Electricity crackled from broken wiring and steel walls shone bouncing off rays of artificial sunlight from a decaying nuclear sun hung like a chandelier. Mars drew his energy sword, gleaming a brilliant azure, older than this colony, tight in his gloved fist.

  The Masked Bandit raised their rifle, a makeshift improvised weapon that fired metal ignited by black powder, a weapon type even older design than Mars’ sword and far more obsolete to contemporary warfare of the space age.

  Mars was trapped.

  He stood at the end of a long alleyway. He had been rash to draw his weapon first, but not wrong. If the bandit was wise, of which they most certainly were not, they would flee to feast on easier prey. Mars dropped his bag of loot; it would only slow him down now.

  The Masked Bandit aimed and fired with practiced precision. The bullets deflected off of Mars’ energy barrier. A honoured symbol and lifeline in his younger days, and now a mythic artifact in his exile whose worth was only exceeded by a functional starship that could take him off of this planet Elba.

  Mars ran for his attacker.

  They had clashed in a shadowed corner of an abandoned city where once advertisements would have played across great and small screens emitting a thousand echoes for a million products that would drown out the silenced voices of consumers-labours crawling like ants for their oligarch-silicone queen. Now in the sound of silence, scavengers and bandits engaged in an ancient biological warfare of single celled organisms evolving to consume one another first started on rocks formed not long after the oceans splashed into existence.

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  Either the scavengers would survive off the environment or be consumed. But, humans were complex creatures, and hunted so easily they could become hunters. Mars had fought before. The fraying red fabric ribbon tied around the handle of his sword was a token of favour from a now dead Countess, a member from a destroyed family beneath a slaughtered dynasty of Queens where solar systems had been reduced to ruin for some reason known only to the elites of the galaxy.

  Bullet after bullet harmless deflected off his barrier: the energy barrier forged for his great-grandfather and passed to daughter to son and then to Mars. It had kept them all alive against monsters, heretics and even the ruin of their liege lords and worlds. Now, it saved Mars.

  He closed in, planted his feet and thrust his sword forward aiming for the throat.

  That was all it took. The Masked Bandit grasped, and clawed at where their throat had been, but in doing so, burned their own fingers off on Mars’ energy sword.

  Mars sheathed his blade as the bandit fell to the ground dead.

  Death was the same as it ever was, and life however transformed through technology had much the same needs. After pillaging the corpse, Mars returned to the alley to pick up his loot.

  He might go to sleep with a full stomach.