SES COMMANDOS CONVENE

On high orbit above SUPER EARTH

2185.05.27

The War Room was slightly less grandiose than the voice had led him to believe. Nobody was watching the hundred feeds anymore. Everyone was watching the middle of the room.

The middle of the room was a table.

It was a holographic war table, sleek, flat, with the fading smell of bureaucracy, the three cities standing on it in columns of light, and around the columns floated the numbers that had been floating around every command channel in the fleet for days. Resupply windows. Reinforcement drafts. Stratagem rationing. The numbers spelled out confusion for the soldiers, and despair for their commanders.

Adamas was on the far side of it.

Joe had been fighting under that voice. The person it belonged to turned out smaller than the voice, and looked like they had been awake since the wormhole opened.

“Coffee?” Adamas asked.

Joe snatched the offered mug, spilling a third of it down his armor, drank the rest in two gulps and sighed with satisfaction that his headache was finally going away.

Adamas waited.

"You've seen the data," they finally said.

"I have."

"Then you've seen what it says."

The analysis surfaced in Joe’s mind before he had tried reaching for it.

Casualties in the billions.

Cities being overrun, and ill-equipped SEAF tasked to defend them.

Three cities, under constant, severe pressure.

My algorithm estimated that the entire combined force on Super Earth could defend one city, maybe two at best-

But there are three under attack.

"It says we lose one of them," Joe said. "No matter what we do. "

"Yes," Adamas said. "And nobody in this room will say it out loud. Saying it means choosing, and nobody wants to be the one who chose. So I brought you here to choose it with me."

"Why me?" Joe suddenly got nervous. “Did I miss a briefing somewhere? Forget a set of orders or- I tend to forget-”

"When I asked this room where to spend what we don't have, the room looked at the floor. Then I watched you spend what you didn't have on someone else's fight, and watched it work. Then I watched you tell three broken divers on a bus-stop roof that they were going to win." Adamas leaned on the table. "You're the only person I've seen in this war who knows what the numbers can't buy. So tell me. Which one do we lose?"

Joe looked at the three columns of light.

Pure arithmetic would say lose the one furthest gone. Numbers simply do not lie. But the numbers had never had to hold a line with what was left after a decision like that.

"It's not about which one we can save," he said.

"No," Adamas said. "It isn't. Go on."

"Shells run out. Stratagems run out. People run out. We've been out of all three for days, and the war is still being fought, which means there's one resource left that we haven't run out of." Joe put his hand on the table, in the empty dark between the three cities. "Morale. That's the last supply line in this war. Everything else is running on it."

Lia looked up from her console for the first time since he'd come in.

"York Supreme falls," Joe said, "and the west breaks. Not just the city, the entire hemisphere. Every diver on that half of the planet stops believing it can be won, and the moment people stop believing, no number you put on this table saves us. Equality-on-Sea falls, the east does the same. And Port Mercy—" He stopped, and looked at the smallest of the three columns. The room suddenly took on an even more solemn air. "Port Mercy stopped asking for reinforcements three days ago. They ask for ammunition, and nothing else. They know. Everyone in that city knows. We are not choosing whether Port Mercy dies tonight. Port Mercy is already dying. What we're choosing is whether it takes the other two with it."

The War Room went quiet.

"So we pull everything," Adamas said. "Every shell, every reinforcement, every stratagem that was going to Port Mercy goes to the other two. We make York Supreme and Equality-on-Sea unkillable, and we spend Port Mercy."

"Yes."

"And then we announce it."

Joe looked up. That part he had not expected, and Adamas saw his surprise.

"You were going to keep it quiet," Adamas said. "Everyone would have. Quiet is kinder, and easier, but it is how wars like this one get lost. The moment the truth leaks out on its own — and trust me, it always does — it stops being a decision and becomes an uncontrollable avalanche. Fear spreads faster than any squid invasion, and you know that." They straightened up.

"So we don't let it leak. We announce it. Not as something that happened to us. As something we chose. We chose where to win. That's the only version of this that leaves two cities still believing they can be saved."

Joe looked at the table for a long moment.

"That's the toughest call possibly in the history of the Galactic War, Adamas," he said quietly. For once, he did not envy the position that Adamas was in.

"Yes," Adamas said. "But I’m not doing it alone."

The dispatch went out on every channel in the fleet, and on every public frequency the GWR still had the right to use. It read:

326TH KAI’S COMMANDOS, FLEET-WIDE PRIORITY.
STRATEGIC REDEPLOYMENT ORDER, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.
PORT MERCY IS TO BE STRATEGICALLY SACRIFICED TO CONCENTRATE DEFENSIVE CAPABILITIES
ALL AVAILABLE RESOURCES ARE REDIRECTED TO THE DEFENSE OF YORK SUPREME AND EQUALITY-ON-SEA.
THIS IS NOT A RETREAT. THIS IS A CHOICE OF WHERE TO WIN.
HOLD THE LINE.

The broadcast went out, and everyone in the room turned to the corner of the table. Port Mercy kept ticking there, muted, one point at a time, patient as a clock with a dying battery.

Adamas looked at it for a long time.

"Joe," they said. "How many lives did we just doom?"

PORT MERCY

SUPER EARTH

2185.05.28

He went in after the Fleshmob fast and close, hoping to get a clean shot.

That part worked. His legs did not survive the landing. Both of them, broken somewhere under the armor, and he was still holding his rifle, still telling himself that counted, when the shadow fell over him.

The Fleshmob stood above him, wounded from the dive, and it wound up the punch that was going to end it.

He saw it coming. He had time for that much, and for the thought that it was stupid, dying in sight of a resupply beacon.

Then the street behind the Fleshmob erupted in gunshots.

Rifle fire. The sound of the standard-issue Liberator. Thirty, maybe forty, all of them firing at once in a desperate volley, one that disregarded all concern for ammo conservation.

SEAF.

The sheer momentum of the volley punched the Fleshmob sideways, off him. The volley refused to die down, and the Fleshmob, riddled with lead, gave away instead.

He crawled. The resupply beacon was forty meters away, and forty meters on broken legs is a country. He crossed it, injected stims into himself until the pain became a sound he could ignore, let the healing do what it could, stood up, and went back.

He went back to thank them.

The platoon was dead when he made it back. All of them, arranged in the shallow crescent of a last perimeter, mauled by Voteless where the line had finally been reached, and what was left of the middle of the crescent had been blasted apart by Overseer plasma. They had killed the Fleshmob, and then they had died anyway, in the eleven minutes it took him to stand up.

He did not learn their names. The war had not given him time for that.

A shadow loomed over the street he was on. He turned, and there it was. The Leviathan that watched the fight play out as a spectator, now turning mid-air, smashing through glass and rebar as if they were candy, going in for the kill.

“Just for me? You shouldn’t have.” The last Helldiver alive in Port Mercy managed a pained chuckle. He tossed away his empty rifle and unsheathed his saber.