soft junction between helmet and collar, tore the guard’s head off again—this time holding it away from the body. The headless corpse fumbled, grabbed, couldn’t reach. The digitons swarmed anyway, building a new neck, a new spine, pulling the head back down from Fozi’s grip with telekinetic force.

They weren’t just healing. They were fighting the concept of death itself.

Lumo pulsed the stark reality, but the words came out wet.

"We can't kill them. They're not alive. They're subscriptions with feet. Every time you drop one, the billing cycle renews." His four eyes tracked the math across his fading Menu—attack points insufficient, enemy regeneration off the charts, their own health bars flickering into the red. "I have to charge the HITE. Full power. It's the only thing that sticks."

The bandits turned.

Ren and Fozi held the line. Ren's light discs scythed through three guards at the waist—torsos hit the deck, legs kept walking, and the digitons swarmed, knitting flesh back to bone. Fozi tore a head clean off, spine trailing like a wet rope. The body caught it mid-roll, fused it back. Ari's punch-bombs cratered chests, turned organs to slurry. The guards fell. They always fell. And then the healing kicked in—cheap, brutal, subscription-based, pulling them back from the edge again and again.

And Lumo was lying on the floor.

He hadn't noticed when he went down. Maybe when the vehicle started glitching. The Neptune V was dying with its master, its hull flickering, its systems coughing static. Lumo felt it in his marrow—the digiton rot spreading through his own nervous system, his four eyes glitching between spectrums, his blood pooling warm beneath his back.

Ari tried to reach him. Fozi covered. Ren deflected. But the guards kept reforming, kept advancing, kept healing.

Ari was at his side now, gold chain swinging, face spattered with someone else's blood. "You told us you were gonna steal us an icon. That we wouldn't have to work for a year."

Lumo's vision swam. The SAIPAN glitched across his sight—amber, vermilion, a shade of purple that tasted like burning.

"I told you I didn't care," Ari continued, voice cracking. "Said I could keep robbing fools forever. But you wanted your Goddamn TG Blue—" he mispronounced it, always did, TC-14 Blue, the score that was supposed to end all the running, "—here, and now you're gonna get killed for it!"

Lumo tried to grin. Blood came out instead.

"Worth it," he whispered.

Then the glitch hit full force, and the world went white.

Dear Journal.

It’s me, Lumo.

I’m sitting here, mid-air, watching Ari try to punch a hole through an unkillable guard. The man’s ribcage is jelly. The guard is still swinging. Fozi tore a head off—the head is crawling back to the body.

This is fine.

This is the day, I think. The one where the math stops adding up. The one where I finally run out of clever.

The blast caught the security saucer's forward shield. The barrier rippled, fractured, held.

Ari screamed. “You fucking drone! You killed my friend!”

He’s talking about me. I’m right here. But I’m also not. I’m bleeding out on the deck plates, static crawling up my arms like a second skin made of wasps. The SAIPAN is dissolving in my skull. The colors are bleeding together.

I’m dying.

But that thing is happening again. That feeling in my chest—not a heartbeat, a command. A pull. Like a fishhook in the gut, dragging me toward tomorrow against my will.

Lumo starts to fade, the world going white.

Dear Journal.

It’s as if I was going to die today.

But that thing is pulling me to tomorrow.

Telling me: Not today.

With every last ounce of strength left, teetering on the edge of death, the HITE charged. Lumo locked onto all four guards with the targeting system. He punched it.

The seismic force crushed them. One moment they advanced, weapons cycling, cold predator eyes locked on the bandits. The next they crumpled against the far bulkhead, armor cracked, limbs bent wrong. The Cannis hit hardest—his augmented skeleton absorbed the brunt, but even he slid down the wall, leaving a black smear.

The bandits brushed themselves off. Fozi spat something dark onto the deck. Ren adjusted his posture, the Grey's version of shaking it off. They tried to make light of it, the way you do when you almost died and don't want to admit how close it was.

"Heard that one's mother was a glitch," Fozi rumbled.

No one laughed.

Ari ran a hand through his mullet, gold chain swinging. He looked at the heap of crushed guards. Tried to find something in his cracked voicebox that sounded like he wasn't terrified.

"Look-it," he said. "Asleep like little angels."

Fozi snorted. Ren's telepathic pulse carried something almost like a laugh.

But the joke landed hollow. The tan guard's fingers still twitched. The olive-skinned one's chest rose—shallow, but rising. The healing had already started, that cheap subscription-based regeneration knitting bone and sealing wounds. The Cannis's eyes were open, watching them through the blood running down his snout.

The bandits' ripped clothes were plastered to their skin with sweat and someone else's blood. They had no healing tool. Just each other. Just the HITE, now drained, its reservoir flashing empty on Lumo's Menu.

Ari's grin didn't reach his eyes. "We should probably move."

“Right, move then.” 

Lumo yanked Ari back as the air behind them split open—a phantom hatch blooming out of nothing, its edges crackling with raw digiton static. The guards were already reaching for them, gauntleted fingers closing on empty space where the bandits had been standing a heartbeat before.

Lumo clapped his hands together.

The telekinetic shove hit the guards like a freight train made of invisible force. Four bodies lifted off the deck in unison, arms and legs pinwheeling as they sailed backward through the phantom hatch, over the skyway’s edge, and into the smog-choked abyss below. Their screams faded fast, swallowed by the wind.

The bandits erupted. Fozi fired a beam from his fist—pure celebration, violet light punching into the bruised sky. Ari followed, then Ren, their arm-cannons painting the darkness in jagged streaks of gold and crimson. 101 clapped, the sound like rocks grinding together.

Lumo leaned against the bulkhead and let his Menu flicker to life.

Dear Journal. It’s just me, Lumo, and my bandits again. My story continues.

The Neptune V banked hard around a data-tower, its engines screaming. They burned a black streak across the red-coloured asphalt of the Corona Hills skyway as the saucer made its escape. Below, the city sprawled in all its neon-drenched desperation, and above it all, the MARS sign stood watch from the cliff, its letters flickering like a promise.

Freedom, it said. Just on the other side.

Ari whooped and punched the throttle.

Lumo closed his journal and watched the sign shrink behind them.

ATILA