THE GALACTIC WAR ROOM

S.E.S. Commando’s Convene, in high orbit around SUPER EARTH

2185.05.25

Lia read the dispatch out loud to the War Room. There was no need to. Every screen in the room already carried it, and everyone in the room had already read it. But someone had to say it out loud.

She paused after the second line. Then she read the third.

"Forty-five seconds," she said. "We traded our last rainforests for forty-five seconds."

Nobody corrected her.

Adamas was at the supply board, doing the brutal arithmetic that is warfront attrition, which had become more of a list of apologies. Well, except the one request for “edible crayons”, which they promptly denied.

Reinforcement drafts were arriving late and green, and went to whichever front was losing fastest. Resupply windows had been halved twice in one week. Stratagems were rationed, and every morning Adamas moved someone's budget to cover someone else's deficit, and did not write down whose it had been, because that was kinder.

Port Mercy was on the corner feed, muted, as it had been for days. Its defense percentage ticked down one point at a time, patient as a clock. Adamas checked it every few hours and did not touch it. Some decisions were not ready to be made, and making them early was the same as making them wrong.

"Where do we spend what we don't have?" Adamas asked the room.

It was not a rhetorical question. The analysts looked at the map, then at their consoles, then at the floor, in that order. The two ministry liaisons, who had stopped pretending to liaise a week ago, looked at the door.

Nobody answered. Answering meant choosing a city, and nobody in that room had volunteered to be the one who chose a city.

Adamas let the silence stand, and started to suspect the silence was the answer.

The war had outgrown one Room.

EQUALITY-ON-SEA

SUPER EARTH

2185.05.25

Joe's assignment came through this morning. He had stopped hoping for orders: hoping had started to feel like bad luck.

Defense of District Twelve. His district. The one he had grown up in.

He went in with a squad he had met twice, and the sector's SEAF platoon, which had come home from a front four thousand kilometers away and been tired ever since, the kind of tired that stops counting days.

The patrol route crossed the school first. Or what had been the school. The fence was down, the yard was a crater, and the main building was a low hill of brick with rebar growing out of it. Scattered around the school were spent casings, abandoned weapons, and a couple of dead Overseers. Joe could not help but feel a small, guilty, honest flicker of gladness. He had hated that school.

The war had made him the kind of man who could be glad about a ruined school, he realized, before hurriedly moving on.

The Illuminate found them just a few blocks after. Voteless in a flood, Overseers drifting above, and two Harvesters stepping along behind, patient yet eager to kill.

The barricade on the east avenue broke in under four minutes. The flood turned toward the second line of defense, a line that was not supposed to matter yet.

Joe made the call before anyone senior could make it for him.

He pulled the SEAF platoon off the wall they had been assigned to and put them on the avenue, where the flood actually was. Then he reached into his capsule where his daily allotted stratagem balls were, and started tossing them like they weren’t worth an average citizen’s yearly income each.

The SES Star of Dawn, Joe’s Super Destroyer that had been heavily, meticulously customized, answered his many calls, and ordnance smote the horde of squids.

Two sentries, one machine gun and the other gatling, dropped on either side of the choke point and weaved a web of crisscrossing lead, mowing down Voteless that had dared to cross. Joe’s assigned Eagle swooped down from behind, narrowly missing a skyscraper, and took down Harvester shields and tore through the Overseers. The Fleshmobs, unhindered by the sea of bullets, confidently stepped into the gas mines that had been deployed just ahead. With an almost comedic poof, the caustic gas was released and quickly dug into the equivalent of a nervous system the Fleshmobs had. They charged blindly, hoping to connect with someone, but instead were introduced to a concrete wall on the side.

Joe lifted his Breaker automatic shotgun and fired, quickly turning the heads of the few Voteless that survived into mist. Before they even hit the ground, Joe already swapped to his autocannon on his shoulder and fired a shell straight into a Fleshmob.

The Fleshmob staggered, but took the heavy APHET round like a boxer taking a gentle slap on the face.

The gas wore off, and it saw its target and charged.

Shoving away the SEAF soldier frozen in fear behind him, Joe stared down the Fleshmob mere meters away from squashing him into jelly, and actually focused for once.

Any damage dealt to just one body part is ineffective. Small arms, AP rounds, doesn’t matter.

Explosives would probably do the trick, but at this distance it would kill me and everyone around me.

Fire and gas take too long.

That leaves one option.

In that one split second, Joe flicked a lever on the autocannon that said “Flak mode”, used all his might to dive backwards, aimed at center mass, and held the trigger down.

The rounds travelled the few meters between them instantly, then detonated into shrapnel. Suddenly the Fleshmob was struck by a relentless shower of sharp fragments, each biting into a different part, each belonging to what used to be a different body.

Blood spurted out everywhere from the Fleshmob, gashing wounds opened on every torso and limb. Its charge was cut short by the sheer momentum, and confused, it let out a weak groan, and fell inches away from Joe’s feet.

The platoon's sergeant found him afterward, at the triage station, and handed him a stim she had definitely not been issued. Joe gratefully took it without question and healed back the two shrapnel wounds that managed to punch through his own armor.

"Sir, forgive me for saying this, but you spend firepower like a man who doesn't plan on being alive for the audit," she said.

"I plan on being alive," Joe said. "The audit I'm less sure about."

She laughed, once, and called him Joe instead of “Helldiver”, which he noticed but did not correct her.

A thousand kilometers away, in a room that had gone quiet, Adamas leaned closer to a screen.

"That call," they said. "Who made that call?"

The feed stayed on Sector Twelve long after the breach had been sealed. The diver moving down the ruined avenue. The SEAF platoon moving with him, close, like he had always been theirs.

"Who is that?" Adamas said.

Lia checked the roster. "Joe. 181st Jaeger Korps, then the Special Warfare Group. Transferred to us three weeks ago. He's been waiting on assignment."

"Not anymore," Adamas said.

The fighting moved down to the river by noon.

The promenade was still standing, most of it. The railings, the old lamps, the repurposed cargo dock, the skateboard rink children played on, the benches elderly couples used to sit on and read. Joe had promised Avery this view, years ago. He had never brought her.

The river was still beautiful. The promise was still unkept, and she was exactly where he had wanted her to be, which was somewhere else.

He checked his magazine and moved on.