SES COMMANDOS CONVENE
In high orbit above SUPER EARTH
2185.05.30
The Great Host broke.
Lia watched the story unfold, as told by the numbers. The fleet that had taken a century to build and two weeks to bleed out stopped committing, stopped maneuvering, and began, ship by ship, to run. FTL wakes opened across the dark like footprints left from a fleeing thief.
They burned on their way out. New Haven. Pilen V. Widow's Harbor. The worlds they had taken first, they lit on their way to somewhere else. Three planets were razed, five cities had fallen, but-
"They're gone," Lia said. "They're actually gone."
The dispatch that went out that night carried the victory, and the count of what remained. It carried four words for the fleet that had burned three worlds on its way out.
They will be found.
EQUALITY-ON-SEA
SUPER EARTH
2185.05.30
The guns stopped in the late afternoon.
The loudest sound of the eleven days was the absence of them. It came gradually, district by district, and no one was quite sure what to do with it.
Then the civilians came up out of the shelters, and it was over.
On the feeds of every screen that mattered, the flickering stopped, and the light turned solid. The numbers that fluctuated over the week had settled.
Of the seven Mega Cities, two remained. Prosperity City. Equality-on-Sea.
At the plaza at the hinge of the line, Choko stood at the edge of the scorched ground with the Torcher slung, and for the first time in her life, felt that burning something down was the wrong thing to do.
Joe stood on the barricade at the edge of the schoolyard and looked up. The station hung there, dark against the evening, its welds catching the last of the light. He saluted it, one hand, and went back to his city.
THE DEMOCRACY SPACE STATION
In low orbit above SUPER EARTH
2185.05.30
Vice watched the Eagle Blockade get to work.
He stood at the front of the bridge and watched the wall of fire walk its slow count across the plain, exactly as he had drawn it in the dark weeks above Claorell. The bridge worked quietly around him. When the Host began to break, somebody started laughing, someone else started crying, and against all the regulations of the Ghostdivers, the bridge filled with noise, of joy, of grief, of pain and of relief.
Vice left the bridge.
He went to the small office that had always been his. He closed the door and took care to lock it, setting it to refuse everyone. When Kurumi's voice came through the panel, asking, he answered it himself.
"Not now."
"Even me?"
"Even you."
A pause, on the other side of the door. Then her footsteps, going away, slow.
He stood in the quiet for a moment, and then he brought the writing up on his screen.
It filled the display, the script of the Illuminate, the one thing in the whole war no human being had been able to read. Vice read it.
The reports were coming in from the retreating Host. Failure after failure. The rout. The burning. Then the casualty numbers, in the long counting figures of his people.
The tears came quietly. One, then two. He let them stream down his face and didn’t wipe them away.
His people were dying out there, their hopes of revenge forged over a century now ashen and dead. The city below him remained standing. Both of those things were what he wanted. Both of those things were what he had done.
His face did the only thing it could.
Years ago, he had defected from his own species, using the Illuminate craft of bending minds to form another, human, version of himself. The Ghostdivers and everyone else always saw him as just a man, perhaps a little eccentric, perhaps a little quiet, but one of their own. It saddened him that he had to deceive the people that trusted him with their lives in this way, but it had to be done. But as the years passed, the disguise stopped being a disguise at all.
He had refused, once and always, to fight his own kind head on. Not one Ghostdiver raid, not one order, not one bullet had ever been aimed by his hand at an Illuminate ship. His war had always been the other type, the slower type, the one that cost him a name and a service record and very nearly his life.
Below him, Super Earth was still lit.
SES COMMANDOS CONVENE
In high orbit above SUPER EARTH
2185.06.02
The table stayed.
That was the arrangement, afterward. This was the table where Port Mercy had been weighed. Where the west had been spent. Where the blackout had been trusted. It did not get put away, and Adamas saw to it.
Some furniture is load-bearing.
Joe stood across from it again, on the day they offered him the bigger thing. Leader. He listened to the offer all the way through with a somewhat distracted smile, and shook his head.
"Not yet," he said. "I'm not ready."
Adamas looked at him for a moment. They nodded. That was the end of it.
One seat at the table was never assigned. After the last day, there were two. Nobody sat in either, and nobody had to say why.
They had saved them seats at the table. They always would.
XENOBIOLOGY CENTER
TURING
2185.09.01
The office in the Xenobiology Center had two desks in it now. A window that looked out at something green. A feed on the wall that stayed off. The war was over. The feeds had other things to be, now.
Avery asked him about the Illuminate and their experiments, then the Terminids and their various strains. And he answered patiently, treating her as a friend. The only friend he made, at least so he thought.
Avery’s phone rang. She took one look at the caller’s name, and ran off to pick it up.
EQUALITY-ON-SEA
SUPER EARTH
2185.09.01
Joe threw the cloth down on the floor, panting, and straightened up to look around his bunker. The squid remains have finally been cleaned off after two months of hard work, the coffee machine sat on the workbench happily whirring away to produce his sixth cup of coffee for the day, and the newly installed screen worked perfectly, the EHEF insignia shining in a corner as the battle reports of his members rolled in.
The call he had been trying to make finally came through.
“Hey, I cleaned the place up.”
“Knowing you, I doubt that bunker is anywhere near cleaned up.”
“Fair enough. Anyways-” Joe felt his face going red just a tiny bit.
“-remember that place by the river I told you about?”
