The Green Room

The Green Room of the Crystal Dome amphitheater was supposed to be a sanctuary of luxury, but Juno "Jinx" Vance thought it felt more like a brightly colored coffin. The walls were lined with pulsing neon tubes that cast a garish pink glow over the velvet couches, doing absolutely nothing to cut the bone-deep chill of Cryos-9. Outside the reinforced permaglass window, a localized blizzard was raging, burying the resort-city of Nova-Vail under a mountain of merciless, howling ice.

Jinx paced the length of the room, the heavy reinforced heels of her combat boots sinking into the plush carpeting. She checked the seal on her kinetic-shield gauntlet for the fourth time in ten minutes.

"If I freeze to death in this oversized ice cube, I'm haunting your tour manager," Jinx announced, stopping to glare at her younger sister. "And the security out there is a joke. I saw two rental guards sleeping near the loading dock. I could have breached this perimeter with a spork and a bad attitude."

Stella "Stardust" Vance didn't even look up. The galaxy’s reigning cyber-pop queen was perched on a vanity stool, meticulously tuning her custom sonic-guitar. She was currently wearing a holographic wardrobe—a shimmering, shifting projection of crystalline light that made her look like a human supernova.

"Relax, Jinx," Stella sighed, strumming a power chord that vibrated the champagne flutes on the nearby table. "You're always so paranoid. It's a solstice concert, not a war zone. People are here to see me sparkle, not to shoot at us. Besides, Nova-Vail is exclusive."

"Exclusive just means the people trying to kill you have better funding," Jinx snapped back. The ghosts of her old mercenary squad whispered in the back of her mind—a constant, suffocating guilt. She had trusted 'exclusive' intel once before, and she was the only one who came back. She wasn't going to let that happen to her sister. She leveled a finger at Stella's outfit. "And if we do get into a firefight, that dress is essentially a glowing targeting beacon. You look like a radioactive disco ball."

Stella finally looked up, flashing a perfectly engineered, devastatingly arrogant smile. "It’s called fashion, Juno. I wouldn't expect a woman who wears tactical body armor to breakfast to understand."

Jinx opened her mouth to deliver a withering retort when the heavy steel blast doors of the Green Room didn't just open—they violently imploded.

The concussive force threw Jinx backward into a glass coffee table. Smoke and pulverized concrete flooded the room, followed immediately by the searing red flash of automatic plasma fire.

"Down!" Jinx roared. She didn't think; she reacted. Muscle memory from years of brutal warfare took over. She lunged across the room, tackling her sister off the vanity stool just as a volley of plasma bolts vaporized the mirror where Stella’s head had been a fraction of a second prior.

Four heavily armored syndicate mercenaries poured through the breached doorway. They wore blank, thermal-optic masks and carried military-grade suppression rifles. They weren't here for autographs. They were an extraction squad.

Jinx raised her left arm, activating her kinetic-shield gauntlet. A translucent, hexagonal dome of blue energy sprang to life around them, absorbing the next barrage of laser fire with agonizing, high-pitched whines. The shield’s power gauge instantly dropped by twenty percent.

"My guitar!" Stella shrieked, scrambling on the floor as her holographic dress glitched wildly from the electromagnetic interference.

"Forget the damn guitar!" Jinx yelled over the deafening roar of weapons fire. She unholstered her heavy kinetic-pistol and returned fire blindly around the edge of the shield, forcing the forward mercenary to duck into cover. "Ventilation chute! Behind the couch! Move your ass, Stardust!"

Trembling, Stella crawled toward the massive intake grate set into the baseboard. Jinx backed up with her, keeping the failing kinetic-shield angled toward the door. With a vicious kick, Jinx shattered the grate's locking mechanism.

"In!" Jinx ordered, shoving her sister into the dark, metallic tunnel.

As the syndicate squad advanced, Jinx tossed a flash-bang grenade into the center of the room. The blinding white detonation gave her exactly two seconds of cover. She killed her shield and dove headfirst into the chute, sliding down into the freezing, metallic bowels of the amphitheater just as the mercenaries blindly saturated the room with plasma.