DEMOCRATIC SPACE STATION

In high orbit above PILEN V

2185.05.15

Vice had always found it faintly ironic that the loudest object in the Federation's arsenal had ended up in the hands of a man whose entire career was built on being silent. High Command had handed him the Democracy Space Station: seventy-seven Presidential-Class cannons, hangars full of Eagles enough to vaporize a large asteroid, and a crew of four thousand souls who were, as a rule, extremely loud.

He still commanded her quietly. The crew had learned to listen.

"Contact!"

The shout came from the sensor pit in the middle of the CIC, and every conversation died mid-syllable.

"Talk to me," Vice said. Panicking was never his forte.

"Massive FTL signatures, bearing — sir, bearing everywhere." The sensor officer's voice cracked. "They jumped straight on top of us. No warning, nothing. The picket satellites in this sector went dark with Widow's Harbor, we had nothing looking outward—"

"The fleet."

"Illuminate, uh, Overships. A dozen confirmed, more still emerging. And screens, sir. Screens of small craft. Hundreds — no — thousands of them."

The main display flickered, and there they were: the gargantuan silhouettes from the Widow's Harbor briefing footage, domed prows tapering to long segmented bodies, tens of kilometers of glowing tentacles trailing behind like something out of a deep-ocean nightmare. And swarming around them, shapes that no briefing had ever catalogued.

Sleek. Flat. Forward-swept wings sweeping back into a tapered tail, like a ray drawn in a single stroke of ink. Pale chitinous hulls dotted with purple-blue lights. They moved in perfect pairs, banking in eerie synchronization.

Stingrays, as they would go on to be named.

"All hands," said Vice, quietly, and the entire station heard him. "Battle stations."

The DSS answered. Seventy-seven cannons bellowed while the station's attitude thrusters spurted into action to cancel out the recoil. But the Overships hung back at the edge of range and let their little fish do the work. The Stingrays came in waves, diving at the station's superstructure, twin lances of plasma carving burning lines across her armor. Point-defense guns swatted them by the dozen — flashes of yellow and white trailing behind the elegant arcing streaks of blue, all of it in the middle of a hail of purple plasma. If not for the death and destruction, it would have made a perfect fireworks display for a child.

But the Stingrays kept coming. The first waves died in purple-white explosions, and more took their place at once. The line of contact crept closer to the DSS's hull with every minute.

"All Eagle squadrons, all hangars, open. All Eagles, launch. Clear our vicinities."

The Democracy Space Station opened its fists, and every fighter she carried rose to meet the swarm.

"DSS Actual, this is Eagle Leader. Fourteen birds off the deck." The pilot's voice was calm, terse, her training holding her awe down. "Requesting permission to engage, and — sir, requesting intel. What exactly are we looking at here?"

"Small craft, paired formations, plasma armament, from the looks of it. They like to line up strafing runs — never sit on their attack axis."

A brief silence. When Eagle Leader answered, there was a tremor under her professional calm.

"Sir, we may have a problem."

Eagles were atmospheric fighters, the finest ground-attack aircraft Super Earth had ever built. Which is to say, they were built for a world where wings worked. In vacuum, wings were nothing more than dead weight. Every maneuver an Eagle performed above Pilen V relied on reaction-control thrusters sipping from tanks sized for minuscule course corrections before a dive into atmosphere.

"Eagle Leader to DSS. RCS fuel is bleeding out fast. These birds were built as aircraft, not orbital combat!"

The Stingrays, by contrast, moved through vacuum like they were born in it. Which, Vice reflected, watching a pair of them execute a pincer on Eagle Seven — one drawing the pilot into a turn, the other sliding silently into his six — they were. Seven went down in a silent bloom of fire.

"Eagle Leader to DSS, new contact report. Stingrays have light-class energy shields, they break under concentrated fire. Also, they're screaming."

"They're what, Eagle Leader?"

"Some kind of broadcast over the open channels, sir. Sounds like… Doesn't matter what it sounds like. It's psychological. Recommend all pilots mute."

Vice almost smiled. A Ghostdiver would have muted it without being told.

The battle went badly, fast.

The Eagles were running on fumes. The Stingrays swarmed the station like hornets at a nest, methodically dismantling her defenses while the Overships closed in to add their own volleys from ranges her guns could barely reach. Fires bloomed and were fought down, bloomed again, and were not. Deep booms rolled through the station, each one followed by a shudder — first from the impact itself, then worse, from sections of hull giving way to the vacuum outside.

"Commander." Shipmaster Two stood at Vice's elbow. "Structural integrity is below critical on the dorsal axis. One more volley like that last one and we break apart. The warp drive is spooled and holding."

"And the Eagles?"

"Forty birds left. RCS critical across the board."

Vice looked at the tangled, sparkling ruin that used to be the command center's screens and did the arithmetic. The station could leave now. Or they could pray to Lady Liberty that she held under fire long enough to warp after the Eagles docked.

The Eagles could not dock in the time the station had.

"Hangar bay, prepare for mass emergency docking, have rescue and repair teams ready. All Eagles, break off and return to bay. We will keep their heads down."

"Sir—" the shipmaster began.

"I am not leaving my pilots behind, Shipmaster. That is not a negotiation."

The channel crackled. "DSS Actual, this is Eagle Leader." Her voice had gone terribly calm. "Negative on recovery. We've run the same math you have. Our fuel doesn't reach the bay, and you know it."

"Eagle Leader—"

"Requesting permission to cover your withdrawal, sir. You have seventy-seven cannons and four thousand crew, and we have forty fighters and maybe three minutes of thrust left. The vote is very one-sided."

Vice's hand found the railing. The Ghostdiver in him — the one who had built a legend on the principle that the mission outweighs the individual, that professionals complete objectives and leave no room for sentiment — stayed quiet while the rest of him found words.

"That is not your call to make, Eagle Leader."

"No, sir. It's ours to request. Get the station out. And tell them—" Static swallowed the channel for a moment as her Eagle rolled through a plasma bolt, then the sound of rotary cannons sawing a Stingray in half.

"Tell them the Eagles of Pilen V held the sky."

Silence. Then, softer: "Liberty guides your step, DSS Actual."

Vice stood for one second. Two. Somewhere beyond the hull, his pilots were spending their last drops of fuel and their last rounds on a fight they already knew they would not fly home from.

"All hands, brace for emergency warp," he said.

Vice raced down the corridor toward the command bridge. He was almost halfway there when the Overship's volley struck.

The corridor stopped being a corridor. The bulkhead two meters ahead ceased to exist in a flash of purple, and the shockwave picked Vice up and slammed him into the wall behind him hard enough to see stars. Emergency lighting strobed red. The air began to move, streaming past him toward the wound in the hull, screaming at a pitch that climbed and climbed.

The station's response barely made it past the ringing in his ears.

"COMMAND BRIDGE DECOMPRESSION DETECTED. EMERGENCY BULKHEADS SEALED. COMMAND BRIDGE DECOMPRESSION DETECTED—"

The bridge door was sealed. Protocol. The same protocol that had just stopped what was left of the bridge's atmosphere from bleeding out into space, and had just as politely locked whoever was inside alone with a dying room.

Vice pulled himself upright. His ribs filed a formal protest, which he ignored, and he reached for the sidearm at his hip.

Of all the sidearms worn by Commander-level Helldivers, Vice's was the one the crew whispered about. A grenade pistol: a revolver-sized launcher firing high-explosive grenades, custom-fitted, absurdly powerful, and wholly unsuited for corridors, doorways, or anywhere near walls. In the opinion of everyone who had ever seen it, it was the sidearm of a man who had never once met a collateral damage concern he liked.

He leveled it at the door. And hesitated.

On the other side was the command bridge. There was at least one living soul over there — the console chair had not been empty when the bulkhead hit. An explosive round would blow the door off its tracks and detonate inside a sealed, venting room. The overpressure alone would—

He had spent his entire career in silence, choosing the precise tool for the precise moment. This was not that moment. There was no precise tool. There was a door, and time, and someone's lungs on the other side of it.

"Forgive me," said the founder of the Ghostdivers, and pulled the trigger.

Six minutes earlier, data analyst Kurumi had been doing her job.

Her job was, on paper, the safest on the station. Log combat data, collect telemetry, fill in spreadsheets no one ever reads until someone needs a number for a headline or a medal. She had requested the post because it required neither being seen nor being spoken to, and Kurumi had built her entire life around requiring as little of other people's attention as possible. She did not volunteer. She did not raise her hand. In briefings she sat in the last row and took notes.

But she watched. That was the thing about Kurumi. She watched everything.

She had watched three different commanders authorize warp jumps from that console, always from the corner of her eye, always pretending not to. She had memorized the sequences the way shy children memorize the answers to questions they will never dare raise their hands for. The authorization cadence. The interlocks. The emergency override that took two hands and a confirmation no one ever used, because no one ever expected to need it.

When the bulkhead hit, when Vice's voice came through the warped metal separating them, Kurumi did something she never thought she was capable of.

She made a decision.

The deck tilted, the lights died, and the shriek of escaping air swallowed every other sound. Trained officers were still grabbing for handholds when the smallest analyst on the bridge was already on her knees, crawling toward the console against a howling wind that wanted to hurl her into space. Her ears popped. Her vision narrowed at the edges. The emergency lighting painted everything red, and the console was thirty steps away, or possibly a kilometer.

I can't, she thought, as she always did. I can't, someone should — someone needs to —

There was no one. There was her, and the console, and the air leaving the room.

— okay then.

She hauled herself up by the console's edge. Her fingers found the sequence: interlock, interlock, both hands on the confirmation plate, emergency warp, execute. The screen demanded confirmation. She confirmed it.

The console made a cute little chime, as if she had received a new text message. And then the stars outside the viewport stretched into lines.

I did it, thought Kurumi, as she fainted. Nice.

The grenade took the door off its tracks and sent it crashing into the room in a curl of smoke and shrieking metal. Vice came through the breach with his cape over his face, and the first thing he saw was the viewport, and beyond the viewport, the blue-green smear of Pilen V stretching into a long white line.

They were already in warp.

The second thing he saw was the analyst. Small, motionless, folded over the warp console as if she had been shielding it, her data pad cracked on the deck beside her. He crossed the tilting room in two strides and found a pulse: thin, but very much there.

"Command bridge," he said into his wrist-comm, and was surprised to find his voice steady. "Warp successful. Get a medical team to my location. Now."

The DSS tore through folded space, trailing fire, atmosphere, and the names of forty Eagles that were not coming home.

Kurumi woke to the sterile, slightly unpleasant smell of a med-bay and the particular silence of being watched.

Commander Vice sat beside her bed, still in his uniform, his cape scorched at the hem, reading her data pad with the unhurried attention of a man who had all the time in the world and nowhere to be. He looked up when she stirred.

"Good morning, analyst," he said. "Or evening. The station's clocks are a topic of ongoing discussion."

"Sir." The word came out as a croak. She tried to sit up, remembered she was supposed to be unconscious, and lay back down. "Sir, I — the console — I didn't mean to — I should have waited for—"

"You executed an emergency warp while the bridge was venting atmosphere." Vice set the slate down. "The drive log says the full sequence took eleven seconds. The previous fastest authorization on record was thirty-four. Mine."

"I — watched. Before. I'm sorry, I know I wasn't authorized to—"

"Kurumi." He said her name the way he said everything: quietly, and all the way through. "Forty Eagles died to buy this station three minutes. You got her out in eleven seconds. If that was unauthorized, I would hate to see what you do with permission."

She stared at the ceiling. The ceiling was very interesting. "...The Eagles, sir? Is there any chance—"

"No," said Vice. "There is not. I will not lie to you. That was the price, and they chose to pay it." The med-bay hummed. Around them, the station groaned as it limped toward Claorell and whatever shipyards remained there. "The dispatches will say they fought valiantly. It will not be enough, but it will be all we have."

"Yes, sir."

He stood, and paused at the door. "For what it's worth — the door was sealed by protocol, and I knocked the only way I know how. You… may have heard the knocking."

Kurumi, who had in fact heard the entire door arrive in the room, decided some things were best left unspoken.

"I heard a small knock, sir."

The leader of the Ghostdivers managed a smile. "Good. Rest, analyst. When you're ready, I would like to discuss a possible promotion with you."

Kurumi blinked.

"You will not be required to raise your hand."