The official story ended with sanctions. The news channels replayed the same footage stern-faced politicians condemning Russia and China, praising Mechanicus Technologies for its "humanitarian spirit." To the world, it looked like Alex Price had won.
But in the shadows, war continued.
The first strike came through the net.
A wave of cyberattacks surged against Mechanicus orbital networks. Russian state hackers and Chinese military units launched coordinated breaches, injecting worms into civilian channels, trying to burrow past firewalls into the station's command core.
They never reached it.
For every virus they unleashed, the system responded with something worse. Firewalls that rewrote themselves. Traps that mimicked open ports, luring hackers in before sealing them in infinite code-loops. Some attackers swore they heard voices binary whispers before their systems fried.
It was as if the network itself was alive, a machine spirit Alex had bound to its task.
The hackers disappeared. Some were "retired" by their governments. Others simply went mad.
Then came the mercenaries.
A convoy bound for the Kenyan facility was ambushed in the desert. Men with unmarked gear, NATO surplus rifles, and off-world comms interceptors. They struck fast, brutal, trying to seize cargo crates filled with Mechanicus alloys.
But when they cracked the crates, they didn't find metal. They found servo-skulls.
The drones screamed, red optics flashing, discharging arcs of electricity. The mercenaries were dead before they hit the sand.
Weeks later, an entire PMC outfit in Siberia vanished during a raid on a Mechanicus supply depot. Satellite photos showed nothing but a field of burning snow and strange sigils carved into the ice, glowing faintly like circuitry.
The message was clear: Alex was not just fighting back he was making war sacred.
Meanwhile, Alex's vision grew.
The Plasma Reactor now throbbed like a sun in its containment field. Linked to orbital satellites, it began to power the framework of what would become the Earth Defense Grid a lattice of orbital platforms armed with rail cannons, energy shields, and null-field disruptors.
Tony stood beside him during one of the early test firings. The two men watched as a platform in low orbit activated, unleashing a railgun slug at a piece of lunar rock.
The stone disintegrated.
"Overkill," Tony muttered, though he couldn't hide the grin. "But I like it."
Alex said nothing, his hands folded in a tech-priest's benediction as the machine's echoes hummed.
But even as Earth grew stronger, Alex felt the weight of the Ancient One's warning.
In his private sanctum, he studied the weakening veil of the universe. Fractures flickered at the edges of perception rifts where things moved just out of sight. Not Thanos, not yet. Other things. Lesser, hungrier.
The plasma reactor was not only a weapon. It was a ward.
He anointed it again with sacred oils, servo-skulls chanting in binary. Every calibration, every coil, every capacitor was blessed as much as engineered. To Alex, there was no difference anymore. Engineering was prayer.
"Steel is salvation," he whispered. "Circuit is scripture. Flame is faith."
And far away, in Moscow and Beijing, men in dark rooms whispered their own prayers not to gods, but to vengeance. They could not fight Mechanicus Technologies head-on. But they could bleed it slowly.
Sabotage.Infiltration.Allies hidden in plain sight.