I
In the red dust of Deloyer you learn to count
not years, but supply drops.
Each sunrise is a ration stamp,
each dusk a tally of who did not come back.
They call you Fang of the Sun
because you bite light out of orbiting empires,
because your footprints bloom like burn marks
on the whitewashed reports from Earth.
Your Dougram is not a prophecy of chrome,
no angelic super‑weapon descending clean from the sky,
but a patched‑together real robot,
bolts remembering every recoil.
It rides on the bed of a truck,
sleeping under tarps that smell of diesel and wet canvas,
rust and hope sharing the same hinge.
Under sniper dawns you listen
to coolant ticking itself cool,
like a tired heart deciding to beat again.
You were supposed to inherit speeches,
chairs around polished Earthside tables,
the calm weight of a family name.
Instead, you inherit radio static,
frequencies stitched with the breath of seven comrades,
the Deloyer 7, laughing too loud in the dark
so fear has no room to sit down.
Your father signs decrees in a different gravity,
ink floating like small black eclipses
over a planet he no longer walks.
Out here, rebellion is a kind of weather.
It gathers first in the farmers’ backs,
in the curve of a hand closing
around a wrench, a rifle, a ballot never counted.
Your cockpit glass reflects their faces,
superimposes their hunger over your own,
so when you sight along the reticle
you are aiming at the future, not the enemy.
Sometimes, between artillery pulses,
Deloyer remembers it is beautiful.
Wind braids itself through canyon grass,
a child runs beside an armored convoy
holding a paper sun on a stick.
For one frame, everything is still:
dust, truck, combat armor,
the small hand raised in ordinary greeting—
and the war, embarrassed, looks away.
You keep moving.
Your maps are made of afterimages,
lines traced by retreating engines and
by the newsfeeds you will never trust again.
Some nights the Dougram kneels,
half from damage, half from prayer,
and you climb down through the smoke
feeling older than any general watching you
from the safe side of a classified screen.
History will later condense this into a logline—
“a small team of guerrilla freedom fighters
rise up to free a colonial world
from the iron fist of Earth.”
It will not mention how often
you wanted to go home
to a version of home that no longer exists,
how the word independence tastes
less like victory and more like metal on the tongue.
Still, in the censored margins of tomorrow’s textbooks,
someone will draw your machine in the corner,
all sharp angles and stubborn knees,
and write beneath it not hero,
not ace,
but this:
He learned that the sun is not a flag
but a wound that keeps on burning
until even the children can see
where the light is really coming from.
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