CLAORELL

2185.05.24

Vice ran the repair effort from a borrowed room in the Claorell garrison, where every desk had somebody else's name on it and the coffee tasted like a new invention from the Advanced Interrogation division of the Truth Enforcers. From the window, at dusk, you could catch the station crossing the sky: a piece of darkness that moved against the stars, dotted with scaffolding lights and the occasional welder’s spark.

The math came back the same every morning. The yards could rebuild the dorsal axis by the end of the month. They could rebuild the Eagle bays by mid-June, if the Eagle bays mattered more than the magazines, and the magazines mattered more than the reactors, and the reactors mattered more than the hull. Everything the Democracy Space Station needed, the yards could supply one piece at a time, in an order chosen by committee. The station needed all of it at once.

Then the intel came in from his own battle.

Data cores pulled out of the wreckage above Pilen V: Stingray wings, chunks of Overship hull, things the salvage crews had stopped trying to name. Half of it went to the analysts; the other half came back tagged with a color Vice had never seen on a report before: UNDECIPHERABLE. Illuminate writing. The same squiggles and dots that had lit up every screen in every war room on the twelfth of May.

They brought it to him like bringing an already dead patient to a doctor.

"We tried every decoding method we have," the lead analyst said. "There's nothing we can do with it, sir. Sorry."

Vice had them leave it on his desk. Then he had them leave.

Alone, in the quiet, the leader of the Ghostdivers gazed at the enemy's writing. After a few minutes, he stopped, leaned back, and sighed.

If anyone had been in the room, they would have seen exactly that much. They would not have seen which line his eyes stopped on. They would not have heard him say, very quietly, "Clever."

The order went out before dawn.

Every Ghostdiver unit on Super Earth, in the middle of the worst invasion in a hundred years: disengage. Withdraw to orbit. Redeploy to the Automaton front.

Mission objective: scrap metal.

The responses came back faster than he could register.

First the requests for clarification, which is what commanders say when they mean you cannot possibly mean this. Then the objections, which is what they say when they know you do. Then the channels started carrying the word itself. Someone with enough rank to know better said it out loud, on an open frequency, and the word stuck, because words like that always stick.

Treason.

The next day's coordination meeting was standing room only, and not the good kind. Three separate ministries sent representatives, which meant at least three separate ministries had agreed about something, and the thing they had agreed about was Vice. The word from the open channel got said again, quieter this time, in the voice of people who intend to put words in writing.

Vice gave them his answer. He gave it once.

"The station will come back. Everything else is a detail."

If you took every word in the Ghostdivers doctrine, then did the exact opposite thing, the chaos that erupted in the room would probably resemble the results.

Then Kurumi stood up.

She had not been invited. She was a junior, a member of data staff, and every rule in that room said she did not get to speak. She stood up anyway, carrying her data pad like something she was planning to set down hard.

"The DSS needs forty-one thousand tons of high-grade alloy to return to combat status," she said. "The Claorell yards have three thousand eight hundred in stock, and a monthly output of eleven hundred. The Automaton Legion, on the other hand, is made of exactly the alloy we need, and is currently walking around twenty-two worlds wearing about four hundred million tons of it. I've attached the recovery projections. They're conservative."

Someone started to speak. With a single impatient flourish of her hand, she made him sit back down, which startled even herself. She looked at her hand with a newfound awe before continuing to speak.

"I ran the numbers three times. Commander Vice’s order is the only path that puts the station back in this war before the end of the month. Every other path loses it on schedule."

She sat down and put her hands in her lap, where they could not shake, mostly.

Vice looked at her for a moment.

"For the record," he said, "the promotion discussion is over. You're getting it, since you're already doing the job."

Kurumi said thank you, very small.

Later, in the corridor, she caught up with him and asked the question everyone had been asking since yesterday.

"What did it say? The writing."

Vice kept walking, long enough that she was sure he would not answer. Then he stopped.

"It mattered," he said. "That's all you get."

Kurumi stood there and decided that was either the most honest thing anyone had told her all week, or the least. Possibly both.

Adamas called on a secure line at midnight, Claorell time.

"You pulled them," they said. No greeting. Adamas had stopped doing greetings sometime after the invasion started.

"I did."

"I have four cities. Three of them are losing. I was going to ask you for two companies of Ghostdivers for York Supreme tomorrow morning, and instead I got told they're off fighting bots for junk."

"Yes."

"Why."

That was the question everyone was asking. Adamas was the only one asking it without anger, which made it harder.

"The DSS needs to come back." Vice said simply.

“And why is that?”

"That’s classified."

“I outrank you, Vice. Tell me why!” Adamas’s voice betrayed just the slightest hint of frustration.

“I really can’t. It will all be worth it in the end, I promise.”

A long silence. Somewhere on their end, something large fell over, and neither of them reacted, because it had been that kind of week.

"I'll tell you what I know," Adamas said at last. "I know you spent forty Eagles to bring that station home. I know you read something out of that wreckage, because I know you, and I know what you look like after you've read something. So I'm going to allow this once. But I’m keeping the Commandos right here on Super Earth."

"Thank you."

"You’d better be right."

The line went dead. Vice sat for a moment in the borrowed room, looking at nothing. Then he opened the redeployment board and began moving pieces off Super Earth, one by one.

AUTOMATON FRONT

2185.05.24

The Ghostdivers went to the Automaton front, unannounced and unseen, as they had always done.

The operation needed more hands than Ghostdivers could bring, and the volunteer list had been open for six minutes when Alpha's name went on it. Bot country meant stun lance work.

Ghostie was there too, trying to redeem his somewhat injured pride from his last mission. His official contribution to the operation was a series of entries in the southern sector's security logs, in which three bot garrisons had simply stopped existing without so much as a panicked bleep from a trooper. His personal contribution was two lines of HUD text: recycling duty is beneath me, followed, two minutes later, by found a pristine capacitor. mine. Nobody argued.

The fortress fell on the second night. “Fell” was more of an exaggeration.

The morning report was four lines.

FORTRESS SECURED.
GARRISON ELIMINATED.
ZERO ALERT SIGNALS TRANSMITTED.
SCRAP ESTIMATE ATTACHED.

The estimate was large enough that the logistics officer who received it checked the number three times, and a fourth for luck. The report did not mention that Vice had gone in personally, at the head of the infiltration team, because Vice had written the report and did not consider it relevant.

Alpha read the report, and immediately went to find Vice.

"You did the whole thing quiet," he said.

Four hundred bots in that fortress, and not one of them had pressed a single button.

Vice was already looking at the next map. "Noise is a resource," he said. "Don't spend it where you don't have to."

Alpha had lived his entire life for noise. He decided, right then, that he was never going to get used to this.

As the Pelican carrying the final group of soldiers lifted off the landing zone, the ground support crews below were already swarming the wreckage: cutting, hauling, loading, the long unglamorous work that wars actually run on. On the recovery board in the cabin, the scrap tonnage climbed while Vice watched.

Someone had put the Super Earth feeds on the cabin's main screen, as always.

The cities were still burning. The lines were still thinning. While he had been here, cutting up robots, the planet he had left behind had gone on bleeding, district by district, city by city.

Above Claorell, the station hung dark and silent, waiting to be paid for.

Vice watched the cities burn, and asked himself the question he had been asking since the order went out.

Had he made the right call?