Jens Hartmann

Session 01 — Operation Living Bomb

The limo ride from Las Vegas Airport to the Voss Campus told Jens everything he needed to know about the team he had been assigned to. Ronnie produced his own deck of cards and immediately tried to palm the aces, lost badly despite the rigged odds, then accused Sammy of cheating and swept the cards off the table in a fit of rage. Guy said nothing, which meant he had seen the palming and was keeping it in his back pocket. Jens watched the entire sequence unfold from his seat, cataloguing personalities and calculating tolerances, the way he would assess the load-bearing capacity of a bridge he intended to drop. The poker game was instructive. The people were volatile. The engineering of a functional team from these raw materials was going to take work.

Adrian Voss and Major Jenkins delivered the briefing in a secure conference room at the Voss Campus: The Meteor Event, the emergence of super-powered individuals, and a young man designated The Exploding Man who could walk into a market, detonate, and crawl away alive to do it again. The mission was live capture in a Taliban cave complex deep in the Afghan mountains, with a $100,000 bonus per operator for success. Before the team departed, Yi Jiangku — intense, sharp, radiating purpose — distributed three manila folders to various team members. The labels read “Hungry God,” “Toasty Titan,” and “Jens.” One of those folders carried his name. Nobody explained why, and the moment passed before he could press the question. It sat in the back of his mind like an unexploded ordnance that someone had forgotten to mark.

The night insertion went cleanly — parachutes into the Afghan mountains, five kilometres out from the target. Major Jenkins spotted a tripwire across the primary approach vector within minutes of landing. Jens moved forward without hesitation. In complete darkness, working by touch and the faint gradations his night-adapted eyes could parse, he traced the wire to its anchor points and disarmed the device with steady, precise hands. The same hands that had crimped detonators underwater in the Baltic, that had set limpet charges on ship hulls by feel alone. The tripwire was crude but effective, the kind of simple engineering that kills the overconfident. He respected it, neutralised it, and moved on. Deeper in, while Guy deployed gas grenades into the lower chamber and Ronnie secured the target with a rifle butt and restraints, Jens picked off a sentry at the rear cave entrance with a single pistol shot from nearly thirty yards — through darkness, through dust, through the residual haze of knockout gas. The P8 barked once. The sentry dropped. Surgical accuracy at a range where most operators would have hesitated to fire. During the helicopter exfiltration, four insurgents on flying carpets pursued the aircraft across the mountain passes. Guy and Ronnie handled the aerial engagement — grenades and .50 calibre — while Jens maintained overwatch from the cabin, tracking the remaining threats and covering arcs that the others had left exposed.

Dawn found them at a NATO base in Afghanistan, the prisoner in medical custody, Major Jenkins raising a glass of whiskey. The payout was $150,000 per operator. Jenkins delivered the real prize: Voss Combat Suits, identical to his own, waiting back at the campus. Jens accepted the news with the quiet satisfaction of an engineer who has just been told that the next project involves technology he has never seen before.

Session 02 — Terra-ble First Impressions

The debrief at Voss Campus was standard — Guy delivered the operational summary at his usual rapid-fire pace, Ronnie filled in the details about the target’s resistance to tranquiliser darts — and then Ronnie slapped a button that Guy had placed on the conference table and the room filled with smooth jazz. The laughter broke something loose in the team. In the mess hall that evening, the operators settled into the kind of easy, sharp-tongued camaraderie that forms between people who have recently survived something that should have killed them. Ronnie tormented Pauly the bartender with requests for sausage rolls and scotch eggs. Terry Muñoz, the nervous young cook, scrambled to keep up. Jens observed the social dynamics with the same methodical attention he applied to everything else, filing away the interpersonal architecture of the group — who pushed, who absorbed, who deflected.

The suit fitting at R&D Level -1 was the first time the engineering truly seized his attention. Four Voss Combat Suits hung on the wall — seven-foot exoskeletons of plated armour, powered by backpack-mounted energy cells rated for eighteen hours of continuous use. Jens provided suit familiarisation training to the other team members, walking them through the systems with the patient thoroughness of a man who had already spent hours studying the technical documentation and needed to understand every subsystem before he would trust the hardware in the field. While Ronnie punched Sammy’s unoccupied suit across the room and Guy tested communication links, Jens focused on understanding the base technology — the power distribution, the structural reinforcement, the interface between the wearer’s nervous system and the suit’s response architecture. He requested no additional stealth modifications, no bolt-on weapons systems. The suit itself was the puzzle. He intended to understand it completely before he started modifying it.

Then Voss led them down to R&D Level -2, through security that only he could authorise, to The Portal. A circular, wavy arch dominated the centre of the room, its surface shimmering like heat distortion. Built using meteor fragments. Linking, for reasons no one could explain, to a planet designated Terra. The team stepped through and found a dead world — cracked earth, thin atmosphere, two suns hanging in an overcast sky. The suits compensated for the low oxygen without difficulty. Thirty minutes of jogging north brought them to a three-foot hole in a hillside where Sammy crawled in invisibly and found a car-sized insectoid creature gnawing on a human femur. Further north, they found torn fatigues bearing the name Hernandez — what remained of the previous recon team that had gone through the portal a month ago without powered suits and never returned. Then the ruined city appeared on the plain below: crumbling concrete, exposed steel beams, three-legged furniture, three-wheeled vehicles with yoke controls, and at its centre a statue of a three-eyed, three-armed, three-legged humanoid holding a blade above its head. Guy estimated the city had been destroyed by conventional weapons roughly a century ago. From a twelve-story building near the centre, the team watched two to three hundred giant insectoid creatures digging methodically across the northern landscape.

The portal was built using fragments. The alien world had drained fragments embedded in its soil, detectable on the suit sensors within fifty yards of the statue. An entire civilisation had risen and fallen on this world, and the fragments were here too — connecting two planets across a distance that conventional physics could not account for. The engineering questions were relentless. How did the portal maintain coherence? What was the energy source? Why did the fragments drain? What was the relationship between the alien technology and the materials that granted superhuman abilities on Earth? Jens sketched the statue in his field notebook, measured doorframes for the average height of the three-limbed inhabitants, recorded the composition of the building materials by visual assessment, and noted the directional orientation of every street relative to the two suns. His hands never stopped moving. His Leatherman came out to pry a circuit board fragment from a ruined console. The notebook filled with precise, annotated drawings — alien architecture, insectoid anatomy observed at distance, portal aperture dimensions from memory. The questions would not stop. The questions were the point. Understanding how the fragments worked — how any of this worked — was the reason he had volunteered for the programme, and now the scope of what he did not understand had expanded to include an entire dead planet and a civilisation that had been erased from it. Sleep, when it came, was brief and interrupted by calculations he could not finish.

Session 3 — What Happens in Vegas

Las Vegas R&R began with the revelation. Somewhere between the Voss Campus and the Las Vegas Strip, on a roadside that offered nothing in the way of context or ceremony, Jens produced his own meteorite fragment and showed the team what it could do. He opened a portal. The geometry of it was the same as The Portal back at R&D Level -2 — the same shimmer, the same aperture distortion — but this one was standing in open desert air, held together by a fragment Jens had been carrying without briefing anyone. The team looked through it and felt the thing that people feel when physics offers them an exception to everything they thought was settled. What Jens felt was slightly different: the effort of holding the aperture open was enormous, and the effort of closing it was worse. He could not close it cleanly. The portal hung open longer than intended, wide enough for something to step through from the other side, and then it collapsed on its own terms rather than his. He stood on the roadside in the flat Nevada light, exhausted and trying not to show it, and registered the fact that he had made an uncontrolled aperture in a semi-public location. What came through while it was open, or whether anything did, was not immediately apparent. It became apparent later.

In Las Vegas proper, Jens wore a cowboy hat and boots and committed to both without irony. He is constitutionally incapable of wearing a costume halfheartedly. At karaoke he sang “99 Luftballons” in German, front of the room, full commitment, no apology to anyone. When the mime brawl started — mimes, on the Strip, as an outdoor performance piece that somehow became a confrontation — Jens covered Ronnie’s back with quiet competence, blocking, redirecting, making sure the geometry of the fight did not fold Ronnie into an angle he couldn’t see coming. He is effective in a fight precisely because he does not perform effectiveness.

The cleaning lady was found later that night. Jens and Sammy heard screams from one floor below and moved to investigate. A hotel worker had entered the wrong corridor at the wrong time and encountered something that had come through from Terra while a portal Jens had opened was still hanging open. A Terran Insectoid was consuming her head-first. Jens drew his silenced pistol and put the creature down with rapid shots to the head. Then he forced the portal shut — the same kind of portal he had struggled to close on the roadside, but this time with a dead woman on the floor as the cost of his earlier failure. Sammy handled hotel security while Jens stood in the corridor processing what had happened. The woman did not survive. Jens is Truthful and has no mechanism for softening what he registers as accurate. He registered that a woman died because he opened a portal carelessly and could not close it on schedule. He said so, plainly, once. Then he went quiet in the way that precedes long, careful recalculation. He is already thinking about what he will say if Voss asks him directly about the fragment. He does not have an answer yet that clears the bar of being both true and survivable.

Session 04 — Fallen Stars

In Greenland, Jens identified The Dragon through the rifle scope — confirmed the State Farm logo on the lapel, called it out to the team. The fragment was gone before any intercept was viable. He logged it as a named entity sighting and moved on. In Iceland, he watched Ronnie physically throw Sammy backward mid-air to win the race to the fragment site, then strip off his glove and pick the thing up barehanded. The fragment went inert on contact. Jens noted the power discharge in his field log, noted the fragment’s subsequent lack of detectable emission, and added it to the growing list of data points he does not yet have a framework to contain. The suit cameras were recording. Command would have seen all of it.

Norway produced a different problem. Ronnie’s suit locked up mid-insertion — full joint freeze, the kill switch engaged remotely by Voss Dynamics command — and Jens moved to assess the situation with the reflexive practicality of an engineer encountering a stalled system. He offered to diagnose the lockout. Ronnie’s response — precise, unambiguous, delivered flat from a frozen suit — was not a request for distance so much as a statement of territorial boundary. “Don’t fucking touch me.” Jens straightened up, withdrew, and accepted the information. Ronnie does not want assistance. Noted. He submitted to the Voss Dynamics blood draw before departure without protest; there was no productive calculation that led to refusal.

Russia required the portal. The bear — a regenerating, thirty-five-foot problem that Sammy’s explosive had already killed once — was between the team and a workable solution, and Jens opened a spatial aperture under its forefoot. The geometry was imperfect without a second anchor point: the portal opened, the foot sank partially through, the bear lurched, and the aperture collapsed under load before he could use it for anything more decisive. It was the first time he had attempted a tactical portal application under fire. The attempt is in the notebook with its limitations honestly recorded. What it showed him is that the anchor problem is the engineering constraint, not the aperture generation — which narrows the design space considerably. He is already working through solutions.

Before the team shipped out, Jens went looking for Brittany on the base. He did not find her. He left a note with her room number — brief, factual, his contact information and an indication he had tried. He did not write more than that; Jens is Truthful, which means he writes what he can verify. He pocketed the inert Russian Fragment from the site when the formal sweep was complete and nobody was inventorying. He now holds multiple fragments and has told nobody. The weight of that is not guilt — he does not evaluate it as a moral failure, he evaluates it as a risk he has accepted with full information. The engineering questions the fragments represent are too important to surrender to a bureaucratic handling chain that may never answer them. He is aware this logic has exactly the shape that precedes very bad outcomes. He is also aware that he is going to keep the fragment.

Session 05 — Deep Sea Fragments and Desert Swarms

Brittany was in the briefing room. Bald. Suited. Smiling at Sammy with the kind of directness that Jens recognises as communication operating on a frequency he cannot tune to. She clapped and became eight and the room became briefly complicated. Jens ran the depth estimates before the team deployed — fragments at fifty, one hundred, and deeper — using the available telemetry and his own analysis to give the mission a planning framework. Jenkins took the shallow one. The team took the sub.

Underwater, Jens attempted to link his suit’s targeting software to the submarine’s weapon systems. The integration was partial — a compatibility problem between TL9 suit architecture and the sub’s own fire control, which he logged for post-mission review. Then the anglerfish appeared. Jens saw the light first — a bloom of bioluminescence in the black water, beautiful and precise — and then saw nothing else. The lure caught him completely. His hands stopped. His thoughts stopped. He was aware, distantly, that the creature behind the light was enormous and that the light itself was a predation mechanism, and neither fact produced any motor response. He sat in the sub and stared until Sammy’s turret shot broke the spell. The lost turn is in his notebook with a clinical annotation: Visual hypnosis. Complete incapacitation. Duration: one full combat round. Mechanism unknown. Must determine whether this is a Will-based resistance or a physiological vulnerability. He does not enjoy the entry. Jens does not have many entries in his notebook that he does not enjoy.

The highway was simpler. Six insects in pursuit, visible in the mirrors as a dust cloud with too many legs. Jens planted a remote mine on the road, waited for the optimal moment — not the first moment, not the dramatic moment, the moment where the density of the cluster maximised the blast radius — and triggered it. The bugs came apart. Limbs hit the asphalt like branches after a storm. Ronnie, riding ahead, heard the explosion and looked back to find nothing but smoke and road. He hadn’t noticed the pursuit at all. Jens said nothing about it. There was nothing to say.

In Las Vegas, Jens wore a crown of ten beer cans and stole a pinwheel from a child using sleight of hand to replace one that Ronnie had stolen from a different child, which was the kind of logistical chain that feels absurd until you account for the fact that Jens approaches small problems and large problems with exactly the same methodical precision. At Medieval Times, he drank Caribou and cheered for the green knight and watched the jousting with the focused attention of a man who finds all systems interesting, including medieval ones.

Then the screaming started and the parking lot was full of insects and Jens climbed to the roof. Elevated position, clear sightlines, personal weapons. The creatures below were the same things he had seen on Terra — the same morphology, the same clicking, the same armoured carapace and central eye. They were here. On Earth. In a Las Vegas parking lot. Jens had opened a portal on a Nevada roadside three weeks ago and struggled to close it, and now there were insects in the desert and insects in the city and nobody had drawn the line between those two facts aloud. Jens has drawn it. The line runs from his portal through the Bellagio cleaning lady through the highway pursuit to this parking lot, and the gradient is not flattening. Brittany was below with her copies, firing and screaming Sammy’s name. Ronnie was shooting insects through the eye. Guy was driving a Lexus into the swarm. Jens lined up his first shot from the roof and calculated how many rounds he had and how many creatures he could see and acknowledged, with the dispassionate honesty that is his primary character trait, that the math was not good.