EQUALITY-ON-SEA

SUPER EARTH

2185.05.28

Joe made the broadcast from his private bunker, now ever so slightly less covered in dust.

Some things are easier to say without an audience.

It went out on every channel in Equality-on-Sea. Military, civilian, the frequencies the old radios used. His own voice, which he had never liked hearing.

"This is Helldiver Joe of the Galactic War Room, 326th Kai’s Commandos. York Supreme is still in critical condition. The city held last night, but will not hold another night on what it has. I am calling for a movement of soldiers and resources from Equality-on-Sea to the defense of York Supreme. Everything we can give."

Then the part that cost him.

"I was born in this city. I know what I am asking it to do. I am asking anyway. The war is not won by where we wish to stand. It is won by where it breaks if we do not stand. York Supreme breaks, the west breaks, and then we are only waiting. Send what you can. Keep what you must.”

He took a breath, before-

“Please.”

He switched the channel off and sat with the silence of the room for a moment. It pained him in a place he was going to have to keep walking on.

Silence.

He braced himself for the wave of despair he was about to feel. He gazed into the wartorn horizon of the city, at the scene he’s been looking at for what seemed like years. Fallen skyscrapers, smoke scattering from the fires, flashes of light where the fighting happened, the singular set of exhaust plumes of a something taking off towards the west-

Wait. Taking off?

Even as he watched, the city had started to answer Joe’s call. SEAF Dropships lifting off half-loaded and lifting anyway, requisition boards going red, Helldivers telling their shipmasters to reroute. The sergeant's voice came through his private channel while the last of her people were already moving.

"Go save the west," she said. "Someone has to keep the lights on."

Joe managed a chuckle. He finished packing in thirty seconds and flew his shuttle to the Star of Dawn.

YORK SUPREME

SUPER EARTH

2185.05.28

York Supreme spent the morning like a patient on a breathing tube.

They held the last barricade north of the river, the three of them. Alpha's saber had two notches in it that had not been there yesterday. Lunar was counting rockets out of habit and stopping at zero, then starting again, as if the number might change its mind. Choko's Torcher was empty, and she had not put it down. Nobody asked her why.

The next wave was massing past the smoke. Everyone could hear it. It was the kind of wave you prepare for by checking your weapon one more time and then, there being nothing else to do, sitting down.

They sat down.

"Can I ask you something," Lunar said. "Why do you still carry that thing empty?"

Choko looked at the Torcher. "It's not empty," she said. "It's waiting."

"That's a very concerning thing for a flamethrower to be doing."

"I knew a diver once," Choko said. "Older. Older than the war. He carried his like I carry mine, and I asked him the same question you just asked, and he sang me a song instead of answering."

"A song."

"He said fire was the honest weapon. He said the other ones kill what's in front of you, and fire tells you who you are." She shrugged, small. "He told me to go the way of the fire. I did."

"And the song?"

"It's called the Arsonist's Lullaby."

She sang it quietly, to the barricade and the smoke and the wave of squids massing past it.

When I was a child, I heard voices

Some would sing and some would scream

You soon find you have few choices

I learned the voices died with me

When I was a child, I'd sit for hours

Staring into open flame

Something in it had a power

Could barely tear my eyes away

All you have is your fire

And the place you need to reach

Don't you ever tame your demons

But always keep 'em on a leash

She stopped singing. For a moment nobody said anything, and the wave on the other side of the smoke seemed, impossibly, to be waiting too.

"Keep them on a leash," Lunar said. "Right. Let's do that, then."

They stood up. Their armor dented and torn, their weapons empty, their bodies wounded and exhausted. They were ready to accept their demise.

And the skies tore open with a roar.

Not one ship. Not ten. The sky above York Supreme filled with Super Destroyers warping in until the sun had to work around them, hundreds of them, and between them the air was full of falling fire. Hellpods. A meteor shower of them, coming down all over the city like seeds.

The wave they had been waiting for broke against something else's arrival, and forgot them.

The nearest Hellpod had landed in the middle of the avenue, hissing, still red-hot. Alpha reached it first, rifle up, and the pod opened, and the diver inside looked at the three of them through a scorched visor.

"Who the hell are you?" Alpha asked. "Where are you from?"

"Equality-on-Sea," the diver said.

They looked up.

The east had come for the west.

Joe's Hellpod landed three blocks from the barricade, and he came out of it already moving.

Light armor. No shield, no plate worth calling plate, just speed, a shoulder-mounted autocannon and the particular calm of a man who has decided what he is. The Illuminate had the avenue. Voteless in the hundreds, Overseers drifting above them, two Harvesters walking down the middle of the street like they owned the lease, and a Fleshmob or three rolling between the cars.

Joe flipped the autocannon to flak and went to work.

Flak rounds burst in sheets of shrapnel at the height of the horde, and the horde melted like a particularly badly cooked stick of butter. He walked the bursts left and right in front of him like a man painting a wall. Where the Voteless broke, the fleshmobs rolled in, and the flak tore them asunder. An Overseer dropped low to catch him from above. Before it was ready to fire, Joe had twisted around, autocannon back on APHET mode, and one clean shot constructed a tunnel between the front of its head and the back.

The first Harvester turned its eye toward him. Three shells into the joint of its left leg, and the Harvester knelt, then fell, and the eye went dark.

Adamas landed heavy.

Heavy armor, the kind that costs more than some districts, and they landed in the middle of the avenue like they intended to be found. And found them they did. Plasma from three directions, a Harvester's beam, a Voteless tide, and Adamas walked forward through all of it with the ballistic shield up and the Knight in the hand behind it.

The Knight was a small thing next to everything else they carried, a bullpup SMG that handled like petting a purring cat and had a fire rate that blurred. Adamas wielded it like needlework. Voteless came down in rows. When the rows got thick, the heavy machine gun took over. The high-pitched buzzing of the Knight took turns with the deep chugging report of the HMG.

They did not talk. They did not need to. Adamas was the fixed point the fight broke against, drawing every eye and every barrel, tanking shots that would have vaporized anyone lighter, and Joe was the thing moving around that point, light on his feet, picking off what mattered. Shields came down to flak. Overseers died low. Fleshmobs came apart at the seams.

The second Harvester turned on Adamas, its eye charging.

Adamas raised their shield. The beam broke across the shield like water, splashing iridescent light across, and in the moment it took the Harvester to realize what it was not killing, Joe was on its legs with the APHET, and it crashed into the avenue like the rest of its kind.

It was a group of Voteless that found the range. It came over a wrecked car at Adamas's blind side, too many for the Knight, too close for the shield angle, close enough to smell of blue.

Adamas drew their sidearm.

The Crisper was a pocket-sized flamethrower, and it had never once pretended to be anything else. Adamas used it exactly as advertised, point blank. The Voteless burned from the inside of its swing, and the fire was, at that range, almost gentle. A warm embrace of death as a gesture of mercy.

"Practical," Adamas said, to nobody, holstering it.

The wave of Illuminate had been broken.

Alpha stood at the barricade with his notched saber in his hand, dripping purple, alive against every odd he had counted that morning. Lunar was yelling insults at a dead Overseer at the top of his lungs. Choko stood looking at her Torcher, which was no longer empty, and no longer waiting. The war had given it back.

Joe found Adamas standing in the middle of the wrecked avenue, like the wreckage had been arranged around them.

They had never fought together before. It had taken the whole war to arrange it, and about eleven minutes to finish.

Joe asked for the feed from home.

Equality-on-Sea was still standing. Thinner. His city had emptied part of itself into this one, on his word.

And his word was now a debt.