FORT UNION

2185.05.30

On Fort Union the war was a feed on a wall.

Avery had watched the technician for three days before she spoke to him. He worked the satellite relay station at the edge of the settlement, surrounded by screens, patient with all of them.

Their first conversation was about xenobiology. She asked him about the light in the Illuminate ships. He answered too thoroughly, and she liked that.

The next morning he showed her what he had been waiting for.

"It's for the Host," he said.

It was not a weapon. It was an instruction, written in the Great Host's own command language, asking it politely to converge on itself. An order nobody had given, signed to look like one that had been.

He sent it through the relay at midday, and promptly went back to his coffee.

Avery watched the fleet telemetry on the wall three hours later. Whatever he had written found the Host in the dark between stars. A chunk of the Great Host, a piece of the fleet that had taken a century to build, tore itself apart answering an order that was not there.

The news reached the feeds that night, squeezed and twisted into a completely planned victory through the mouth of the media.

Avery did not argue. She sat with the technician and watched the feed. He told her about the luminescence of squid blood, and she listened.

Nobody in the war ever learned his name. That was fine with him.

Joe never knew. He had enough war of his own.

THE DEMOCRACY SPACE STATION

Docked in low orbit above CLAORELL

2185.05.30

Kurumi closed the ledger herself.

The station was close to being operational. It looked nowhere like new, its sleek silvery hull welded with salvaged, half-rusted Automaton alloy, still carrying the wrong insignia. In fact, it looked downright ugly. But no one gave a damn about the color palette of a paint job.

The past few days felt like a fever dream to her, as she watched the shimmering field of starlight made from the sparks of thousands of welding workers. She had handed out countless data pads, transferred terabytes of data on damage analysis, quality checks, armor integrity testing. And around her, people flowed by, their sleep but a vague memory, each with their own job, each burdened with news from Super Earth, of the war stretching on, of the falling cities, and worst of all, of the name-calling that never ceased.

Treason. Treason. Treason.

Every ton of scrap had been accounted for and installed. Every fortress stripped in silence. Every argument she had won with numbers. It all ended on the same line.

"The station is ready."

Vice had been quiet all those days. The bridge simply waited.

"Course," he said.

Kurumi had it prepared. She had had it prepared for days.

"Super Earth."

The bridge stayed silent, as Ghostdivers always do. But Vice could see the same light start to glow in every one of their eyes. He wanted to tell them how proud of them he was, but opted for a slight smile instead.

Somewhere behind him, in a memory he did not say out loud, a voice said you'd better be right.

"Time to find out," Vice said.

The stars stretched into thin lines again. Claorell melted away behind them, and for a moment, Kurumi felt like a hero.

The station turned toward home.

EQUALITY-ON-SEA

SUPER EARTH

2185.05.30

The smaller waves were the lie.

For two days the Host had fed the city scraps, and the city had believed them. In the early afternoon of the last day, the Host spent the last of its lies.

Everything that was left came at once.

The last tenth of the Great Host, the part of it still able to land, threw itself at Equality-on-Sea without waves and without pauses. It was the last push, a final struggle made by a dying beast. The Great Host refused to die quietly.

And with it, the defensive line started to bend.

It had broken and been rebuilt. It had been traded and manned and walked forward behind fire. But it had never bent. Now it did.

Ammunition ran short on the factory belts. The civilian carriers ran under a standing barrage, and some of them did not get up. The sergeant gave her orders standing. Then sitting. Then sitting from the ground. The words were the same words every time.

At the plaza at the hinge of the line, Alpha held.

He had taken the position without asking. The hinge was the loudest place, and Alpha had always gone toward loud.

The breach came at him with the last Leviathan of the war leading the charge, then every Illuminate unit they had left at the back. He met it with his accelerator rifle. Then his anti-materiel rifle. Then everything he had. The plaza filled with fire and noise, with the kind of fight he had been chasing his whole life.

"Take the line back to the second position," he said, on the channel.

"Alpha—" Choko said.

"That's an order. Go burn something on your way."

She did. She took the line back. She burned what he had asked her to burn. The channel stayed open behind her.

Behind the barricades, Choko watched as one man, saber in hand and rifle in the other, stood tall against the horde of shambling Voteless and Fleshmobs, the wall of Overseers in the air, the Leviathan opening its bomb ports.

Alpha opened his radio one last time.

“Heh, now it’s a fight.”

SES COMMANDOS CONVENE

In high orbit above SUPER EARTH

2185.05.30

Lia saw it first. She always did.

The scanners of the Galactic War Room, only recently fixed, nearly died again trying to register the signal. An undeniable sign of FTL travel, but this time, its signatures were human.

"Contact," she said. "Massive."

Adamas was at her console before the second word landed.

The signature resolved. Lia checked it twice. Then a third time. She went very still.

"That's not possible," she said. "They said it’s damaged beyond repair."

"It is damaged, but whether it was beyond repair was very much in the air.” Adamas responded.

The visual resolved on the main screen, slowly, and the War Room went quiet.

The Democracy Space Station came out of warp ugly. Her sleek silver hull was gone, welded over with patches of half-rusted Automaton alloy that had never been sanded, never been painted, never been asked to match. The wrong insignia was still on her flank, scraped only halfway off. The weld seams ran across her like stitches. She looked like something built out of a refusal to lose, because it was.

It was the most beautiful vessel humanity has ever seen.

EQUALITY-ON-SEA

SUPER EARTH

2185.05.30

Joe heard it before he understood it.

A new sound, under the gunfire. Low. Not a shell, not a siren, not anything the war had used before. It sat under everything, in the teeth, in the barricade, in the ground itself. A vibration from beyond the stars.

Then the sky flashed a brilliant white. What’s left of Joe’s visor automatically darkened the flash, but the SEAF around him had no such luxury, and flinched away.

The light faded quickly, and silence filled its place.

The squids faltered, for the first time in days.

Joe looked up. Everybody looked up. The guns went quiet one by one, down the whole length of the bending line, as the shadow crossed the city.

It crossed the sun like an eclipse. The hull came down out of the warp light patched in dark metal, scarred with welds, covered in patches. It hung over Super Earth like a held breath.

Joe knew it. Fifteen days ago he had stood on Claorell and watched that station limp in with half her hull missing, and thought: that is a wreck.

This was an answer.

Every channel opened at once, then, and one voice came through all of them. It was quiet. It did not need to be loud.

"This is the Democracy Space Station. Keep your heads down, we’ve come home."

The station's batteries opened.

It did not sound like the orbital strikes the city knew. Those came down as single blows. This came down as a continuous roar. Columns of fire walked across the plain outside the city in a slow, deliberate line, shoulder to shoulder. Where they walked, the squids vaporized into the dust it kicked up. Where its missiles hit, the surviving Overships cracked like plastic.

The first column came down on the plaza at the hinge of the line. Exactly on the breach. Exactly where Alpha had stood.

Joe watched it fall, and understood, standing there, that the fire had arrived one second and one man late.

Then the hangars opened.

More than two centuries ago, a masterpiece of fantasy fiction was written, and in one of its books one character exclaimed something that happened to be exactly the same thing Joe exclaimed, two centuries later.

“The Eagles! The Eagles are coming!”

They streamed out of the station in squadrons, banking over the city with their engines screaming, and dove into the gaps the cannons had cut. They came down in squadrons by loadout, and each loadout had its own voice.

The first wave carried cluster bombs. The canisters split open over the tide mid-dive, and the bomblets walked across the plain in lines of small, precise detonations. Like something being erased, row by row.

On the line, people stopped firing to watch. There was no shame in it.

The second wave carried five-hundred-kilogram bombs, and the ground jumped every time one landed. Craters opened in the horde large enough to swim in. The Leviathan that had crossed District Nine that morning took six of them in a circle, and a seventh on the back. For the first time for many, this would be the first time they saw a Leviathan break cleanly into pieces, crashing into the terrain and trailing blue fire and what looked like blood.

The third wave was napalm. It flew low, and it did not hurry. The fire came down in long ribbons and lay across the plain in windrows. Squid or fortification, it did not pick. The smell reached the barricades after a while, but nobody minded this time.

The Eagles of Pilen V had held the sky. The Eagles of Equality-on-Sea were now holding Democracy itself.

Then the fleet joined the station.

Thousands of Super Destroyers hung in the sky over Super Earth. Every one of them opened at once.

The Ruby reserves had emptied the high-cost vaults, and the vaults came down as ordnance. 380mm walking barrages stepped across grid squares in lines a kilometer wide. Railcannon slugs landed like thrown spears, faster than their echoes. Orbital lasers dragged across the plains and whatever squid was under it crumpled into nothing.

High above the fleet, the SES Commandos Convene retracted some of its high-power comms antennae. They would not be needed here. Instead, as Lia typed the commands into the central console, armor plates and hull sections silently slid back and revealed the weapon ports underneath.

Yes, the Convene was a command ship. But no, it did not mean at all that she had no bite.

Lia had never fired a weapon in her life. Her entire career had been spent reading numbers other people made. She told herself she would be careful, precise, and brief.

She was careful, and precise. She was not brief.

The first 380mm barrage she walked across a grid square came out cleaner than the gunnery officer beside her. She checked her own strikes against the telemetry, corrected, and fired again. The second one was better. The third one she enjoyed.

By the fifth barrage, the gunnery officer had stopped watching his console, and was watching her.

"Orbital napalm barrage," she requested, on her sixth pass. Then her seventh. Then her eighth.

She had never understood Choko, in all the years of the war. She understood her now, completely, in the orange glow of the targeting screen and the tiny, cheering figures around the charred remains of a hundred squids.

When Choko's voice came through the shared channel, later, it was warm, and a little hoarse.

"Whoever's on the Convene's guns. You have my respect."

Lia blushed at her console, and requested the napalm again.

The defensive line walked forward behind the fire and explosions.

Joe walked with it. His autocannon was hot, his hands bleeding through his gloves again. He found himself laughing, and he was not the only one. The sergeant walked on the line's left, standing up straight, shouting something incoherent and running as if the exhaustion that built up for days went away in an instant.

Above the fire, the Illuminate ships started to turn back.

Comms returned with the station. The jamming that had held the city blind died under the Democracy Space Station's arrays. Every channel in Equality-on-Sea opened at once. The first voice through was the one Joe had spent two days trying to be worthy of.

"Joe," Adamas said. "I'm watching a force following you that doesn't belong to any unit I know. SEAF. Helldivers from every fleet I can name. Civilians. Who are they?"

Joe looked at them. Two shifts' worth of squid ink on armor. The runners and the riders. The volunteers hauling ammo and carrying his message, the platoons he had pulled out of the dark.

There was no name for it. There had to be one.

"The EHEF," Joe said. "The Equality-on-Sea Helldiver Expeditionary Force."

There was a pause on the channel.

"That’s not a unit name on the records."

“I may have made it up on the spot.”

Laughter came from both ends of that call. And when it died down, Adamas found themselves in tears.

“See you back on the Convene, Joe.”