EQUALITY-ON-SEA

SUPER EARTH

2185.05.24

Joe had not been home in nine years, and he was spending the homecoming in a basement.

He had built the bunker himself, years ago, more of a personal hobby or pet project than anything. And like all his half-finished projects, he had not set foot in it since. Dust had been running the place in his absence: it lay thick on the crates, on the chair, and on the workbench where the coffee machine sat broken. The caffeine withdrawal headache arrived on day two, and he had meant to fix the machine then, but the headache had made him lose all motivation to spend time untangling wires. That morning he had even held a caffeinated stim in his hand and considered it. He put it back. Stims were precious now, the kind of precious you did not spend on a headache.

Joe had spent the last two days with his scanner instead. Civilian models were supposed to receive the approved broadcasts, and only the approved broadcasts, which meant seventeen channels of propaganda and nothing else. Joe had grown up taking things apart and had never respected anything that was only supposed to do one job. Forty minutes, two bent antenna pins and a yelp from a small electrical shock later, the scanner pulled in SEAF feeds.

Twelve fronts across the continent. Twelve ongoing missions, and he was present in exactly zero of them. His transfer to the GWR had gone through, but no assignment had come down yet, so he waited, while his city got ready to be a battlefield - the city he had been born in, the city he had always promised himself he would return to under better circumstances.

Feed seven was Administrative Center 02, six hundred kilometers north.

A Helldiver squad was raising one of its buried emergency cannons. Four divers, plus a SEAF platoon holding the perimeter of the plaza. Joe had seen this exact mission done in Eagleopolis.

The squad's comms came through the feed, thin and crackling.

"All nearby friendlies, platform's coming up. Ninety seconds. SEAF, eyes out."

"Eyes out," someone confirmed, and the feed showed the plaza tilting as the cannon platform rose out of the abandoned playground.

The Leviathan came around a ministry tower at that point, and Joe's hands suddenly stopped fidgeting.

It moved with an unhurried patience. A trilobite the size of a street, segmented and finned, drifting between the towers at a height of its own choosing, purple-blue lights ticking along its back. Below it, the plaza was an open book, and it was reading.

"Contact, contact, LEVIATHAN, southwest-"

"Smoke," a Helldiver said, very fast. "Smoke on the plaza, all of it, now."

Three smoke strikes landed at once and swallowed the cannon platform whole. Joe let out a breath he had been holding, because he knew how this part worked. The beast's (beast? Machine? He was not sure) cannons could not start a lock on what they could not see. The squad had bought themselves a window. The cannon kept rising through the grey.

A small gust of wind, perfectly enjoyable on an early summer day, breathed through the plaza, and lifted the smoke just enough.

The Leviathan's lights changed color.

"Uh, we have a-"

The first cannon shot landed on the SEAF perimeter, and the feed's audio peaked and died for a moment. When it came back, the perimeter was a trench, and the platoon that had been holding was nowhere to be seen. The second shot took the ammunition pile. The third shot took a Helldiver, who had been crossing open ground, stratagem in hand, and did not get to finish typing it out.

Joe was six hundred kilometers away, in a basement, watching through a scanner he had no business having. He whispered the useless things people say to screens.

The squad fired back. Everything they had went up at the thing at once - rifle fire that sparked off its hide like rain, rockets that chewed at a fin, a Spear missile that punched into a midsection segment and detonated inside it, spraying blue fire out of the wound.

The Leviathan shuddered, but didn’t leave.

Its bomb ports opened over the platform, and the third Helldiver went under ten plasma bombs in what the feed's timestamp would later describe as zero point eight seconds.

The cannon came fully up with a reluctant rumble.

"Someone fire the damned thing!" someone shouted, and then a bomb dropped on the platform's edge.

The pavement beside it was covered in crimson blotches and a pink mist hung slightly above.

One man was left on the platform. A Helldiver. Joe watched him look down at his squad, and then at the SEAF trench, and then up at the Leviathan in the sky. The feed's audio carried only the wind, and the Leviathan's cannons cycling up for another volley.

The Helldiver walked to the firing controls. He was limping. He put both hands on the aiming plates, and with what’s left of his strength, he turned the six hundred tons that was the cannon. The barrel climbed. The Leviathan drifted, unhurried, into the sights, because it had never once in its life needed to hurry.

The cannon fired, and the feed went white at the edges.

The shell took the Leviathan through the front fin, clean in and out, and blue flame poured out of both holes at once. The beast's lights went out in a chain, front to back, like streetlights at dawn. It tilted, as if in curiosity, and then it fell out of the sky between two ministry towers and took half of the plaza with it.

Joe realized he had been gripping the scanner hard enough to crack it. He let go.

On the feed, the dust was still coming down when the Voteless started pouring out of the metro entrances. Behind them, Overseers rose up out of the side streets, staffs already glowing.

The Helldiver checked his weapon. Then he checked it again, just to be sure.

He had no magazines left.

Joe could see the stim rack on his belt from the feed camera: empty. There was no resupply beacon anywhere on the platform. In the corner of the feed, in small, dispassionate text, it said:

EXTRACTION ASSETS: NONE AVAILABLE.

The man stood on the platform, among the brass, and his fallen comrades, breathing hard.

"Tse-nah," the man spat out.

Joe sat up. That was the dialect of his own city. That Helldiver shared a home with him.

He slumped down against the cannon's housing. His medical stats showed several cracked ribs, severe lacerations across his torso, and a broken leg. He sat there for a moment, watching the blood drip away from him as if he didn’t notice the horde closing in all around, and then raised his left arm and started tapping on his wrist.

Joe read the stratagem codes scrolling across the feed before he could stop himself.

ORBITAL 380MM HE BARRAGE.

TARGET: REQUESTER POSITION.

"No," said Joe, to the scanner, in the basement, six hundred kilometers away.

The feed held for three seconds. The horde reached the base of the platform, right before the sky began to whistle.

It started with one shell, and then there were a dozen, and then the sound stopped being countable. The plaza fountained up in columns of black earth and grey concrete, each one taller than the ministry towers. The horde was unmade mid-stride, Voteless and Overseers alike, simply erased by blast fronts that overlapped and overlapped again until the explosions were no longer separate events but one long rolling sound.

Like the last thunderstorm on a late summer night.

Fire and explosions walked the plaza block by block. The cannon, and the platform, and the man who had called all of it down on his own head, were gone somewhere between the first flash and the second.

The feed held on the burning plaza for a long time.

Joe reached over and switched the scanner off.

Grief got to his chest about one second ahead of rage, and then it was a tie. There was nobody in the bunker to say it to, so he said nothing, and sat in the dark with eleven silent feeds and one that had been a man.

Then he picked up his comm and called Avery.

She answered on the fourth ring, and he could hear the suitcase in the background, the sound of someone packing with both hands.

"I'm alright," he said, before she could ask.

"You say that every time," Avery said. "You also say it like that every time."

"I'm alright. Listen - the civilian channels are going to stay thin. Whatever the broadcasts tell you, the information you can actually get is going to be scraps, and most of the scraps will be lies. I need you to evacuate EoS."

There was a pause.

"I'm already booked," Avery said. "Transport leaves tomorrow. I'm going to Fort Union."

"Fort Union." Some quiet typing can be heard across the fuzzy audio. “Let me see… Some Terminid research facilities, a couple of satellite arrays, nothing the squids would care to attack.”

"You’re not the only one who can check, Joe." Another pause. "Come after. Promise me you’ll come after."

Joe looked at the dead scanner. Six hundred kilometers north, a plaza was still burning around a cannon that had done its job, and a man from his city had not come home either.

"Someone has to keep the lights on here," he said. "I'll keep the scanner warm."

"That is the worst promise I've ever been given."

"It's the one you're getting."

She laughed an empty laugh, and they said their goodbyes. The call was hung up, and the bunker was quiet again, just Joe and the dark and a coffee machine that had never gotten fixed. Joe patted it sadly.

Outside, the sirens started. The ordinary ones, the ones his city wore every day now, telling everyone to take shelter while the war raged on, hundreds of kilometers away.

Joe looked at his cape hanging by the door.