EQUALITY-ON-SEA

SUPER EARTH

2185.05.30

The Illuminate had stopped sending ships.

Joe stood on the barricade at the edge of the schoolyard and watched them come. He understood. After the Leviathans died, after the Overships were impaled, the enemy had stopped spending things that mattered. Now they spent bodies. Voteless in tides that did not stop. Waves that traded corpses for hours. The guns had been firing for days. The barrels were wearing out.

The lights they had turned back on flickered now. The grid ran on what the volunteers could keep alive, running on next to no sleep and no rest.

The western divers were still there. The ones from York Supreme fought like this was their own home. The sergeant's SEAF held the ground under all of them. Nobody talked about how long it could last.

The news from York Supreme reached Equality-on-Sea in fragments, in the voices of the ones who had gotten out.

The city had fallen at 1742 hours. That much was official.

The rest came in pieces. The last Pelican. A diver who had refused to board. And one fragment, passed from mouth to mouth along the line, about a Helldiver on a rooftop, a pile of dead squids below.

A cracked visor.

Frozen, somebody said. Grinning.

Joe heard those two words, and the swamp came back.

NUBLARIA I

2185.02.13

Nublaria was a world of swamps and marshes, a planet that swallowed one’s soul.

Joe had taken Virgo there himself, his first cadet, to finish the kid's training where the ground would do the teaching. Virgo was like all overly enthusiastic cadets with an unrealistic view of battle; highly excitable, prone to stammering, and generally talking too much.

Virgo trusted him completely. He asked questions about everything and wrote down the answers.

Nublaria belonged to the Predator Strain. Fast bugs, aggressive bugs, the kind that closed the distance before the sound of them arrived. And the Predator Hunters, the ones that went invisible right before they struck.

That morning, Virgo killed his first Bile Titan.

It came out of the marsh with its sac swollen. Joe dropped down a pair of EATs and instructed him. Aim for the mouth, hands steady, keep backblast area clear.

The first EAT rocket had missed, striking the Titan on its armored front leg. The blast took a chunk off the tough chitinous armor, but the Titan, while enraged, wasn’t particularly harmed.

Joe handed Virgo the second EAT without a word. The kid was as quick to panic as to excitement, and he wanted to teach him not to panic under pressure.

The second EAT struck bullseye, right in the Titan’s face as it was charging up its bile, and Virgo grinned as the towering monster of a Terminid buckled, collapsed and sank into the muddy swamps.

Joe had been looking the other way.

A false contact to the east. A noise in the reeds he had gone to check. Thirty seconds of attention spent on the wrong silence. He did not see the swamp go quiet. He did not see the telltale shimmer.

The Hunters were already invisible. Already committed. There was more than one of them.

Virgo was still grinning when they took him.

A rage had filled Joe that he never knew he had. He emptied an entire Stalwart magazine into the swarm of Hunters, but he knew it was too late. By the time he saw Virgo, one of his legs was bent the other way, half his torso was gone, and his visor was half cracked and half missing.

Joe reached him with the grin still there. Eyes glazed, still bright with the Titan, the last thing on his face the proudest moment of his life.

Joe knelt in the swamp and roared with a grief and a guilt that he had never experienced before. It would stay with him for the rest of his life.

"Joe."

EQUALITY-ON-SEA

SUPER EARTH

2185.05.30

Joe wordlessly turned off his suit’s high heart rate warning. He realized he was dizzy from the hyperventilation, and took time to take a deep breath and collect himself.

Not in front of the SEAFies.

The sergeant's hand was on his shoulder. He was on the barricade. The schoolyard. The guns. The grin was six hundred kilometers away. The soldier in front of him was alive. Looking at him. Waiting.

"I'm here," Joe said. "I'm here. Get your people stacked on the second line. Nobody holds a block alone tonight."

Then the blackout hit.

Every channel died at once. The fleet net. The district nets. The feeds. The relay he had spent two days wiring. What filled them wasn’t static, it was silence. A silence with a shape to it, cut clean around every frequency at the same instant. The shape of it said it had been done on purpose.

District Twelve lost the factory belts first. Then the eastern districts went. The city went blind block by block. Every block that went dark started, separately, quietly, to believe it was the last block still fighting.

That was the weapon. After the ships and the Leviathans and the tides of Voteless, this was the thing the Illuminate had been saving.

They had realized the same thing Joe and Adamas did a few days ago, that their last resource is morale. And now, they were finally attacking it. The radio silence made every soldier left in the blackout start believing one thing.

Every district alone. Every soldier certain the rest were already dead.

Joe stood in the dark of a dead net and felt the swamp again. The thirty seconds. The wrong silence.

Not again.

He did it with his hands first. Hardlines out of the old switching stations. Salvaged relays. Frequencies nobody had used since before the war, that the squid tech did not think to silence. Nothing was supposed to still be alive on them. On screens reserved for tiny HUDs and simple indicators, he typed code, bypassed blocks, hacked into networks that Super Earth itself didn’t know about. What he couldn’t do with hardware or software, he relied on word-of-mouth. Helldivers in their FRVs, SEAF and civilians on foot, sprinting in every direction to districts that may as well be other continents. And Joe had sent them one message.

Instead of orders, he sent a roll call:

Sound off if you are still fighting.

Just a few hours later, the answers started coming back.

The first answer came from the factory belts. Then the customs plaza. Then a SEAF platoon three districts over that everyone had written off, sounding furious at being written off. The districts that still had working comms equipment wasted no time utilizing them. As for the districts that don’t, it took a little longer.

Someone in District Two found a working flare gun, and a bright spark of red sailed into the air and hung there defiantly.

A singular column of smoke climbed into the air, straight and narrow. It was a smoke signal, a method of communication millennia out of date. And yet it constituted an answer. Another district was still there, still fighting.

The roll call went around the city like a fuse. Every block that answered heard the blocks on either side of it answering, and stopped being alone.

A district nobody had heard from since noon came back with a voice so hoarse it sounded like paper, and counted eleven rifles, two stims, and one civilian who refused to be counted separately.

Another answered in the middle of a firefight. Whoever had the radio shouted their grid reference over the firing, got it wrong, corrected it, and somebody in the background laughed before the channel cut.

One district with no radio answered with gunfire. Three shots. A pause. Three shots. The old drill signal for holding, and the whole line went quiet for a second to hear it.

Joe's switchboard was a crate of scavenged receivers, and it lit up one frequency at a time. A woman's voice, calm, reading out her wounded. A kid relaying somebody else's message word for word, slowly, carefully, like he was carrying eggs. Somebody singing the Super Earth anthem severely out of tune. Nobody told them to stop.

The runners came back to the schoolyard too. A girl with a strip of paper in her fist. Another tech-savvy Helldiver with jury-rigged relays fashioned out of stratagem balls.

By midnight there were no dead frequencies left on the crate. The city had a sound again. It was ragged, and it was thin, but it did not stop.

A shift relay started that night, without anyone ordering it. The city divided itself in two. One half fought while the other slept. Then they traded, and the line never had a quiet hour again. Divers with squid ink caked into their armor from twelve days of fighting noticed it on each other in the dark, by touch. Somebody called them Tattoo Artists. The name stuck before the night was over.

The defense percentage climbed out of the dark. Ninety-nine point something. Then the nines kept coming.

The squids were losing.

SES COMMANDOS CONVENE

IN HIGH ORBIT ABOVE SUPER EARTH

2185.05.30

The feed from Equality-on-Sea died at 2214 hours.

Lia watched the telemetry flatline. "They're blind," she said. "Everyone down there is blind."

Adamas looked at the dark on the screen for a long time.

Two nights ago, they had spent the west on a city they could see. Now the last city in the east had gone dark. Everything they had left, the Ruby reserves, the last ships, the last of what two cities had been bleeding for, was aimed at a black screen.

"Send it," Adamas said.

"Adamas, if the city has already—"

"Send it!"

The last of the fleet turned toward the dark. Adamas keyed the dead frequency anyway. They spoke to it, knowing nothing on the other end could hear.

"Hold," they said. "We're coming."

EQUALITY-ON-SEA

SUPER EARTH

2185.05.30

Night fell on Equality-on-Sea. The city did not go quiet.

The roll call went around and around in the dark, block by block. Every hour the answers came back with more voices in them. Two shifts, trading. The city answered with its gunshots, exhausted, yet relentless.

By morning, the Ruby reserves found them anyway. Crates dropped blind onto the factory belts. Fast Recon Vehicles rolling off the drop pads straight into the line. Somebody in orbit had aimed them at a black screen and trusted the dark to be wrong.

Joe stood on the barricade at the edge of the schoolyard, listening. Twelve days ago the lights had been going out. Last night, they had come back on. Tonight the city kept them lit one answered call at a time.

The roll call came around again. Block by block, the city answered it.

Nobody fought alone that night.

The attacks came again at dawn, but in smaller waves.

That was the thing nobody had expected. The waves that broke over District Twelve were thinner than the waves of the first day. The Great Host, built over a century by a civilization far older than humanity, nearly spent in just two weeks. And yet, the invasion persisted, probing every defensive position in the city’s outskirts, looking for a weakness, an opening.

Equality-on-Sea gave it none.

The night shift came off the line and slept standing up against the barricades. The day shift stepped into the gaps they left. The guns did not stop in between.

The roll call went around every hour now, and every block answered by name. Factory belts. Customs plaza. District Twelve. Each answer carried the next one. Hour by hour, the city heard itself holding. It held.

Joe had stopped counting the hours he had been awake. His autocannon had a new barrel, its third. His hands, even through his gloves, grew blisters that popped, then grew again, from the constant reloading.

The sergeant gave her orders sitting down. Standing took longer than she could afford. Neither of them mentioned it.

The ammunition came up the line in civilian hands. People who had never carried a crate of it before the war carried it now like groceries. They ducked when the ordnance came down, but they kept walking.

The defense percentage held at ninety-nine point nine seven, unmoving, unblinking. Both sides of the war dared the other to let go first.

SES COMMANDOS CONVENE

IN HIGH ORBIT ABOVE SUPER EARTH

2185.05.30

Lia read the numbers at dawn, the same hour they were being read on every ship still flying.

The Great Host was down to its last tenth. The final offensive was falling on the last two cities with everything that remained of it. There was nothing left anywhere to send them. The Ruby reserves were empty. The western fleet was spent. Every ship in orbit over Super Earth was already aimed at a target, and already firing.

Adamas watched the two lights on the map.

"Prosperity City?" they asked.

"Holding," Lia said. "Same as us. Barely."

There was no math left to do. There was only the thing both sides had been doing for eleven days. Spending everything. Trusting it was enough.

"We're done choosing," Adamas said. "Equality-on-Sea stands."

Nobody argued. There was nothing left to spend, and that, it turned out, was what agreement looked like.