YORK SUPREME

SUPER EARTH

2185.05.25

Alpha's watch began at dark, and the Illuminate did not let him rest. The waves came out of the dark city blocks like tide water, and between the waves there was no quiet, only reloading.

Choko's fire line ran out of fuel before the wave ran out of bodies. Resupply came forty minutes late, with half of what she had called for, and she burned the half like it was the whole.

Lunar counted his airbursts out loud. Nine. Eight. Seven. The numbers after that were quieter.

Somewhere around the ninth wave, he asked on the open channel whether anyone else felt the squids were cheating. Choko told him to stop arguing with the enemy's lawyers and keep firing. Nobody laughed. People breathed, though, which was the job.

The line at the Grand Avenue bridge broke just after midnight. The flood poured through the gap and into the plaza beyond it, and for four minutes the defense of York Supreme was a rumor.

Choko, cursing quietly, threw her last orbital napalm barrage. The plaza burned in a straight bright line, and what came through the gap stopped coming.

York Supreme held. It held by a margin so thin that people would have argued about it with a dictionary in their hands. But it held.

THE GALACTIC WAR ROOM

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

2185.05.26

The map in the War Room had stopped being a map and became an overlapping mess of attack vectors, defensive positions and supply routes.

Three cities still stood. York Supreme, Port Mercy, Equality-on-Sea. Three cities were bleeding. The supplies that could keep them standing were counted in hours now, and the math that had been run countless times by countless officers returns, stubbornly, one answer.

Not enough. Not enough. Not enough.

Adamas stood in front of it for a long time.

Which of these do we lose?

They did not say it out loud, as if keeping the silence made the decision less real. That was the day's other lesson: there were decisions in this war that they cannot make by themselves, that no one can make alone.

In the corner of the board, the feed from Sector Twelve was still running. The diver, moving through the city he had grown up in. The SEAF platoon, moving with him.

Adamas had found the one person in the room's hundred feeds who answered questions nobody in the room would answer.

They started typing on the comms.

EQUALITY-ON-SEA

SUPER EARTH

2185.05.26

Lulls in battle, like this one, tend to make people make dangerous decisions. Such as sitting down.

Joe sat on the roof of a collapsed bus stop with the platoon and three stray Helldivers who had drifted into District Twelve over the last two days. Each of them was from a different corner of Sector 02. Each of them had been separated from their own squad by the same flood. None of them were in any hurry to find out what was left of them.

"What's the word from above?" one of them asked. He was from the factory belts to the north, and he had the look of someone who’s beginning to see through the propaganda. "Real word. Not the dispatches."

"You want the real word?" Joe said, typing away in his suit’s operating system and tweaking some parameters that didn’t really matter. "The real word is that there is no word. That's the honest part. Everything else is somebody guessing in a nicer font."

That got a laugh, of the short kind. It’s hard to be honest in a war like this, but honesty brings attention.

"We're done for, you know," the second diver said. She was from the river districts further down south, and she said it flatly, like a weather report. "All of this. Three cities against what's left of their fleet, and all we got are playground cannons and dwindling supplies of stratagems. It's an unwinnable war! I don’t even know why I’m here trying anymore. Not a single reinforcement has been sent to this city. No word from the capital except empty promises, and-" her voice dropped to a whisper. “-And lies. I might as well get out while I still can, find a planet in the Galactic rim and, I don’t know, build a farm or something.”

The third one, a kid from the coastal sectors who had not said much of anything since he arrived, looked at his boots.

Joe let it sit for a moment. Morale, he had decided a long time ago, was not something you shouted at people. It was something you built under them, one honest plank at a time.

"You're wrong," he said. "Not about the odds. The odds are exactly as bad as you think, and the people telling you otherwise are selling something. You're wrong about the losing."

"Enlighten me."

"When was the last time any of you saw the squids taking the time to prepare or to resupply?" Joe said. "Think about it. Widow's Harbor, four days. Pilen V, three. Everything they've taken on this planet, they've taken fast. They cannot afford to be slow. They crossed a wormhole with everything they had: a giant fleet built over an entire century. The Great Host, they call it.”

“Sure, they’re big and scary and fast. Sure, we’ve been losing territory since it started. But they have been losing their fleet too.” Joe pulled out some data estimates with one fluid motion that suggested hundreds of times of repeated practice. “Here’s the snapshot when New Haven fell. The Great Host was already down 20% or so of their fleet. Think about what this means.”

“Twenty years of their entire civilization’s work went down the drain in a week.”

“They cannot afford to slow down, even a bit. Because our industry, our ability to produce and repair, our ability to grind them down outweighs theirs a hundred-fold. They have to take everything fast.”

"And if they don't?"

"Then it stops being their war, and starts being ours. A war of attrition that’s on our side. We still have territory, we still have soldiers. Grind them down with every square meter they take. Trade our space for their time, and I’m willing to bet my cape that we have more space than they do time. And if we just keep holding, they will eventually - and that eventually will happen sooner than you think - be ground to nothing."

The platoon was listening too. The SEAF soldiers never stopped looking like someone who got to the front of the autograph line in a meet-and-greet. It never quite went away, no matter how many days of shared trenches and stims and bad jokes went into it: the look of people who had grown up on the broadcasts, and found the people in them sitting on a bus-stop roof eating ration bars.

"Is it true," the youngest of them asked, "that you fought on Malevelon Creek?"

"I wasn't at Malevelon," Joe said. "But I was at Vernen Wells, which is where they teach you that an Automaton's idea of a fair fight is four hundred of them and one of you, and that the correct answer is to agree with them."

That bought him the rest of their attention, and he had been saving it for this. He told them about the war they were too close to see. Three cities fighting where seven had stood. The enemy fleet at a quarter of what it had been when it came through the wormhole. Supply lines stretched across a galaxy, bleeding at every connection. And then the piece he had been saving longest.

"You've all seen the dispatches from the bot front," he said. "The whole fleet's been tearing the Automatons apart for scrap. Did anyone stop to ask why? Nobody strips an entire front for scrap metal, not to say Automaton alloy. Our armor is titanium, our shells brass, our weapons steel. There is exactly one thing in this war that eats forty thousand tons of this specific alloy. The DSS, and that means it’s being rebuilt. And there's only one place in this galaxy it's being rebuilt for."

He let that hang in the air. It deserved it.

"The Democracy Space Station, coming back to Super Earth. To the cities that are still standing. To this one. So no, we are not losing slowly. We are holding until the cavalry gets here. All we have to do is be standing when they run out of—"

His comm screamed priority.

The channel answered itself. Priority channels don't wait to be picked up. And Adamas's voice came through, the voice of every command net in the war, except this time it had a destination.

"Joe. Commandos Convene. Now."

He rose quickly, then staggered a step from his cardiovascular system lagging behind from days of constant fighting. The three stray Helldivers looked at him, eyes wide. The sergeant looked at him with the expression of someone who had suspected it for days.

"You're leaving," she said.

"I'm coming back," Joe said. "Somebody has to keep the lights on here, remember."

"Who's holding your district?"

"You are," he said. "You were holding it before I showed up. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. A-and don’t do anything I would do," he hastily added, remembering his Hellbomb techniques. “There’s a grey area somewhere in there – eh, you know what to do.”

The transport shuttle came for him within ten minutes. It came empty, and Joe took that as a sign: whatever he was being fetched for, it did not want an audience.

He watched District Twelve shrink under him. The bus-stop roof. The Helldivers silently saluting him still. The river. The school he was glad about. The promenade he had never shown anyone. All of it getting smaller, until it was one district of one city of one planet, and then the planet itself came up around the shuttle like a blue wall, and there was the war, all of it, spread out across a continent: three cities glowing in the dark like three embers in a pan of ash.

And above it all, cutting a slow black line across the stars, the SES Commandos Convene.