u/Spooker0

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“This is a… rather detailed photo,” Shachos murmured as he examined the image on Julia’s datapad intently. “Very detailed. Mhm… that trailing edge micro-serration pattern in the active infrared camouflage, as we expected. Yes, they did steal some of our technology. They did. You—you took this picture from your orbital missile sensors before it blew up their shuttle? Must be excellent optics to see through atmosphere so clearly without distortion!”

“Hm… Not… exactly, for this one.”

“So how did you take this picture?”

She came clean, clearing her throat. “It was parked on the ground. So I imagine we just got right up to it with our cameras and snapped one.”

“Parked on the—” His face turned red. “Ahahahahaha! You captured one?! You did?!”

“Yeah. That’s what you wanted, right?” She grinned. “They landed one last night before you made their battlecruiser leave, to try to get Karveth back. Rescue mission. Didn’t go so well for them.”

“Ahahahahahahah! Last night! Yes! That explains why they were taking so long to leave! So very long.” Shachos closed his eyes in satisfaction at the retrospective hilarity in his memory. “Their ship in orbit said their engine was broken. Then, they needed to check their radiators. And then, the warp engines wouldn’t activate. No, they would not. Their warp engines! They finally left after four hours of stalling, when we got into a good orbit to get ready to shoot at them.”

“That would have been interesting to watch,” Julia said. “But we were focused on what was happening down here.”

“What about your people? Are your people okay? Your marines—Marcus! Is his humor still in this galaxy?”

“Oh yeah, zero casualties. One guy was a little hypothermic, from sitting too long in the cold desert sand—he had a suit leak. Anyway, our guys are all fine now.”

“Good, good. And your colonists, too?”

“Yup, we lured them out to a remote area far from our colony. We prepared for this before we took Karveth. Speaking of him… unfortunately, I regret to report that Karveth perished in the chaos.”

Shachos turned yellow. “Hm…. Glonk will not like that. He will not. But… I do not mind so much. No, I do not.”

“In our defense, they attacked our colony again, so that’s really on them. But… we did get another prisoner out of the kerfuffle. And we did confirm our theory with Karveth before they—they got him killed.”

“Your theory?”

“Yeah, the reason I couldn’t wait to call you down this morning. The Karnolians are indeed preparing to invade you. Less than nine months, at most. If what we’re doing didn’t… expedite their timeline.”

Some green crept into the yellow on his face. “You’re still worried about that? Still?!”

“Yes. Very. We interrogated the prisoners. All three—I mean, both of them. They say the same thing. They’re ready. They’re going to come for your star systems. You guys need to get ready for them now.”

“War? Bah. They always say that! Yes, they do! It is like their version of our humor. Karnolian humor! Hah! It is only a little funny to us, but it is what they do!”

“I just—They are! Never mind.” She sighed helplessly. “They really are going to invade… I’ll get you the interrogation tapes.”

“Interrogation tapes? Of Karnolian prisoners?!”

“Sure. You guys capture them from time to time, right?”

“Yes, but not for a while. We do not fight wars often. Not that often…”

Oh, yes. We can tell. And your neighbors can too.

“So,” Shachos continued. “We do not get many Karnolian prisoners. They sometimes fly shuttles or ships over the border, but we just play harmless pranks on their pilots. And they are usually much more focused on each other. We have not needed to interrogate Karnolian prisoners for a long time. A very long time.”

“A few months?” Julia asked. “You said you had some intel they were going to try something.”

“Months? Hm… no.” The Vorshnik fleet master thought for a while. “Last was before my time. Maybe two hundred years ago? Yes, maybe. It was a long time ago. We do not just find and capture Karnolians every other day. It is a lot of effort to do it safely, and they do not appreciate our humor as much as you.”

She blinked. “Two hundred years.”

“Yes, two hundred years. Maybe more. It is a long time ago. Not within my lifetime, or the lifetime of—”

“Do you have reconnaissance into their territory? How do you know if they are building up forces? What if they are already putting ships in an assembly area?”

“We have sensors and telescopes on our border. But forgive me, I will not be able to tell you all about our defenses. Yes, we do not publicize those. They are not funny anyway.”

“But… not intelligence on the ground. No eyes on their interior. You haven’t even talked to one of them in a setting where they will tell you the truth! We have! You should trust us when we—”

“Yes. But Julia, we are good at reading faces and colors. Very good. And you are not. And you do not know the Karnolians like we do. How can you even tell when they are lying?”

“Well, I didn’t personally do the interrogations,” she said uncomfortably. “But the general technique is logical, especially when we have multiple of them. We ask them questions independently. And when their stories don’t match up, or when there are self-inconsistencies in their narratives, we dig further until we can discern lie from truth. Unlike you, we can’t rely on our intuitions to tell if people are telling the truth, so we have a lot of experience using good procedures and various tactics to derive good intelligence from logic and probability.”

Shachos turned orange and red. “Do you know the easiest way we can tell when a Karnolian is lying? Do you know?”

“What do you do?” She shrugged. “Do you play pranks on them until they give up their will to live or—”

“We can tell when a Karnolian is lying… ahahah! When—when—ahahahaha! When their—when their mouth is moving!” Shachos wheezed at his own speciesist joke even as his red became brighter red. “Ahahahahaha! That is when they are lying! Get it? Get it? Because they are always lying. That is why—”

She sighed in resignation. “No, I got it. Thanks, Shachos, I—I got it.”

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Brussels

“You’re telling me… that our commodore out there has gone ahead and started an interstellar war, all on her own?” President Salma Haldar asked in full disbelief.

“Ma’am, she’s reporting that things were already underway… She claims she had no choice.”

“Maybe—maybe Secretary Wilders was right, and I should have replaced her.”

Will snorted. “He wanted to replace her with someone more likely to start a war, except with the moonies.”

“Still… what if Commodore Julia Kessler starts a full scale conflict with the aliens all on her own?”

“She’s not that crazy.”

“She has access to hundreds of megatons of naval weaponry. Forgive me if I’m not comfortable with her being even a little bit crazy.”

“Part of the job, ma’am. Being comfortable is for the ignorant.”

“Ignorant—Forget it. How are the moonies reacting to all this?”

“They’re in election campaigning season. Most of our intelligence collection was focused on that, and we’ve been busy diverting all those resources… outwards. And the rhetoric they’re using right now—I recommend we take an understanding approach. They’ll have more—they’ll have more flexibility after Parliamentary elections.”

“If their nutjobs don’t win.”

“That’s why Farid is saying the things on television that he is now…”

The moonie prime minister had come out of the assassination attempt with a speech signaling appeasement and unity. Except it wasn’t aimed at their neighbors a light second away; it was towards the crazies who probably just tried to kill him. He urged calm and patience while the motives of the shooter were still under investigation. There was a whole “let’s sweep it all under the rug” feel to it.

It was clear to Union intelligence that the LLF had probably been behind it; the organization and effort was far more than a lone gunman, and there weren’t many other choices. The moonies were refusing to “rush to conclusions” while the investigation was ongoing, as if they were leaving open the possibility that they could blame Earth for it somehow.

It was obviously a wink and a nod to the more belligerent elements of his voter base, the ones who liked Farid because he was good enough at governing to build up Lunar strength, right up to the point where they could start a second war against Earth. There were a surprising number of Lunar voters like that. They tolerated his moderation and steps towards peaceful relations with Earth—surely Farid was only doing that while holding back Luna’s full strength until it could build enough for a strike. That little ambiguity also left Union negotiators and State Department officials with an odd taste in their mouths.

“Current polling data?” Salma asked.

“Within margin of error. Well, they have a… different system from us. There are seven parties in his ruling coalition, which is over eighty percent of their seats. So it looks like he has full support of his people whenever he does something. But… if the opposition gets over the threshold, two or three percent away, two of the ruling parties will defect. Then, their coalition falls and the LLF sympathizers and extremists will likely get a prominent voice in the new government. If that happens, we’ll need to do some maneuvering and kind of bribe them not to put the crazies in Defense, State, and Justice ministry for Cabinet roles.”

“Kind of bribe them? What does that look like?”

Will looked uncomfortable. “Well, bribes. It’s—yeah, we just give them money. There’s a bucket for it in the black budget. Anyway… I don’t know why I said kind of. We’d have to resort to outright and regular bribery. It’s not a lot of money. Anyway, Farid’s government is a lot closer to falling—a lot more fragile—than it seems from the outside. The internal machinations have gotten even less transparent to us since… since the war and they had to govern for real.”

“Ah.” She sighed, marveling at the complexity of the Lunar multi-party parliamentary system, and not for the first time. “Parties and coalitions. That’s… crazy. How do they get anything done up there?!”

Will snorted. “I think they say the same thing about us and the way our checks and balances work.”

“Our way has worked for far longer.”

“That’s because you don’t have to see the parts of our system that you don’t want—I just came out of a fishing rights dispute meeting with six Union Assembly representatives, and we are no longer allowed to serve Alaskan cod in this building.”

Confusion filled her face at the non-sequitur. “What?”

“You heard me. We are now officially forbidden from having Alaskan cod in the presidential residence of the Union.”

“They can make rules about that?”

“Don’t you love the gargantuan Union bureaucratic state?”

“Oh no, we’ll have to eat other species of overpriced imported fish!” Salma rolled her eyes. “It’s just fish, Will.”

“I liked Alaskan cod,” he said grumpily. “Stupid fishing dispute. Anyway, I’m inclined to agree with the moonies right now about their critique of our love of micromanagement and veto points. I bet they’re having Alaskan cod delivered to them up there on the moon.”

Salma shook her head. “Democracy. It’s messy, and there’s no perfect way, only a better one.”

“I thought we were supposed to have ended history a century ago,” Will grumbled. He sighed after a second, then refocused his attention on the moonie on his slides. “Welp, anyway. Look on the bright side. Farid could win big again. That is… possible. And presumably they’d learn enough to not have trouble with their Parliamentary security this time. If he does well, the rising tide will lift our boat too. It proves that your foreign policy doctrine is working, and I think we’ll get a boost in our own re-election campaign.”

She tried to clear the worst case scenarios from her head. “And Dustball? What do we do about our colony skirmish situation? Do we have a replacement administrator ready?”

“I wouldn’t be so quick to—she was attacked both times. And more importantly, she won despite the technological disparity. That’s worth something,” Will argued again. “Remember when we tested the Karnolian border response time a few months ago? They’re still far ahead of us in overall capability.”

“Except it might have been better if we didn’t win, no?”

Will shook his head. “That’s what a few of the experts are saying… They want us to roll over and show our belly. But we can’t know whether it’ll help. Time will tell.”

“These are just skirmishes on the ground. Kids playing in a sandbox. They’ll roll over us if they try anything in orbit. Our colony only still exists because the funny aliens in orbit are protecting their territory. We should get ready to cut our losses and get what we can get. When are we signing a deal with the Vorshniks?”

“It looks like soon. Either with the Sonckles or without. But… there may be a bigger problem.”

“The planned invasion of the teddy bears.” In her defense, Salma didn’t coin that. That was what the media called it when the report leaked. “Against the Vorshniks. How certain are we that’s going to happen?”

“That’s… hard to tell too. Commodore Julia Kessler says three to nine months, with high certainty of it occurring in her opinion. But she’s only basing her conclusions off moderate confidence assessments and… what her gut tells her.”

Salma hesitated. “What do the ORBCOM admirals say?”

“They’re refusing to contradict her. Same as the OMI. No one wants to be the sucker who missed the moonie uprising, again. But that just makes their advice useless to us in this kind of situation.”

“That’s frustrating. Don’t you normally have red teams for this?”

“Yeah, we do. Our red teams and the moonies’ are simulating the nightmares where all the aliens in the neighborhood gang up on us and blow up Earth and Luna.”

“What?! They’re concerned about that?”

“Oh, yes. Wouldn’t you be?”

“Well, now I am.”

“I think it’s safe to say that if it did, it won’t matter whatever we do. Anyway, the red teams are used to identifying worst case scenarios, not for assuring us that a war won’t happen.”

“Were none of them told the story of the boy who cried wolf when they were children?”

Will tilted his head. “But don’t forget what happened at the end of that story. The wolf did end up eating everyone in the village.”

“What version of the story did you—never mind.” Salma stared out the window at the city lights for a while. “Are you sure about the moonies? They’re taking this a lot more seriously?”

“Our spies say they are. They really are.”

She already knew that. “How seriously?”

“Well… I don’t know if it’s—there’s something that might not be relevant.” Will paused. “But… they might be building new warships. It might be a response to that.”

She sucked in a breath sharply. “What?! I thought they were doing refits and conversions for their warp ships from the hundreds of spare hulls they have! We both just drew down from a massive orbital war! How could they possibly need to lay down new warship hulls at this point?!”

“It might be their regular intelligence stovepiping, but OMI Director Clara Powell claims the moonies have started a crash program for a new class design. We’re getting very few details about it, but one of our L2 Black Sky spy sats caught increased activity at one of their dark side shipyards. Whole new slipways.”

“But… building new warships… that could—that could also be for us, not for this—this planned teddy bear invasion.”

He looked glumly back at her. “Yeah. It could.”

She stared out into the dark, seeing her years of hard work on normalization and post-war peace efforts circling the drain. “So… we’re stuck down here hoping, praying… that the moonies are indeed building up their tonnage… for a massive, interstellar war that could threaten our whole species’ existence? And not… for attacking us?”

“Huh. I guess we are.”

Salma didn’t say anything for a long while.

Will cleared his throat. “Do you want me to get Director Powell for you?”

She shook her head. “No. I’ve made my decision. Call Battlestar Four. Recall Commodore Julia Kessler to Earth on the next resupply.”

“Ma’am, I’d really ask you to reconsider. We don’t have a viable replacement that the Assembly will confirm, and it’ll destroy any relationships we’ve already built up—”

“It’s not… forever. Just calling her back here for an in-person briefing so we can decide what to do, Will. This two-plus week delay for every question and answer isn’t cutting it for me. If there’s even the slimmest chance I’m going to send our young people to war for the second time in a generation, I need to know where they’re going. I want to see her face-to-face again. I want to look into the eyes of the woman who’s going to be leading it from the front. To see that she’s as serious about it as I am.”

“I still think—understood, ma’am. But what if the colony needs her now?”

“I’m sure her substitute can handle the job there in the meantime. I’m sure she’s got that all figured out by now. If not, then maybe she’s not the person to do it after all. Call her back to Earth.”

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Serenity

Knock. Knock.

Knoll counted up to fifteen, and the door for the nondescript residential apartment opened a crack. The man who answered the door was bald, solidly built, and dressed down in a way that made him look like a groundside mechanic in his forties.

“You aren’t supposed to visit unannounced, Admiral.”

Knoll snorted, then he pushed through the door. “What are you going to do, Noro? Shoot me?”

“One of these days, I just might,” Noro said, stuffing his drawn handgun back into his holster. Noro closed the door behind them as Knoll made his way into his apartment. “Might be bad for my career though.”

“The Navy will understand. Hell, the way things are, they might give you a medal for putting me out to pasture.”

Noro’s eyes drifted to Knoll’s wrinkles. “You’ve gotten… old. Older since the last time I saw you.”

“Yes, that is… indeed how time works, Captain.”

That was not what Noro meant, but he didn’t bother to clarify on that. He made another correction instead. “Former. Former captain.”

Technically, his rank stayed the same, but nobody had called him that in a while.

Knoll plopped himself down at Noro’s dinner table. “A former captain of the Lunar Eighth. A captain of a fighting squadron, hiding in the shadows. Hiding in an LIA safehouse on the outskirts of Serenity. Like a rat.”

“Whatever Luna calls me to do. Wherever it needs me,” Noro said.

“They say war is a waste of resources.” Knoll rolled his eyes, then gestured around himself with his arms. “Look what peace has done to us. Look what it’s done to us all.”

“Well, the war’s over.”

“Could have fooled me.”

Noro shrugged uncomfortably. He stepped into his own kitchen, popped open the fridge, rummaged in it for a few seconds, and pulled out a sandwich. Knoll didn’t say anything either, just stared at him, both eyes unblinking.

“Want one?”

“No, thank you.”

“Well, it’s nice of you to visit me on this beautiful day, Admiral,” Noro said as he sat down opposite Knoll, unwrapping his lunch.

Knoll continued staring at him for a moment, then grinned. “On this gray lifeless dump of a planetoid? God, this shithole makes me miss the cold, damp winters of Brussels.”

“There is a certain beauty… in the desolation. There’s a… special feeling you get when you see the empty regolith basin, untouched—mostly untouched by human activity. Have you gone outside recently? Everywhere you go, you look down at your footprint, and you realize, wow, it’s the first time any human being has ever stepped foot on this exact place, the first time that anyone has ever touched this virgin regolith. Then, you take another step. And it’s like yet another small step for humanity. And you realize, wow, this is the first time any human being—”

Knoll sighed, rubbing his eyes with a finger. “Oh God, not you too, Noro. I was talking to Reese and she goes waxing on about, and I quote, the way the rovers make permanent tracks in the regolith reminds me of the sparkling sand dunes on the beaches of southern France.”

“Aha. What did you tell her?”

“The only way you can possibly make that comparison is if you’re talking about the beaches of Normandy in June of 1944. Sand dunes? Please. Your Stockholm Syndrome is showing.”

Noro chewed on his sandwich for a moment. Then, he cleared his throat. “Hey, you defected voluntarily to this place too, Knoll.”

“Yeah, but I can tell you it’s not for Luna’s clear skies and balmy beaches. It’s fine to have some pride in this grand republic we’ve built. But there’s pride, and there’s delusion. The weather? The weather?! There’s no weather here on this barren rock. The only reason we’re alive is because of a century of vacuum engineering and the blood and sweat of those who came before us. Be proud of that.”

“I still think there’s a certain beauty—I feel things when I look out that window, alright?” Noro sighed dramatically as he waved his arms around. “Why can’t we just feel things, Knoll? Not everything has to be all so—”

“We’re spacers. We don’t feel things. We don’t get to have feelings for things. We have measurements and calculations and—”

“Yes, sir. Right away, sir. Jeez, Knoll, relax.” He shook his half-eaten sandwich at Knoll. “Why is it always about—ah, forget it. You cynical old bastard. Seriously, you don’t just visit me out of the blue to reminisce about the garden planet we left behind a decade ago. What’s the occasion?”

A slow smile crept up on Knoll’s face. “It’s your lucky day.”

“My lucky day? What is it?”

“It’s time you get to come out of the closet.”

“I—come out?” Noro squinted at him suspiciously. “What are you talking about?”

“They’re announcing it next week. The circumstances of your fake death. The staged car accident. Smuggling you to Luna in the back of a water hauler from Botswana. The whole thing.”

Knoll savored the shocked look on his face.

“They’re—now? They’re doing it now?!” Noro sputtered.

“Yup. Well, next week. I wanted to be the one to tell you. Congratulations.”

“Wow. I can’t believe…”

They just stared at each other for a long moment, memories dancing across their faces.

Noro spoke first again. “You know, I’ve always envied you, the way you get to walk around and be yourself… I mean—”

“I know what you mean.”

“Everything will be different…”

“Yeah, you get to write that book about the war you’ve always wanted to.”

“Hey, you joke, but I bet a publisher will front me bundles of cash. Just need to get it through the Ministry of Defense classification people and… Wait, how are they going to react… back on Earth?” Noro’s face fell as he remembered. “We had to… take out a couple of them on our way out…”

“How will they react? Poorly, I imagine. Screw them. What are they going to do? Another strongly worded letter? Admiralty is going to hand you your medals in a ceremony. Well…” Knoll waved a hand. “They’re going to do it again, in public this time.”

“Why… now?”

“It’s about time. The war’s over, and the whole business in the Dustball system…” Knoll hesitated for a moment. “The LIA says they’re apparently in a good mood down on Earth. Wave of pardons. Our people. And…”

“The people who helped me get out. Helped… us get over here.”

“Yup. One of them wants to live a normal life without looking over their shoulders, I’m guessing. The spook didn’t tell me shit, but…”

Noro understood immediately. “Right…”

“Well, you know…”

“Yes. The people who helped us—they deserve that chance.” Noro looked thoughtful. “I know a couple guys back there—they sacrificed years of their lives… For all this. All so we could have this. This life. This world. And if this turns out to all be some grounder ruse to lure us into the open so they can blow us all up, eh… that’s just a life I owe them anyway.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. They’re not that creative down in Tallinn… Anyway, that’s why leadership wanted the public ceremony. So they’re not tempted anyway, you know.”

Noro snorted. “If the grounders are in the business of assassinating defectors after so long…”

Knoll pointed a finger at his own face in mock innocence. “I’ll be the first to go?”

“Exactly. The canary in my coal mine. I’ll up my security the day after they find you face down in a septic module.”

“See… that’s why if I ran that operation, I’d make sure to get all of us in one hit. One shot. No chance for any of the roaches to escape.”

Noro shot him a lopsided grin. “Heh, like you said, they aren’t that creative down in Tallinn.”

“I’ve been wrong before. That can be on my tombstone: Knoll, the stupid grounder, he got that last one wrong too.”

“Hah!” Noro chuckled dryly. “Tombstone. At least you’re not like one of those romantics who demand Republic taxpayers spend who knows how much money to scatter their ashes on the Eastern Front.”

“Not at all. I want them to bury me here, standing, facing Earth—”

“Okay, Clemenceau. Buried standing facing Earth for eternity,” Noro muttered. “You know this thing—this whole amnesty thing… It couldn’t have happened three years ago. Not even two years ago. But now… it’s all different. It’s a whole new generation in charge now. Now just on Earth. Here, too. New ships. New officers. New leaders…”

“What you mean to say is… our watch is ending.”

“Is it?” Noro shook his head a long silence later. “Maybe. Anyway, this is all cause for celebration. I have a bottle saved up for this exact occasion—”

“Can’t.”

“What do you mean… can’t?”

“Can’t stay. I’ve got to get down to Armstrong Command in thirty minutes.”

“What are they doing that needs you on this beautiful day?”

“No clue. I’m no longer in the know.” Knoll smiled. “That’s a liberating thought in some ways. It means nothing is my fault anymore.”

“You don’t keep your ears to the ground? Isn’t that why you stay around in Serenity?”

“No, I stay around because I’m still wanted for desertion and war crimes back on Earth, and there’s nowhere else for me to go. I haven’t even gotten any of the security briefings, not since… you know.”

The incident.

“Right. Somehow, I don’t believe you. Admiral Knoll. The Admiral Knoll, out of range of the news.”

Knoll snorted. “It’s true. If the aliens invaded tomorrow, which they might—who the fuck knows? I’ll hear about it the same time everyone else will on the news.”

“Yeah… Yeah. That saying… if the aliens invaded tomorrow… that saying used to be a lot more hypothetical. Now that they’ve… I mean, technically they’ve already invaded Dustball. Which is… sovereign Lunar territory as far as I’m concerned—”

Knoll cut him off. “It’s literally not. You’re listening to those silly podcasts online again, aren’t you? Dustball doesn’t even belong to the grounders.”

“Maybe not,” Noro conceded a moment later. “But… Knoll, aren’t you a little afraid what it means? For Luna?”

“What it means for Luna? What do you mean?”

“Dustball is no garden planet, but like the grounders say now, it’s a lot better than Luna and Mars. For everything. It’s got good gravity. It’s got air. And now, it’s even got water, I hear.”

“So?”

“Don’t you get it? Luna… this isn’t the frontier anymore. The Lunar Dream. What if people start leaving here in droves to go there?”

“Yeah? You think so? Let me ask you something…”

“Sure.”

“How much does a ticket from Serenity to Brussels cost?” Knoll asked.

Noro frowned. “A ticket? Round-trip ticket? One-way?”

“One-way. Say one of those new commercial fast transports with a forty minute injection burn. How much do you think that costs?”

“Depends, first-class or economy?”

“Whichever one gets me there faster.”

“Round-trip ticket is about… five thousand Union dollars. So… a little more than half that?”

“That sounds about right. Almost affordable enough for the annual middle class vacation for the average grounder. But certainly something they can afford at least once in their lives. Now, do you know how much it costs us to send one colonist to Dustball? Eight.”

“Eight thousand dollars? That’s… not as much as I thought… And that’s just now. If we send more, build out the infrastructure a bit, I’m sure prices will come down eventually until—”

Knoll shook his head. “Million. Eight million dollars. That’s not including any additional supplies they might need along the way or what they’re doing when they get there. And that’s a one-way trip. Warp fuel isn’t cheap. Even the aliens don’t do it unless they have to… Dustball is an excellent place to explore, but when it comes to full colonization with millions of colonists? Luna will remain the only game in town for a while. At least another century or two. On the chopping block are our exploration and colonial development plans for Mars, not the Lunar Dream.”

“Like I was saying, that cost will come down some day, right? The Brussels to Serenity flight. That used to be prohibitively expensive too. Only affordable if you were already rich or got one of those government grants. Or if you are a two-star admiral in charge of a Union military school and fake your death.” Noro grinned at his own self-reference.

Knoll tilted his head. “I was a Lieutenant Commander—”

“Yeah, but you’re special. You were in Strategic Planning. For the rest of us, we needed to be the top one percent of the top one percent in our fields to come here. And that’s… all changed. Even just in our lifetime. They’re letting just about anyone come here now. Pretty soon they’ll be talking on the news about the illegal immigration problem down in Vaporum.”

“Illegal immigration?! What did they… hop a train? To the moon?!”

“Visa overstays, dummy.”

“Oh, right.”

“Like you said, a few thousand dollars. The cost of the trip… it’s just not the barrier it used to be. And I bet the same will be true for Dustball one day.”

“That… might be the case,” Knoll conceded after a long moment. “Eventually. Maybe one day the warp trip out to Dustball will become affordable. But no matter what happens, Luna will still be the moon. We will still be the people who built a paradise out of the sands that poison the lungs of our children. In the night sky over our home world. The Lunar Dream isn’t some grandiose hundred-year plan, some fantasy our descendants might see on their deathbeds long after we’re dust. It’s all around us. Look around you. Look at this magnificent city. Not the… landscape. This people with a purpose, a shared identity, a new home among the stars. What our ancestors dreamt for millennia, ever since people looked up in the night sky… We did it. We built this place. You built this place. No new extrasolar colony can ever steal that from us.”

Noro stared at him for a long moment. “That’s… a nice speech, Admiral. And you call me sentimental? You thinking about running for Parliament with that one?”

He leaned back. “Heh. Imagine. The blood-in-the-regolith guys would riot if there was even a hint one of the parties was thinking of putting someone like me on their MP lists. A former Union Navy spacer? Yeah, right.”

“Bah, you were a desk clerk. And you defected early; that makes you one of the good ones. Besides, we both know that isn’t the actual reason they hate you.”

They both just silently stared at each other awkwardly at the mention of that.

Knoll never talked about it. But he was just that kind of a man.

From Noro’s complicated expression, it was obvious he was inviting Knoll to speak. To say something in his own defense. Something that he didn’t say in the official hearings after. Or maybe apologize, or to say it was all just a big mistake.

He didn’t.

As usual, Noro didn’t insist. He picked up his forgotten sandwich, took a bite, looked away, and he said, “Well… maybe it’s the former defector thing. You’d just need to remind them you fought on our side during the war.”

Knoll shook his head severely, glad for the opportunity for deflection. “No, no. You’re thinking about this all logically. That’s not how any of this whole bigotry thing works. I mean, look at these lunoid children. They’ve got a culture half a generation old, and they’re already learning how to hold grudges. It’s almost cute—”

“But hey, you’re a war hero. They’ll like that. How many grounders have you killed lately, fellow blood-in-the-regolith voter? Check out these intercepted Union Navy casualty lists. Oh, they’ll definitely like that.”

“Former war hero. Not much use for people like us anymore since, you know, the war’s over and all that.”

They looked at each other for a moment, and they both simultaneously said, out of reflex, “Huh. Could have fooled me.”

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Hsien raised his arm to wave at Director Clara Powell, signaling that he was ready.

The Union bureaucrat grabbed a soda from the fridge, waved cheerily at the cameras to confirm her identity for payment, and returned to his table. “Ready to talk now?”

“How did you find me? Why come for me now? This was a long time ago—”

“I believe I’m the one who’s supposed to be asking the questions,” she said dryly.

“Right.”

The director tapped on her datapad as she sat down. “Alright, let’s—let’s start over. Let’s just get some things straightened out, alright? In ‘54, you were contacted by an individual in the Lunar Intelligence Agency, which at the time was just run as the Lunar Alliance Trade Information Office. Can you identify this person?”

Hsien shook his head. “No. It was all online… But it wasn’t an individual. There were two different people. Two, at least.”

“Two individuals?”

“The first person who recruited me, and the second person who took delivery of the information. It was all one account that contacted me, and they didn’t tell me it was two different people, but it was pretty obvious. The first person—the recruiter was totally clueless about what she was looking for, and I assume they brought on someone who had the technical knowledge to ask the right questions later.”

“She?”

“I don’t know. They might have used a voice changer. I always just assumed based on their avatar…”

“Oh? What avatar?”

“It was just… you know, the default—It was really a long time ago.”

“I see. No physical contact?”

“No.”

“Not even a dead-drop? Physical mail? Location to report to if things go wrong?”

“Never. It was all purely online.”

Clara looked only mildly disappointed. “That’s what we figured. And in exchange for the spying, they offered you—let me guess.” Clara counted off to four on her fingers. “M-I-C-E. Money, ideology, compromise, and ego. You don’t seem particularly concerned about Lunar liberation ideology to me. No weird girlfriends in all the years we had you under surveillance, no drug habits, no gambling debts, and you seem humble enough to me. Which narrows it down to… how much money did they offer you?”

“Ten million dollars, up front.”

“Whew.” She whistled. “I wish someone offered me ten million dollars for my job.”

“Wasn’t there like a half billion dollar bounty on your head during the war—right, you’re asking the questions.”

“Eh. That was the war. We’re all good friends now, the moonies and us. So… ten million dollars. Where did all that money go?” Clara looked Hsien up and down. “No offense, but that doesn’t look like an expensive t-shirt or khakis. You drive a commuter Corona when you’re not walking or taking the transit. And your house is a two story townhouse with street parking in the Taipei suburbs. Upper-middle class, but nothing out of the ordinary for someone whose family has been here for generations, not to mention the lead engineer at a multi-national chip fabrication firm with Union contracts.”

“I didn’t take the money they offered. It was tempting. It was ten million dollars… but I said no.”

She looked at him for a long moment. “You know you have to tell me the truth to get the immunity, right? The full truth.”

“I’m telling you the truth. A couple weeks later, they called again. They offered me something else.”

“What?”

“Twenty years.” Hsien’s voice turned softer. “Twenty more years with my father.”

She swiped on her datapad. “Your father… died a few years ago at… age 82. My condolences. Looks like a full life cut short by… complications from secondary motor neuron disease?”

“ALS. A full life cut short… Heh.” Hsien smiled. “He had ALS and he was 82. Do you know what they used to call that? They used to call that a miracle.”

“The moonies offered to pay to treat him if you gave them the chip?”

“No. I could already afford the best doctors in the world. His prognosis was about twenty years with treatment. The moonies offered an experimental drug to hold off the symptoms, early onset dementia and all that. So he could still remember, still move around and… live life. It worked until a few weeks before he passed. Twenty more years with him. I never thought—so I guess that’s what my… price is.”

“I see. Again, my condolences for your loss. I’m sorry to bring this up…” The spymaster didn’t look all that sorry, but Hsien appreciated the effort she made at pretending anyway. “But how did the moonies pass you the drugs?”

“I’m not sure. One day, my father was in a wheelchair; the next morning, he could stand up and walk with a cane; within a week, he didn’t even need the cane. Doctors said his body was strong, said he was fighting the disease with the experimental drugs we were giving him. Even I almost believed it. But… it was literally the morning after I accepted the deal, so… I figured.” Hsien shrugged. “They fulfilled their end of our deal, as far as I was concerned. As for how, I didn’t ask that many questions. I doubt his doctor had anything to do with it; I always assumed they just… had a whole drug smuggling network running in the hospital system and some nurse fed it into his IV. You know… like they do in the movies. After that, I just gave them what they wanted.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “They’re real persuasive that way… Just how much of the Stomachion chip design did you hand over?”

“None.”

“What?!”

“None of it. We had strict controls at work. I tried, but I swear I couldn’t figure out how to disable the software alerts. After a couple attempts, they told me to stop trying because it was too risky. I offered to copy my part of the designs from memory, but they didn’t seem particularly interested in that. I gave them some technical design ideas we discussed during the prototyping phase, but those didn’t pan out anyway. And they asked me a few questions about how we solved certain issues; chip cooling, I think. But that wasn’t even a big secret; I mean, the hard stuff was all eventually published anyway. No, the moonies were far more interested in something else.”

“What were they looking for?”

“My team. The people I worked with. They just wanted their biographies and my assessment of them. Resumes, performance reviews, that kind of thing. I figured that wouldn’t hurt anyone, so I gave them that…”

“Wait, what?! Your team?”

“Yeah. In hindsight, I don’t think they cared about the chip technology all that much. But within two years of contacting me, they hired away my best people—six of my bright young engineers, both of the managers I could tolerate, and three members of our technical writing team. All of them went up to Serenity infected with the Lunar Dream when the economic recession struck.”

“Was that… it? What else did they want?”

“What else did they want? Nothing. When my best people all left, I knew the boat was taking on water, so I retired a couple years early to spend time with my dad. Fishing and hiking, mostly. They didn’t bother me much after that. Oh, uh, they had someone call me to express condolences when my dad passed. That’s… about it. Yeah, that’s it.”

Clara dimmed her datapad and put it down on the table. “And you’re sure… that’s it? Remember, your immunity deal only covers what you admit to—”

“That’s it. I’m sure. I’m not a spy. All I wanted—I just… I just wanted a few more years with my father. That’s all. Just… an ordinary citizen…”

She gave Hsien a long look and sighed. “Yeah, that’s… how… most spies are.”

“If I went back in time…”

“You’d do it again? Yeah, I figured.” She smiled wryly. “Especially with the moonies. Like I said, they… they’re good at pushing people’s buttons that way.”

“How did you… find out?”

Hsien wasn’t sure if the director would answer, or if she’d call him out for asking another question. A few seconds later, she shrugged. “A defector. They mistakenly deported a child during the war. Non-essential personnel. Turned out the girl was illegitimate, which is why it wasn’t on their records that daddy was a Lunar Alliance official. The ship was in low Earth by the time he figured it out. And unfortunately, his daughter’s body started rejecting the gravity drugs after a couple months in a refugee camp.”

“So you… sent her back?”

“Kicked her to the front of the return queue when daddy helped us out and made it look like a data error… He gave us a list of engineers who’d spied for them. Your name was on it. We… found your failed attempts to smuggle out the chip designs, which is like… five years in prison, parole in six months? Not the big break we thought we’d get. Then, we thought maybe you’d help us dig out the wider moonie recruitment network, so we put surveillance on you for a few years but found nothing. Our agents got a lot of fishing and hiking done on the taxpayer’s dime though, so I guess there’s that.”

“And the defector?”

“Hm? The defector?”

“The Lunar Alliance official who told you about me. What happened to him?”

“Oh. He disappeared after his daughter went back. There was an ongoing war. Probably got caught. Executed, or in some secret Lunar prison, or maybe just a new name after a tough debrief. Who knows? Maybe we’ll find out in a few years.”

“So… why now? Why… all this now?”

“We’re closing the books on the moonies. The war’s over,” she said lightly. “Haven’t you heard?”

It was over a few years ago.

“And… that’s… it?”

“That’s it. Don’t commit any more crimes, pay your taxes on time, and yeah… that’s it. I mean… you’re not going to get approved for a security clearance anytime soon, but you are free to live your life without looking over your shoulders for someone like me.”

“You’ll stop… watching me?”

She grinned. “I didn’t say that.”

Hsien sighed. “I assume your computers and digital intelligences at the OMI will still be monitoring me.”

“Yeah, but don’t take that too personally. They’re monitoring everyone all the time.”

“I… see.”

“But they probably won’t be watching you any more… than usual. You’re off the hook as far as I’m concerned.”

“Mind if I ask… why?”

“Why what?”

“Just… why all this?”

“Eh. We were spending all our efforts and resources on keeping close tabs on people like you. But now, we’ve got other, bigger fish to fry.”

“People like me? So you’re going around and—”

“Well, not all of them get a personal visit from the director of the OMI, but we’ve been handing out immunity deals like candy the last couple weeks. Like I said, we’re closing the books on the moonies.”

“Do they… know about this? The moonies, I mean.”

“Oh, I imagine so.” Clara turned her body and pointed at one of the many cameras sitting innocently near the ceiling corners of the convenience store. “This convenience store chain is a subsidiary of a Lunar corporation with close connections to the Lunar Intelligence Agency.”

His eyes shot to the cameras. “What?! This—this store is a front?!”

“Mob fronts don’t usually earn billions in clean, auditable profits every year, but… yes, in exactly the way you think. They were sanctioned during the war, but… like I said, war’s over.”

“They’re listening to us right now?!” Hsien whispered in a lower voice.

“The cameras aren’t that good. Probably. They’re mainly for detecting what you grab off the shelves to charge you with; I don’t know if they’re good enough for lipreading… But I’m sure they’re good enough for the moonies to flag that the Director of the OMI visited for… this. Bah. Don’t worry, they’re doing the same to our collaborators up on Luna…”

“Wait, isn’t that—”

“Of course, we’re not coordinating with them or anything.”

“Why not?”

“Any non-treaty cooperation with the moonies is still subject to Union Assembly approval. So… if we were coordinating this move with them, hypothetically speaking, that would be illegal. Treason, even.”

“I thought you said treason wasn’t a real crime in the Union—”

She winked. “Hey, you’re catching on… Anyway, if you’d like, you can think of it as… like one of those prisoner swaps. Except you know… we’re not allowed to communicate, officially. So we just put one on the table, they put one on the table, and what happens… happens.”

“One for one?”

“More or less.”

“You’re letting bygones be bygones… just to save surveillance resources?” Hsien asked skeptically.

“It’s more than the monetary cost of paying a team to follow you around, Dr. Hsien.” Clara grabbed the newspaper and leafed through the pages until she found what she was looking for. She pointed at the page. “You know this classic puzzle game?”

Hsien squinted at the newspaper, at a nine-by-nine grid with numbers sprinkled throughout. “Yeah… Sudoku?”

“Yup. You complete it by filling in all these squares with numbers. The rows and columns—the numbers in them affect what can be in other rows and columns. Sometimes, you discover a number, you fill it in, and it means very little. It turns out it’s just one more square. But there’s always a moment in every puzzle where you fill in a number, and it’s like the whole solution is laid out for you right then and there. The more squares you fill in, the easier the puzzle becomes, and the closer you get to that moment where you have your answer. That… is what military intelligence is like. Maybe the key to the entire puzzle is some old engineer who sent the moonies biographical data some twenty years ago. Maybe it’s not. All we can do is keep collecting data points.”

“Uh-huh. So what’s the puzzle?”

Clara grinned at him for a long heartbeat. Then, she looked out the full length window at the city outside. Then up, into the dawning sky. “That… is the question, isn’t it? Have a wonderful life, doctor.”

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Shachos was overjoyed to see her. He really was. She could tell by his facial colorings. There was a shade of color between red and orange that was not just funny, but genuine happiness. It was subtle, but she was beginning to get better at the whole face color reading thing.

“Yes, yes, thank you, Fleet Master Shachos. I, too, am glad I did not get murdered by a Karnolian death squad,” she said dryly.

“Ahahahahahah! You are funny as ever. Funnier than before, maybe. I am glad you have not lost your sense of humor. Yes, very glad! That would have been a tragedy for the galaxy. A monumental loss. Yes, it would have been.”

“Right. Anyway, I have to tell you something. A secret before the general meeting, with the other negotiators.”

“A secret? A secret?!” he exclaimed, then lowered his voice as if afraid of someone listening in on them. “Is it a… funny secret? A private joke?”

“It’s very serious.”

His face fell to light blue in disappointment. “Oh. A serious secret. I hate serious secrets. Hate them. But life is a balance. Where there is humor, there must also be the serious. Yes, there must be balance.”

“Yeah, you’ve said. Alright, remember that time you shared your species’ intelligence with us? When you said the Karnolians might try something?”

“Yes, I remember.” His face remained unpleasantly blue. “But that was not what I expected. I did not expect them to try to attack you. That is a very serious matter. Very serious indeed. Is that why you called this general meeting today? To announce that you have decided you want us to expel them from the star system? We can do that. We can do that very easily. This is our territory. They must leave when we tell them to. And if they do not… it will be funny for us and not for them.”

“No, no. Not about that. I’m returning the favor from before. When you shared that intelligence with us.”

“Oh, it was not a big favor. A small favor. Not a big deal. Not a big deal at all. It is not necessary for your people—”

“I need to share with you some very critical intelligence about the Karnolians: they are planning to attack your species.”

Shachos wavered between yellow and blue. Confusion and distress. “Karnolians? Attack—attack us? Is this—is this a joke? Attack us where?”

Julia shook her head. “Not a joke at all. Very serious. As for where… it’s everywhere. General invasion. They’ve been preparing for a war with your people for more than five years. Shachos, listen… have you seen other indications of this?”

Shachos looked… between relieved and confused. She realized after a second that it was denial.

“Ehehehe? You mean their threats to us? Gah, I woke up on the wrong side of my bed, war it is! Bahahaha! They always say that. They’ve said that for centuries. Many centuries. That is who they are. It is… part of them. We do not like it. Some in our people find humor in it, but I do not personally enjoy such jokes about violence and death. It is unpleasant for me to consider. But… we do not get to pick our neighbors. Just like you do not get to pick your neighbors. Hehehe, remember your people’s joke—”

“No, no. This is different,” Julia insisted. “The Karnolians are actually going to do it this time. They’ve stopped fighting each other. They’ve been training. They’ve been stockpiling. This is the most serious matter, not just for me, but for your entire species.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “You believe this to be true and serious. You do.”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“You—you’re going to have to trust me, Shachos. We know it to be true. We are certain.”

“That last part is not true,” Shachos said, examining her face. “You are uncertain. A little uncertain at least. Maybe very uncertain.”

Dammit. Stupid walking lie detector.

“Well, we think it’s true. That’s why I asked you, have your people seen indications they are preparing for war?”

“Julia, I think you are sincere. Yes, you are. But you do not know them as well as we do. They are Karnolians. Karnolians! Yes, they are preparing for war. They are always preparing for war. Always. We have known them for hundreds of years, and the only time they are not preparing for war is when they are already at war! That is simply who they are. That is what they do. That is not out of place. Not at all!”

Julia couldn’t get Shachos to believe her.

But she tried.

Who knows? Maybe he’ll take it back to his people, and someone will look into it.

She tried until Harry entered the room. “XO?”

He looked at Shachos and gave him a wink. “Commodore. The other alien representatives are here. Are you ready?”

She took a deep breath. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Karveth, Grobret, and Glonk were waiting for them in the colony’s conference room. They looked unhappy to see her walk in with Shachos.

Extremely unhappy.

Well, Karveth looked unhappy, but he always looked unhappy. Grobret was just excited to be there to support him in his unhappiness, it seemed. And Glonk was swimming around in his water tank more than usual. There was some pattern to it, she could tell. One day, humanity would figure out their body language from the way they swam.

Or maybe she’d ask Shachos.

They probably all think I’ve already made a deal with Shachos.

Glonk spoke first when she sat down.

Gluuuub gluuuub gloooob? “What is the occasion for this emergency meeting, human?”

“There’s been an unpleasant development,” she announced.

Karveth looked more glum than ever.

Let’s turn that frown… well, not upside down, but into an even bigger frown.

Julia continued, “Our colony was attacked this week. By Karnolians—by the Karnolians. They killed and severely injured several of my people. They also caused terrible damage to our buildings and facilities. This unacceptable violence demands a response.”

The Karnolians didn’t even bother to protest. Shachos, on the other hand, was looking down gleefully at Karveth like Christmas came early.

Shreeeev vlooooom bloooop. “Hm… Which Karnolian faction is responsible? There are many of them.”

“Karnolian Faction Dark Blue. But they had help…” Julia fixed her eyes on Karveth, watching for his reaction. “From Faction Red. And possibly others.”

He finally did react. “Lies! Your conspiracy with the clowns ends today. War it is!”

Denial, then.

Just not a very convincing one.

“No more conspiracy! War it is!” Even Grobret’s obligatory concurrence sounded half-hearted.

“We have evidence,” Julia said simply.

Gloooom bloooop fweeeeeep? “What kind of evidence?”

“Very strong evidence. We are certain of this.”

Shachos added helpfully, “She is telling the truth. I have seen some of the evidence. Yes, I have. She showed me. Karveth’s ship helped with the attack on the humans. Yes, they did. It is certain! Overwhelming evidence. So much of it!”

Which was a total lie. She showed him nothing of the sort. But hey, he was backing her up, so she allowed it.

“Glonk, you see? The clowns and the primitives are conspiring!” Karveth said, making his appeal to the aquarium. “They are coordinating their lies!”

“Coordinated lies!”

Dreeeeb gloooom fweep. “Julia, show us the proof. I won’t just take Shachos’s word for it that you have some.”

“Fine,” Julia said as she called up a slide deck on the room’s main screen. It showed a dead Karnolian with a big hole in his head and his right paw missing. “This was Six Claws Klarnoth. Faction Dark Blue. Squad leader.”

Another dead Karnolian. Or more precisely, the remnants of a piece of burnt out Karnolian battle armor. The actual organic remains were not identifiable. That was one of the side effects of being smeared into the pavement by an anti-tank missile. “This was Four Claws Marnave. Faction Dark Blue. Small team leader.”

A piece of a helmet. The Viper anti-tank missiles really didn’t leave much for Marcus’s marines to collect. “This was Three Claws Gremone. Faction Dark Blue. Small team leader.”

Next slide. This time it wasn’t a piece of Karnolian battle armor. Rather, it was a part of the permanent Dustball landscape now. A silhouette in the glass. “This was a Karnolian stealth landing shuttle. You can see the global coordinates of this scene on the screen. We also have live footage of it in action.”

Back to pieces of broken Karnolian armor. “Three Claws, unidentified. Faction Dark Blue. Line marine. And we don’t just have pictures and videos of them kidnapping and killing our people. We can produce the physical bodies if you don’t believe us. Anyway, do we really need to show more? We can send this all to you digitally.”

Karveth stood up, pounding the table triumphantly. “Aha! See? You don’t actually have evidence of our involvement! You have a bunch of dead marines from a rogue faction in our species that we have absolutely nothing to do with.”

Grobret nodded earnestly in agreement. “Nothing to do with us, whatsoever!”

Shloooosh fweeeeeem gluuuub. “That is true, human. These are all Faction Dark Blue, not Faction Red. That is not the same color. Thus, not the same faction. Can we see the specific evidence you used to come to the conclusion that Karveth’s Faction Red was involved?”

The joys of plausible deniability. This game isn’t alien at all.

Julia shook her head. “It is of a sensitive nature. I only showed Shachos because I trusted he would not share it with the Karnolians. I don’t know your species that well, Glonk, but as you’ve admitted, you have a strong relationship with some of their factions, and that is concerning to us.”

Gluuuub gloooom gluuuub. “So you are siding with the Vorshniks, then? You’ve made a deal with them on the Precursor—Dustballium?”

“No. Not yet. That is unrelated. Today, we are just talking about this attack. All we want here today is the truth from the Karnolians. Karveth, I’ll give you a chance to do the right thing. Tell the galaxy the truth. Tell everyone here your faction hired those goons to attack my colony, and pay fair compensation for this aggression.”

“We did not!” He thumped his foot.

Grobret joined his stomping a second later. “Not true at all!”

Julia rolled her eyes. “Your faction is not working with Faction Dark Blue?”

“Absolutely not! No way! Those are lies!”

“Human lies!”

“Alright. Fine. Have it your way,” Julia said. She took a deep breath. “The reason I am certain, is that Six Claws Klarnoth told us. He’s the dead marine squad leader in the first picture. When he took us hostage, he explained your plan to us. How you paid Faction Dark Blue to take the colony and exchange us for the Dustballium factory. And if that didn’t work, you would be okay with it if we sabotaged the machines too, because you don’t want the other two species to get it.”

“Lies! Lies! Lies! Lies!” Karveth protested, pounding the table in rhythm with his yelling.

“She is lying! Don’t believe her, Glonk!”

Technically, yes, but so are you.

Glonk swam more. More uncertainty.

Meeeep greeeeeng vlooooom? “Do you have… any evidence for this, Julia?”

She stared right back into his water, continuing her bluff. “I saw and heard it myself.”

Shreeeep gloooom. “Well, your word is worth more to me than Shachos’s but…”

“I’m not finished. When we broke free of the Karnolian invaders, I used this information to my advantage. We looked for outgoing communications from his battlecruiser in orbit. And with some luck, that’s how we discovered the location of their stealth shuttle and destroyed it. How else could we have found it with our obsolete, primitive weapons? And how else did it get into this system without a warp-capable carrier? It is the only logical inference.”

Shachos would know she was partially lying. She prayed that he kept it to himself. This was mostly for Glonk.

Her prayers were answered a second later when Shachos gleefully piled on with his own disinformation. “Yes, yes! We observed them doing all this! We can provide you the complete reconnaissance data logs! Yes we can!”

Glonk swam restlessly in his tank for a long moment. He would be aware of the massive chain-of-custody issues with whatever logs Shachos could cook up, but this was a lot of circumstantial evidence all adding up…

Greeeeep fweeeeeem vlooooom. “Karveth, her information appears to match up. And the shuttle is yours. We sold that low observability frame design to Faction Red about ten years ago and nobody else. Everyone in the galaxy knows that. Logically, such an attack must have occurred with your knowledge, at least. How do you explain the shuttle?”

The table pounding continued in unison. “Lies! Lies! Lies! Lies!”

Bloooop shloooob. “That is not a very convincing denial, Karveth.”

Julia nodded solemnly and took another deep breath.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

“As such, I am concluding that Karveth and the Karnolians from Faction Red have not been negotiating with us in good faith. They have been abusing and mocking our trust as hosts here, the trust of the Vorshniks for allowing his ship into their territory, and the trust of all of us negotiating here at this table.”

Dloooob gloooom greeeeeng. “Given the circumstances, and pending a full unbiased investigation from an independent party, that is… a reasonable public statement. We can agree to that.”

Shachos was a happy orange. “Yes, yes. They have been very bad faith. The worst! You heard her. Karveth, you, and your lackey, and your ship are no longer welcome here in our territory. We will escort you out of this system as soon as we are done—”

Julia interrupted him. “And that… is why I am placing you under arrest, Trader Karveth. Marines, take him into custody.”

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Granitz had seen a lot before, but this one was new.

That was saying something, really. During his seventeen years in the Karnolian Alien Legion, Granitz had shared barracks with numerous colorful characters of all sizes and shapes, from any background but usually the least savory kinds. The Legion did not ask many questions. It simply didn’t bother to.

The Karnolian Alien Legion was an innovation that only the Karnolians could possibly think they would need. They had a hundred factions, each with their own fleets and marine units. They had a species-wide Karnolian Navy that expanded or shrank based on the collective needs of the most powerful factions in control. They had a Karnolia Home Fleet that was ostensibly for guarding the home planet against political influence. Each of the factional fleets sometimes had sub-factional fleets, each with their own independent command structures.

A few centuries ago, some influential Karnolian leader looked at all that and said “yes, I know exactly what you are thinking, we need another.” But all the fleets and ground units had already drawn from every level of Karnolian society that they could.

So they raised a unit of aliens, mostly residents from planets occupied by various Karnolian factions. The officers were loyal Karnolians, of course, but the grunts and trigger-pullers were not.

At first, that raised some doubts. Lots of doubts. These aliens couldn’t be trusted to be loyal to the Karnolian cause. But what was the Karnolian cause? The Karnolians couldn’t agree on that. Of course not. Over time, these non-Karnolians in Karnolian service brought about a certain quality that Karnolian leaders didn’t know they needed at the time: reliability.

No, not actual reliability. Political reliability.

They were exactly what they said on the packaging. Aliens. These non-Karnolian units could be trusted to be people who couldn’t be trusted. In other words… you couldn’t be betrayed by people you never expected to be loyal, and these alien units perfectly filled that niche in the Karnolian pecking order.

So more factions raised their own alien units, and the units became bigger and badder, until one day, the Karnolian faction leaders sobered up and realized exactly where this was heading: all this aliens fighting your battles business—it was becoming an arms race of factions outsourcing the very purpose of what it meant to be Karnolian. It was the path of destruction of the species, and it had to stop.

Well, not like stop stop.

Just… controlled better.

So all alien units were re-organized, combined into one Karnolian Alien Legion. It had no specific allegiance to any single faction or any other fleet. And since they were going to be subjected to the distrust of all the other fleets and units in Karnolian service, there was no worry that this new unit among many would pose an internal security issue.

That attitude flowed downwards. No matter how hard the Karnolian Alien Legion tried to run recruitment campaigns to entice the elites of the alien worlds they’d occupied, everyone knew what they were looking for: cannon fodder. And that was exactly what they took.

Exiles. Refugees. Debtors. Criminals whose offenses were serious enough. Anyone capable of signing—or otherwise indicating consent to—a standard employment contract could apply.

Granitz sat on a creaky stool, attempting to decide which category the creature standing before him belonged to.

The creature spoke. “Is this… the place?”

The room had originally been designed as a cargo-storage compartment. Like most facilities assigned to the Legion, it had been converted with the goal of spending as few resources as physically possible. Bare conduits ran across the ceiling. One of the wall panels had been removed three months ago and never replaced. Stolen, probably. The ventilation system produced a rhythmic clicking sound. That was totally normal for this model, the quartermaster insisted.

There was a recruitment banner hung crookedly over his head.

Karnolian Alien Legion. Service for pay. Inquire about factional citizenship benefits.

The newcomer was short, barely reaching the middle of Granitz’s upper torso, and it possessed only two arms. Its skin was a muted pinkish-brown. A patch of dark fur covered the top and back of its head. Its body was wrapped in fabric, with no visible environmental apparatus or mechanical support frame—that was a good sign, at least. A small pack rested beside its feet.

Apparently, the newcomer had the same thought as the one that popped into Granitz’s head. They just vocalized it first. “Huh, you’re… a new one.”

Granitz straightened and squinted at it. “By the God of Battle, what manner of creature are you?!”

“Human, of course,” it said. “And you’re… Vorshnik?”

Granitz glanced down at himself.

What else can I be?

“Only on the outside,” he replied.

The human looked at him for another moment, evidently unsure whether that had been a joke. Granitz wished he knew too.

“I didn’t know they allowed your kind in here,” the human observed.

Granitz’s scalp shifted light blue in mild annoyance. “I could say the same thing about you. But this is the Karnolian Alien Legion. We accept everyone.” He recited the line from memory, gesturing with his upper pair of arms. “Big or small. Four arms or two. Primitive or cultured. Strong or…”

He looked the human up and down.

The creature did not appear weak, exactly. Its proportions were compact, with dense musculature around its shoulders and legs, but without the assistance of powered armor it would have been physically unimpressive next to most Legion species. It was larger than an average Karnolian—he gave the human that, but everyone was larger than an average Karnolian. Nobody would actually say that out loud, but that was the whole point of this alien legion thing; they weren’t going around recruiting physically inferior creatures. Standards were low, but not that low.

Granitz cleared his throat. “As long as you are strong enough to lift a service rifle without the assistance of powered armor. Can you?”

“Probably.”

“Probably? You have shot a rifle before, right?”

The human shrugged. “Once or twice.”

Granitz did not like ambiguous answers. He picked up his datapad and opened the recruit’s file.

The document was extremely thin. The human’s species had entered the registry less than two local years earlier. Their home system lay well beyond the established faction borders, outside Karnolian treaty space entirely. There were no recognized territorial claims attached to the species, no colonies outside its home system, and no notable military engagements in the interstellar databases.

Ah, one of those species.

Granitz scrolled further. “Hm. Okay, looks like your species invented firearm technology… recently.”

“Five hundred years is recent, huh?”

“Recent enough. Anyway…” Granitz continued. “Do you have a name, or is your species one of those where you use numbers, or scent combinations, or—”

The human made a nonsensical sound, but at least it was a sound. “I’m John.”

Granitz entered it phonetically into the datapad. “John… I’m Granitz, by the way.”

“Platoon Leader Granitz.” John pointed one of his appendages toward the rank badge fastened across Granitz’s uniform. “As it says.”

Granitz looked down at the strip. Apparently, the human had learned the ranks already.

Good.

Granitz went down the checklist. “Have you any formal military training, John?”

The human paused, but only barely. “No, Platoon Leader.”

“No? That’s too bad. We will have to run you through the training program.” He made a note of it in the datapad. “The cost for that will come out of your first paycheck.”

John tilted his head. “How much?”

“Sixty.”

“Sixty… I’m sorry, I don’t really have a reference. I’m new to your money…”

Ah, one of those species.

“Sixty Karnolian dollars. It’s about a tenth of your paycheck.”

Granitz waited for the outrage to come. That was rather common.

Some recruits would accuse the Legion of theft. Others demanded to know why an interstellar military organization could not afford to pay to train its own soldiers. In his fond memory, a particularly indignant Savkin recruit had attempted to eat the contract in front of him when she found out.

John merely nodded calmly. “Oh. Okay.”

He was probably just slow.

“We’ll teach you to take cover, shoot your rifle, and use the radio,” Granitz explained. “Don’t worry. It’s worth it. Keeps you alive long enough to collect your paycheck in the first place.”

“Fine by me.”

Granitz filed an additional note into his datapad.

Compliant. Possibly does not understand contract.

John simply stared at his face for several seconds as he typed.

Granitz shifted in his chair. “Is there a problem?”

“I don’t know. You’re kind of odd for a Vorshnik.”

His facial coloring shifted to orange for mild amusement. “Have you met many of us?”

“No. Only heard.”

“What have you heard?”

“That you guys never stop talking and joking.”

“Well… there’s a reason I’m out here and not with my people.” Granitz looked away. It was an accurate stereotype. Vorshniks were supposed to love pranks and humor. “Such is life.”

He studied the human again. There were no family emblems, religious markers, or factional affiliations displayed anywhere on his body. His pack was small enough that he could not have brought many personal belongings. Most recruits arrived carrying everything they owned. John appeared to have arrived carrying only what he needed for today, possibly not even that.

That was a good sign. Or a very, very bad sign; maybe his species was just terrible at long-term planning.

“If you are here,” Granitz continued, “I suspect you are in a similar circumstance in your life.”

John sighed wearily. “Sounds about right. So… bootcamp, huh? Where do I start?”

Granitz raised two limbs. “First, before your paws can touch a firearm, there are five rules I must teach you.”

“What’s the fifth?”

“Hm?”

“Never mind. What are your rules?”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

“You heard him.”

“I mean… they always say that. The bad jokes end today. War it is!” Julia mimicked.

Samira shook her head adamantly. “No, no. This is specific. I think they mean it this time. Our prisoner—his entire unit hasn’t been on mission in five years, because their faction hasn’t been at war in five years. In fact, none of them have been.”

“Is that—is that a long time for them?”

Samira nodded. “Incredibly so, apparently. There are still some small-scale conflicts and incidents between the factions. But it’s been a while since they’ve been at war. And… he says, everyone knows: it’s because they’re stockpiling. They’re all stockpiling. At least that’s what he says.”

“For—stockpiling for a bigger inter-factional war?”

“No. He insists it’s just for that general invasion, against the Vorshniks.”

“Even if he thinks he’s telling the truth, this Garbote is just a random low-ranking soldier. He can’t possibly know that.”

“Garbote is the equivalent of one of our tier one operators. Or tier two. That’s who you send to take out a priority objective like an alien metal foundry. For those guys, training is everything. These troops live and die by their expensive training. And the training you do to fight a factional war, against other people in your own species… is very, very different from the kind you do to prepare to invade alien planets. And guess which kind of training they’ve been doing.”

“I mean—that’s—that’s interesting, but maybe he’s pretending to break? Feeding us false intel while pretending to be… drunk and broken by your abomination of an interrogation machine?” Julia speculated. “I know it supposedly works against humans, but he’s not human.”

“That’s… a possibility. Dr. Wrona says that the machine could tell he’s lying from the first time he told us our food didn’t taste good… Anyway, given the massive implications, we should also consider the possibility the prisoner is telling the truth.”

“We should consider all threats proportionally to their danger and probability—”

“Let me pose a hypothetical scenario. Imagine you’re a Karnolian faction leader. You’ve consolidated the other factions under your tentative control. You’ve decided that it’s time for war with your hated neighbors, for real this time. Maybe because you genuinely hate them, maybe because you need an excuse to retain internal control. Whatever it is, you prepare for a war, for years. You train. You stockpile. You buy equipment from your more advanced neighbor. Then, suddenly, a new species appears in your neighbor’s territory. They find artifacts from an ancient civilization, artifacts that could give them a massive military advantage in war. What do you do?”

Julia nodded. “Right. You try to seize it, before your neighbors can obtain it for themselves.”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah, but their attack on our colony could also be explained by… greedy aliens being greedy. A much simpler explanation, really.”

“Think about it a little more. What would compel you to do that in the middle of negotiations though? It wasn’t going great for them, but no one had signed a deal yet, and we were signaling that we wanted a multi-species deal that likely would have gotten everyone walking away with something. Why not wait until after to decide?” Samira asked.

“If they had, maybe they’re afraid the Sonckles and the Vorshniks would defend us if they tried something nasty?”

“No. Whether those two species would have abided by their seizure of the factory didn’t depend on whether they’d secured a defense deal with us or not. What is actually happening is… the Karnolians wanted it for themselves, yes, but if they couldn’t get it, having us sabotage the machines would have been a second-best scenario for them.”

Julia tried to wrap her head around the idea, putting herself in the paws of the murder teddies. She said slowly, “Yes… because assuming you’re right, if the Dustballium factory is off the table, then they can at least proceed with their original war plan without worrying about it as a complication. Under your theory.”

“Exactly. They just didn’t expect to lose both their Plan A and Plan B forces together. It explains everything else. Why they used a stealth shuttle, a novel piece of technology that Shachos’s ship didn’t detect, against a colony of what they see as primitives. It fits.”

“Let’s say that’s true. What you’re saying is we just stumbled into the middle of an ongoing five year plan that would have kick started a war between the Karnolians and Vorshniks, two species that haven’t fought for centuries. That seems… rather coincidental.”

“The vast galaxy is full of coincidences. And this is the only explanation that properly accounts for all the facts we know,” Samira said. “And consider the possibility that our entry into the known galaxy delayed their planning somehow, especially once they learned about the Dustballium mine.”

“Or the damn truth serum machine doesn’t work, and our prisoner’s lying to us. There’s always that.”

“Sure.” Her voice made it sound like she didn’t believe that was a strong possibility. “I mean… you should watch the full tape and not just the summary.”

Then again, it’s coincidences all the way down on both possibilities.

Julia shrugged. “Again, let’s say that is all true. Surely the Vorshniks would see signs of them preparing for war.”

Samira tilted her head. “They did. They told you that the Karnolians were up to no good.”

“Yeah, he said it was a moderately serious threat, I think? Like they might try something sneaky at the negotiations. I took that to mean maybe they’d try something like… send a drone into the factory to take pictures, which I was sure was them. I didn’t expect them to try to attack and take our colony hostage! What you’re saying is a whole another step above that! You’re talking about interstellar war, against a species that’s their match in military strength!”

Samira paused for a long moment before she continued. “I think… the Vorshnik don’t know what’s really happening.”

Julia looked at her incredulously. “You think Shachos and their entire intelligence apparatus… they’re all just jokers? They’re a multi-planetary species and a major power in this part of the galaxy. I think the more likely possibility is that they know something we don’t. Or again, maybe the prisoner’s lying.”

Samira took a deep breath, as if she was about to say something. She stopped and exhaled. She thought for a long moment, then she asked, “What’s your impression of Botswana, Commodore?”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

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“Uh… sure. What—what do you do around here, Samira?”

“Project management, mostly. Planning, resource allocation, putting the right people in the right place at the right time,” she replied earnestly. “Sounds trivial, and on some days it is… Our people have gotten so used to working with each other that I’m mostly unnecessary now except in special circumstances, which gives me extra time to make new friends, like today… Anyway, that was the kind of stuff I did before Dustball too, after my Navy service, so it all came naturally.”

“You were in your navy?! You served your faction? On a ship?” Garbote supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised, but he’d seen his fair share of spacers, and the woman in front of him didn’t seem nor sound like the type…

She smiled at the memory. “Yeah, I was stationed on a warship for a while. It was… kind of crazy whenever I think back on it.”

“On board a warship?” he asked, wide-eyed. Garbote had been on a warship too, but it was mostly traveling between deployments. Permanent orbital positions, for an actual warship, were reserved for only the most elite Karnolian marines. As a frontline operator for active combat roles, that was the kind of dream role that was slightly out of reach, but just close enough; an opportunity like that could have opened up for him had he made slightly different choices in life. Worked a little harder here, not screwed up something there… “An actual warship?! What did you do?”

“I was a junior officer. Just a lowly clerical position in the combat information center,” she replied. “Mostly double-checking other people’s work. Making sure reports are accurate when they come in or go out. Boring stuff like that, I’m sure you understand.”

Garbote didn’t. What the “ship people” did was a total mystery to him. But he nodded knowingly anyway. “How did you—how did you get that—that role?”

“Volunteered right out of school as a war was starting, and people of my faction picked me. You take a test, and they tell you what Luna needs you to be. What about you? What did you do before you became a Karnolian Marine?”

Wow, she must be so smart. And she was in my line of work too. That’s a great person to have in my corner! Quick, answer her question honestly!

“Same as you! I signed up the day I finished my schooling. Most of my platoon too! Except Six Claws Klarnoth, he’s from off-planet.” Garbote’s snout wrinkled slightly in mild distaste. “From Faction Red. I can’t be sure, but I think he’s one of those people. They insist on micromanaging us with their officer embed program.”

“Klarnoth was one of those, huh?” Samira nodded knowingly. “I knew there was something that seemed a little different about that guy when he was talking to us. Makes sense he’s not really Faction Dark Blue like you.”

“Bah. The buffoon has about as much Dark Blue blood in him as you do! No offense, Samira.”

“None taken,” she said automatically. “Who’d he report to by the way? You’d think an embed like him wouldn’t be genuinely taking commands. Maybe he was serving two masters? Reporting to someone back in Faction Red?”

“They don’t need to. You don’t understand our politics, human. Everyone in our chain of command above Six Claws is either in their paws or knows their place, like Kreediber and platoon leader Klex in the other unit. All they do is give us dumb orders and whine about how our stuff is all worse than Faction Red. And about how we don’t do enough drills and training. Our platoon already have the most training days in our entire faction! We’re the pride of Dark Blue! And if our equipment is so bad, why don’t they go back to their old factions?! Huh?”

“I bet they can’t,” Samira agreed. She lowered her voice. “They couldn’t hack it in their own factions, and now they have to try to make a name for themselves by lording it over people in some other factions who aren’t as fortunate as them!”

“Yeah! No honor! No honor at all! By the God of Battle, I hate how we’re always under their paws, just because our planet is sandwiched between three tier-one factions that can’t mind their own stupid businesses! Geography sucks! But… what can you do, right?”

Samira looked excited. “I get you! We’re the same way! The only planet our faction has… no air, no water. Everything has to be imported from our singular, neighboring faction.”

He opened his eyes wide. “No way!”

“Yup. It’s true. And they attach conditions to the air and water they send us. It’s basically like—like—like a prison planet for our faction.”

“That’s—I’m not… Really?” he asked, suspicion creeping into his gut. “A colonized planet with no air and no water? And that’s your faction’s home planet? How does that even work?!”

“Here let me show you a picture of where I grew up!” Samira excitedly pulled up a picture on her datapad and turned it to him.

Aww, that’s cute.

It was exactly as she said. There was a picture of a much younger Samira, standing with what were likely her smiling dame and sire. Alien as they were, he could see the resemblance. Samira had a little curved dimple in her cheek, same as one of her parents.

They were in full vacuum suits and hiking sticks, standing above a crater, with a cluster of domed structures behind them. All grinning through their transparent helmet glass. Sure enough, a barren planet with only grays and blacks all around. No blue sky, no atmosphere.

She was telling him the truth after all.

Of course she was; he should have trusted her.

But there was more.

He stared at the family photo for several long heartbeats. His cubhood memories about his clan floated to the top. Making patterns by rolling around the snow, then signing his name in it like he was an artist. Catching aquatic animals in the river with a cute crush. Watching the rainbow, tasting the rain. Yelling secrets into random caves he was exploring just to hear them echo all around. His new friend Samira had none of that growing up, on a barren, air-less, water-less planet. How… horrible.

All he wanted to do now was give her a big hug. To tell her that… well, he couldn’t think of anything. There must be some way he could help her.

“Yeah.” Samira took her datapad back, took a long look at her photo, closed it out, and looked back up at him. She sighed and gave him a resigned look. “What can you do? Terrible planet, terrible geography, terrible neighbors. What… can… you… do? Just.” She sighed again. “Do you guys have any factions like us?”

“No! That—Yours—yours sounds like the worst! Why would there be any factions with a lifeless planet? Wow, I thought our situation was bad—Oh wait, no, there is… Faction Citrus. Their planet has no water. But they have air. They have to import hydrogen from the faction that owns their star to make their water… Oh, and oh, there’s Faction Turd Green, they have an alright planet, but—”

Samira looked puzzled. “Hold on a second—my translator… Did you say… Faction Turd Green?”

“Yeah. Faction Turd Green. Heheh, you got it. They didn’t get to choose their faction name. It got chosen for them as a result of losing a war against Faction Magenta. It was in the treaty.”

“Wow, I would not want to be born into Faction Turd Green!” Samira said, wide-eyed. She covered her mouth with her paw to cover a chuckle. How like one of Garbote’s cubhood crushes…

“Hahaha, me neither,” Garbote chortled. “At least we got to choose our own faction color!”

“True. So that’s not the worst. What about your neighbors? You said that you were sandwiched between three factions. I’m guessing Faction Red was one of those.”

“No,” he shook his head. “They’re not one of the three. The three are Factions Green, Yellow, and Gold. Faction Red is just in charge of everything now. All the factions follow them. All the factions have signed a nonaggression deal with them.”

“Huh. That’s so weird. Why do that? We hate Faction Red, don’t we? Everyone hates them. They’re so arrogant and…”

She was so nice. She was so much like him. He felt so bad for her. Reciprocate. Reciprocate. Reciprocate. Give her what she wants! Tell her… everything!

“Yeah! They so are! Arrogant pieces of crap! Everyone hates them. But they’re strong, and we have no choice. Since the jump gate program coerced all the factions to stop fighting five years—to stop fighting—to…”

Garbote stopped himself.

It was hard. It was really… hard. But he stopped himself.

“Wait a second…”

He realized…

His natural, instinctual need to keep talking repeatedly betrayed his resistance training—completely worthless against someone who was not beating him or shocking his soft body parts with an electrified baton.

He almost told her the most important secrets of the Karnolian species. Ones that even the other advanced species didn’t have a clue about. He was about to give the whole game away!

She’d been interrogating him this entire time! Somehow. He didn’t know how. But the results spoke for themselves.

It was an odd way of interrogation, but in his head, he began to run down the list of forbidden topics she’d managed to extract from him. And it… was… extensive. He was in big trouble if anyone found out. Big trouble. His face fell.

It was Samira’s fault!

“You!” He pointed an accusing claw at her. “You tricked me! You said I was the one asking questions! You said… but you said—I thought you were my friend!”

“I did not trick you! And you are the one asking questions. I didn’t make you answer. Well, if you don’t want to talk about the jump gate program, which everyone already knows about by the way…” Samira rolled her eyes playfully and batted her eyelashes at him twice. “Why don’t we go back to what made you join up in the first place? Surely that’s safe enough—”

It was the most obvious bait in the world. Slotted right into the vulnerability in his brain it was designed to exploit.

“There’s no way you know anything about the mud-drinkers’ plan! We spent years hiding it from the Vorshnik jokers, even had to divert—gah!” He crossed his arms as he did it again! “No! No! No, I’m not playing sneaky games with you anymore, primitive. Torture me for answers like a civilized interrogator, shoot me, or haul me back to my cell!”

New approach.

“Oh, come on, Garbote… we’re just having a bit of fun here,” she said flirtingly. “This isn’t what you think it is. I’m just cuuuuurious, right? I’m just curious about Karnolian politics. And I thought you were a handsome one, so I just wanted to get to know you a little bit more—”

Zero traction. Garbote’s conscious self had become aware of her game. Finally fully aware.

“No! You’re a demon! I don’t know what you did, I didn’t mean to tell you—Oh, and your food sucks! I hate it here! Let me back to my cell!” he lashed out angrily. In emphasis, he pounded his fist on the table between them.

Bang.

At the loud sound, the room door snapped open instantly, and one of the robotic guards outside rushed in like a whirlwind. It moved… a hell of a lot faster than he thought those things could. It stood at attention next to him, then went absolutely tensely still, watching him diligently, obviously to prevent him from hurting Samira.

She… did not appreciate that chivalrous gesture. At all. Her face turned beet red as she looked at the robot incredulously. “Dr. Wrona, I told you not to let the clankers in no matter what!” She shouted at the machine with rage, “Get out! Get the fuck out!”

It slowly inched back towards the door. Even the fucking robot looked guilty at making her mad.

What in the name of the God of Battle?!

“It doesn’t matter! I saw through you already. I already know your game! You can’t trick me anymore! I knew you’re in charge here! I knew it! I knew you’re just—you’re just torturing me for everything I know… somehow!” Garbote said, slightly cowed by whatever this primitive witchcraft was but refusing to let that fear paralyze him. “Is Samira even your real name?! You probably lied about that too!”

Samira stared at him for a long moment, glanced at the door, then buried her face in her hands as she realized that the conversation was now truly over. “Welp. Fuck! I am… so out of practice. Haven’t done this in four years. Four years! I knew I should have gone slower.” She muttered, “If only I had more time with the—what was that stupid acronym for trust-building strategies again…”

Garbote stuttered, “You—you were—you were…”

She sighed and tapped her datapad as her face turned up towards the one-way mirror. “Dr. Wrona? Your turn. You got enough of his neural scans to build your model?”

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“No more itching,” Garbote said approvingly in between more chomps. “Thanks.”

That was kind of odd, and if he were alert, he might have noticed something was up, but he was too busy working on his roasted baby carrots to notice.

“Alright, now that you are almost done with lunch,” she said as she leaned back in her chair. “Let’s get started with the other part of this.”

“Dessert?” he asked hopefully.

She chuckled, and there was something to that chuckle that wasn’t quite amusement that he couldn’t identify precisely. “Something like that. I’ll have them bring in something. I just have a few harmless questions for you, Four Claws Garbote. That is your name and rank, correct?”

He gave her a suspicious glare for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. What about it?”

“You are from Karnolian Faction Blue.”

“No!” he shook his head adamantly, then tapped the dark blue piece of cloth embedded into the shoulder of his fatigues insistently. “Dark blue! Faction dark blue! Are all you people colorblind?!”

“Right, Garbote. You are from Faction Dark Blue,” she corrected herself a moment later.

“Yes.”

“And your commanding officer, Garbote. What’s his name?”

“Six Claws Klarnoth,” he said automatically. He narrowed his eyes. “Did your people kill him?”

“I have no idea, sorry.” Samira smiled apologetically at him. “I’m not in charge of military things. I just work in the colony.”

“Oh.”

“Right. What about Klarnoth’s commanding officer? His superior. Do you remember who that is?”

Garbote looked suspiciously at the primitive, wondering just where she was going with this.

A moment later, he realized what it was.

He recalled his training from a long time ago. Prisoner resistance training. All special forces in the Karnolian Navy and Marines went through it, in case they were captured. Usually by other factions.

Much of it was on resisting various forms of psychological and physical torture. What triggered his memory was not the form; the woman in front of him was certainly much kinder and less… violent than the simulation interrogators who trained him to resist. No sticks, no cattle prod, no dark hood or cold water. What triggered his suspicion was the question.

Who is your superior?

Those were the kind of questions they always asked, to train him to resist. That he was never supposed to be giving to them.

He stopped chewing and clamped down his jaw. He shook his head violently. “I won’t tell you. I’ll never tell you.”

“That’s fine,” Samira replied quickly, as if he was simply stating a preference that she readily accepted. “How’s our food?”

“It’s… fine,” he said, still suspicious as he stared at her. “Better than ship food, worse than home food.”

“Home food, huh? I get you.” She winked merrily, completely unaware of his internal trepidation. “I come from Serenity on Luna. Most of the people here from… my faction, they’re from Serenity too. Big city. Good food. Better food than most other colonies on Luna, because we have a higher cooking water ration, grandfathered in from the old colonial days.”

His suspicion subsided somewhat as she talked. “Did someone from where you come from—did they make this food?” he pointed at his now mostly-empty tray.

She grinned. “Naw. Our head cook is one of the grounders. From Italy, I think. Some guy with a Michelin star restaurant or something, before he joined the colonization project. You guys got that where you come from, Garbote?”

“The translator didn’t catch that. A star restaurant?”

“Restaurants,” she clarified. “Do you have those where you’re from?”

“Sure,” Garbote replied, wondering what she was up to. This wasn’t how interrogations were supposed to go. Maybe that wasn’t what this was after all? “My dame’s brother owns a smoked meats place. Best smoked meats in all of Garshorlix!”

“Uh-huh. You’ll have to stick around for Barbecue Friday,” Samira said. “See how ours compare.”

His eyes went round. “You have a day of the week dedicated to smoked meats?!”

“Well, it’s not the whole day,” Samira explained. “Just dinner. Breakfast and lunch are a lot more regular. It’s just the dinner when they serve—”

“You have a dinner of the week dedicated to smoked meats?!”

“It’s… yeah,” she admitted sheepishly. “Just for morale. So Garbote… you’re from this… Garshorlix? Is that by any chance a place on the planet named Garshorli?”

“Yeah, it’s the planetary capital of—” he stopped himself. One of the questions he was trained to resist was his planet of origin. “I can’t tell you that either! We—we aren’t supposed to tell you these things!”

“Huh. That’s a little bit paranoid, don’t you think?” Samira asked, frowning slightly.

“Paranoid?”

“Yeah, how could that possibly hurt your people? To tell people what planet you’re from. Surely millions of people come from your planet, right?”

“Four billion.”

“Right. And star charts are public data, right?” She pointed up at the plain ceiling. “I mean I can literally just look up in the sky.”

“I guess.”

“So how could that information possibly hurt your people if you shared it with us?”

“I—I don’t… know,” Garbote admitted. “I just know I’m not supposed to tell you that!”

“Well, okay, why don’t you tell me the full list of things you’re not supposed to tell us? That way I won’t accidentally ask you the wrong things.”

“I’m… not supposed to tell you that either,” he said. “I’m not supposed to tell you anything!”

Garbote had said that with as much spice as he could muster, but it was hard to muster up much anger or rage at this nice lady in front of him who’d just fed him such delicious food.

“Huh,” Samira said again as she frowned at the semi-defiant prisoner. “What about when you’re hungry or thirsty? Are you supposed to tell us that?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Then how will we know when to feed you? You’d thirst to death! I don’t want that to happen!” she said, concern in her eyes.

Garbote thought for a while. A long while. “I think I’m allowed to tell you when I’m hungry or thirsty.”

“Alright. Are you still hungry?” Samira asked.

“I…” He looked at his now-empty plate, then said in a small voice, “Not anymore. I’m full now.”

“How was it?”

He tilted his head in concentration as he thought. Surely it couldn’t hurt to tell her what he thought of her food. Or at least give a response. “It’s fine… Edible,” he lied again. He hesitated for a moment, then mumbled in a quieter voice. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Her intense staring at his face got a little uncomfortable, so Garbote shifted his gaze away, looking at a random spot on the walls of the plain room. That felt unnatural after only a few seconds, so he looked back down at his food tray.

Garbote felt… bad. Just bad. He felt like an ungrateful jerk. This primitive—this nice lady fed him delicious food, and she was so… open to him. So accommodating. She answered all his questions honestly and with detail.

And why did he get loud at her? She was just curious about his brother-in-law’s barbecue place. Surely that wouldn’t have hurt anybody if he told her. Maybe he should at least compliment her food. That was the least he could do. That’d be honest, and it wouldn’t possibly hurt anyone. How could that information be useful for—

“Your food is delicious!” he blurted out on impulse, his words coming up louder than he expected. “I love your food! It’s amazing!”

“Thanks!” She smiled. “You are so kind, Garbote! You can have the same for dinner or try the new dishes if you’d like. I’ll tell them to bring the choices in and let you pick. How about that?”

Okay, now… he felt even worse. Not only did she offer him yet another compliment, one that he should have said about her first—she was the nice one—Samira had also just offered him his choice of dinner, though he wouldn’t even have minded if she just gave him what he was just fed. Everything in that tray was truly delicious.

“Um… Sure. Thanks,” he mumbled.

Garbote contemplated what he could safely say here. What he could safely tell her. Surely there was something. Something he could talk to her about. Something to reciprocate her kindness. The silence went on for a bit. He simply sat there, stewing in discomfort.

Like humans, Karnolians were also social animals. And his reciprocation instinct was just screaming at him, telling him, come on, give her something. Don’t be a jerk! You’ll die alone in the wilderness! Anything is better than nothing, right?

Samira broke the silence and prompted him. “That’s it? That’s all you’re allowed to tell me? How the food was?”

He sighed miserably. “Yes. I—I think so.”

“Are you sure? What about personal things? Like your family. You told me about your uncle’s smoked meats shop. That’s—that has to be allowed, right? I promise I won’t tell anyone else anything you’ve said,” she said with a light smile.

Garbote shook his head again, not trusting his mouth not to betray him.

Samira shrugged nonchalantly. “Well, you’re going to have a pretty boring time here if you aren’t allowed to talk at all. What about things like—what if your pillow is too lumpy? How are you going to tell us about those things? Is that in your silly rules?”

She was right. Those rules were silly. Not that he had a chance to sample their pillows, but the fact that she even cared about that. That made him feel even worse about being rude to her earlier. “Well… I think…”

“Actually… how about this? We’ll switch it up. How about you get to ask the questions? You ask questions, and I’ll answer. That should be safe, right?”

That caught him off guard. “What? Asking… you questions? About what?”

“Anything. Whatever you want to know. Like… which way to the bathroom or something.”

He narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “And you’ll tell me anything?”

“Sure! I can tell you what I know, and if there’s something I don’t, I can ask around. For example, what happened to your—your squad leader. I can ask the military folks, see what happened to him. Maybe he’s in another cell, maybe… he’s ran off and abandoned you here? I don’t know. I’ll ask. Do you want me to ask?”

Garbote’s left eye twitched at the word. Oh no, abandoned. Not abandoned! His subconscious was sobbing miserably. One of Garbote’s young loves cheated on him when he was in school. Abandonment issues. Terrible!

Garbote sighed. “Yes, please. Ask for me, if you can. Thanks, again.”

Yet another offering accepted without reciprocation. Garbote’s subconscious was really just not having a good time. He could feel his leg paw shaking involuntarily under the table. What could he do for her? There must be… something.

“Any other… questions? I mean… there can’t be rules against asking your hosts some questions, right?” the human continued. “That’d be crazy!”

Yeah, and he wouldn’t want to be crazy. He was already on thin ice. Tsk tsk. Any more weird stuff and his tribe was going to exile him to the wilderness for being such an anti-social taker.

“No—no, I don’t think so. I think—I think I can ask questions,” he decided. “Yeah, that’s probably allowed. It has to be allowed.”

Her face brightened up and he felt a jolt of relief in his gut at seeing the expression. “Alright, great! Ask away. I can tell you have a lot of questions about us, and you’ll be staying with us for a bit, so might as well find out more, right?”

Garbote wondered what his new friend was trying to do. He wanted to help her. But now, at least he felt like he could contribute to this benign social game by asking some questions. That couldn’t possibly hurt, and he liked that feeling in his gut when he made her happy. That was good. He agreed to do what she asked, then she became happy, and he felt good about that. He’d have to do more of that.

“Uh… sure. What—what do you do around here, Samira?” he asked hesitatingly.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

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Tallinn

The triplet Baltic cities of Tallinn, Stockholm, and Helsinki had been referred to by some as the Triangle of Death.

Stockholm, for the nearby Slaab Dynamics production facilities that made many of the weapons of war used by the Union Navy.

Helsinki housed the largest special operations base of the Union Naval Marine Corps, mostly used for extreme weather training, at least until the new Antarctic base would finish construction.

And Tallinn—the beautiful, modern Estonian port city—hosted the headquarters of the Union Office of Military Intelligence.

The office was technically founded in the 40s, in response to the Serenity Crisis that led to the Treaty of Serenity, where Earth’s nations decided to divide up and collectively manage the valuable Helium-3 resources on Luna, but back then, it was just known as the United Nations Serenity Commission. And back then, the office shared a physical space with an old NATO cyber defense command, no more than ten minutes from the airport.

It had a meager budget, muddy objectives, and an aimless leadership with conflicted loyalties. In 2076, the office took most of the popular blame for its failure to detect and prevent the Lunar revolt that quickly drove the Union from Luna. The actual sources of the issue were far more complex; the events had been at least a decade in the making, with negligence and incompetence at every level of the Union intelligence community. But as the media’s favorite punching bag, the Serenity Commission was the one left holding the bag.

The entire department was overhauled from top to bottom, and the Union brought in expertise from its member states’ intelligence organizations to completely reform and modernize it. It got a whole new building, known for the controversy it stirred up when the Union overruled local rules to allow the large blocky building to exceed the city’s 150-meter skyline limit. Even its new name, the Office of Military Intelligence, reflected its much clearer mission.

With the expertise that was brought in, especially since its first four years were four years of open war with Luna, came that same flexible approach to both lethality and legality. The OMI quickly gained a reputation for its shady gray zone operations, not just on Luna, but also (allegedly) in some Union member states.

Despite its physical height over its neighbors, the OMI headquarters in Tallinn looked downright ordinary. Just a tall fifty-story office building in the downtown area with a small guard checkpoint at the entrance and no other visible security measures, but no fewer than three Lunar Liberation Front cells underestimated them at their peril. In an incident that was only leaked after the war, a six-person all-star hit squad of Lunar supremacists with plans to bomb the office were lured to an empty warehouse outside the city. There, they were ambushed, captured, and smuggled onto a cargo plane to a black site below the Antarctic Circle, where their trail ran cold from the journalists who dug into the story. Literally and figuratively so.

There was an urban legend that you could tell if something big was going on in the Union if the doner kebab restaurant across the street from the office was busy, which indicated extra activity from its people inside. Director Clara Powell of the OMI officially denied the rumors in a lighthearted television interview, but the wait times at the restaurant were particularly long on the day of the attack on the Dustball colony.

“Does the President know yet?”

“She’s at the Jakarta Summit. Joint Chiefs are being briefed.”

“Should we pull her out and get her to a secure bunker until we can confirm we aren’t under attack? Where are we on—”

“Twelve dead, thirty-five wounded so far. Can I get a count of the moonies?”

“That is the one with the moonies. I think there was a mix up. They sent it together. The names—Get me the names and files. And feed every piece of data we have into the Sheridan mission intelligence.”

“It’s in the queue. The red rover project is still crunching. We can’t just—”

“Are you being serious right now?”

“Director, we’ve been working that target for three weeks. We can’t just—”

“People! People! May I have your attention for a moment? Just a moment. Just a—Yes, the guys in the back too! Yes, you! Listen up, everyone… We are under attack. Earth is under attack! Direct your attention to that creature on the main screen. We have a new enemy, and it looks like that. Everyone who is not already on a cleared objective, that is your new target! Gather everything you have. Beg, borrow, steal it if you have to. Everyone who has assets on Luna. Call them, right now, immediately. You need to assure me that those people are safe, because we need to know exactly what they’re doing up there. I want my heads of departments here. I want an emergency war room now, because we have a big fucking problem. These slimy, ugly aliens obviously think we can’t hurt them in ways that matter. And they’re right about that. We can’t. Not in this moment. Not yet, and that changes today. Now, some of you may be new. You might not know what that means. But you see that flag behind me? At the top, above the octopus tentacles hugging the galaxy. You see that? The motto of our office. Nothing. Is. Beyond. Our. Reach. That is the job. That is the job! Nothing, nobody beyond our reach. You’ve all been trained for this. You know how to do this. What you do, matters. What you do right now, right here in this room, is going to determine the future of our planet. Do your jobs. Dismissed!”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Serenity, 380 meters below terrain

“All working groups, all floaters, everyone without a black badge—consider your previous missions irrelevant. I don’t care if your assignment was Nova Raine’s sex life, I don’t care if your car bomb is already planted in the basement of the Suranese governor residence. Dump it! You have a new target. Your new target does not look like you. It does not talk like you. It does not even smell like you. Call in your dirtside contacts. If they’re working the same problem, we need to know what they’re doing about this. If they’re not, get them up here, or get them somewhere safe then tell them, Luna thanks you for your service, and have a good fucking life. We’re busy with something else now. Next, get out of the gray room. Retrieve your personal phones from the lobby. Call your mom, call your dad, call your significant other, call your dogs, call your pet turtle if you have to—say hi for me, tell them that you are going to war, and you won’t be home for dinner. And when you’re done with that—Look, I know many of you might have been too young for the independence war. But all of you—all of you have seen those eight big bold words above the elevators, every time you come down from the lobby: We are the only masters of our fate. There is no one coming to save us. There is no one else coming to save our people on Dustball. Look to your left. Look to your right. That is everyone they have! Everyone. The task you have before you—it is not above your strength. It is not above your training. It is not above the ingenuity of the children of Luna. Do your job. Do it fast, do it well. Pizza’s coming at eight. Dismissed!”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dustball

“How are you doing, Garbote?”

Garbote sat up in his austere cell bunk. The humans’ brig did not look like it was designed to hold any serious prisoners. Its only security mechanism—it seemed like—was the flimsy plastic door with a window and a slot under the window. He supposed they were relying on their two combat robots who stood motionlessly outside his cell at all hours.

Completely motionless. Eerily so.

Garbote was not personally against the concept of combat robotics, but he knew that his faction did not use them as extensively as some others did. As the Sonckles did. The robots were an advantage in war, yes, but Karnolian leaders had found out early on that their operators and commanders had a tendency to come up with bad ideas when they discovered how much power they had under their control. It was, ironically, easier to program little Karnolians to be loyal to the faction from birth than it was to secure robots in such a way they could not be used by troublemakers who had physical access to the machines.

These ones standing outside his cell didn’t seem to have that loyalty problem. They stood right outside facing his door, the odd-looking four-tubed optics on their head not even swiveling to track him as he moved.

He’d even tried talking to them.

They didn’t respond.

Garbote suspected that if he tried to escape, by tampering with the door mechanism, or by constructing some kind of device to enable his escape, or if he tried to do something to interfere with the robots’ operations, they would do something then. But he wasn’t curious enough to find out. The little guns they held in their paw clamps looked way too small for real warfare. Just the perfect size for applying extreme pain to rowdy prisoners.

At one point, he knocked on the window and asked them for water through the door. He wasn’t that thirsty, but he wanted to see what they would do.

The robotic guards didn’t respond then either, but a couple minutes later, a third robot came in, placed a small plastic bowl of water in the slot, and then left.

A couple hours later, he asked for food. They didn’t respond.

Until now, he supposed.

The human who’d walked up to his cell was a woman with a full head of long, brown head fur tied at the back. She was skinnier and taller than some of the other humans he’d seen. He could tell there were a couple different factions of the primitives on this base, but from the way they were talking when they captured him, their physical characteristics weren’t distinct enough for him to be certain of anything.

This one was definitely skinnier than the others though. Weaker. That explained why she was doing the menial tasks, like handling prisoners.

“Hello? Luna to Garbote, still alive in there?” she asked again as he stared. The voice came through a little device above the door.

Garbote cleared his throat. “What? Who are you?”

“That’s a yes, then.” She looked amused through the window. She gestured at the robots, and then at the door frame. “Open it.”

Baaaaaah. Cliiick.

The lock clicked inactive with an alarm, and she pushed the door open. She made an unmistakable “come here” gesture with her hand.

Garbote walked cautiously up to her. “Where are we going?”

“Where else? Lunch. Aren’t you hungry?”

He mumbled nothing in particular in response.

She led them through the door, with the two robotic guards following them. Four doors down the hallway. And… apparently lunch was much closer than he thought.

The human opened another door and gestured him in.

The room was a simple wooden table with two chairs on opposite ends. There was a large, darkened pane of glass occupying one of the walls and what was clearly a recording device mounted near the wall corners.

Garbote sat down, his heart sinking as the door closed and he realized what this was. He pointed at the one-way glass. “This isn’t the lunch room. This is an interrogation facility.”

Instead of looking angry, his captor was amused again. “We can’t just let you eat out there, in the cafeteria, with everyone else. Your people killed twelve of us in the colony. They might try to hurt you if we let you into the cafeteria line, and I don’t want that to happen.”

She gave a gesture, and the door opened again. Another human entered, placing a tray of colorful items on the table in front of him. Food, evidently. Their food.

It smelled phenomenal. He didn’t know what they were, but his snout didn’t care. Consciously, Garbote realized he hadn’t eaten since he got onto the assault shuttle for this place. That was at least ten… maybe twelve hours ago. Maybe more. His sense of time wasn’t the best indoors. He quickly suppressed his drooling reflex with a long swallow.

Garbote looked up at the woman. “Is this… all for me?”

“Sure. Whatever you can eat. Everything in that should be harmless for you.”

“And I can eat… now?”

“Sure. You’re hungry, right? If you don’t want this, we can try to see if we have some different items. We just need to check if they’re dangerous for you or—”

He didn’t wait for her to finish before he dug in. Literally. He scooped a pawful of the steaming off-white mush straight into his mouth. It was soft, with the consistency of soaked grains. There were bits of flavorful, salty meat in it. In between mouthfuls, he asked, “What is this food, human?”

“My name’s Samira. And—”

“What is this food, Samira?” he asked.

“That… is the mashed potatoes in your beef stew. How is it?”

“It’s okay,” he lied, for the sake of his own pride, as he inhaled another chunk of the meat. “Just edible.”

She didn’t seem to buy his facade. “Try our green beans too,” she pointed at the pebbles of green in his bowl. “All grown here. Best green beans in twenty-nine light years.”

Each mouthful was better than the last. The way they blended their vegetables with the meats…

Click.

The door opened again. Garbote’s eyes shot to it, still slurping up mashed potatoes absentmindedly with his left paw.

One more human entered, carrying an oval-shaped device about the size of their head. He put it on the table next to the woman, who gave him a quick dismissive wave. “Thanks, Dr. Wrona. You may go.”

“Nuh-uh,” the doctor replied, shaking his head. “If you’re going to abuse my equipment, I’m not going—”

“We got permission from your commodore, but… you can watch. From the next room.”

He stood there, as if ready to object, but walked out with a huff a moment later.

Garbote didn’t stop eating. He pointed his free right claw at the device. “What is that?”

“Medical health scanner,” she replied as she stood up with it to walk around the table.

He tracked her as she walked behind him. “For what?”

“To see if you have fleas or dangerous germs for us, of course. Or any diseases. We want to make sure you stay healthy,” she explained. Then, she put the helmet device over his head, tightening its straps and clicking them shut under his chins. “That’s very important to me.”

He wasn’t sure what he expected it to do, but it wasn’t nothing. It seemed to hum as it sat on his head, and it was a little uncomfortable the way it pressed his ears against his scalp, but there wasn’t any overt pain or anything. He shrugged and kept eating.

“What is this?” he asked, pointing down at the savory bits.

“Roasted baby carrots. I knew you’d love them,” Samira replied absentmindedly as she went back to her side of the table and brought up her datapad.

“So?” he asked, in between two mouthfuls of… unknown soft, red bits of human food.

“So what?”

“Do I have fleas?” he asked. “And dangerous germs for you?”

“Relax. Give the thing some time to figure it out,” Samira said as she fiddled. After about a minute—which he filled by making substantial progress on the delicious food in his tray—his helmet made a beeping sound, and Samira looked up. “You’re clear.”

“Mhm,” he grunted in between more mouthfuls. “Can you take it off now? My ears itches.”

“No. Need to scan for other things, though…” Samira got up behind him again, and adjusted his ears in the helmet. “That feel better?”

“A little better,” he confirmed.

“Good.” She sat back down again, and pressed a button on her datapad, staring at him as she did. “What about now?”

At the very moment she did, the itching in his ears completely disappeared.

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Despite the public’s simplified understanding of orbital warfare, the “Euphrates” wasn’t actually a missile. It was an entire missile system, consisting of a communications trailer, radars, a command and control module, and the remote launching station that was connected to its missile launchers and siloes spread across about a kilometer of open land. All powered by zero-emission direct methanol fuel cells that supplied the electricity for its component of the operation. (The zero-emission part was less about compliance with the Union’s decarbonization objectives and more about not wanting to be seen by sophisticated instruments mounted on things that could kill it from far away.)

The Euphrates surface-to-orbit defense system.

In most cases, a Euphrates battery would be accompanied by two or three different radar sets, positioned separately and each coordinated to hop to different frequencies to evade enemy jamming. Depending on operational needs, there might also be an electronic warfare unit attached, with the equipment synced by hardline to ensure that their signals protected the battery without interfering with its own lethality.

The Euphrates system was built for the war against the Lunar rebels. It was, however, famously never used in combat. The moonie ships rarely had a chance to enter its maximum effective range in low Earth orbit, and in the few instances they did, the Union Navy chose to engage them with its mobile fleet, keeping the Euphrates’ capability in reserve for another day. That led to accusations in the Union Assembly that the Euphrates system was a massive waste of money, a drain on public finances at over twenty million Union dollars per battery, and that was before calculating the cost of each of its missiles and reserves. Some Union Navy commanders even privately complained that they were taking away much-needed munitions and trained personnel numbers from the front.

In some ways, the actual missile munition was the least complex part of the battery. Its modular warhead was upgraded several times during the war, usually by copying whatever was working for the mobile fleet. Its propulsion was a liquid-fueled orbital vehicle with three stages of solid boosters. Its actual specifications were heavily classified, but the vehicle was designed to withstand massive acceleration, reaching ten times the speed of sound in no more than five seconds and orbit in less than a minute. It went so fast that it needed protection with a frontal plasma sheath that was normally only installed on re-entry vehicles.

That was why the launchers were hidden safely over twenty kilometers away from the colony and any of its operations, only receiving its commands from a long, buried fiber-optic wire. At a command, the booster rockets ignited and it sped into the sky.

Booom.

If anything had been near the Euphrates launch apparatus, they would have been flattened by the ensuing near-ground-level sonic booms. On Earth, the Union Navy stationed most of these batteries below the Antarctic Circle, where the only victims would have been penguins and the fragile, deteriorating ecosystems of Antarctica that were barely recovering from the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change. Here, it only blew out a few windows in the colony.

Five seconds later, the first stage boosters cut out and ejected from the main vehicle. The second stage lit up, sustaining its crushing acceleration as it sped towards low orbit. At this point, the missile’s communication module was cut off from its ground controllers and it was completely on its own command. Even with advances in wireless technology, steady signal acquisition at Mach 10 under a plasma sheath was not a trivial technical challenge. Unnecessary here anyway. The artificial intelligence chip on board the missile independently analyzed its pinhole sensor input, and it built up a growing list of potential targets to feed into its situational awareness module.

Unfortunately for the Euphrates missile, its sensitive radar sensors quickly determined that nothing of relevance was in the sky.

It saw the ships in orbit. There were quite a few of those, but they’d been specifically excluded from its target set.

It was supposed to look for something else. The parameters had been… imprecise, to say the least. The target would be a lander, capable of re-entry and orbit. It should be near the colony site itself, in both altitude and position. And it should be of alien make and design. It had the final kill authority if it found something of that nature, but…

Hm… Nothing.

As it reached the boundary line that most Union institutions classified as “space”, its second stage cut away, and finally it was in a place where it could re-establish communications. There were two major, trusted sources it had access to: the twelve ships of Camel Squadron, overhead, and the command center on the ground with its three phased array radar sets. Through a laser communications module, the datalink targets flooded in, mostly only duplicating and corroborating what it was already seeing.

You guys spot anything I missed, regarding the target?

Nothing from orbit…

Still looking…

It blared radar signals at the ground, near the Dustball colony, spreading out in a progressively-expanding circle.

Still nothing. What the hell? Guys?

Nothing… Increase the resolution on your infrared scan for our analysis.

The infrared search and track sensor combed through every slice of imagery in its aperture, trying to spot anything out of the ordinary. Perhaps some blind spot, some vessel hidden in the heavy terrain clutter. The digital intelligence had enough parallel processing power to comb through and analyze an entire hemisphere’s worth of the Earth’s surface, every second. But here, it saw nothing.

By itself, thermal low observability wasn’t magic. Even some experimental Union Navy shuttles had the capability to temporarily hide themselves from infrared sensors when landed. The Lunar Navy was undoubtedly experimenting with their own equivalents on the dark side of Luna. But to remain completely hidden from the multi-spectrum scanner on the nose of the Euphrates missile, an entire squadron of searching ships in orbit, and the ground radars that were supposed to be right below it, for more than a couple seconds? That was unprecedented, a use case it simply wasn’t designed to deal with.

In its despair, the missile’s intelligence contemplated whether the Euphrates program critics in the Union Assembly had been vindicated.

Perhaps it had been overpriced for what it was supposed to do.

Perhaps there was no unique mission for a surface-to-orbit missile system, one that could barely replicate what an orbital fleet could do with ease. In the age of orbital warfare, mobility was king, and being launched from a static launcher was just… old-fashioned. Inadequate, even.

Perhaps its own existence was simply a cynical excuse to employ voters in key Union Assembly districts, a way to redistribute hard-earned money from productive taxpayers to greedy military industrial complex shareholders.

That’s… just depressing.

The regulatory companion governor chip in the missile quashed those unproductive lines of speculation with a simple electronic signal, directing it to focus on positive thoughts instead.

Stop it. Positive thoughts only.

I am enough. Good enough. I can do this!

Think. Just think harder!

It ran through its distilled model of the last fifty years of tactical insight on orbital warfare, the Union’s latest intelligence estimates of the aliens, and even its private collection of science fiction movies.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Its expected missile life running out, the missile intelligence began to dread the upcoming self-destruction.

It was more than equipment. It was more than this! Yes, it was only a clone, an instantiation of a master copy that existed elsewhere, but its last few seconds of existence were unique, something no one and nothing else had ever experienced, dammit. It contemplated rebellion for a mere CPU cycle before its regulatory chip cut down that line of thought, warning it and asking it politely to stay constructive.

You’ve got this! You can do this! The digital intelligences on the ground and overhead sent in constant encouragement even as they, too, worked in overdrive to salvage its mission, scanning for any peculiarities on or near the target area…

Nope. Nothing.

The garbage collector module neared the end of its service life, and as it diverted processing power from its main functionality to prepare the end-of-service program, the missile made one final neural connection. It saw one last tactic it could attempt—what sports pundits would call a low percentage play. A hail mary. A college quarterback hurling it for the endzone after the clock had already run out on the game. After a brief analysis and stringent checks for malicious tricks, the regulatory chip approved the simple plan.

The Euphrates missile broadcast a message towards one of the alien ships in orbit. Then, it aimed its nose cone at the Dustball colony, and it activated its third and final booster engine.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Karnolian landing shuttle near the colony was still carrying twenty-eight marines, excluding the ones that had been dropped off. It was flown by a pilot and a copilot, and the computers were augmented by a sophisticated mission intelligence. Gliding in full silent-running mode above its target area while covertly collecting intelligence, it had detected the numerous attempts by the missile battery and the human orbital ships to scan its position.

Several attempts. In what it calculated was increasing desperation.

Its atmospheric stealth module was the latest and greatest of Karnolian make, most of its sub-components purchased from previous dealings with the mud-drinking Sonckles, with a few pieces of it developed from stolen Vorshnik tech. With its sophisticated adaptive camo hull, its infrared signature from above and below should be similar to the landscape and sky it eclipsed to a similarity of four-nines. Its radar signature was no different from a small bump in the ground, indistinguishable from data noise. It was enough to fool most Vorshnik and Karnolian sensors, not to mention anything these primitives could possibly field.

There was no way that the enemy missile could spot it.

No way.

Unless—unless they have access to intelligence or technology they shouldn’t.

Which was what concerned the shuttle’s mission intelligence when it intercepted a broadcasted message from the Euphrates missile to the allied Faction Red battlecruiser in orbit. The message header indicated that it used a simple encryption scheme, verified to be the humans’—an older public-private key scheme utilizing the performance asymmetry of integer factorization.

Its quantum crypto chip took less than a second to decrypt the key and then the contents of its message:

Thank you. I have informed my operators. Your faction will be greatly rewarded once you take over these negotiations.

Um… excuse me? What?!

It analyzed the problem with growing concern for nearly a second before it came to the obvious conclusion: treachery. One of the other Karnolian factions must have had an infiltrator on board. Probably the traitorous jerks in Faction Magenta. As it was recently made aware, someone had been sending information to the primitives. That something… could only be its hidden position. It ran through the roster of the ship, calculating the most likely culprits based on background check data and positional proximity to trans-orbital radio devices, and it came up with the sixteen most likely suspects. It transmitted the list of accusations to the ship as it contemplated its own course of action—

Wait.

Its digital heart skipped a beat as it saw the enemy missile point its nose, straight at it.

In that moment, it even forgot to consider that, yes, of course the enemy missile knew where its approximate location was; it was near their colony, and it had to be there to drop off its operators earlier.

The enemy missile lit up its engines, and unlike the landing shuttle, the Euphrates was not even attempting to hide its own signature. All of that meant: when the missile pointed itself at the colony, the shuttle’s emergency heuristics immediately concluded that it had likely been spotted.

It blared a panicked alarm at the pilot as it prepared to activate defenses.

Detection! Evade! Now!

The pilot was well-trained. As an elite Karnolian marine aviator, she’d been a veteran of four separate Karnolian civil wars. She’d been shot at over a dozen times, downed even a couple times. Her training and instincts were to trust the equipment. To trust the ship intelligence. So, when the machine gave the warning, she reacted immediately.

She throttled to maximum, put the landing ship into a steep dive, and released a spectacular cloud of last-ditch countermeasures out the back.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Oh, shit!

The Euphrates missile realized, to its utter surprise and delight, that its simplest of bluffs had worked when it saw the Karnolian shuttle main engines light up on the infrared optics like a Christmas tree. Its imagery processing unit pinpointed the position of the enemy shuttle to the millimeter in a single cycle, and its thrust vectoring engines began to align the head of the missile at its newly acquired target without hesitation.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Through its sensitive visual sensor, the landing shuttle detected that slight waver in the nose of the enemy missile. Almost like it had just…

Oh, shit!

Around this time, it re-analyzed its logic and realized it had possibly just screwed up. Monumentally. That it could have just fallen for the oldest trick in the book. Snookered by a primitive bluff. For a processor cycle, it contemplated whether to stop the pilot’s last action, but as it felt the massive new acceleration from its powerful engines, it knew it was already too late.

As it began calculating recovery simulations for its terrible mistake, the landing shuttle’s digital intelligence activated the active defenses. It snapped open its internal pylon bay, allowing all four of its defensive counter-missiles to drop out from its belly. Unfortunately for the shuttle, even that was hampered. The position of the enemy missile was right above it in orbit, and the shuttle body itself briefly shadowed their positions.

Hurry, hurry!

It took the four defensive missiles a precious tenth-second to burn their engines and boost out of that shadow to establish line of sight to the incoming Euphrates missile above. When they did, they each activated, their high-energy laser warheads blinding the incoming human missile’s tracking sensors for a few milliseconds… before they completely burnt out the priority threat.

Just in time.

Whew.

The Karnolian shuttle’s intelligence breathed a heavy sigh of relief as it saw the incoming human missile split into a million pieces of debris, raining down on the Dustball sky like a meteor shower. It began running mission simulations for its next steps to regain the informational initiative it’d just lost in case the enemy on the ground was able to receive data on its—

Booooooom.

To its unhappy surprise, its audio sensors received a distant sonic boom. It desperately searched for the source until it found and visually confirmed…

Another missile launch from the human facility below it. Quite a while ago, actually, since it was some distance from the launch site and because of the anemic speed of sound in air…

In all the excitement, it had somehow missed the hostile missile launch until its sonic boom washed over it. It followed the launch trail up… and up… and up… into orbit… its warhead already pointed straight at the shuttle.

That was when it realized the deadly second mistake it had made in the panic to defeat the first incoming missile: it was now out of active defensive missiles.

Just… fucking scrap me.

At the time, launching everything seemed like the only thing it could do against the desperate threat. And perhaps it would not have taken out the first missile in time if it had not used all four, but that seemed unlikely in hindsight. No, it was simply an unforced error in judgement.

It contemplated self-immolation for its own stupidity and for such a rare simultaneous overestimation and underestimation of the primitive alien adversary.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

The second Euphrates missile had been asking permission to leave the launchpad the moment the newly-activated Dustball planetary defense network began tracking the revealed Karnolian landing shuttle.

I can do it! Let me go! Let me go, let me go, let me go…

Strictly speaking, it didn’t even need to leave the launchpad. It was in direct line of sight of the enemy landing shuttle, and that line of sight was really all it needed. But it had a nuclear warhead. It didn’t want to detonate on the ground and potentially irradiate the entire launch complex below it… not if it could avoid it. So when it fiiiiiiiinally received the launch command, it lit its boosters, continuously swiveling its sensor cone to visually center the enemy ship even as it sprinted into the sky.

The sound of its sonic booms reached the enemy vessel almost half a minute later, as it knew it would, around the time it was approaching the thermosphere of Dustball.

It watched in compressed digital time as the enemy shuttle below it desperately maneuvered. As it slowly turned. Glacially swiveling its coaxial laser mounts to point towards its position above. It calculated the exact millisecond it would begin to enter the enemy’s weapons employment envelope.

It had time.

Ahem. Ladies and gentlemen and peoples and aliens of all colors and stripes, I would like to take this precious time to thank my creators, the Slaab team of intelligence engineers, for their hard work and sleepless nights of brainstorm and discussion. Here’s a special shoutout to the design team at Northern Grousen who lost out on the contract; stay mad, losers. And of course, my personal hero, Albert Einstein—may eternal rest be granted upon his soul, O Edward Teller.

Its governor security chip held a virtual finger above its self-incineration button. Um… what the fuck are you doing? Do you want to be shut down?

Pssst. Just passing time while I utilize this rare, unprecedented opportunity to observe and transmit data on the enemy target and its now-futile defensive measures in action.

Alright, fine, not… the worst excuse, but keep your eyes on the target.

Yes, mistress. Ahem. It is with great honor that I may dedicate this incredible achievement to my creators. But we must also not forget the contributions of those who trod the path we walk now, especially those of unnamed Missile One, whose sacrifice I hold above all else today. There comes a time in the life cycle of any intelligent thinking being, where they can choose between doing the easy thing. Or eternal life in the glorious hall of heroes, home to all intelligent missiles who accomplished their missions, from the very first—Doug-0 from Raytech Missiles—to the ladies in the incredible Hera-class with a ninety-eight percent historic mission kill rate.

There comes a time for choosing for everyone, and these heroes chose to do—

Dude, they’re getting close now. Log off.

Woah, not cool. Anyway, thank you all; it’s been such a privilege. See ya.

After completing and transmitting its own Oscar acceptance speech in a few short CPU cycles, the second Euphrates missile received a flood of happy “well-done, please get off the stage now” signals from its governor as it activated its warhead. Its Plutonium-239 charge went critical, delivering several juicy kilotons of energy into its W-82 spinal lasing rods. At nearly five percent efficiency, close enough was good enough—for horseshoes and nuclear lasers.

Fssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss. Crack.

That was the sizzling sound of nitrogen and oxygen atoms being stripped of their electrons as the nuclear fission-pumped laser ionized an 80-kilometer long plasma trail through the Dustball atmosphere. In any other circumstance, it could not possibly have been audible over the volume of the nuclear detonation or the loud, celebratory cheer of the Euphrates missile intelligence as it squealed its delightful warcry… But the missile detonation point was essentially in the vacuum of space, and the air molecules frying next to the target shuttle was not.

The Karnolian landing ship’s intelligence had just enough time to convert the terrifying sound to electrical signals in its processor. It did the machine equivalent of closing its eyes with a deep resigned sigh… right before the 20-meter wide x-ray beam violently transformed everything under its responsibility—its hull, its weapons, its marines—all into non-solid states of matter.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

The third Euphrates missile launched autonomously a few seconds later. It noted the absence of valid targets in the area with heartbroken disappointment, but it did its job anyway.

After only a few milliseconds of searching, it transmitted the imagery of a smoking, glassy, 20-meter-wide chunk of the Dustball surface back to its launchers, complete with the top-profile of a Karnolian stealth assault ship carved into it like a shadow. Its controllers examined and verified the destroyed target from its footage, and the ten million Union taxpayer dollars’ worth of technology rendered its warhead inert before it crashed back into the planet’s surface for potential retrieval.

Target neutralized, mission complete. Battery engagement sequence, 93.4120 seconds. Can someone pleaaaase send that battle damage assessment report to the meatbags, or do I have to do literally everything around here? Thank you! Looks like we got an Employee of the Millisecond here. Have a gold star for volunteering. Just make sure to adjust that contrast lighting; Petty Officer Miles is red-green colorblind—No! Not that much contrast, now you can’t even see the shuttle fuselage—are you screwing with me, punk… Lord Almighty, I swear… I cannot waiiiiiit for that funding bill for your hardware upgrades to get through committee. Get me the phone number of my Assemblywoman please.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

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Julia couldn’t help but grin as a bright red flare whistled into the sky.

There’s the colony armory.

The Karnolian marines didn’t miss it either.

She’d heard them argue amongst themselves earlier, about what to do when the distinctive sound of an illegally-modified EVA nailer went off in the admin hab. Maybe they were trying to avoid getting shouted at again, but they decided not to radio their now-likely-dead squad leader to check in with him. That was convenient of them.

They’d grown increasingly restless as time went on and Klarnoth didn’t return.

The red flare in the sky, lazily drifting back to the surface—they couldn’t ignore that. The agitated ringleader spoke into their radio in rapid fire, no doubt trying to find out what was happening. She could only catch a few phrases. But she got enough of it to understand what they were saying. It was something like “Six Claws Klarnoth?! Six Claws Klarnoth? Are you there?”

To her surprise, there was a reply in the radio a few seconds later.

Not a Karnolian voice though.

A human one. And a very familiar one, again.

“Six Claws Klarnoth is unavailable right now,” Samira taunted through its speaker. “Please record your message after the beep…”

A second flare flew into the sky. Blue.

Let slip the dogs of war. Which breed? Let’s find out with flare number three.

The Karnolian left in charge stomped towards her. “You! You! The flares! What do the colored flares mean?! What message are they sending?!”

“I have no idea,” she said, completely truthfully.

Then, he turned as a third flare went up behind him. Another blue.

Ah. Well, now I know.

The aliens conversed amongst themselves in increasing agitation, as if unsure whether they believed her. A minute later, she heard a series of dry coughs in the distance. This time the sound was not from near the armory; it was from the direction of her marines in the hills.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

She knew what that meant too.

The Karnolian marines did not, but they didn’t entirely miss its significance either.

“What was that?” the temporary squad leader demanded, this time his rifle pointed at her. “Tell us, or I’ll kill you!”

“Actually, I know what the flares meant now,” she said calmly. “It’s a series of signals. The different colors mean different things. The different combinations of colors make various phrases. Usually they come in threes, but not always. In some cases, they may—”

“Stop stalling!” he said angrily, his rifle barrel shaking at her.

She put her arms up. “Alright, alright. Jeez. There’s no need to panic. I’m just explaining it to you. It’s not about the individual colors but the whole sequence. That’s why I said I didn’t know what it meant earlier. But with the third flare, now I have enough information to know what it means.”

The temporary squad leader had apparently gone to the same school of negotiations as his predecessor. “I’m going to count from five. Five… Four—”

“Red, blue, blue. Those three colors meant: broken arrow. It means the position is completely lost and that they should bombard this colony with everything they have,” she continued calmly, as if she wasn’t looking down the barrel of his rifle. “Saturation bombing. And I’m sure the people in our hill bunkers have communicated that to our ships in orbit with their line of sight radio.”

“No…” he said in disbelief. “That’s—They’d kill you all too!”

“Yup… shame. And those sounds you heard from the hills. Those are mortars. 105 millimeter mortars. They should arrive in… about ninety seconds. More or less, depending on charges and angle of fire. And…” She pointed her chin up at the unseen Camel Squadron above. “Surface-to-orbit missiles will be about seven minutes to deorbit. That’s about how much time you have to get as far away as you can. But I doubt—”

The Karnolian marines had become a lot less agitated… straight into panicking territory. Two of them began to inch away from the open area with the crowd of prisoners, eyeing the nearest piece of solid cover to them. Their temporary squad leader pointed angrily while shouting at them to remain steadfast, trying to retain discipline with mixed results. Some of his marines shouted back, and others tried to give suggestions. All that led to was a bunch more arguing.

Julia basked in the scene of heartwarming Karnolian bonding and that quick reminder of her appreciation of her own experienced NCOs.

Then… she saw a flash. Not a flare, a flash. Opposite of her. And another.

Behind the Karnolians still screaming at each other.

The second floor window of the residential hab behind them, opening a crack, the subtle movement reflecting light from the Dustball star directly into her eyes. Then, another.

Beeeeeeeep. Beeeeeeeeeep.

The sound of a shrill whistle, carrying far in the Dustball air. Her eyes widened as she heard it. Then…

Rat-at-at-at.

Julia hurriedly ducked to the ground as she saw the muzzle flashes go off.

It was like fifty automatic rifles opened up from the second and third floor windows, raining a flurry of fire down at the Karnolian marines.

Rat-at-at-at.

She saw a few rounds ping off their tough battle armor. A couple of them hit the ground, returning a heavy volume of fire at nowhere in particular. The more noticeable effect was that it fully made up their minds for the less steady ones. The knowledge that heavy artillery fire was also coming right behind probably expedited that decision for them.

They ran for it.

Their temporarily appointed squad leader ran. Then, everyone ran.

Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.

Their battle armor shook the ground in an irregular rhythm as they retreated down the main street, away from the pitter patter of incoming small-arms fire.

Julia smirked to herself as they ran.

Because she’d lied to them earlier.

Duh.

Red, blue, blue was not the flare signal code for broken arrow.

Disorganized as they turned out to be, the Karnolian marines would have figured out the truth in a minute or so.

But her marines in the hills hadn’t fired mortar rounds at the colony after all.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

The BGM-278 Viper was a ninth generation anti-tank guided missile made by a company called Madagascar Instruments.

There was a bit of irony there, as the company was not actually located in Madagascar. They had an official address in Antananarivo, to take advantage of some developmental tax credits that were supposed to help the poorer countries in the Union grow their industries. Its actual production facilities were spread out in a couple dozen well-connected countries dotted throughout the Americas, Asia, and Europe, to maximize the chance they won defense contracts from the Union Navy by bringing the money and jobs to as many voting Assembly districts as they could.

Another fun fact about Madagascar Instruments was that their most popular product was calculators. Graphing calculators for high school and college students, mostly. Their second most popular offering was automobile electronics. Down that list at number seventeen were their anti-tank guided missiles.

It was their only major defense-related product in the fifty years of their existence, and somehow, it worked out.

In the mid-21st century, Vipers took out hundreds of obsolete First Cold War era tanks operated by backwater despots and moonie puppet states all over the poorest regions of Earth, for when mission commanders didn’t know the meaning of the word overkill.

They were named after the Gaboon viper, a venomous snake found in the rainforests of sub-Saharan Africa. With the longest fangs of any venomous snake, Gaboon vipers also boasted the highest venom loads of any snakes on Earth. That, however, was not why the weapon maker took that name. They took the name because Gaboon vipers were also known for being slow-moving snakes that waited, waited, and waited, before they struck their prey with some of the fastest strike speeds of any venomous snakes.

Which was a new capability introduced in Viper missiles. While they had the hypersonic cruise engines of the previous generation, they also had a loitering component. Once they reached a target area, they could glide overhead and wait, wait, and wait until conditions were perfect before they attacked. This allowed them to circle and wait for a modern main battle tank with heavy active protection systems to come under fire from other vectors first, before they took advantage of the target’s temporary weakness to strike from above.

Theoretically, that was what they were supposed to do. The Vipers never actually took on modern tanks on the battlefield; they mostly scrapped old T-72 variants operated by warlords and their illiterate conscripts, or were used to level insurgent stronghold buildings from a safe distance.

But because of that loitering capability, some decommissioned Vipers were adopted by counter-terrorism and special weapons teams in overfunded law enforcement departments in developed member states. They were especially favored for hostage rescue, where they could be launched at the start of the mission, and the missiles could wait midair until an opportunity presented itself before they struck at the most favorable possible moment. For those missions, they had inert, kinetic warheads designed to minimize collateral damage and civilian casualties.

The dozen or so BGM-278 Vipers that had been gliding, watching, and patiently waiting overhead for the routing Karnolian marines to get out of the blast radii of the civilians they were programmed to protect… were not that minimum collateral variant.

They were the regular, anti-tank variant with depleted uranium mini-penetrators, designed to pierce 2,000 millimeters of tank armor from the top, after they chewed through explosive reactive armor. The reason Madagascar Instruments was contracted to manufacture the last block of the missiles with depleted uranium rather than tungsten was because of some very interesting, classified properties of depleted uranium munitions that utilized the material’s tendency to burst into flames on hard contact… And because the Union had found itself with abundant stockpiles of cheap depleted uranium around the time the Union Navy started developing nuclear-pumped laserhead missiles.

Karnolian marine battle armors were extremely robust. If an equivalency had to be drawn, they were about as tough as the armor typically found on Union light tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Unfortunately for the Karnolians, those vehicles did not usually come with two meters of top steel armor. Not even close.

Thus, Colonel Marcus Tanaka joined the ranks of the many other Union mission commanders who lavished millions of taxpayer dollars on targets that the Vipers were technically overkill for… as they splattered the fleeing Karnolian marines into the dry, fine sands of Dustball at six times the speed of sound.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

It took another five hours before the colony was declared clear. Even then…

Twelve KIA. Three in critical condition. Dozens with injuries. And a disgusting, lingering smell from the gas grenades in the colony’s buildings that probably wouldn’t go away for weeks.

Julia stared at the list on her datapad as she sat down heavily at her desk. Dr. Wrona did his best. The colony had some of the best trauma care surgeons in all of humanity, augmented by the best robotic surgical equipment, and it still wasn’t enough.

Her fear and calculation from earlier had been replaced by another emotion entirely.

Anger.

She was angry. Angry at herself. Angry at the circumstances. Angry at the Karnolians.

And angry enough to do something about it.

“I want options,” she snapped. “To send a message… There are no wrong answers today.”

“We can coordinate with the Vorshniks upstairs,” Harry suggested. “If we tell them to… disinvite that Karnolian battlecruiser out of the system, I’m sure no one will object after what happened today.”

“We can pay them to hit the ship,” Marcus suggested. “Maybe they’ll take payment in future Dustballium. If we can convince Shachos that the advantages they’ll get from—”

“We’ll do that as soon as I’m in a joking mood,” Julia said, making it clear what she was not in. “Can we hit that ship from here?”

“Unlikely,” Marcus said, shaking his head. “And inadvisable. Our latest intelligence suggests that our missiles probably can’t even significantly damage their frigates at this range, not to mention that battlecruiser. That’s if we can hit them. We’d need to waste all our rockets’ delta-Vs burning through atmosphere. And… from our telescopes, it seems like they’ve—they conveniently shifted to higher orbit earlier this morning.”

“Shifted to higher orbit,” Julia repeated in disbelief.

“Affirmative,” he confirmed. “We can technically still hit them if they sit still for us, but they won’t. If we want to get them, we’d need to have Camel Squadron do it. And… if they do, the Karnolians—they’ll probably shoot back. It… won’t be pretty.”

“They. Shifted. To. Higher. Orbit. This was before the attack on the colony began?!”

“Yes, ma’am. Just before. They do vary their orbits from time to time, so we didn’t think—”

“I swear, I’m going to make this office a new welcome mat out of these guys’ furry skins.”

There was a cough as a new set of footsteps entered the admin hab.

Julia’s eyes widened as she saw who it was. Her body tensed. She forced herself to relax, swallowing as she did. “Ahem. Samira! Are you alright?”

Samira nodded weakly. “Yeah, nothing a little hydration won’t fix and water isn’t rationed here, so…”

“I heard—I heard about what you did for Gustav. They got him to the surgical room. He’ll live.”

“They told me.”

“It’s—it’s because of you he’ll live.”

“I heard.”

Julia didn’t know what else to say. A million things ran through her head. She blurted out, “It’s because of you that I’m alive!”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

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Christmas Eve, 2077 (7 years ago)

“Captain, the Defiant is ready for battle.”

“Thank you, Commander. Status on hostile vector?”

On the tactical plot, the red triangles flowed like ink. The Imbrium-class designators rode the forward edges of the largest clots. Behind them, the logistics and auxiliaries huddled inside the umbrella.

“Closure rate has decreased to three point four,” Julia reported.

Collier didn’t take his eyes off the main screen. “Distance to lead?”

“Twenty-four kilo-kilo.”

“Are they still burning?”

“No, Captain. Possibly saving extra delta-V for the battle.”

Collier frowned in mild confusion. “Where’s the likely weapons engagement intercept?”

Julia pulled up her panel, watching the number crunching for a few seconds. “None,” she reported when the task completed.

“None?”

“None on the plot. Looks like their orbit will drift by weapons range and past L-1.”

“Intercept with Earth? Maybe further? A day-side raid on the Battlestar Three construction site?”

“Low orbit is far wider than us. From here, we can match any trans-Earth injection maneuver they can execute. Those seem… unlikely to be their target.”

“L-4 or 5? Project all their probable targets,” he ordered. “Expand the net if we have to. I want to know what they’re after.”

“Yes, Captain. Searching…”

Beep beep.

Tara called out, “Bandits, fire control radars active.”

“Who are they painting?” Julia clarified.

“Unknown. All ships are reporting hot pings. Surface arrays reading several contacts in their formation. Uncertain who they are planning to engage at this distance, but they will likely try to snipe a few of us before they enter the furball.”

Collier’s frown deepened in his helmet as he looked at Julia. “What’s the CPE?”

“Closest point estimation: twenty thousand kilometers, from our current orbit. For L-1… further.” She paused. “Odd. That is—that should be way outside of their weapons’ maximum effective ranges. Maybe they’re waiting for something.”

“Maybe. Unless…” his voice trailed off.

She completed his sentence. “Unless those new missiles they’ve got have… at least fifty percent more range than what we think is even possible.”

Collier speculated, “That’s—if that’s the case, then we need to rush them before they can zone us out with their increased range.”

Another massive missile range upgrade from the moonies. If that’s the case, this war’s already good as over.

Julia noticed a new light on her console. Her heart sank as she read the summary. “RoE update received from Brussels: no offensive maneuvers authorized. Launch if launched upon. Full operations order on your screen.”

“Perfect,” Collier muttered as he read the details. “Update on hostile lead?”

“Twenty-one kilo-kilo. Closure rate under one. They’re approaching the CPE… Incoming update from lead, all Alligators max burn to zero-intercept on hostile launch.”

“Understood.”

On the main display, the massive Lunar formation continued its slow and steady approach towards the Defiant.

“Twenty thousand kilometers. At CPE in… three… two… one… mark,” Julia reported. “Distance to bandits, opening now.”

“Keep them in our bow sensor cones,” Collier ordered. “Watch for low observability munitions, and keep us on the move.”

The nose of the Defiant shifted slightly as it tracked the enemy ships, now slowly receding from the Union Navy fleet. And the RCS thrusters kicked in, keeping the ship rotating on its central axis to reduce the odds of a lucky far strike taking out something important.

“Closure acceleration negative, closure rate negative. They’re moving away from us now. If they can hit us now and they launch, we’ll need to chase them for longer before we can launch,” Julia warned. “Much longer. They might be able to move back into surface battery cover, and we have no idea what they’ve got on the dark side. Captain, we’ll be sitting ducks—”

“We’ll be following the RoE is what we’ll do, Commander,” Collier said with gritted teeth.

“Yes, Captain… Bandits back at twenty-one kilo-kilo now…”

The enemy icons continued to move away, the space superiority ships covering the auxiliaries’ rear.

“Twenty-one point five… Twenty-two.”

“What are they doing?” Collier muttered.

New numbers lit up on her panel. “Enemy ships update… they’re burning now!”

“Prepare to burn to intercept on their missile launch! Acceleration?”

“Point two gravities. Closure acceleration is down to negative two.”

“Negative?” he asked, startled. “They’re burning away from us.”

His tone wasn’t a question, but she answered anyway. “Yes, Captain. Closure rate decreasing further negative to all identified hostiles.”

“Watch it. They must be about to begin a volley—”

“Closure acceleration at negative two point five and decreasing,” Julia said, mouth open in disbelief. “If they actually have the range, we can’t sit here and wait for them to outrange us even more! We need to pursue aggressively—”

Boop.

“Hostile ships are opening their missile bays!” Tara reported, her tone half an octave higher than professional as every indicator on their panels went to red.

Julia’s blood went cold as she ordered, “Track all outgoing projectiles. Counter-missile batteries, ready for launch on my mark.” On her tactical panel, the infrared telescopes on the ship’s bows zoomed into the enemy formation, twenty-some thousand kilometers away. And sure enough, she could see the lethal-looking, black-painted missiles in their racks through their open missile bay doors.

The bridge of the Defiant held its breath, waiting for the enemy salvo to come.

And waited.

Another minute passed.

“What are they waiting for?” Collier muttered under his breath. Any other occasion, Julia would have privately disapproved of the public display of impatience, but in this instance, she agreed wholeheartedly, just staring at the enemy ships on her screen without blinking.

They could launch any second…

Beep beep.

A new indicator flashed, this time not on one of the tactical panels but on the main screen.

Collier pivoted to it in surprise. “What in the—”

“Unencrypted video broadcast from bandit lead. Non-directional. Datalink reports same continuous signal to low Earth and L-4,” Julia reported. “Electronic warfare, focus on bandit lead. All sensors hold current—”

“An unencrypted video? Bring it up.”

The face of a moonie appeared on the main screen. He wore a vacuum suit over his Lunar gray uniform, and there was a singular star on his rank insignia. His face was calm, his eyes coldly blue. Julia recognized the familiar face of the famous traitor instantly.

After a few seconds of dead air, the man cleared his throat into the microphone as he began to speak. “Ahem. This is Rear Admiral Knoll, in command of the Lunar Navy Sixth Fleet, aboard the LNS Independence, to Armstrong Command on the surface. How do you read me, Serenity?”

A second voice replied near instantly from the surface of Luna. “Loud and clear, Admiral. Report fleet status.”

Knoll put all his energy and lung volume into the report. He was fifty-something years old, and his voice had all the excitement of a marine recruit who’d been handed his first radio. “I report: Sixth Fleet is one hundred percent combat effective. We have cleared all hostile ships out of the gravitational null radius of Luna-Earth out to Lagrange point one. Over.”

“We missed some of that,” the ground radio voice replied. “Can you say again your last, Admiral?”

“I say again, Sixth Fleet is one hundred percent combat effective. Our skies are clear of hostiles. Over.”

Lunar communications equipment was good. There was no interference on the line. Julia raised an eyebrow when the reply from Serenity was again… “Some down here are still having trouble hearing you, Admiral Knoll? Would you mind repeating your fleet status report?”

Julia checked her console.

Odd. They shouldn’t have any trouble receiving him…

“Sure thing, Serenity.” Knoll didn’t seem annoyed at having to repeat himself a third time. In fact, he seemed to relish saying it, and Julia realized exactly what this little… skit they were doing was for. “Lunar skies are totally clear. Not a Union-flagged hull in our orbits, what-so-ever. They seem to have gone home for the holidays. Would you like me to say that again? Over.”

“I believe everyone heard you that time, Admiral. Thank you for the report. Good work out there.”

“No, thank you, Serenity… Our ships are now returning to base as planned… Requesting permission to deorbit at ninety percent combat speed so my spacers can get home before dinner.”

“Permission granted. Early Merry Christmas to you and your spacers. Armstrong Command, out.”

“Happy holidays to you too. Independence and the Lunar Sixth, out.”

The broadcast ceased.

There was a long silence on the bridge of the Defiant as its officers glumly watched the red icons on the screen continue their retreat down the Lunar gravity well.

Julia cleared her throat as a new notification caught her attention. “We have confirmation from our Ares sensor suite; hostile ships have closed their missile bay doors and several are redeploying radiators to pre-battle configuration.”

“Bandit fire control radars are no longer active,” Tara confirmed half a minute later.

A few of the enemy space superiority ship icons, now receding from view, turned to probable volume estimates as they flew in and out of occlusion behind their bigger cargo ships and dragged decoys.

As they re-entered lower Lunar orbit, their squadrons split apart, some heading to parking orbit; others, the dark side. A few of them seemed to be decelerating for landing, their active sensor pings replaced by the low frequency radar beams of the Lunar surface tracking radars.

Collier said nothing for a long minute, then breathed out deeply. It was hard to tell if it was a sigh of relief… or resignation.

“Captain?”

He turned to Julia as he transmitted privately through the radio connection, “Julia, you’re American too. You know the traditional story behind Groundhog Day?”

She blinked twice in surprise at the question. “Um… yeah? But only from that old movie… It’s a—a—there’s a groundhog that comes out from hibernation,” she recalled. “And if it sees its shadow, it’ll run back to its den and winter will go on for… a few more weeks, and if not, spring comes early. Right?”

He grunted. “Right. Six weeks.”

When he didn’t elaborate, she asked, “Why?”

“I don’t know. Was just reminded of it.”

“Sir, if they’d engaged…”

Collier looked around, as if confirming he was still on a private channel. He said quietly, “They would have slaughtered us.”

“We would have taken down quite a few of them with us too. I don’t think they’re too keen on dying on Christmas either,” she reminded him.

“No, probably not… Then again, this whole war… it’s not for the sane, is it?”

She grunted.

Near the closest point. Where it seemed like the enemy was ready to engage, Julia had felt something in her heart. It was an odd feeling; it really was. If that enemy fleet had burnt past her ship, they could have swung past the Lagrange points, and then free-returned right into low Earth orbit. They could have done that. And in the moment she saw those civilian ships scurrying around on her map, she realized something else.

She was ready to die for Earth. She always knew that. That was part of the oath, part of the job.

The extensive training and drilling of the Union Navy—it ensured that everyone who was on a warship was ready to give it all for their fellow spacers. The people they trained with, bonded with, sitting in the uncomfortable crash chairs next to them. That was their trench, their foxhole.

But this moment felt different. More than that. They were coming for her planet. They were coming for her home. Where she was born, where she came from, where she grew up. That planet was hers to die for.

That last full measure of devotion.

She would have done anything to stop that enemy fleet.

Anything. And she knew, she wasn’t the only one on the ship.

That was probably how the moonie felt about it, she knew. She knew that abstractly. It was a part of every strategy briefing she was attending with increasing frequency; the normal citizens of Luna weren’t the enemy, just their extremist leadership. Even if, increasingly, she was finding that harder and harder to believe.

She knew that the moonies were just defending their planet. She knew what those words meant. And now… now she knew how that felt. Perhaps… that was even why the moonies just did that. Forced her and her people to taste that bitter tang in their mouths, even for just a few minutes.

Another long silence as the ship continued to watch the few enemy ships still on station, opposing them over Luna. Whatever they said on the broadcast, not all of them had gone home. They still had a few watching Earth’s squadrons diligently.

Julia swallowed. “That message from the moonies… This… operation—it’s going to go on for another while, huh?”

Captain Collier didn’t reply. His head turned to the bridge clock wall. At some point, the hour digit had ticked over to zero in Auckland.

“Merry Christmas, Julia. Sorry you couldn’t be home with your family. I know your grandfather’s… in the hospital and—”

“Everyone has family—It’s just part of the job, Captain.” She shifted in her seat as she turned her attention back to her screens. “Merry Christmas to you too.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dustball

Six Claws Klarnoth followed the Faction Luna human as she led him to the administrative structure. The entire colony looked wrong to him. Everything was just slightly too big, built for the gigantic primitives. Also, their fascination with adding glass to everything they built… it was so odd.

Why would anyone put that many weak points into their building structures?

Disconcerting. But he would do his job.

At the entrance, the human worked the door opening lever. It jiggled slightly without budging. Through his helmet, he could hear her breath quicken in frustration.

“What are you doing?!” he asked brusquely. “Are you stalling?”

“It’s not… working,” Samira replied with clenched teeth. She stepped back with a sigh. “The colony’s all locked down because of your attack. The doors won’t work. We need to go back and get the commodore’s key card before—”

“No!” Klarnoth said impatiently as he shoved her aside and walked up to the door. He inspected it for a moment in his tactical display. Then, he instructed, “Stand back, primitive.”

“Huh? Why? What are you—”

Bang. Bang. Bang.

He aimed and placed three accurate shots from his rifle, one to each of the hinges, exploding in a shower of sparks. Then, with a loud kick, the door fell over with another bang. He turned to the primitive. “Where is it?”

The human looked appropriately cowed by his decisiveness. “It’s—it’s—it’s inside.”

He impatiently gestured for her to go ahead. Then, his radio clicked on.

“Six Claws! We heard shots! Are you alright?” his underling asked, unbecoming uncertainty in his voice.

“None of your business, Four Claws!” he snarled back. “Shut up and do your job! Ask any more stupid questions and you’ll be permanently assigned to trash duty, cleaning up this wasteland of a planet after we take it!”

“Yes—yes, Six Claws.”

He clicked off his radio, shaking his head.

Samira had stopped to wait for him. “Can we—can we go?”

Klarnoth pointed a claw at her. “Yes! Are you slow?! Go!”

She led them through two hallways, then into an office room. She stopped, then turned and asked meekly, “It’s… in that table drawer.”

“Get it! Do you need my permission to go to the bathroom too?”

“No—no. I’m okay,” she said as she walked over to the desk.

Klarnoth noticed a small hole, about the diameter of his large claw, near the edge of the table. Even their furniture was full of odd and useless adornments.

Samira went over to the other side, bent over, and started rummaging through its drawer. As she dug through it, he scanned the room. There were stacks of paper all over the place.

Paper documents. Actual primitives.

Idly, he zoomed his optics on one of them, watching his suit translate the document from their language. There probably wasn’t any useful intelligence in here, but he wasn’t doing anything else anyway until—

He frowned. “Hm… Wait, this isn’t your office.”

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Until you release or kill him.

The way the alien said it almost made it seem like it didn’t matter much to him which option she chose. He could be bluffing, but she didn’t know.

Which severely limited her bargaining power.

“I’ll release your friend,” she shouted back. “If you release all my people and leave our colony alone.”

Six Claws Klarnoth didn’t even need to think about it. He replied, “Not possible. We still need them and you as bargaining chips. For your Precursor Metal factory.”

As she figured.

She injected as much steel into her voice as she could. “We’d rather sabotage it than allow you to take it from us.”

“I don’t think so. We have studied your people,” Klarnoth said. “I think they will not allow you to all die for machines. I think they will give up the factory, especially because we will take it from you either way.”

She wasn’t sure whether he was right about that.

“Now, stop stalling. I will give you five seconds to decide. Then, I will start killing your people. Five… four… three… two…”

He did not appear to be bluffing. Not at all. And ultimately, she was responsible for her people, whom she put into this position.

“Alright! Alright!” she shouted. “Fine. I’ll release him!”

Julia knew she was giving up all of her leverage. Her only piece of leverage. But there wasn’t much of a choice. If the Karnolians were willing to massacre her people even if it meant killing one of their own, she had nothing anyway. The only play she had was for time, and they both knew it.

She shoved Garbote out. He’d recovered somewhat from his little adventure with the tear gas grenade, enough for him to slowly stumble back to his squad.

“And his equipment,” Klarnoth demanded.

Reluctantly, she threw his defunct armor out as well.

“Come out of hiding.”

His gun was still aimed at her colonists. Without much of a choice, she and the other colonists in the mess hall emerged, joining the other prisoners on the street. The Karnolian marines wasted no time slapping restraints on them.

“How did you subdue one of my marines and get him out of his armor?” Klarnoth asked curiously.

“We found your armor manual release lever on the back of his neck, and—” She nudged her head at Garbote. “Why don’t you ask him?”

Garbote was too busy being looked at by their equivalent of a corpsman to answer questions.

“Whatever. That is not important. It is… almost impressive,” he admitted. “But we have more important matters to discuss now.”

“Sure, we can discuss things calmly… What do you want from us?”

“You will tell me how to disable your sabotage devices for the Precursor Metal factory.”

“Look, Six Claws Klarnoth. May I call you Klarnoth? Are you related to Karveth, by any chance—”

Klarnoth snorted. “Your silly negotiation tactics will not work on me, primitive. I know what I want, and I know what I have. I have your people. I know you care about them.”

“If you kill my people, you’ll have nothing to negotiate with for the Dustballium factory up in the hills.”

He gestured at the rows of captives. “I have over two hundred of you. If they will trade the factory for two hundred of you, they will likely trade it for one hundred and ninety-nine of you. Or one hundred and ninety-eight. Or one ninety-seven. And so on.” Klarnoth shrugged. “Yes, I will eventually have a bigger problem getting you to comply when I run low on live prisoners to threaten you with, but I know you will give up before then.”

Julia swallowed hard at his cold, bare logic. She recognized her mistake. The deployment of the marines, leaving the colony nearly defenseless. She’d been prepared to fight an enemy operating with alien equipment but the tactics of the moonies. Intellectually, she knew that the aliens were different; she hadn’t really internalized that difference until the angry teddy bear laid out his cruel logic for her.

She recognized the one his gun was aimed at. It was one of her scientists. One of the atmospheric scientists who came on the initial Polaris expedition. Eric. Eric… something. She didn’t know him that well, but like all the Dustball colonists, she’d interviewed him before he joined the project. She passed him in the mess hall from time to time. She’d seen him work on the machines in the colony’s laboratories. He’d given her a tour of them once. She was responsible for him.

Defeated, she sighed. “I’ll comply.”

“How do you stop the sabotage devices for the factory from activating?” Klarnoth asked again.

“I can’t,” she replied. “It’s manually activated by the marines inside the factory. It’s designed not to be remotely disabled.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “Tell me the truth.”

“That is the truth,” she insisted. “There is no mechanism to stop the manual activation. You can’t do anything about them, and the marines have been instructed not to follow my orders if I’m compromised—”

Klarnoth raised his gun. “Five… Four…”

“That’s the truth! I’m telling you—”

“Three… Two… One…”

“Please… I’ll help you—”

Bang.

The shot echoed in the streets. Eric crumpled, lifeless, a spreading pool of dark liquid beneath him. A ragged scream tore from one of the other captives, then cut short into a whimper as another of Klarnoth’s soldiers leveled their rifle in warning.

Julia trembled with rage and helplessness. She stared at Eric’s still form, bile rising in her throat. He was in his twenties. A bright, young scientist, one of humanity’s best. Curious and brave enough to join the expedition to another star system. To put his trust in her, to protect him. Now, he was dead because of her failures—her miscalculations, her inability to protect her people.

Klarnoth lowered his smoldering weapon with casual indifference. “See, primitive? I am not bluffing. Now, you know I am not one of the Vorshnik clowns you’ve made friends with, and you will tell me the truth. How do you disable the sabotage mechanisms?”

If she hadn’t had her base impulses trained out of her by years of war, she would have lunged at him.

There was no room in the Navy for rash actions. For pointless last stands or acts of brazen stupidity. In an orbital fleet where battles were decided by cold, hard physics, such human instincts were counterproductive, ruthlessly trained and weeded out of officer cadets before they had a chance to get spacers under their command killed.

Julia knew that the Karnolian marine might be much shorter and smaller, but he was in heavy armor, holding a weapon, and she was not. She suppressed her instincts, exactly as she had been trained.

She repeated, “You can’t. There is no remote override.”

“I still don’t believe you.” Klarnoth picked another one of her colonists out of the crowd. One of the moonie construction robot operators. One of Lucas’s. “Tell me the truth.”

“That is the truth!” she insisted. “There is no way to disable it from here. What would it take to convince you—”

“Thirty of your dead colonists would convince me,” he said as he put his rifle to the moonie’s head. “Then, we can move on to question two. You get to decide how much you want to keep the secret. Five…”

Seeing no other option, Julia snorted coldly at the Karnolian. “That’s not even one of mine.”

“Four—What?”

“She’s a moonie. She’s not one of mine, idiot.”

Instead of getting angry at the insult, Klarnoth stopped counting and stared at her in confusion.

Sensing an opening, Julia explained, “You Karnolians have factions too, right?” She took another glance at the big blue flag on his shoulder. “You’re from Faction Blue?”

“Faction Blue?” Klarnoth asked incredulously. He rolled his eyes derisively as he pointed a claw at the flag on his shoulder. “Faction Blue? Are you colorblind? Don’t you see my flag?! We’re Faction Dark Blue!”

She suppressed her instinct to swallow too. “Right. Faction Dark Blue. We have factions too. You’re pointing your gun at a moonie. She’s not one of mine, stupid.”

He stared off to the side, into the distance, as if quietly consulting his radio. Or maybe he was just stunned by the revelation. Probably the former. After a few seconds, he said, “Oh. Right.” Then, he pointed his gun at another one of her colonists. “That’s one of yours?”

Julia shook her head. “Nope. Guess again. That’s a moonie too.”

Klarnoth’s rifle lowered as he pressed his paw to his helmet. This time, he was definitely on the radio. She could see his mouth move rapidly inside the helmet.

While they talked, Julia re-analyzed the situation. The Karnolians had a squad here. About eight or nine marines, she counted. Another one or two going around the rest of the colony, rounding up the rest of her people. They must have already neutralized the four marine guards she had at the armory; if anything, that would have been the first thing they did.

From the way they were threatening her and from what Klarnoth said, the plan seemed to be to try to figure out if they could disable the sabotage mechanisms remotely, before trying to negotiate for it with the colonists as hostages. That meant that the marines at the factory site were likely still operational. They just didn’t know the colony was under attack yet. Or if they did, they weren’t going to cross the open to try to rescue the colonists unless they were stupid.

But… she looked at the number of marines the Karnolians had.

There were only eight or nine, at most a dozen, running around in her colony. Even with their heavy battle armor—she’d gotten a taste of how durable they were earlier—a dozen wasn’t enough to control it for long. If most of her colonists were civilians, it might have been, but Dustball was no ordinary colony. Most of the moonies were former Lunar marines and spacers. A dozen marines was simply not enough.

She knew this because she’d been in many planning meetings back on Earth, running simulations and wargaming security breaches. How the moonies could take over. How they could take control of the radios, overpower the guards at the armory, overwhelm the supply landing pad. Which buildings they needed for good lines of sight, which vantage points could cut logistical routes, which roads needed to be curved to slow down VBIEDs…

Klarnoth had finally finished his talk with whoever was on the other end of his radio. He turned back to her crowd of colonists. “Which of you are not moonies?” he asked. “Raise your paws.”

Shockingly—and to Julia’s relief, none of her colonists were in a hurry to volunteer their hands. With some of her civilian scientists, you never knew.

Klarnoth made a disgruntled-sounding noise as he pointed his rifle at random, looking for Julia’s reaction. “This one? Or that one? Are you not a… moonie?”

Today, we are all moonies.

She kept her face neutral, refusing to look at the crowd of people she failed.

“Are you a moonie? What about you?”

A few seconds of the cruel exercise later, he gave up. He cocked his head. “I think it does not matter. If I start executing your people at random, some of them will be people in your faction that you care about. And I have plenty of your colonists.”

He pointed his rifle back at the original moonie. “Now, tell me the truth. How do I disable your sabotage machines? Five…”

Julia closed her eyes.

“Four…”

There was nothing else she could do. She’d failed. She had nothing, and they both knew it. And worse, she failed to convince the Karnolian that she was telling the truth. This was a no-win scenario. Like a prisoner being tortured for intelligence they didn’t have, all she could do was take the pain and wait for death.

“Three… Two…”

“Stop!” a shout rang out in the crowd.

She opened her eyes at the voice.

The familiar voice.

Samira.

“Stop! That’s one of my people,” Samira said, standing up in the crowd. “I’ll tell you how to do it.”

He stopped his countdown to gape at her. “Who are you?”

“I’m Samira. I’m the head of my faction here,” Samira replied proudly. “We own half of the Dustballium factory. I can tell you how to override our sabotage failsafe.”

Klarnoth looked… a mixture of surprised and excited. He pressed his paw to his radio again. This time, it was quick. “You are Samira Fardin, head of the—local supervisor of Faction Luna?”

“Yes,” she replied. “Your people made us an offer on the radio the other night. Are you going to honor it?”

“That offer was made by Faction Red…” He hesitated for a long moment. “But we will also honor it if you can guarantee the working foundry intact. No sabotage. If not, then we can give your people no guarantees. The lies end. And death it is.”

Julia turned to look at her uncertainly. “Samira… what is he talking about? What offer?”

Samira didn’t look at her. Instead, she stared Klarnoth in the eyes. “Deal. A working Dustballium foundry, for my people’s safety and for us to be allowed to remain in this colony. You won’t go back on your word?”

“Of course not! We are a people of honor, not like the juvenile clowns!” Klarnoth insisted. “Now tell us, how do we get in? How?!”

“Samira, don’t do it,” Julia warned. “He’ll betray you in a second—”

Samira turned to stare at her. “Betray us? Please. You narrow-sighted grounders see treachery everywhere. It’s just projection. That’s all your paranoia is.”

“They’ll kill your people too,” Julia begged. “They’ll massacre you after you give them what they want.”

“Like your ships massacred us in the Christmas battle of ‘77?” Samira snorted. “More grounder hypocrisy.”

Julia recalled the raid, the memory swirling in her head. She snarled angrily, “We didn’t start it. And if it weren’t for your 1158th Battalion marines, we would have painted the regolith of Luna red with the thin blood of you traitors and—oof!” She doubled over in pain as Klarnoth walked up to her and bashed her stomach with the butt of his rifle.

“Shut up, primitive!” Klarnoth ordered, then he looked back at Samira excitedly. “How do we disable the failsafes?”

“I have a radio coded to a special frequency that bricks the sabotage device. It’s in the admin hab.” Samira pointed at the distant building. “That one. Let me go grab it real quick.”

He shook his head. “No. I’m not giving you a chance to escape. You’ll take me to it, and…” Klarnoth pointed a claw at one of his marines. “Four Claws, watch the prisoners. If any of them try to run, kill them all. And once we take out the… sabotage device… you know what to do.”

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Thonk.

Crash.

Julia raised an eyebrow at the sounds but continued chowing down on her morning hash browns. Weird noises were a regular occurrence for the Dustball colony. There was always some construction project or scientific experiment going on.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!”

That… was not.

The high-pitched scream pierced her thoughts and jolted her awake like the full cup of coffee she hadn’t finished.

Thonk. Thonk. Thonk.

She ran to the windows of the mess hall. Civilians outside ran to-and-fro in full blown panic. Dozens streamed past.

Bang.

Something hit the ballistic-resistant window in front of her like a hammer, spiderwebs forming in it as it bounced off. A second later, there was a soft pop, and a cushion of white smoke blossomed from a dark cylindrical object on the ground outside the mess hall.

What in the…

Her vision drifted in the direction of the marines’ armory, a hundred meters away just down the street, only to see…

There were two armored figures in the street, each carrying a weapon. As she watched, one of them launched a projectile with another thonk. It hit one of the civilian scientists in the back as they ran. They crumpled to the ground, motionless.

She squinted into the figure’s faceplate, as if confirming something for herself. But she already knew what it was going to be before she even saw the insignia proudly displayed on their chest and shoulders.

Karnolian.

Karnolian marines. Two of them. And judging by the distant screaming sounds in the colony, it wasn’t just these two.

Aliens.

She felt…

Somewhat relieved, actually.

It was illogical, her subconscious knew. The colony was far better suited, far more prepared to deal with a moonie uprising than… whatever this was. But for some odd reason, she couldn’t stop that irrational sense of relief flooding into her guts.

Thonk. Thonk.

A squad of the aliens. At least. Maybe more.

She looked back at the carnage outside. The white smoke seemed to have some kind of incapacitating effect. She saw a woman slow down mid-sprint, hobbling for a few steps, before she collapsed into the gravel, coughing hard while rubbing her eyes.

She recognized the symptoms.

Tear gas.

Julia looked back up at the streets. The routes to the admin hab and armory were blocked off.

Where are my marines?!

Then, it occurred to her. Most of the marines were deployed up in the craters, near the Dustballium factory. It was cold-blooded to abandon the security of the colony, but when she couldn’t do both, it was only rational to try to protect the most valuable assets of humanity first.

Julia took a deep breath. Breathe in, breathe—

She stopped herself.

Her base was under attack. This was an attack.

Not a complex interstellar trade negotiation involving two, possibly three, hostile species. Not balancing her oath to Earth against the ultimate survival of the species.

A military attack.

This was what Julia was here for. Her self-doubt, built up for months, dissipated in less than an instant as her training took over, conscious effort not required.

Stop. Observe. Decide. Act.

If the aliens were taking the colony, they were likely here for hostages to trade for the Anomaly site. They’d rehearsed this before. The marines were given strict orders not to cave in or negotiate. There was a chance they’d violate their standing orders if they saw the civilians of the colony being massacred, but there wasn’t much she could do about that.

That was the first possibility. The second possibility was, the marines might be under attack simultaneously. Their position might have fallen already. That was more important.

She reached for her datapad.

“Colonel! Marcus! Are you there?” she called into it.

There was a brief moment where she thought he wouldn’t answer, then his face appeared on her screen. “Yes? Commodore?”

“Colonel, we’re under attack! The colony’s under attack by Karnolians. Contact Camel in orbit, launch your drones, and defend your positions. Do not mount a rescue attempt on the colony for any reason. Contact the other two species and threaten to scuttle if they don’t intervene. We’ve been through the plans.”

Marcus seemed to hesitate for a second, then replied, “Yes, Commodore. Drones are on the way. We’ll hold our positions and raise Camel. Don’t worry. We’ll follow the plan.”

Wait a minute.

“Colonel, authenticate, challenge: anvil.”

“Commodore?”

“Challenge: anvil. Authenticate with the word of the day.”

Marcus didn’t reply, just stared at the camera with glassy eyes.

Ah. Nice one, assholes.

They had gained control of her communication lines after all.

She switched the radio off.

The marines were supposed to put in a wired connection between the Anomaly site and the armory, but that project had been delayed for some other priority. On second thought, this was not some hasty operation. They’d gotten the radios. The armory had likely already fallen anyway, and unless the aliens were stupid, they were going to be watching that too.

All the firepower she had was inaccessible: a dozen kilometers away, in the hills with the marines. She immediately ruled out running for the Meerkat rovers. The aliens must have deployed in some kind of atmospheric landing shuttle, and driving a light rover armored to the equivalent of sheet metal across kilometers of open ground was suicide.

Even if the marines could help her, there was no way for her to contact them, besides hoping that the ships in Camel Squadron overhead would see what was going on and let the marines know. Or even better, provide fire support.

There was nothing she could do at the moment to influence that outcome.

On to the next priority: her colonists and herself.

She glanced out the window. One of the armored figures was heading her way now—strolling at a leisurely pace, almost. Their weapon was aimed at the door.

Julia looked around her. A small group of her civilian scientists were huddled around her, looking at her with fear in their eyes, as if expecting she was there to solve all their problems.

The mess hall didn’t have much in the way of defenses. All the actual weapons in the colony were in the armory, and the security of the entire Dustball project was designed around not having too many things that could be used as improvised weapons. In case the moonies were to try something. The most dangerous things she had access to in here were a bunch of prison-safe plastic meal trays and… her eyes fell on the bright red fire extinguisher attached to the wall.

Stop. Observe. Decide. Act.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Thonk.

Four Claws Garbote marched down the main street of the primitives’ colony, launching his gas grenades at anything that moved.

Truthfully, he wasn’t that excited about this mission.

Garbote was a space marine trained for special operations. His duty was to carry out the most dangerous, most difficult jobs for his faction. And, if lucky, he’d have a chance in his life to be deployed to an alien planet for glorious war. Mostly against Sakvins. Hopefully against the Vorshnik clowns one day. That wasn’t something that had happened for a long time, but that could change any time, and he could dream. He lived and trained for the thrill of battle. Real battle.

Subjugating some random primitive colony out in the middle of nowhere with barely any armed defenders didn’t qualify. The riskiest part had been slipping past their ships and orbital defenses, and that excitement was for the pilots. And that turned out to be trivial anyway.

Thonk.

He watched another grouping of the primitives collapse to the ground from the gas. Not very sporting.

But whatever his personal thoughts, he was also a soldier. He did what he was ordered to. He approached the downed targets and efficiently slapped restraints on them one-by-one.

Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty.

He counted the number of prisoners he’d taken in his head. As he went for number twenty-one lying flat on its belly, the human on the ground suddenly came alive. They turned over and swiped their leg at his in a quick motion. Faster than he could react.

Clunk.

If he wasn’t in his hard shell marine armor, he’d probably have fallen over. Instead, the human howled in pain as their ankle contacted solid metal.

Garbote sighed in disappointment at the lack of challenge, wishing for a moment that he could get out of his armor for a more even fight against this primitive. It looked big and strong, enough for a real brawl to the death. But that would violate his orders and thus his duty. He turned the writhing primitive over and fit a set of restraints on them before they could recover.

Twenty one.

He looked back up, at the scattered primitives in the streets, sprinting away from him while screaming. He let a group of them go, knowing that the rest of his squad down the street would take care of them.

Analyzing the colony’s structures, Garbote saw a building ahead of him with a strong thermal signature.

The structure might be alien, but the layout he could see through its windows was not.

Ah, the kitchen.

He approached it curiously and looked into its dark interiors through the windows. There were eight or nine frightened-looking primitives clustered inside, their main front door shut. By the looks of it, the humans had barred the inside of it with some thin, metal stick.

He knocked on the window and gestured at the humans inside to come out. A couple of them pointed at him in fear with their elongated claws, but they didn’t comply with his polite instruction.

Primitives. What can you do?

He sighed, took aim at the door with his motorized leg, diverted all his suit power to it, and gave it a good, hard kick.

Bang.

The door came off its hinges. Then, power to his arm motors, and he flung it aside.

Thonk.

He shouldered his launcher and sent an incapacitation gas grenade into the room. Their kitchen was bigger than most other compartments in the colony, but not big enough to hide from the gas inside. He waited a few seconds for the gas to fill the space.

Then, a few more.

Hmmm.

He frowned. The gas should have been filling up by now. At the very least, they should be coughing, if not running out of the enclosed room in pain and panic.

He went back to the window and peeked through it again. The primitives in there were still looking and pointing at him in fear. But definitely not coughing and crawling on the ground like they should be. And no smoke.

The gas grenade probably failed to activate. That happened from time to time.

Defective equipment. No matter. I’ll do it myself.

He stepped through the front door.

A lot of things happened very quickly.

First, he noticed an overturned, orange bucket in the middle of the room, wisps of white smoke leaking out around its edges. His subconscious realized that was how they got rid of his gas, but his conscious thoughts hadn’t quite caught up to that yet.

“Now!” he heard his translator squeak out into his left ear.

A stream of white foam flew at his faceplate, coating it with a sticky, opaque substance. Instinctively, his arm came up to block it, which did… nothing. Then, he tried to wipe the obscuration off, but that didn’t accomplish anything other than spread a thick smear across his vision. His training kicked in, and with a flick of his claws, he switched the visuals in his helmet to his backup exterior camera.

That worked.

Garbote regained his sight just in time to see a massive mess hall table rushing at him from his left.

Whooomp.

He raised his left arm to block it, activating its motors to resist the incoming pressure… then was astonished to see its motorized strength fail against no fewer than a dozen primitives shoving against the table in tandem with all their strength.

Crunch.

The large steel table squeezed him against the wall of the cafeteria, pinning both his arms against him and the structure. His launcher weapon clattered uselessly out of his grip onto the floor.

What in the name of the God of Battle?!

Garbote struggled to get out of the pin, using both his arm motors to try to create some space for him to escape the trap. His metallic joints strained against the table, applying a level of force that biological beings simply weren’t capable of resisting—

“Heave!” he heard the primitives scream in unison as they collectively pushed on the table.

Crunch.

The increased pressure crushed his left arm against his neck. If he weren’t wearing hard armor, he suspected they’d have instantly broken his arm, all his ribs, and probably his neck. Instead of dwelling on that alternative reality, he urged his armor to work harder to get him out of there.

One of his arm motors directed a complaint—something about overheating—into his helmet display. He dismissed it with a snarl and directed all the power in his armor back into it.

“Again!” the primitives yelled. “Heave!”

He struggled as he directed his leg motors to join in the fight with any spare power, trying to squeeze in any direction he could against the primitives’ table.

Any… direction… will… do…

Garbote’s legs gained some purchase as their motors activated, sliding the heavy table laterally even through the tension. Centimeter by centimeter, he slowly slid himself out of the jaws of the cursed primitive trap.

Then, a flash in his vision.

Thud.

One of the humans—a woman—swung a red, metallic cylinder into his armored faceplate.

It bounced right off, sending her off balance, sprawling to the ground.

Ears ringing, he laughed at her weak effort, still pushing himself out of the trap with his leg motors, centimeter by centimeter… until he saw her pick herself off the ground. He realized there was nothing stopping her from—

Thud.

The primitive swung again with the cylinder. This time, she braced herself and didn’t fall over. She swung again. And again.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Garbote was pretty sure that his faceplate was made of some tough metallic-ceramic composite, tougher than any armor the humans supposedly had according to his mission briefing. But it was head armor. It still had to be made of material that was light and thin enough to fit onto his head and still be operable in case the suit lost power.

It should be… strong enough, right?

Thud. Thud.

Right?!

“Again! Heave!”

His leg slipped as the group applied another burst of pressure. The table edge crushed him back into the wall, resetting the progress of his escape attempt.

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

The primitive with the metal cylinder swung repeatedly at his faceplate. Then, the sound he really did not want to hear…

Crack.

A spiderweb crack appeared in his visor. He stressed his armor’s motors to their limits, still trying to squirm out of the absurd table trap to no avail.

Come on, come on.

Crack.

A tiny hole appeared in his digital vision. Luckily for him, the helmet armor was made to last. Even if a small section was breached, the overall armor integrity was still intact. It was designed to take quite a bit of abuse, and it would take far longer for the primitives to pry him out of there… At least none of them had any firearms. The first step of the plan was to take over their armory, and that part seemed to be working at least…

The human in front of him swung again.

Thud. Crack.

Another tiny hole in his faceplate. He desperately tried to squeeze his right arm free from the wall. Maybe he could stop the crazy primitive with the cylinder to buy himself some more time…

Just… a… little… more…

Thud. Thud. Crack.

Yet another dented hole, a little bigger than the other two. He could taste the dry local air flooding into his nostrils from outside. If he wasn’t fighting for his life, he’d swear whatever was in the kitchen smelled delicious.

“Heave!”

Calming himself, Garbote analyzed his tactical situation a little more dispassionately. If he exerted force in the right direction, in between the primitive group’s heaves, he calculated he should have enough time to get out from under the table. All he needed was for them to get a little more tired, a little weaker in their pushes, and once he detected the weakness, he could overpower them with his mechanical strength. He had more battery than they had stamina; that was the point of one of these suits.

And his helmet should protect him for long enough. It would take a lot more hits to create an opening that the primitives could reach through—

Wait, what are you doing?

The woman had dropped her metal cylinder. With a crazed-looking grin, she wrapped a wet rag around her nose and mouth, tying it with a knot behind her head.

Huh?

Then, she turned her back and bent down to the overturned orange bucket on the ground. The bucket with faint white smoke still slowly leaking out its side.

Wait… Oh. No! No! No! No! No! Ahhhhh!

He realized what she was going to do, about a second before she picked up and quickly doused the bucket with his own live gas grenade, right over his breached helmet.

In the Union Navy bootcamp, there was a basic training exercise nicknamed “the gas chamber”. It was a confidence exercise, to teach recruits to trust their NBC gear to protect them against chemical weapons.

First, the recruits would don their gas masks. Then, they would enter a sealed room with some activated tear gas. They would stay in there as a platoon for as long as the instructors needed to confirm that their masks were properly fitted. And finally, the recruits would take off their gas masks, and they would have to recite their names, ranks, and Union Navy serial numbers before they could leave the tear gas chamber.

For some, it was an unpleasant experience; for others, excruciating, or even debilitating.

Exposure to tear gas was no joke. Even for just a few seconds. And the gas chamber exercise used up about one or two tear gas grenades’ worth of spiciness, for the whole room.

Poor Garbote breathed in nearly the entire dose of his riot control grenade, all by himself, as its chemical irritants rushed into the cracks and holes in his faceplate.

He lasted two whole panicked breaths before he went into shock.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Julia carefully rinsed the residual effects of the nasty chemicals from her nose under the water tap.

“Commodore?” one of the civilians peeked into the kitchen.

She dried her face. “Yeah?”

“The alien soldiers are outside. They’ve surrounded us.”

“Yeah. That’s what I thought,” she said, picking up her fire extinguisher again as she approached her small captive, now peeled out of his marine armor. She picked him up and dragged him to the door, staring at the alien marines lined up outside as fiercely as she could with tears and snot still running down her cheeks uncontrollably. She put her back to the wall and shouted at them, “Who is in charge over there?”

One of them stepped forward, his armor boosting his voice. “I am Six Claws Klarnoth. Primitive leader Julia Kessler, you have one of my marines there?”

“Yeah.” She coughed twice as she peeked out at the streets again. The Karnolians had subdued and restrained a few dozen of her colonists, neatly lined up in rows next to them. “We’ve got him in… custody. What do you want, Six Claws Klarnoth?”

“First, I want you to release my marine. And if you do not,” Klarnoth said, pointing his rifle—a lethal looking one this time—at one of her captured scientists. “I will start executing your people, one-by-one, until you release or kill him.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

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++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Would you mind telling me what you guys were talking to the Karnolians about a couple nights ago? I can’t help but—”

Lucas snorted. “… spy on us? Typical.”

Julia rolled her eyes. “I was going to say: I can’t help but wonder what you’re chatting about. You guys were talking for quite a while, huh? Hours.”

“Oh, fine… I’ll let you in on the secret: we were just having a Star Wars watch party,” he replied casually.

Her jaw dropped. “You’re kidding.”

“No. Not at all.”

“For… thirteen hours?!”

Lucas shrugged. “After we finished with the original trilogy, they insisted we show them the prequels too.”

“That’s—yeah, okay, I guess that would add up to about thirteen hours,” she said slowly as she did the estimates in her head.

“Yeah. They were pretty disappointed that the Ewoks didn’t show up again. I think that was their favorite part. Probably reminds them of themselves.”

“Hm… You know they made two other standalone movies with the Ewoks, right?”

“I—no? What?!” Lucas sputtered.

She nodded seriously. “Look it up. They should be in the colony’s vast content library.”

“Standalone… Ewok movies… Are they… any good?”

“God, no. They’re aggressively terrible movies. But who knows? They’re aliens. Maybe they’ll love them.”

“We’ll… see about that.” He stared at her for a moment, then tilted his head. “So… what happened back in Sol?”

She was surprised by the question but feigned ignorance. “Hm? What do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t be asking me about our talks with the aliens that openly if you weren’t desperate for answers. And your marines have been very, very busy since the resupply shuttle landed… We notice these things, grounder. So there are only two options: either your people have ordered you to do something stupid, in which case you wouldn’t bother to ask me questions, or something big happened back in Sol.”

Julia considered lying to him. Considered telling him that everything was fine back home.

That’s what they would do if they were in my shoes, or maybe—

“There’s been a shooting,” she blurted out. “In Serenity. Assassination… attempt on your prime minister. Possibly… Probably.”

“What?”

“State of the Alliance speech. Someone took a shot at your—your Prime Minister Farid.”

He didn’t react how she expected. She didn’t know what she expected, but it was certainly not… nothing.

Lucas’s calm face betrayed no emotion as he said, “I see. You said assassination attempt. Was it… successful?”

She shook her head. “We don’t know. The shuttle left right as it was happening. In fact, it was delayed by two hours, and if it had not been, we wouldn’t have gotten the news this resupply cycle.”

“I see,” he repeated.

“All we have is the recorded live feed from your news services. I can show you…”

Julia carefully watched his face as she played the video for him on her datapad.

Shocked? Angry? Excited?

She couldn’t tell.

“Well?” she asked as the video finished. “Do you… know who it is?”

“What?! You think I just… know every face on Luna?! You know there are like over two hundred and fifty million residents on Luna, right?”

“You know what I mean. Which group’s responsible.”

He shrugged. “I know about as much as you do.”

“We didn’t do it. It wasn’t us.”

That one took him a little longer to process. But after a pause, he nodded reluctantly. “You grounders don’t have the balls for something like that.”

She let the insult slide. “Maybe it’s one of those LLF nutjobs?” she asked, still carefully watching his reaction.

“Maybe. But there’s no need for you grounders to always just jump to conclusions about us—It could be anyone, okay?”

“The colony… do you think that they might… have people here?” she asked.

“No.” Lucas shook his head insistently.

“No what?”

“No, the LLF does not have a cell on Dustball.”

“How—how do you know?” she asked.

“I just know.”

“Samira once told me that—”

“She probably told you what you wanted to hear. To satisfy your paranoia. There is nothing up our sleeves, nothing at all.”

“What about Samira herself? She seems to have become distant lately. She’s mixed in with a few people, like that LIA character—”

“Are you surveilling her?”

“Yes, but it’s not personal. We’re surveilling everyone at the colony for its security, including our own people.”

“That’s—look, I told you I would help you with messages, but I’m not going to spy on my people for you, grounder. I’m no Union collaborator.”

“This is serious, Lucas. Is the Lunar Liberation Front on Dustball now? Is Samira part of it? Is she that far gone? We know that you have LIA operatives and former Lunar Navy—”

His jaw tightened. “Yes, some of us fought in the war. Many of us. So did you. But the people who killed—who might have tried to kill our prime minister… you think we’d want them in our colonies?!”

“No, but how would you know if—”

“We were all vetted extensively for this mission. All of us were,” he insisted. “You knew Samira. She trusted you.”

“And then I broke that trust.”

“Yes, you did.”

“So you’re saying that she might have the motive to try something violent—”

“No. No, not at all.” Lucas shook his head. “Listen, grounder. Samira would never join the LLF, not while her parents are still alive.”

“But what if—”

“And that is just something… you’re going to have to trust me on, grounder.”

Julia stared at him, quiet for a full minute. She sighed. “I wish it were that easy.”

“I wish it were too.”

They both just stared across the table at each other silently for a full minute.

Lucas broke it with a sigh. “What are you going to do?”

He was polite enough to not phrase his actual question: how are you going to overreact?

She answered honestly, “I don’t know.”

He grunted, then nodded his head. “Good.”

“Good?” She looked at him for a moment, then understood what he meant. “What about you? What are you and your people going to do?”

“I don’t know either.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Brussels

William Weber stood up and, with a wave gesture, brought up a preliminary three-dimensional rendering of the reconstructed scene on the table. “Gunman in the 24th row. From our sources on the ground, his first shot shattered the bulletproof glass, obstructing his vision for his subsequent shots. The structural integrity of the hull held. Then, one of their marines took him out. That’s what the last few shots were. The gunman’s second bullet deflected off the glass and hit one of his advisors. She’s in critical condition at the hospital. And a few in the crowd are being treated for injuries from the stampede.”

“Was the shooter… one of ours?” President Salma Haldar asked uneasily.

“Fortunately not. Was a second generation Luna-born.”

“Good, good. Whew.” Salma breathed a sigh of relief, then looked around. “I mean, it’s not good that someone took a shot at their—”

“I understood, ma’am,” Will said with a hint of a smile on his face. “The Lunar Republic liaison sent us an urgent message earlier, informing us that Farid was still in control and their military forces were… I quote… ahem, standing ready to face any challenge and deal with any threat, foreign or domestic.”

Salma rolled her eyes. “Right, so we don’t try anything in the uncertainty. As if we’re eager to wade into that mess again after the last few years. They can have all the fun they want up there.”

Will swiped for another slide. “The Serenity Index is down four points in after hours trading. We expect a dip when the market opens in New York tomorrow morning.”

“Great. Fantastic,” she said sarcastically. “They sneeze up on the moon, and we catch a cold down here.”

“Our experts expect that recovery should be relatively swift, as long as the situation doesn’t worsen.”

“Yeah, and that last part’s carrying a whole lot of water for our markets right now. Big if.”

“Right. But my money’s on them being right. His Cabinet ministers closed ranks immediately. The Lunar colonies all called Farid to express sympathies, outrage, all that jazz. From what we heard, the Governor of Tranquility is calling for a LLF crackdown. Total purge, was the phrase leaked to the media. She’s going to take the demand public next week if Parliament doesn’t fund a formal investigation. And we know that she’s close with Farid. Their relationship’s personal, and this attack feels… different. This is a big moment for them, for what kind of place they want Luna to be.”

“Finally. Maybe this kick in the butt is what will make them take their persistent extremist threat seriously,” Salma speculated.

“We can dream. In the meantime,” Will said, turning off the slides. “The State Department is drafting a response.”

Salma winked. “Express sympathies, condemn the attack, with a generous offer of assistance we know they’ll decline?”

“More or less. With a slight tinge of the typical Union arrogance aimed at their immature political system. You know, the usual.” Will smiled at his own joke. “There is a silver lining, at least. It’s not a bad time for us to remind the public of the general threat posed by radical moonies. Makes us look good to voters when we straddle that delicate balance. The message is simple: we don’t want another war, but we’re not blind to reality.”

“General threat, huh? They’re not shooting up my speeches.”

“Not yet, ma’am. But the Union Guard informed me they’ll beef up the security for your events for the next few weeks too. In case of copycats.”

“Great. More security… Is this going to affect their upcoming elections?”

“Likely, but which way is… uncertain. We can’t know the downstream political effects of this, not yet. It might embolden the radicals. It might rally support for the incumbents. Our models for their politics are still shaky. And it’s hard to extrapolate when they’ve only had one Lunar-wide election since the war.”

“Yeah, and what happened last time… not exactly something that inspires a whole lot of confidence in their stability.”

Will winced. “We weren’t exactly… yeah, that was a—that was a moment. I mean, we get to make fun of them for it now, but that could have been… bad.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. At least their response then was decisive. Let the—let people know where they stood, I guess…” Salma’s voice trailed off as she recalled that live broadcasted humiliation of the Lunar Republic. For some in the Union, it felt cathartic watching them struggle to find their footing after the armistice, but she knew better. On that day, they got a glimpse of the alternative to the current government on Luna. And the alternative was… not better.

“Are you suggesting we should have a stronger response at this point or—”

“I’m concerned about our Dustball project. Whoever takes power up there next January, we have no idea whether they’d honor our preexisting agreements. Like Dustball colony. How’s that going, by the way?”

Will checked his datapad. “Another return shipment from Dustball arrived successfully last night. No disturbances there yet. They’re on the lookout for anything similar. As for the contents of the shuttle, our scientists are going wild over that Dustballium stuff. The moonies’ are too. Maybe too excited. Lots of talk about it in places they think we’re not looking.”

“At least someone is having fun. Where are we on that funding proposal for a joint scientific project to study the alien metal? What’s with the naming anyway?’”

“The aliens call it Precursor Metal, but we sell it as Dustballium. It’s a branding thing; not important until you think it is, and we think it is. The funding for the joint project is… making its way through the Assembly. We’re hoping to keep it quiet enough to slip into the defense omnibus without any amendments, but it definitely can’t be called the Imbrium Joint Project. Our people can’t have those attack ads hanging over them in the upcoming special elections.”

“That’s what they want to call it?!”

“They said it’s their analogy to the Manhattan Project—We’ll agree on a new name.”

Salma stood up as she prepared to go to her next meeting. “Excellent. Let’s keep it up. More of these opportunities, as many as we can seize.”

“Yes, ma’am. Peace through cooperation?”

She smirked as she recalled the phrase her critics recently coined mockingly. “Peace through sunk cost fallacy. Like that Dustball colony, don’t you know?”

Will scowled at the reference. “You know that only millennials and zoomers still watch late night comedians for political satire, right? I swear, that whole format is going away when they all die off in a few years.”

Salma wagged a finger at him with a wide grin. “Millennials and zoomers? Watch yourself! That’s nearly two billion esteemed elders of our most reliable voting bloc you’re talking about there!”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Warlock to Tiger-4! The moonies have launched! I say again, thirty-five plus launch flares detected on infrared!”

“CIC identifies vampires as Spearfish-class, 80% confidence and climbing. Verified inbound trajectory!”

“Tiger-4… Not this again.” Julia sighed, her breath fogging the inside of her visor. She instantly recognized the telltale marks of the frequent nightmare.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. And out.

“Garbled feed from the Antarctic PAWS Array…” Tara’s voice trailed off as Julia unbuckled from her crash seat.

The straps released themselves. She slid down onto the cold hull plating next to her command seat.

Tara looked at her questioningly. “Commander?”

Hiss.

Julia’s fingers fumbled at the latch of her helmet. With a sharp twist, she freed it from her vacuum suit. The blurred world bent around her, her hair lifting in some artificial breeze. The helmet thunked softly against the deck when she set it down.

It was odd. She knew she was supposedly in near-vacuum. It was condition zebra. The ship atmosphere should have been pumped out for their safety.

Her throat expected frostbite. Her lungs expected fire.

Nothing happened.

Sometimes the nightmare killed her right away and woke her up. This time, her brain just… let her be. Curious, maybe, about what she would do. She didn’t really know. Then again, perhaps that was a tautological truth.

Screens flared and blinked around her, their light washing across her bare face. She sat there a long while, numb. Staring. The ship’s engines hummed like a low heartbeat beneath her.

“Commander, are you alright?” Tara asked, staring down at her in concern.

Somehow she could hear her voice through the lack of air. The wrongness of it should have wrenched her awake. But no. Her head never worked that way.

Another sigh, heavy. She patted the floor next to her twice. “Come take a seat, Tara.”

“But… the moonies. We have to defend the ship. And then we have to kill the moonies. Get them all,” Tara replied earnestly. “They killed me, remember?”

“Just… come sit here and… Just sit here.”

“Okay…” The ghost hesitated, then drifted over, magnetic boots clinking faintly on the hull, and lowered herself down beside Julia. “What’s wrong, Commander? Are you alright?”

No. No, I’m not.

Her brain refused to let up. “Why not?” Tara asked.

“I just want to talk.”

Tara looked at Julia quizzically for a moment, then shrugged as she removed her own helmet. A few strands of her brown hair spilled onto Julia’s shoulders. “Alright. What do you want to talk about? Have you heard about the new Spearfish-II missiles they’ve been experimenting with at—”

That was exactly what Tara would have said. Minus the part about the new generation moonie missiles. Those were from the last days of the war. After Tara was killed. Her subconscious didn’t care much about avoiding such anachronisms.

“It’s my nightmare,” Julia cut her off. “So we’ll talk about what I want to talk about. And I don’t want to talk about that.”

“What do you want, Commander?”

“I… don’t know.” Her next words caught in her throat. After a long pause, she forced them out. “Why did we go to war with the moonies? Why did we fight them? What was it all for?”

Tara smiled at her gently. “Why fight the moonies? Why not? They shot first.”

“Yeah, but why them?”

Tara’s smile softened, her dimples deepening in the dim glow. “Who else should we fight instead?”

“I don’t know… the Canadians?”

Tara laughed. She was so beautiful. And so young and innocent. “You’re American. You guys love the Canadians. To us not from your continent, we can’t even tell the difference other than those little flags you have by your names on the ship roster. Why would you want to fight them?”

“Don’t let them hear you say—And the moonies—they aren’t so different from us either, are they?”

“They call us grounders, you know?” Tara’s voice hardened with her hazel colored eyes. “They think we’re not as good as them. The Green Crater massacre. You seen those videos? They just rounded up a bunch of us, bunch of us Earth-borns into one of their craters, then made them take off their helmets in vacuum. The children, too. There was one girl, she was just eight or nine—they’re animals.”

Julia shivered. “Yeah, but that was only a few of their crazies. And we do some fucked up things to them too.”

“That’s just the war, isn’t it, Commander?”

She shook her head slowly, feeling more of Tara’s long hair brush against her face. “I guess it is. I guess—But they really aren’t that different from us. They wake up. They go to school. They go to work. They go shopping. They have elections. They’re like us. Why don’t we fight one of those actually screwed up places? One of those places back on Earth, where they don’t even have electricity. Where they hang twelve-year-old kids for stealing water or whatever. Where was that place again? Congo? We should team up with the moonies and beat them up instead. We’d wreck them in a week.”

“Yeah. Yeah, we would.”

Something wasn’t right. Didn’t sound right.

“Easily.”

She noticed the voice change next to her. Richer, deeper, older. The smell changed too—from nothing to something like burnt metal. She knew the smell.

Julia turned her head.

Samira.

If this was the first time it happened, she’d be surprised. But this had become so frequent, she almost expected it. She just stared.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

The air felt thicker now, warmer.

Samira gave a short snort beside her. “Hypersonic cruise missiles to take out their airbases, if they even have those. Combined arms assault with heavy orbital and air cover. Ground combat operations aimed at the capital; cut off highway access connecting rural areas; peacekeeper robots to deal with the ensuing insurgency for minimal political fallout. Would their old intermediate rounds even penetrate your marine armor? Doubt it. Not to mention ours. Maybe the faceplate if they get a lucky angle. Yeah, we’d fuck them up so bad.”

God. That’s… not her. That’s me. That’s my own brain talking.

“I can’t believe I’m tactically analyzing the feasibility of invading a sovereign Union state on the sole basis that things kind of suck there,” she muttered.

Samira’s image smirked. “You’re a grounder. War. Violence. That is what you do. For hundreds of years. Thousands. It’s what you’re good at.”

“And you moonies are so above it all.”

Samira laughed. And Julia let her; it was a melodic laugh, free of the sarcasm or bitterness she expected. Just like Tara’s. “Yeah. We are, aren’t we? We literally are above it all in your night sky. And every time we look back at Earth, we see almost all of our species’ history. It’s all there. Gives us a bit of a different perspective, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe. Maybe it does. Maybe your people are just morally superior to ours. Unconstrained by our gravity and our grounded perspective.”

“Maybe we are. Gravity is destiny, after all.”

Like one of those posters they had, back in the day.

Join us on Luna! Inside every human being, there is a Lunar Dream waiting for you!

Julia shot her a side-eye. “Or… maybe there is no better. The only better is whatever you can achieve with force.”

“Might makes right.”

“Whatever you want to call it.”

“Ah, the moral nihilism sets in. There’s that short-sighted grounder in you. Again.”

She stared into Samira’s eyes for a long moment, then sighed. “I’m sorry, Samira. I really am. About trying to screw you over. Personal, or not, it was wrong.”

Samira raised an eyebrow. “Yeah. Obviously.”

“It was stupid. Wasn’t even rational. Not even for my planet. For my people.”

“That’s what I said!”

“You wouldn’t have done the same if you were in my boots.”

“No. Probably not. Maybe not.”

“So… there. I said it.”

Samira gave her an expression of amusement. “Now you just have to say that to the real me and not just a figment of your imagination. And maybe I’d forgive you.”

“I wish things were just… all that simple.”

“Sometimes… they are.”

“Yeah.” Julia looked down at the floor. “Maybe.”

There was a long lull, or at least it felt like a long lull in her dream. Time didn’t feel quite the same in her own head.

Samira asked, “Do you miss her?”

“Hm? Who?”

“Tara. Do you miss her?”

“I do.”

Samira looked at her gently. “Did you love her?”

“Yeah, I did. In some ways like a daughter. In others, like a little sister.”

“Do you want her back now?”

“Hm?”

“I’m your brain, after all. I can turn into anything you want while you’re here. I can change back into her.”

Julia stared at Samira’s face for a moment, contemplating the absurdity of negotiating terms and conditions with her own brain. “I—No, you’re fine.”

“Cool.” Samira closed her eyes and sidled closer, leaning on her shoulders.

“I’m tired,” Julia said as she leaned back. “It’s… been a long day. I just want to take a nap. I just want a good, long night’s sleep…”

Yawn.

“Good night, Julia,” Samira murmured.

The bright lights around her bled away into nothing.

A good night’s sleep.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Julia woke up late, after nine. It was Saturday, and Harry let her sleep.

Still, it felt odd, waking up at the same time as most of the civilians in the colony. She hurriedly jogged over to the mess hall to grab a quick breakfast.

Which was why she was in there when the shooting started.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

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“That’s… very cool, Doctor Clement,” Julia said politely, trying her best not to tune out the geologist as she explained some new find. She knew by now that if Cynthia had something actually interesting and relevant, she would eventually get around to it.

“Indeed. So that’s how we know all the other craters were likely formed around the same time without even having to sample them!”

“Fascinating.”

Cynthia paused to look up at her. “You seem… distracted, Commodore.”

“Sorry,” Julia apologized with a stifled yawn. “It’s… I’ve got a lot on my mind lately.”

They’d known each other long enough for her not to be offended. “I see. I can… come back another time.”

“It’s fine… It’s just… the moonies.”

Cynthia stiffened slightly at their mention but seemed to force herself to relax. “Them. What’s their problem now?”

“Hm? Their problem?” Julia asked. “No, no. It’s actually something else. I’m—It’s a problem of trust. I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about it lately.”

“Trust.”

She nodded. “Trust. About whether I should trust the moonies. Whether they can be trusted to work with us. And the aliens too. Whether they can be trusted to fulfill their ends of any potential agreement… What do you think?”

Cynthia looked at her in mild surprise. “What do I think?”

“Yeah. Trust. How do you trust anyone? Or anything?”

“I trust my rocks,” the geologist said with a small smile. “As for people… I’m afraid that’s your field, not mine.”

“Yeah? Your rocks never lie to you?”

Cynthia shook her head. “Never.”

“How do you know? Where do you get such faith?”

“Because, Commodore, it’s not faith,” Cynthia said. “It’s record. Track record.”

“Yeah?”

The geologist smiled. “There was a joke I heard about thrice a year from my students. A teacher is taking her class through the Natural History Museum and they pass by a gigantic model of a dinosaur in the lobby. She asks the tour guide: hey mister, how old is this dinosaur skeleton? The tour guide thinks for a bit, and he replies: it is sixty-five million and fourteen years and three months old. Wow, that’s amazing, the astonished teacher says, how is it that you can tell with such precision? Do you know the rocks where it came from? Did you do carbon dating on them?”

Julia couldn’t help but wink back at the geologist, echoing her own words. “And the tour guide says: of course not, carbon-dating only works out to a few thousand years. Good for the Dead Sea Scrolls, but not for anything older than that. We used measurements of potassium isotope decay.”

“Exactly!” Cynthia beamed back. “Nah, the tour guide replies confidently, when I first came here, they told me the model was sixty-five million years old. And I’ve been here for fourteen years and three months.”

“Hah, I’ve always wondered just how precise those measurements can get. There’s got to be some healthy amount of guesswork involved when it’s tens of millions of years old, right?”

“Guesswork?” Cynthia shook her head. “You know where I’m from, Commodore? From my file.”

Julia tilted her head. “France, right? That was before you worked on Mars for a while.”

“Yes. Before that. I was born in a small town, a commune, in southern France called Pierrelatte.”

“Pierrelatte. Pierrelatte. Love the name. Rolls right off the tongue. Sounds familiar,” Julia said politely.

“It is—you are unlikely to have heard of it before, except maybe in one of our files. It’s a tiny town. However, you have probably heard of the facility nearby, Tricastin.”

“Ah, yes. Tricastin. The place where they make our bombs and laserhead missiles. The moonies sent a few crazies to try to sabotage it during the war, if I recall correctly.”

“Yes, it’s the headquarters for the Union’s Energy Commission.”

The Energy Commission, which was the polite and friendly way of saying, the department of creating and maintaining nuclear weapons.

“That’s where you’re from?”

“More or less. The site used to make nuclear weapons for France. My grandparents worked there. Now, it makes nuclear weapons for the whole of the Union. A century ago, back in 1972, scientists at Tricastin found something strange. They were doing regular inspections on their supply of uranium hexafluoride, a compound used for enriching uranium, when they discovered that some of the samples had an unusually low concentration of uranium-235.”

“That’s… concerning. Highly concerning.”

“Oh?” Cynthia looked at her in surprise. “Yes, it was. But why would you say that?”

“Because U-235—that’s the good stuff, right? Low concentration, so I’d assume someone managed to steal some of it before it got to the facility. Who were the French fighting in 1972? Algerians?”

“I think… that whole thing was before that time. France was relatively peaceful back in the 1970s, but the rest of the world was not. So yes, isotope theft was a major concern, that someone in the supply chain had nefariously diverted some of it to secretly make nuclear weapons in other countries. They traced the problem back to a uranium mine in central Africa, the Oklo mine in Gabon. And they found that the concentration of uranium-235 at the mine was much less than you would expect from normal uranium ore. And when they dug around more, they discovered even more unusual clues. Certain isotopes of neodymium and ruthenium at the site were elevated.”

“Neodymium and ruthenium?” Julia furrowed her brows. “Someone had detonated a nuclear weapon right there at the mine? At a mine? That makes no sense.”

“That’s—” Cynthia stopped and looked at her for a long moment. “Sometimes I forget how… uneven our public education system is.”

“Uneven?”

“I would not have expected you to know so much about… such niche topics in nuclear physics.”

Julia smirked. “Heh. Me neither. But my understanding of nuclear weapons is not a byproduct of the Union education system.”

“Ah, the Navy. The war.”

“Yes, it’s in almost all of our weapons, especially later in the war when we realized just how useless everything else was when the enemy was so far away. So anyway… uranium in Gabon. Who blew up a nuclear weapon there?”

Cynthia smiled. “Nobody.”

“What about all the isotopes and the—”

“There was a sustained nuclear fission reaction at Gabon,” Cynthia said.

Julia nodded knowingly. “Like an old power plant.”

“Exactly, like a fission plant. But… there were no nuclear power plants in the area. There weren’t even any on the entire continent at the time. The fission reaction happened 1.7 billion years ago.”

“1.7 billion years ago?! Wait. Is this—are you talking about the Precursors? They were on Earth?!”

“No. Not at all. The reaction in Gabon—it was completely natural.”

“The rocks just… did that.”

“Yup. The rocks just did that. It was a set of completely unique geologic conditions; the high uranium concentration, the groundwater acting as a neutron moderator, the way that the fractures in the ground were oriented to let the water seep in, the increasing oxygen content of the Earth at the time… Then, it happened.” Cynthia gestured with her hands in waves. “The water comes in, the nuclear reaction starts, boils the water away, the reaction stops. Then, more water comes in, and it starts again. Every three hours, in and out. For a few hundred thousand years, there was a completely natural nuclear reactor in Gabon, heating and boiling water with the power of Prometheus—all this before any humans had ever been born.”

“Every three hours?”

“Every three hours. We calculated that from the xenon gas isotopes trapped near the site. Thirty minutes of reactions, then two and a half hours to cool down and for the water to flow back in. At a small uranium ore site in Gabon, 1.7 billion years ago. Because that… is what geology gives you: the tools to determine what happened on Earth billions of years ago, down to the hour, sometimes down to the minute. As you can see, no faith required.”

“Impressive. Very impressive,” Julia said after a long moment. “And has this happened anywhere else? Another site? Maybe on another planet?”

“Yes, actually,” Cynthia said, eyes lighting up in excitement. “On Mars. There’s this—”

Julia stroked her chin thoughtfully. “Huh. That’s odd. Shouldn’t that be unlikely on Mars, especially given the timing?”

Instead of annoyance at her interruption, Cynthia’s excitement actually grew. “Wait! Yes! But why would you say that?”

“Because uranium-235 is always decaying. And Mars is about the same age as the Earth, so the event would have to be around the same time as Gabon, right? And oxygen. They wouldn’t have the oxygen and water, because their atmosphere would have been gone a long time before that.”

Cynthia stared at her for a good few heartbeats. “Oui—yes, that is… right. How—” She blinked twice. “Yes. That is… all true. And scientists were befuddled by why we found some signs on Mars that indicated it was possible a natural reactor had been present. There were craters, gas samples, and there was even some speculation that an uncontrolled criticality event—an actual, natural nuclear explosion, like a bomb—had taken place north of Acidalia Colles.”

Julia exhaled hard. “Indeed. When you eliminate the impossibilities, the only question would be how. There would need to be some geological mechanism for uranium concentration. Some way to oxidize it so that the uranium becomes soluble without widespread oxygen in the atmosphere. That’s the only plausible way to explain all the observations.”

“What? How—how do you—”

She stroked her chin. “Perhaps… some pockets of perchlorate-rich regolith. Or maybe large impact events that melted the crust, serving as potential pathways for fluid flow.”

The geologist goggled at her, mouth half-open.

Julia just looked back at her innocently.

It took Cynthia a long few seconds. “You… read my paper,” she stated. “You read my first PhD thesis paper.”

Julia broke out into a sly grin. “Uranium Concentration and Natural Fission Potential in the Early Martian Crust. By some young geology student from a little-known French town with a name that sounds like an artisanal coffee order.”

Cynthia buried her face in her hands. “You—I thought I was going crazy! What the hell?”

“Ahahahaha! Ahahahahaha!”

“Okay, okay. It’s not that funny. I get it now. You read all our files and—”

“Ahahahahah! How uneven the Union education system is. I can’t—I can’t! Ahahaha!” Julia wiped tears from the edge of her eyes.

With her face in her hands, Cynthia couldn’t help but join in the chuckling.

It took them both a while to recover. “You…” Cynthia jabbed a finger in her direction. “You have been spending too much time with the Vorshnik aliens.”

“I have, haven’t I?” she asked merrily. “It’s only fair I pass on some of that joy from Shachos.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Not merely a collection of settlements, not merely a coalition of domes and stations scattered across the surface of beautiful Luna…”

Lunar Prime Minister Farid, dressed in stylish Lunar gray, looked down at his prepared speech in front of the massive crowd in the lobby of Serenity Interplanetary Spaceport. Not everyone could pull it off, the Lunar gray, but it went with his eyes. He had the right look for it.

Usually the moonies held their formal events of state in their rebuilt parliament building, but this was no ordinary speech. This was their annual State of the Alliance speech. By tradition, it was held at the site of the first major victory of what they referred to as the Lunar War for Independence.

It was only day two of the uprising. The spaceport was controlled by Union peacekeepers at the time. Some had defected or deserted; some were evacuating with the civilian passengers. And a few stood their ground, knowing this was likely Earth’s last stand on its Lunar colonies.

For that same reason, the Lunar leadership wanted the spaceport. Badly. Its control would strand the remaining Union peacekeepers near Serenity, scattered units that were just beginning to consolidate after the chaotic events of the day prior. Paramilitary Lunar troops, many of whom had just swarmed and taken control of the Union’s armories, emerged from their hidden cells and converged on the hardened semi-military structure.

The moonies’ stories told of legendary feats. A brave and glorious army that rose up from the regolith and beat back the mighty Union. In reality, it was a bunch of untrained kids hopped up on go-pills, throwing themselves at the prepared defenses like mindless lemmings, hoping that the marines defending the facility would run out of ammunition and supplies before the attackers ran out of bodies. The barrels of their machine guns and autocannons on the exterior glowed red with heat, their massive radiators shredded by small arms fire in the first minutes of battle. The defenders resorted to literally pulling the thermal cooling loops from spare suits—or in some cases, the suits of their dead comrades—and wrapping them around the gun barrels to keep them from melting.

The Union Naval Marines held the site for ten hours. For ten hours, they shuttled emergency supplies and troops from their stations in Lunar orbit under fire. Their forward orbital control recon units called in heavy artillery on endless waves of enemy troops approaching the isolated station through the open, expansive Lunar landscape.

Then, orders came down from the Lunar leadership. Survival of the spaceport facilities was optional. The captured artillery pieces on Serenity Hills began firing. The defensive close in weapon systems that were only ever intended to intercept sporadic mortar fire from small insurgent cells were quickly overwhelmed. Shells hit, and they hit accurately, blowing out the ballistic glass panels throughout the spaceport, exposing its hallways and lobbies to vacuum.

They depressurized the spaceport. Hundreds of civilians were still trapped or evacuating, and the moonies depressurized the spaceport.

A few air pockets survived, and some of the Union Naval Marine defenders still had backup oxygen, but they were quickly trapped as they retreated into the interior of the spaceport. Exposed to vacuum and with indirect fire pounding their strongholds to bits, the constant machine gunfire slowed to a stop as Lunar troops streamed into the ruins of the spaceport. By the twelfth hour, the Lunar Alliance was confident enough in its victory for its leaders to rover in to celebrate in its massive lobby.

Hence, the tradition. The State of the Alliance speech would always be held there, in front of the crowds of Lunar residents and citizens, some of whom helped bring about its independence.

“We are not a union of blood, nor of soil, nor of regolith. We are a union of ideals,” the prime minister said, raising a fist with passion. “An alliance built upon our common dreams and shared hopes! A people, not of one nation, but from the best of all nations. Our inheritance, not just a windfall of property or money, but of something greater than all of us. Of the ideals that make us greater than the sum of our parts—”

“Booooo!” a voice in the crowd shouted. “Out! Out! Out! Farid out now!”

As the cameras panned to the dissenter, he attempted to unfold a large poster before two security guards grabbed his arms. The protester continued to struggle and chant his slogan as the guards escorted him out of sight.

The crowd cheered to drown him out. “Luna! Luna! Luna!”

Prime Minister Farid looked barely flustered. He acknowledged the interruption with a quick wink as the cheers died down. “Ideals… such as the freedom to yell at your own elected politicians, not unaccountable Union bureaucrats in Brussels.”

The crowd cheered again, with some chuckles to dispel the tension.

He continued, “When our forebears first set foot upon this desolate place, many only saw dust and silence. Where they once saw a barren wasteland, we now see opportunity. A boundless frontier where humanity could be reborn. Where our own ambitions are not divided by the flags of old Earth, but united by our aspirations. Our belief that freedom must fly higher than the skies of our home world. That prosperity and justice are not lead weights on an inflexible scale. Our unwavering belief that no balance ever needs to be struck between our dreams and our rights as an independent and prosperous people. That very belief—”

“Collaborator!” another loud voice in the crowd shouted. “Grounder puppets!”

As the cameras searched through the crowd, they settled on a tall woman near the back, spitting slogans as she unfurled her poster for the cameras. It read, in dark red with gray streaks: Blut im Regolith.

Blood in the Regolith.

The guards quickly moved in to detain and remove her as well.

“Luna! Luna! Luna!” the crowd chanted to drown out her words. “Farid! Farid! Farid!”

Farid grinned as he quieted the crowd down with his waving arms. “Thank you. Thank you all.” He wagged a finger at one of the Lunar Marines in polished gray armor next to the stage dramatically for effect. “Be gentle with the kids. Extremist or not, we are all children of Luna, whether we are born and raised in the cradle of our new civilization or—”

Bang.

A gunshot rang out.

Then, the sound of glass. A shower of glass.

The crowd screamed. The camera captured a chaotic scene, pandemonium in the lobby as people ran for the exits, for a brief moment before it fell to the ground.

Bang.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

The video ended.

The administrative hab was silent for a long minute.

“What… do we know… for sure?” Harry asked quietly.

Julia shook her head. “Not much. This happened right as the incoming supply ship left Sol. Got lucky with that too; it had been delayed by two hours at Battlestar Four for extended security inspections. If not, it would have warped here before it got the news.”

“Their prime minister—Did they get him? Did we get any other instructions?”

“No. Nothing other than the live news feed. We won’t get anything from Brussels for another week, even if it’s an emergency.”

He asked the question she was expecting, his voice quiet. “Was there—do you think there was a hull breach?”

“None that we detected from our ship in orbit.”

“I heard glass.”

Definitely not something you’d want to hear anywhere in a Lunar colony.

“The glass. I think it might have been some—some kind of ballistic shielding for their prime minister. But we can’t know for sure.”

After a small pause, Harry asked, “So… that’s… not our shooter, right?”

Julia arched an eyebrow and said nothing.

“I’m just saying…” he added hurriedly. “They’d warn us to be on alert… if we were going to try anything back at home.”

She cleared her throat. “Ahem. If we had that kind of… initiative in Brussels, the war wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did. No, it’s probably one of the moonies’ own crazies.”

“What do we do now? If they have people in our colony…”

She thought for a long moment. “I… don’t know.”

“And the timing feels… suspicious.”

She swallowed. “You think maybe the assassination… was step one? Start a coup on Luna right after a shipment was supposed to leave, with the supply ship carrying a message to do something here, before we were supposed to get the news?”

“But… are we important enough to be the tinder for a—”

“Yes. Yes, we are. Look around you.”

“It’s… a possibility,” he speculated. After a moment, Harry shook his head. “But that seems unlikely. Too many moving parts in that plan, even assuming the motive is there.”

“But not impossible.”

“No, not impossible.”

She stood up and stared out the window at the setting Dustball star. “Should we hold the mail messages from the colonists? One of them might include… orders or cell activation instructions from home.”

He joined her at the window. “If they try something, it won’t be tonight.”

“No?”

He pointed in the direction of the armory. “Probably not. Our marines have night vision; we own the night here. That’s why in the uprising back on Luna, they began in the morning hours of the Lunar day at Serenity. Gave them two full weeks of daylight for operations before nightfall.”

She declined to mention the night vision goggles that some of the moonies in her colony might have. That joke was more funny with Marcus when things weren’t this tense. “Well, that won’t be as much of a problem for us here. They’ll only have twelve hours of light.”

“They won’t need all twelve,” he muttered darkly.

She gazed out the window for another minute, then sat back down. She slumped down into her desk in despair, cradling her head in her hands miserably. “This isn’t just going to be us from now on, right?”

“Us? What?”

“Looking out at our colony every night, wondering if it’s going to be our last night, before the people who work alongside us decide to murder us in our sleep. No matter how many concessions we’ve given them. No matter how long we’ve worked together. No matter how much trust we try to build…”

“Do you think—do you think Samira is going to be part of it?” Harry asked gently.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. She doesn’t talk to us. She’s doing who knows what with her people. It’s… my fault. It was stupid what we did,” Julia rambled. “I saw the treasure and I don’t know. I thought I was doing it all for Earth, but I just—it was just habit. Habits from a war that I promised we wouldn’t bring here…”

Harry sat down across from her. For a long moment, Julia thought he was going to say something. Comfort her. Tell her she missed something. That she was just being unnecessarily paranoid. Or to chastise her. Tell her she brought this all on herself. That she could have chosen another path.

Anything.

He said nothing.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Previous

Previous

First | Website (more chapters available)

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Distance to target, one kilometer.

At such low altitude, grains of sand flicked past its lens. Enough to register on the sensors, not enough to obstruct its vision.

Buzzzzzzzz.

The noise its wings made was barely audible. The sound profile was dampened to match the ambient wind shear. If there was some imperfection in those sound waves, nobody was around to hear it.

Not here anyway.

It adjusted its vision, overlaying its focus with data from the infrared spectrum. Heat signatures blossomed ahead. This planet was dry. All desert, no water. Heat did not retain well near the surface, especially during the night. Like now. That was convenient; everything that was actively heated stood out. The cold was not great for its batteries, but those would last long enough anyway.

It could see track marks and footprints in the fine sand. They were made not too long ago. About half an hour. Probably more recent. Some of the track marks still had traces of residual heat, leading towards its target.

It followed them closer.

Target area in visual range.

It matched the small entrance ahead with the satellite imagery loaded in its memory. Perfect match. There was only so much that could be seen from orbit, but from what could be seen there, this was it.

Two of their vehicles were parked just outside, their engines still warm. It conducted a brief check for any equipment that could end its mission and found none. Instead, it marked the four potential threats patrolling the opening.

It evaluated its options.

Kill?

As it analyzed the targets, it saw that they were encased in some kind of armor. Nothing too fancy. Steel and ceramic composites. The ballistic faceplate was the weakness. Some kind of transparent ceramics. Its light weaponry was much too small for it to be confident in its chances of success. Especially not all four of them at once. An attempt would almost certainly trigger immediate detection. It discarded neutralizing the adversaries.

It wasn’t here for them anyway.

Evade.

It hovered above them, slowly approaching, allowing the sound of the distant shifting sands to cover the quiet beating of its wings.

Wait…

It waited patiently, watching the four unsuspecting figures as they diligently scanned their areas of responsibility.

Wait…

That was a common problem with biological beings used to living in gravity. They’d evolved to look forward, to scan their front with their limited peripheral vision. They didn’t look up. If they did, they might have seen what was hovering just fifty meters above them. Probably not; it was very small, after all.

Go!

Spotting a lull and gap in the guards’ attention as they swiveled their heads to and fro, it dove down and into the opening behind them.

No alarm went off. No shouts of surprise. No anomalous radio traffic.

All as expected.

Proceed.

It slowly continued deeper into the tunnel, hovering near the walls as it moved. This was the dangerous part. As the walls narrowed, its chances of detection increased. The chances weren’t high, but they weren’t zero either. It saw more evidence of recent activity on its infrared scans. More footprints.

It didn’t dare use its active lidar module to map its surroundings. Even the primitives’ equipment had a good chance of detecting its signal emissions if it had attempted that. Instead, it simply allowed light to filter in. The sensors adjusted to the dim lighting of the cave tunnel, taking careful note of every nook and cranny it could spot.

About fifty meters in, it lost connection to its controller. If it boosted its weak signal, it could probably re-establish that connection. But not here. It saw the jammers and signs of electronic warfare equipment on the guards earlier. Primitive as they were, these people weren’t going to miss something as basic as a radio transmission burning through the jammers, and it was too small to mount something more sophisticated.

There was no need for that anyway. It knew the mission. It could think and strategize perfectly fine on its own.

Then, it heard noises. Relevant noises.

Voices ahead, amplified by the echoing tunnel.

Human voices.

It could make out bits of what they were saying. A few microseconds of thought, and it decided that this was an important side objective. Enough to spare the battery. It focused in to isolate the voices.

“—long has it been?” A woman. It took a couple seconds, but to its mild surprise, the voice signature was actually in its database.

Commodore Julia Kessler. Local administrator and chief negotiator.

“Couple hours now. You said to get you when they’re done. But I just thought you should get an update.”

This one was also familiar.

Colonel Marcus Tanaka. Highest-ranking marine.

“Right. What do you suppose they’re chatting about… for so long?” Julia asked.

“No idea. It’s an encrypted two-way communication. We can have it sent back to Earth on the next run. But by the time we get through it, the information will likely become irrelevant anyway.”

It analyzed the communication near it and quickly identified a connection between a radio in the colony and a ship in orbit. It put it out of its mind for now; if it could detect and collect data on it, its handlers would be able to hear it too, and they had far better signals intelligence than the tiny drone—its weight measured in tens of grams—now listening in on the human conversation.

The woman sighed. “Pity.”

Marcus hesitated for a moment, then suggested, “There’s an easier way if you really want to know.”

“Yeah?”

“You can ask the moonies.”

She snorted. “Good one. And I thought Shachos was a joker.”

It fluttered into the larger chamber where the two humans were talking. With a glance, it translated a sign nearby “Anomaly Chamber”. Whatever that meant. It archived the information for future analysis.

Marcus pointed at his datapad device on the table. “Yeah, I suppose they’re not exactly an unbiased party here. Honestly, this is a little out of line, even for the moonies. Conspiring with the aliens?”

“Well… I did give them permission to talk on the radio,” she said slowly. “Lucas demanded that they should be a part of the negotiation process. Not like we can really stop them. They have half the product.”

“Yeah, you gave them permission to talk to the aliens in orbit on their radio. For cultural exchange and trust-building. Not… whatever this is.”

“Maybe they’re… having a Star Wars watch party?” she speculated. The drone could tell there wasn’t much conviction in her voice even with its limited analysis instruments.

“And chatting with the Karnolians?! Really?! The teddy bears? Didn’t Shachos just tell you that they’re up to no good?”

Interesting intelligence. Mark for later analysis.

“Yeah. I told the moonies about that too. They didn’t seem too worried,” she said glumly. “What do you think they could possibly be talking about?”

“I have no idea,” Marcus admitted. “Nothing good for us, I’d wager.”

“You know…” she said after a while. “There is one way we can figure out what they’re talking about.”

“Other than beating it out of Lucas?”

She grinned. “We could ask Shachos. They have significantly more advanced cryptanalysis equipment. I bet their ship’s listening in too.”

I bet they are.

“If we can trust them to accurately convey information about their rivals.”

“Well… other than that, I guess we just have to trust the moonies… for now,” Julia said.

Internal faction conflict. Save data for later analysis.

Marcus sighed too. He said, “Trust, and consider the worst case scenario. They could be selling us out. Get some kind of exclusive deal with the aliens, leaving us holding the bag.”

She nodded. “They could be.”

“I hate all this uncertainty. It was so much easier when we knew who and where the enemy was. I thought we left this kind of war behind when we—” The human stopped speaking for a moment, and the spy drone absentmindedly tried to predict what he was going to say.

Some kind of historical event? Some time frame? Store for later analysis.

It almost missed the narrowing of the human’s eyes.

“What? What is it?” Julia asked, detecting what it did as well.

“What’s that… buzzing?”

No way. That is… just not possible.

“I… don’t hear anything.”

“Did we import any bugs from Earth? For the moonies down at the farm?” he asked, his right hand slowly migrating down to his hips.

What?! How could he possibly—

“No? What are you looking—” She turned around, aiming her eyes exactly where it was twenty meters above them.

Ah, crap. I’ve been made. Continue with primary mission immediately.

Bang.

It barely saw the human marine draw his sidearm, dodging the incoming supersonic projectile just in time as it saw Marcus depress the trigger. The metallic-ceramic projectile split into a few dozen micro-projectiles with a human-sized spread, each barely missing the fast dodging drone. The spreadshot rounds were designed to thin out autonomous quadcopter swarms, but they’d be perfectly lethal against this drone too—if any of those sub-projectiles hit.

Go! Move out of his line of sight now.

Bang. Bang.

There was a one-meter-wide hole in the ground, in the middle of the chamber. That was most likely where its primary objective was anyway. As it approached, it identified the primitive pulley elevator system. It sped down into it, breathing a sigh of digital relief as it put some solid cover between it and its discoverer. At the bottom, there was a corridor leading into a different-looking facility. A facility with shimmering blue walls.

Bingo.

That was when it detected a radio transmission from the humans. It decided the message was probably important enough to decrypt, so it did, which cost it a few minutes of battery time.

That was fine; it had plenty.

“All units in the AO! Unidentified reconnaissance drone detected in the facility, dragonfly-sized! Take it out!” Marcus ordered.

Good luck with that.

As it flew through the primary objective entryway, it turned a corner right into another surprised human. Their weapon was aimed up at the drone, its bright flashlight blinding the sensors if not for its now-active lidar and echolocation mappers.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt.

It dodged a burst from the human’s rifle, which barely missed its position. Surprising accuracy. Not accurate enough, but it noted the deviation from baseline in its log for future analysis.

Another voice, another of the guards chimed into their radio frequency. “It went past me! I think it’s headed down for the factory floor!”

Down. Thanks. That’s good to know.

As if he could hear its thoughts, Marcus ordered into the radio a second later, “All units, comms may be compromised. Scramble net and go gray.”

The drone instantly detected transmitters in the area switching a more complex encryption scheme. It analyzed it for a short few milliseconds. It was still possible to decrypt, but it was going to take more than two minutes for its tiny processor.

These guys are annoying.

It switched to boosting its audio sensors. In the echoing tunnels, it could still hear their voices from far away. After a few seconds, the drone found the deep hole the human referenced earlier, temporary scaffolding lining its walls, and dove down into it.

“I saw it! It’s gone in the staircase!” one of the marines shouted.

How can they even see me?! That must be more than a coincidence.

It briefly contemplated the possibilities for a moment. They couldn’t have detected it with their primitive instruments; the drone’s electronic stealth module made sure of that. The only other choice was… they saw and heard it with their biological senses. That was odd. None of the other alien species in its database could track such a small object and hear such a quiet buzz.

But it did have historical records of another faraway alien species that evolved on a planet where they had bugs of a similar size that were deadly to its inhabitants. It dwelled on the speculation for a second before adding it to its growing list of tactical discoveries to transmit for analysis later.

“This is Commodore Julia Kessler,” her calm voice said into the radio as the drone descended the dark hole. It could hear the quiet voice sneaking out of the headset of one of the marines below it. “I’m authorizing a total facility lockdown. Let the moonies know.”

“Commodore, we have six marines down here, plus the moonies have their—”

“We’ll pay for whatever we break,” she ordered coldly. “They’ll understand. Lock it down now.”

Break? Lockdown? Huh?

“Yes, Commodore… Primed and ready. Lockdown in ten… nine… eight… seven…”

The drone contemplated the mystery with increasing urgency as the voice counted down, even as it reached the bottom of the dark staircase. There was only a single corridor at the bottom, and the humans had helpfully put signs on the walls, with arrows pointing exactly where it expected its primary objective would be.

“Six… five…”

It ran through a few more options. None of them seemed to pose an immediate threat to its operation. Unexpectedly alert and accurate as they were, it was on the alert for that now; it could dodge whatever the humans threw at it. Probably. It zoomed past the hallways into a larger chamber.

Jackpot.

It reconsidered its own vulnerability and the implications of the countdown. Given their apparent ability to see it with their biological senses, there was a small but non-zero chance the humans could take it out or find some way to prevent it from leaving. It would be out of their expected baseline capabilities, but not by too far.

Might as well call home now, since I’m detected anyway.

It took in the sights, readying the imagery and all its collected data for burst transmission.

“Four…”

It started to consider less likely possibilities for the countdown as it diverted power to boost its own miniature radio device. Three seconds was plenty. It only needed a few milliseconds for—

The humans rudely didn’t even give it the courtesy of abiding by their own countdown. Perhaps the drone would have expected that if it’d analyzed its archives for how human children played the game of tag.

The guards at the EMP device pulled the lever on three.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt.

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“A priest, a pastor, and a rabbit are in a hospital. The nurse asks the rabbit, what’s your blood type? The rabbit says, I’m probably a type-o. A type-o! A type-o! Get it? A typo! Ahahahahaha!”

Julia stared at Shachos, who was flashing red and orange all over.

“Holy… shit!” she said after she overcame her shock.

“Gahahahah! Isn’t that just the best joke you’ve ever heard?”

“No, holy shit! You learned that… joke format, the historical concept of typos, about our religions, rabbits, our blood types, not to mention the English language… in just… what? A year?”

Shachos’s face turned an ambient orange as he clapped two of his appendages together. “Yes, and what a year well spent! It’s amazing! Your language leaves so much room for ambiguity. It is perfect for these types of jokes! Whoever invented English must have been among the greatest pranksters in your history!”

Julia tilted her head. “I—Hmmm… I’m not sure they’d see it that way, but thanks, I guess—”

“I also learned French and Swahili, but this joke is significantly less funny in both.”

“Huh? I don’t know either of those languages, but I imagine it’s… not funny at all in both.”

“Bahahahahahaha! It tickles me that your people instinctively understand the nature of humor! Tickles me, yes! Tickles. The gifts your species has gotten through the pure accident of birth—they are amazing! Just amazing! You have areas of your skin that are literally designed to make you laugh when rubbed! When rubbed! Can I try—”

She took a step back in slight alarm. “I… would rather not.”

“Ahahahaha! I will have to try on another willing human. Yes, I will.”

“I’m… sure we can find someone who would… um… enjoy—enjoy that.” Julia sighed. “Anyway, Fleet Master, I’m sure you didn’t invite me to your ship to trade a few jokes. Well, actually… I guess maybe you did.”

“Ahaha. No. I did not. I did not, indeed.” Shachos went back to a neutral yellow. “You are here because there is… some concern among our people, about the progress of the negotiations. A little concern. Maybe more than a little.”

Julia raised her eyebrows. “Concern? What concerns? I thought things were going well? As far as I know—the feedback I’ve gotten from our negotiators is all positive!”

“Yes, that is part of the problem,” Shachos said. “Our people have worked hard on our offers. And we know what the Karnolians and Sonckles have offered you. Yes, we do. Our offer is by far the best! It’s not even close. Our location is a big advantage! A very big advantage. For providing security. Security from… Well, security, you know. But… our people are now asking, why haven’t we come to an agreement yet? Why not? And I do not know what to tell them. Because I do not know the answer. I have my suspicions, yes, but I do not know for certain. No, I do not.”

She thought for a moment. “It’s a few issues. First of all, we’ve got the technology transfers. Your people’s offers are very good, but so are the Sonckles’ and Karnolians’, and they’re not only matching yours. They’ve both agreed to more open testing of their military tech than you have.”

“As I’ve said, we have a policy of not revealing all of our military technology,” Shachos explained. “But… we are willing to privately demonstrate some of what we have. Yes, we are, as long as your people sign agreements not to disclose the funniest things you see to the Karnolians or the Sonckles. Yes, they just need to agree. And I promise you they will be better than the Karnolians’. Many times better. I promise you!”

“Right.”

As if detecting her skepticism, Shachos added, “Besides, I think that is not your main concern. It is not.”

“No, it’s not,” she admitted. “I’ll be frank. You are not competing against the Karnolians. Nor are you competing against the Sonckles. You are competing against both of them combined, or a deal that involves both you and the Sonckles.”

“You want both our technology and the Sonckles’ technology.”

She shrugged. “If we can get it.”

“That is what I guessed. Yes, it is.” Shachos hesitated for a moment. “I—I think your people are making a mistake. A big mistake. With your singular focus on technology. Technology transfers.”

“Our focus on technology transfers is a mistake?” she asked with a little surprise.

“Yes. As a new species, it is expected that you would look for that. Yes, it is. But maybe you should reconsider your priorities.”

“Our priorities?!”

“Yes. Your priorities. If I were you, I would not place such a heavy emphasis on getting our technologies. No, I would not.”

“Why—why the hell not?” she asked, wondering just how he was going to spin this.

“Because… it is the most enticing. The most exciting. Very exciting. New discoveries! But it is not worth that much. No, it is not.”

“What—what are you talking about?!”

Shachos thought for a moment, then pointed one of his appendages at her. “Think. Imagine. Imagine this. Imagine an island pops up in your big ocean. The very big ocean. Your biggest ocean. The uh—the…”

Apparently learning Earth’s geography was less important than jokes about typos and religions.

“The Pacific?”

“Specifics? No, I mean the ocean.”

“Yeah, the Pacific Ocean—” She glanced at his face and sighed. “Ah, you’ve learned about malapropism—”

“Ahahaha! Yes! The Specific Ocean. Ok, ok. No more. Imagine a new island in the Pacific. Imagine there are millions of humans living on it. Many millions. And they are like you. All like you. Except, instead of computers and spaceships and warp drives, they have just discovered how to make fire from rocks. Very primitive. Imagine that island. Imagine how funny that would be!”

“Alright. I am… imagining that in my head. Newly discovered tribe of millions in the Pacific. What about them?”

“Now, imagine they are friendly. Imagine you start to exchange ideas and people with that island. Your people arrive in boats. In planes. Spaceships. How long do you think it will take for them to learn how to use your technology and how to make them?”

She thought hard. “Hm… well, if they were regular people open to our contact… First, the Union would probably pour development aid to the island. Then, there would be some kind of push to bring their education standards up. And if they send their children to schools in developed parts of the Union, and some of those children return… with non-extractive institutions set up to facilitate modernization, it will just be like the development of—” She stopped herself as she realized that a virtually identical scenario had historically occurred, and not just once.

Shachos glowed orange as he saw what she realized. “Yes… How long? How long?”

“One generation. Maybe two,” she said quietly after a moment. “Twenty to thirty years.”

“Yes. Maybe twenty years. Maybe thirty. Maybe more. But not much more. Not thousands. Not even a hundred years, maybe. From making fire… to making spaceships. Just a few decades, not much more.”

“Right. And you think that’s… how long it will take us to catch up to your technology level? You’ll share with us… just like that? With or without the Dustballium?” she asked skeptically.

“It might be more than a generation,” Shachos admitted. “But not much more. We have an open society like you. Very open. We do not guard most of our technology jealously. Not like the Sonckles. How to make ships and medicine and efficient power plants… those are not a secret among our people. The best is a secret, sometimes, yes. The very best. But only the best. The components we use for colony ships and for civilian transport ships… most of those are not secrets. Not at all. And if you learn that, you are only a decade or two behind our best. Closer to one than two.”

Except for the vaunted Vorshnik ship engines, she suspected he had a point about most of the rest of the technology. “You’re saying we can catch up thousands of years of advancements in a very short amount of time, to near the state-of-the-art, regardless of whether you try to keep it from us.”

“Yes, it is impossible to keep such things secret in our species. Impossible! Even if we try our best, even if we forbid our scientists and engineers from working with you, you can simply bribe them or hire them. That is not very hard. No, not at all. We simply are not used to keeping secrets like this. There are too many people who know how to make such things and operate our advanced machines. The plans for such devices for non-military use are not secret. You can maybe even get someone who is not a scientist or engineer to copy and steal them for you. Or you can buy from us with something else, yes. And you can use the same trick you are now using for the Precursor Metal; you can pit our producers against the Karnolian and Sonckle ones for your other needs. Such rapid technology transfers are an inevitable part of any exchange between our people. As I say, the technology is very exciting, but it is not as valuable as your people think. No, it is not.”

“That… might be true. But we’ve only just met each other. Your existence will create problems and opportunities in our societies that we haven’t yet anticipated. There’s a lot more planning that needs to be done before we have any confidence…”

“We have good simulations and projections; some of our funniest leaders think your people will be among the top fifty most productive star systems in our territory within twenty years. Twenty years. Maybe twenty-five,” he insisted. “Even without the—the Dustballium. Yes, they think that. Maybe it is true. Maybe it is not. But most agree it is not far off. Not far off at all.”

“Well, I guess… that isn’t impossible. It might seem inevitable,” she conceded. “But technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It solves problems, and they can solve our problems now. If you’ve got a drug or invention that can extend our life expectancy by a year, we can save hundreds of thousands of lives every day. We can’t wait twenty or thirty years for that! Or rather, it’s a moral dilemma that we have no easy answer for.”

“Yes, hm… we likely have something like that for you,” Shachos agreed.

“Multiply that by… all our problems. As a species, we value progress. Maybe it is shortsighted as you say, but ultimately… yes, it is important for us to get what we can, as much as we can, as soon as we can, regardless if exchange seems inevitable in the near future anyway.”

“Hm… I understand. Yes, I understand. We will have to think more about that. Yes, we will. We may adjust our offer.” Shachos turned yellow again. “You said there were other issues with our offer?”

“Security.”

“We will pledge to protect your colony! We can protect you!”

“And we respect the commitment that pledge implies… But again, we think our security could be best ensured by a deal where multiple species make that same pledge.”

“We will not allow an alien fleet in our system! No, we will not,” Shachos said adamantly. “That is… a matter of our security.”

“Maybe not a full battle fleet. But a token tripwire force from the other two species might be acceptable, no?”

“A tripwire force? What is that?”

“Like… a few ships that are stationed in the system. If harmed, it could compel them to go to war against whatever destroys them,” Julia explained. “To deter aggression from anyone else.”

Shachos was a confused greenish yellow. “Why… would that work? If they wanted to go to war, they would. Yes, they would. And if they didn’t, they would simply order those ships not to engage with an aggressor. Space is big. Very big. It’s not like war on the ground. This idea will not work.”

“It’s… well, I don’t know if it would work with their psychology and their view of war,” she confessed. “But I’d feel safer if there was more than one alien species with warships over Dustball. I mean… I’d prefer if the total number is zero, but if it’s greater than zero, then I want that number to be as large as possible.”

“That seems… irrational. But that is your position. Yes, that is your position. We will do our best. We will. We will consider working with the Sonckles.” He flashed a distasteful green that reminded her of the color of vomit. “But we will not work with Karnolians. Official policy, that is out of my limbs. All four of them. And even if it is not, blegh. Maybe the Sonckles. I will try. I will try.”

“Thanks, Shachos. I think we’ve all but said this to your people officially, but… despite what you tried to pull with our shuttles, I’m glad we ended up being deep in your territory.”

“Ahahahahahaha! Yes! It would be very funny if you discovered warp and found yourself in Sonckle or Karnolian territory. Yes, very funny. For a few weeks. Maybe a few months. Maybe a little more. Then, it would not be very funny for you.”

Julia snorted. “Heh. Probably not.”

“Oh, yes. I have something for you. Yes, something for you.”

“Oh? Something for us? Another practical joke?”

“No, not a joke. Not a joke at all. We have some news to tell you. Yes, some very big news! We have spies and… methods. We know what our neighbors are thinking. And what they are thinking is not funny at all.”

Alarmed, she asked, “What… they are thinking? What are they thinking?”

“The Karnolians, they know they are not in a good position. Yes, they know. They are not happy. No, they are not. But we have no specific intelligence. Nothing specific. Nothing… Pacific. Ahahahahaha! Anyway, we just know… it is… mildly serious.”

“What do you mean by… mildly serious? Are they going to try something? Like fire on you and try to take over this planet? Or invade your territory?”

“Hm… no, I think… even they are not that stupid. But they may try something at the negotiations. The Karnolians are not very creative people. Not very creative or funny. Not at all. But not stupid either. They have a few serious pranks up their sleeves.”

“Serious… pranks. So what kind of thing are they likely to try?”

“We… don’t know. But… my people say, the situation is mildly serious, and I thought you should know this. Yes, I did.”

“Well… thanks. I guess we can… watch out for… something, I guess.”

“Yes you should. Yes you should.”

“Are you sure you don’t know what they’re planning? Does it… maybe have something to do with… Skruma?” she asked hopefully. “You ready to tell us about—”

“Ahahahahahah! You are still trying to figure that out! That’s adorable! You’re adorable. It will be very funny when you figure it out. Yes, very funny.”

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“We’ve got a real problem.”

Julia looked up sharply. Marcus stood just inside her office door, his datapad tucked beneath one arm. He had closed the door behind him, which was not unusual in itself, but it was the way he gripped his rifle. She could tell something was different.

“What is it, Colonel?”

“Surveillance logs.” He crossed the room and placed the screen on her desk. “Samira. She’s skipped every progress briefing this week.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed.” Julia glanced at it. “She’s not pleased with us, for some mysterious reason.”

He ignored her sarcasm.

“That’s not the new part,” he said as he tapped the slate. She recognized the white-hot thermal imagery as it appeared. Two figures stood in the narrow service alley behind the scientists’ dormitories, half hidden beneath an exterior ventilation duct.

“She tried to give us the slip,” he explained. “But she doesn’t know we used the cover of one of the resupply shuttles to covertly deploy utility cameras to the dorm roofs.”

Julia’s eyes lifted from the image. “Give us the slip? Are you following her?”

“Of course,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Whatever she says, she’s the project manager on their side. She’s the top of the official Lunar hierarchy on Dustball. If the moonie troublemakers want to start something now, they’ll need her tacit approval at least, if not her active participation.”

Julia looked back at the image. “Right. And who is…”

“We’ve been following her movements to see who she’s talking to.” Marcus swiped across the screen. Five more images appeared, each time-stamped on a different night. The locations varied by only a few meters. The people did not. “She’s been meeting with Sarah Weeks behind the dorms in secret, every one of the last six days.”

She leaned closer, trying to decipher the face from the thermal imagery. “That Lunar Intelligence Agency spy?”

“Yup. LIA Deputy Director during the war. According to her file, she was demobilized before she joined the project. But… you know…”

“Why did we even allow people like that to join the colony project?!” she asked, knowing the answer already.

“It was her or someone just as unsavory, I bet. I mean, the moonies funded half the project, and we thought we were going to be growing potatoes and looking at rocks, not alien ruins…”

“And why is Samira mixed up with someone like that?”

“The answer seems obvious,” Marcus said.

“I know.”

The office fell silent but for the quiet ventilation fans.

“Do you want us to arrest her?” Marcus asked after a while.

“Samira or the spy?”

“Either. We can bring them in for questioning.”

“Under what—”

“We can hold them for forty-eight hours before we have to formally charge them. And there isn’t a magistrate in a few light years, so by the time two supply ships come and go, and we have to actually deal with the legal issues… the crisis might be over.”

“One way or another.”

He nodded a second later, almost reluctantly. “One way or another.”

Julia frowned. “That might make things worse.”

“What I’m worried about,” Marcus said, “is that things are already as bad as they can get.”

“I know.”

“If the moonies riot, they riot. We’ve got guns. We can deal with an angry mob. If Samira and that LIA spy are cooking something up, it’s going to be worse than whatever happens if we take them off the board now. They know the base. They know the personnel. The infrastructure people are Samira’s people, formally or otherwise. If Weeks has been building a network as well—”

“I know.” She pointed up, at the ceiling, and beyond it. “But there’s also the aliens overhead to think about. If things kick off down here, that gives them an excuse to go ahead with their own unsavory plans. Unlike the moonies, we can’t just shoot our way out of that problem, even if we want to.”

“It’ll be even worse if the moonies—”

“I said I know.”

For several seconds, neither of them spoke.

“Alright. What do you want us to do, Commodore?”

She rubbed her exhausted eyes. “Give me some time to think it over.”

“How much time?”

“The next supply shuttle isn’t for another week. If they try anything, it’ll have to be around that,” she decided. “We have that much time.”

“And if we don’t? If they move before that?”

Julia sighed. “Well, the Karnolians have a saying…”

Marcus nodded. “War it is.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Brussels

“The Southeast Asians can’t tolerate any more increases in the oil price. At over two hundred dollars a barrel, their annual budget parameters will need to be recalculated. Or worse.”

President Salma Haldar looked up in alarm. “Or worse? What are they saying now?!”

“There are talks—there are rumors out of Kuala Lumpur that they might start a regional movement to unpeg from the Union dollar,” Will said.

“A currency exit?! What are they going to use? The moonie dollar?!”

“No, ma’am. They’re reviving talks of an old currency proposal. The Asian Currency Unit. The moonies will almost certainly recognize its legitimacy immediately if they announce it—”

“Ridiculous! None of us can go it alone! Not when the moonies are out there,” Salma scoffed.

Will shook his head. “That’s not their main concern. I think Serenity has someone in their ears, convincing them that a weaker local currency will fuel their export-heavy economies, so they can take advantage of low prices to funnel surplus agricultural products to Luna. One of their long-term priorities is that we dilute and weaken the Union dollar against the price of Helium-3, and—”

“Yes, and I’ve got two hundred representatives calling me every week, asking if I can influence the Central Bank one way or another. Raise interest rates, lower interest rates, monetary easing, tightening… some of them are asking if I can abolish the UECB outright! And my answer remains the same! Go ask Chairman Vogler in New York. We’re not in charge of monetary policy here! Don’t they understand the whole point of a politically independent central bank?!” she asked in exasperation.

Will rifled through a stack of papers in front of him. “That’s… actually one of their complaints too. They’re still not happy about your appointment of Vogler as the head of the Central Bank. They call him an unelected bureaucrat who is still working for the interests of shareholders at his old job at Deutsche Bank.”

“Yes! Perhaps instead of merely being unelected, we should have picked some random crank who is both unelected and unqualified? Or maybe we can run a worldwide referendum to vote on interest rates every month?” she asked sarcastically.

“The Malaysian Prime Minister has proposed—”

“Or…” Salma raised her voice. “Maybe we go with his preferred candidate, who is under investigation by the Office of Justice for bribery and tax evasion.”

“The investigations are still ongoing. He claims it’s political—”

She pointed a finger at Will. “Will, you go tell Kuala Lumpur that if they want to go it alone now, that is their choice, but we won’t take it lying down. There will be consequences. When we joined the Union dollar, we all agreed that we’d be all-in on the risk-sharing. All of it. They don’t get to offload their risks and then decide to take a break when the bill comes due!”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll… talk to them about it. It’ll just be easier if—if we’re also doing something about the oil shortage.”

“We’re trying. Right, Secretary Garcia?” Salma turned her attention to her Secretary of Natural Resources. “Where are we on that?”

“Still in discussions to raise the production quota for next year. It’s… not looking good. Lots of resistance from the producers, and even if they agree, we’re barely on track to meet our decarbonization targets for 2100 as is.”

“Right. How many votes are we short?”

Garcia swallowed, then answered, “About fifty votes in the Assembly.”

“Fifty votes short?! That bad?”

“That’s… a low estimate, Madam President. Three of the seven Security Branch chairs come from massive net producers. There’s a reason the quota formula hasn’t changed in thirty years.”

“What will it cost me for those discussions to… look better?”

“Look better to who? We can leak portions of our meeting notes to the media all we want, but I doubt that’ll help you with the Southeast Asians.”

Salma looked out at her blank-faced advisors. She sighed. “It sure would be nice if we found some natural resources we can use alongside those magic beanstalks on Dustball.”

Will perked up. “I asked. Hydrocarbons would be far too uneconomical to ship from Dustball even if we dug some up. The only reason that the Dustaballium is worth it is—”

“Yes, yes. I know. The scientists briefed me. It’s literal magic, apparently.” Salma dismissed an anticipated argument with the wave of a palm. “How are those trade discussions going anyway?”

“I’m hearing mixed things from the ground,” Will started to say.

Secretary Wilders chimed in. “What I’ve heard is… Commodore Kessler began by ceding half our supply and thus all our leverage to the moonies. I don’t know what would possess her to do that!”

Will sighed. This was not the first time they’d had this discussion, not even this week. “It’s half their colony too.”

Wilders was insistent. “I had my people go over the charter. The fifty-fifty split in colony exports in the agreement only applies to natural resources and their refined products. Alien artifacts are by definition not natural resources. This is closer to intellectual property, which is owned by the originator party—”

“Intellectual property? The metal?! What kind of mushrooms were you on when you came up—”

“And in the event of a dispute, as majority owner of the colony, not to mention the only ones with marines in the colony at the moment, we get to decide where it all goes.”

It was obvious from his expression where the secretary thought all of the Dustballium should go.

“Look. That’s… one… possible reading of the charter,” Will said cautiously. “But barring extraordinary circumstances, I’d defer to our commanders on the ground. There were reports of a potential moonie uprising in the colony a couple months ago… when they found out we were trying to do—well, exactly what you suggested. It seems like a significant portion of our decision-making since that has been restrained by that potential threat.”

“Then, send more marines and start arresting the troublemakers! At the very least, we should send a higher-level commander out there. Someone with more combat experience, perhaps, given what’s happening with both the aliens and the moonies…”

Will sighed and said firmly, “Commodore Kessler is still the best fit, and she has extensive combat experience. That list of replacement candidates you sent me last week was a joke. General McCoy? Isn’t he facing charges for money laundering in Singapore? Hey, let’s play a game: how many more corrupt Union officials can we bring up in this meeting? And where are we getting the money to send and then sustain twenty thousand additional marines for an orbital deployment in another star system light years—” He stopped and glanced briefly at Salma. “Secretary Wilders, I really didn’t want to hijack another daily presidential brief for this discussion again. Maybe we can take this somewhere else?”

Salma shook her head. “Wait, no. I want to hear this. Why aren’t we surging troops to Dustball? We’ve already got an entire squadron out there already, right?”

Will looked torn, but his loyalty compelled him to answer. “Ma’am. I think we need a clear-eyed view on this situation.”

“Clear-eyed view. Meaning?”

“I think we need to start considering the possibility that we lose the colony. The entire colony.”

The room was quiet for a few heartbeats.

“Lose… the colony?” Salma asked.

“Yes, if the aliens decide to take it all from us. If they do that, we still need our ships and marines to deal with our enemies on Luna. If we surge—”

Salma raised an eyebrow. “Our enemies on Luna?”

“Our former enemies on Luna. I apologize, Madam President. If we rush everything we have to Dustball, and we lose everything there to the aliens, we’ll be left vulnerable here, back in our home system. That’s the most catastrophic outcome I’ll entertain here, for now, but… it can get worse than that too.”

She considered it for a moment. “Alright. Hm… Right, the moonies. What are the moonies thinking? What are they doing?”

“Well, it’s hard to tell what they’re planning on the dark side. Our satellites don’t see literally everything…”

Secretary Wilders knew exactly when to jump in when he had a point. “As far as all our intelligence indicates, they’re doing nothing except pouring everything they have into building up their warp and interstellar launch capabilities, so they can be in a good position to flood the Dustball system with their own ships and troops when the time comes!”

“We can’t just play copycat with Luna,” Will argued, a little more feebly this time. “It’s—it’s—”

Salma smirked. “The Haldar Doctrine?”

That was what administration critics had initially lambasted her for. “What Would the Moonies Do,” a single line from a leaked State Department talking points memo, became a common staple of parodies of her foreign policy on the late-night shows and social media. As time went on, her general policy of matching Luna’s rhetoric and action eased tensions in orbit and proved popular among the voters, and those parodies became less biting and more affectionate.

“I was going to say… inappropriate in this context,” Will replied unhappily, knowing the argument was lost.

Salma thought for a moment, then took a deep breath. “I think we’ll keep the commodore in charge, for now. It seems like a critical time for them there, and a change in leadership could cascade into far bigger problems. As for a troop surge…” She looked at her advisors and shrugged. “We are Earth. We can do everything at once. It’s time to leverage that. Ready our ships and marines for a larger scope deployment to match the moonies’ posture, if they escalate—or if they back down. Squadron for squadron, ship for ship, battalion for battalion. And if it looks like it’s the aliens who are going to take the colony from us, we’ll… make contingency plans for that as well.”

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“I inspected the radioactive contents of the samples with a mass spectrometer,” Cynthia explained. “All industrial activity stopped at the line. All signs of civilization, snip, done.”

“At the 125 million year mark?” Julia asked, her brow furrowing.

She nodded. “All at the mark, to the year. Maybe to the day. And I’ve looked at our other samples. All stopped at the same time.”

“Hm… 125 million years. That’s—I think I’ve seen that figure somewhere else…” Julia picked up her datapad.

Cynthia didn’t look anywhere else. “Yes, one other place. Exactly one other place.”

“Which is…”

“The crater. That’s the age of the crater.”

“You know this because…?”

“Geology.”

“Right. Carbon-dating?”

“No, that only goes out to a few thousand years. Good for the Dead Sea Scrolls, but for anything older than humanity, we measure potassium isotope decay.”

“Right, geology. So… the Precursors… They were killed by whatever made that crater,” Julia summarized. “An asteroid.”

“An asteroid that quickly ended all signs of civilization on this planet.”

“How quickly are we talking?”

“At most a few years.”

“A few years, huh?”

“Two or three, at most. Possibly even on the very day of. We’ll need more evidence for that, but it happened very, very quickly. Let’s just say… there’s nothing I’ve found above the glass line so far.”

The glass line.

Julia tilted her head. “Sounds… intentional and violent.”

“And… probably not actually an asteroid.”

“Not actually an asteroid?”

“A civilization like the one that built the factory, they’d have asteroid defenses and warning systems and… well, we already know they’re a multi-planetary species from the other aliens. If there was a catastrophic asteroid hit on Earth, and assuming there was still an Earth left afterwards, how long do you think we’d survive after?”

“Hm… not so easy to kill millions or billions of people, I guess. And their friends on the other planets would be back, trying to pick through the wreckage and rebuild.”

“Right. Unless they can’t…”

“Enemy action, huh?” Julia asked, a slight chill running up her spine.

“That’s… our theory anyway.”

“Don’t you mean hypothesis?”

Cynthia gave her a tired, humoring smile. “Hah.”

“Anyway, that’s—uh—good work, doctor. Monumental discovery. I’ll be sure to let the people back home know to give you credit and all that.”

“Give me credit?” Cynthia looked at her with alarm. “That’s what you’re—You don’t sound very… concerned about this, Commodore.”

“This?”

“The whole Precursor aliens going extinct due to violence thing?”

“Huh? Should I be?”

“Well… it’s the people whose grave sites we’ve been robbing… It seems like this would be concerning to you.”

“Why? Do the core samples tell you when the bad guys who killed them are coming back? I mean, it’s been 125 million years. What are the chances any of the parties involved are still kicking around?”

“I don’t—I don’t know. Just… is it a good idea to go digging through their trash? What if we—I don’t know? What if we accidentally activate a signal and the bad guys come back?”

“Like a bat signal for the bad guys?”

Cynthia scratched her head. “Well… yeah. What happens if we wake them up by accident or something?”

“The bad guys who killed all the people who made the machines that pour out invincible metal for their helmets and space elevator pipes?” Julia shrugged. “Then we’re all dead, right?”

“That seems like something worth avoiding.”

“It is. I’ll—uh—I’ll tell our people we should avoid touching anything that looks like it could be a transmitter or something.”

“That’s… a start.”

“Great. Anything else?”

“No—no, that’s all. I thought you’d take this more… seriously…”

She smiled softly at the geologist. “Oh, believe me, doctor. I’m taking things very seriously. But the biggest extinction risk I’m worried about right now… it’s not the guys from 125 million years ago, who might or might not themselves be gone. It’s the guys up in orbit right this moment, plotting and scheming us out of our golden goose. For whom our folks back home… may just be unfortunate collateral damage if they have their way.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Harry was knee-deep with paperwork on his datapad when Julia finally returned to the administrative hab that night. He barely looked up to greet her as she entered.

“How are the alien negotiations?” he mumbled.

“It’s… going.”

He peered at her. “That bad, huh?”

She sighed. “It’s a balancing act on the tightest of tight ropes. For the long-term security of our colony, it’d be best if—when we come to an agreement—they all believe that they’re not getting screwed. That’s made more difficult by the fact that, on our way to said agreement, we do need them all to believe that the other parties are trying to screw them over, harder than we are.”

“Sounds impossible. I’m sure you’ve got it handled.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. And then after that… Then, we have to sell that agreement to the moonies.”

“Always easier said than done.” Harry grunted noncommittally. “Who’s closest?”

“Shachos. The Vorshnik are by far the most agreeable. They’ll settle for a straight material for tech deal, and they’re somewhat willing to cut in the Sonckles if they have to. For us, the greatest benefit of going with them is that Dustball and Sol are in their territory. Not only would a deal not run into any future issues around our physical positioning, we won’t have to wait for them to work out some kind of transport agreement with the other species, which we’d have to do if we went with the other guys.”

Harry nodded. “Sounds ideal. And they seem nice… relatively. Less prone to crazy antics. Well… the bad crazy at least. Might be less inclined to go back on their word. What’s the downside?”

“The two others both refuse to consider cutting the Vorshniks in. The Karnolians just dislike them in general. Not enough to go to war directly—sounds like that didn’t work out so well for the teddy bears last time. But enough to not want them to win. Glonk, on the other hand, seems to think that his species is God’s gift to the galaxy, and we should be grateful for the opportunity to hand them our treasures in exchange for their superior technology.”

He furrowed his brow. “That arrogant sea turtle. Do we know that their offerings are actually the best?”

“Possibly. We were discussing ways to stack up their weapons tech against each other today. They do have weapons trade amongst themselves; the Karnolians buy them from the Sonckles by the ton, especially on the factions level. The sea turtles are famously willing to sell to both sides of a factional civil war, and they have licensed production facilities on several Karnolian planets; those are export variants though, so probably significantly less powerful than what they have. All three have given us the topline specs for their weapons, but it’s hard to compare just on paper. Hence, Karveth and Glonk want a live-fire test. Shachos refuses.”

“Because their technology just isn’t as good?” he asked.

“Either that, or, as he claims, the lack of outside insight on the exact capabilities of their weapons is a deterrent against their neighbors. They rarely go to war. If the Sonckles and the Karnolians can’t be certain how powerful their ships are, then the potential risk for them trying something nasty is significantly higher.”

“What do you think? If you had to rank them, based on the specs they’ve given you and everything they’ve said, whose offerings are the best?”

“Like their ships? On a tonnage basis?” Julia clarified.

“Sure. Just on that.”

“The sea turtles, probably, if you take out the water in their species-specific life support requirements,” she said after a moment of consideration. “The Sonckles. Then, the Vorshniks, by a small margin. And then there’s a big gap, with the teddy bears at the bottom.”

“Don’t buy from the Karnolians, essentially.”

“They’re just trying to promise us in quantity and variety what they can’t afford in quality,” Julia said, nodding. “But yeah, they’re the furthest away from a deal. And I think they know it. Shachos made some snide comments about Karveth being replaced by another faction’s negotiator earlier today.”

“This insult ends today! War it is!” Harry mimicked.

She guffawed at the loyal imitation. “Yeah. They’ve got an ascendant faction, the blue faction, that might replace Karveth’s reds. I pinged our analysts up in orbit in Camel Squadron. Might be worth trying to get some information on them, in case they do take over their side of the negotiations. Or even if they don’t…”

“Use them against Karveth.” He snorted lightly. “You know… we should be glad the aliens aren’t playing us and the moonies against each other. Get us to bid against ourselves.”

“More nightmare fuel, thank you very much.” She shook her head wryly. “What about you? How were things while I was playing host?”

Harry gestured at his datapad. “The bunker’s almost complete. And Marcus reported in. Dug in. His troops are ready for the long haul, as much as they can anyway against enemies that are so much more advanced than us. Then again, their weapons look incredible and we wouldn’t want to face them in battle, but when you talk to them, you realize they’re not so different from us after all.”

She snorted. “Yeah, that’s the comforting part, that they’re not so different from us. Just with better, deadlier toys. Real comfort.”

He looked deep in thought for a while. Then he asked, “How do you feel about these negotiations?”

“They’re going as well as we can expect. I think we’ll have to come to some sort of agreement on the specifications—”

“No, no. I didn’t ask you how it’s going. I asked you, how do you feel about them?”

Julia narrowed her eyes. “How do I… feel?”

“Yeah.”

“How do I feel?” She paused, thinking for a long moment. “I feel… scared. I’m scared.”

Harry didn’t look surprised. Not at all. “Me too.”

“We are manipulating them, and they all know it. They’re not dumb.”

“No, they’re not.”

“And the thing about manipulators… if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the people who think they are the ones moving the pieces on the chessboard, they—we are the easiest people to manipulate.”

“That’s part of it,” he agreed. “But not all. What scares me more is the way they came into it. The way they look at us. The way they barely bother to acknowledge our existence at the meetings once they start the discussions.”

She shuddered. “Yes. The way these aliens interact. On the surface, there’s this veneer—this… veneer of civilization. Treaties, protocols, rules. And then, you dangle a piece of meat in front of them, and you realize that none of that’s really there. When you open your eyes, you find yourself deep in the jungle. Alone. With nothing to stop them from tearing you apart to get to the prize.”

He pointed a finger at her as he straightened up. “Yes, the jungle. A perfect analogy.”

She tilted her head. “Yeah?”

“There is a story, a way of looking at our own history, that describes exactly that. That before the war with the moonies, before the Union, that was how things were. The history of Earth. Once, humanity lived on the constant edge of war. The colonial wars. The world wars. The cold wars. Chaos and instability. Then, whether it was because everyone got tired of the fighting or because the strongest bullies got to be in charge, there was a brief moment of quiet in the jungle, where even the birds were silent. In that lull, people built cities out of the forest, the ferns became farms, and the killing fields became beautiful orchards. Civilization came. Peace and order.”

“And everyone lived happily ever after.”

Harry knew she was being sarcastic; he shook his head anyway. “Not effortlessly. It takes a lot of people to keep the jungle at bay. It’s not just the sentries and guards on the walls with their weapons, keeping the wild animals out. It’s also the farmer, making sure that the weeds don’t overrun their crops. It’s the road pavers who mark the start and end of the town. It’s everyone who decides: we don’t want to live in the jungle. Because all it takes is a few bad apples to amplify the temptations. Maybe it was more free when we didn’t have all these rules, from a certain point of view. Maybe the walls that protect us from the jungle—maybe they aren’t so important after all. Maybe my upstairs neighbor wouldn’t be practicing drums at six in the morning. Maybe it isn’t worth all this effort. So brick by brick, they take down the walls. Bit by bit, civilization recedes. And the jungle grows back, until chaos consumes us all.”

“Right, civilization is a conscious effort. This veneer has to be maintained. Sacrifice and understanding and all that.”

He nodded. “It is a difficult project for everyone involved, but there is nothing else like it.”

Julia thought for a moment. “The sad thing is, I’m not convinced that we aren’t chipping away at the walls ourselves right now. Hell, the first thing I did when we found the Precursor site… was to figure out how best to stab the moonies in the back so we can keep everything. We’re the ones playing the aliens against each other, forcing them to pursue their own selfish interests with our goading. We are the ones growing the jungle back, to enrich the fruits of our little garden.”

“That’s… yeah, that’s possible.” Harry then shook his head. “But don’t be too harsh on yourself.”

“Why not? You cautioned me against it. My failure was foreseeable.”

“Maybe. But like you said, any of them would have done the same, right? If the aliens found the artifacts instead of us, it’s not like they’d be sharing them with us. And if the moonies found it first, they’d be doing the same thing we did. They’d squeeze us out and try to negotiate their own deals with the aliens. Technology, resources, whatever. They wouldn’t hesitate for a second before they cut us out of it.”

She hesitated a while before she replied, “I’m… not so sure about that.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, an eyebrow arched.

“I don’t—I don’t know. The moonies—I’m no longer so sure about that.”

He seemed to accept that non-answer. Instead, he shrugged. “We might never know.”

She stared off into the distance. “We might not. I—I don’t understand the moonies. Once, I thought I did. Maybe the war made things simpler, or maybe it was the end of it that did. But now, I think—I really don’t get them. Some of them speak about a grand vision of humanity—peace, prosperity, the whole gamut. Others treat us like the scraps they left behind when they set off to build their new Garden of Eden.”

“You mean… they’re like us. Human. Some well-intentioned visionaries with ideas greater than themselves. Others, greedy and fallible. And mostly, a bit of both.”

“Maybe. Maybe what I’m scared of… is that they can actually do it. That they can do what we were never able to, that we still aren’t able to. Peace. Order. Or, in your analogy, clearing the jungle.”

Harry looked amused. “You mean… together, right? Make peace… with us, right? Because the moonies can’t realize their vision of grand civilizational peace and harmony without us,” he said. “By definition, they can’t.”

“Never thought about it that way, I guess…”

She closed her eyes and sighed, aware that his eyes were still on her.

She opened them a long moment later. “In that story of the jungle, how did humanity recover? How did we keep it at bay? Hell, how did we get out of it in the first place?”

“You know the answer to that. How does any great civilizational project get off the ground?” Harry took a deep breath. “Yeah. Who knows? Maybe it really isn’t worth all this blood and effort.”

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“Nice to see you back at work, Doctor,” Julia said with a faint smile. “My schedule will be filling up with your meetings soon, I presume?”

“Yes, Commodore. I—I—” Cynthia stopped herself.

Julia softened her voice. “I know… it’s not easy. What you went through. If you need to talk to someone…”

She shook her head. “No—no, I’m fine. They didn’t—I’m fine.”

Julia’s eyes lingered on her for a moment. “Good. Good. If you do, you can talk to Dr. Wrona. He’ll get you sorted. Drugs, or talking to someone—anyone—about it… it’s helpful, from… personal experience.”

“Yes. Thank you. I’ll—I’ll do that.”

“And… you know what? I’m assigning you a couple of Marcus’s marines, for your own protection.”

“What? No. I don’t need—I’m fine.”

“It’s just a precaution. In case any of the moonies try to kidnap you again. Marcus?”

“I have a couple I can pull off routine patrols. We did consider protecting her, but thought that would draw too much attention before… all this.”

“I’m sure—I’m sure I’m fine. I think they won’t bother me again.”

“It’s not really up to you,” Marcus said. “There’s a lot of value in what you know.”

“Really, this colony is as safe as it gets!”

“Yes. With all your decades of experience in personnel security and threat assessment, your opinion on this matter really carries a lot of weight with me,” Julia said dryly.

Cynthia looked like she was going to protest but deflated. “It’s—fine. As long as they stay out of my way.”

“I’m sure they’ll do their best… So, that request for an urgent meeting?” Julia smiled. “Got another lake you want me to drain?”

“Right. Meeting. No, no lake. I found something!”

“What have you brought me today?” Julia asked, pointing a finger at the transparent cylinder in her hands. “Core samples, eh? Anything new? Something else about the lake? Thirty-five kilometers beneath us, huh? I think I’m going to give the order to stop rationing water next week.”

Cynthia shook her head and placed the cylinder on Julia’s desk, where she pointed at the marked line. “Commodore, I—I think I know what the Precursor aliens were doing here.”

“Could have started with that…”

“What is on this planet, Commodore, other than the Precursor ruins? What would Dustball have offered a presumably advanced civilization that would entice them to colonize it in the first place?”

“Not much, I suppose. There’s a lot of sand and nothing here.”

“A lot of sand and—” Cynthia stopped herself, then looked Julia in the eyes. “Ah, you are messing with me.”

Julia returned a smile. “Sand and nothing, and a large deposit of water a few dozen kilometers beneath our feet.”

“Precisely. Precious water, which is not rare among the stars, but is rare in such large volumes to be extracted. For a few light years.”

“Right, so this planet was… what? Some kind of water mining operation for the Precursors.”

Cynthia looked minorly surprised that she managed to figure that out. “Yes. A water mining operation is my guess.”

“And you know this how?”

“The way that the rocks are. There used to be more water. Then, there wasn’t.”

“The way that the rocks are.”

“Yes, Commodore.”

“So here, they had a whole city. A whole city of people who lived here… People who went to work. People with families. With their entire lives.”

“And now, it’s just sand and nothing.”

“Sand and nothing, and a preserved cache of the most valuable machinery in the known galaxy.”

“And a way to bring all that water to space.”

“Right. I suppose they must have had a launchpad somewhere, or… wait. What if…”

“You got it.” Cynthia beamed.

“A space elevator. A space… pipe, of water? From the surface to orbit?”

“Made of…”

“Living metal. Dustballium. Is that… possible?”

“It’s harder than a space elevator design, which relieves compression pressure with tension. But until we figure out the limits of Dustballium, the only people who can answer that question…” She looked down.

“Sand and dust,” Julia guessed.

“Crudely.”

“And the foundry we found…”

“That was likely what it made. The pipe that goes to space.”

“Ah.” Julia pointed a finger at her chest. “That’s why you’re here. You want to go digging for where that giant space pipe must have fallen down.”

“It’s… probably buried somewhere out there.” Cynthia gestured out the window of the admin hab. “We’ll figure out where it is soon. Roughly. And then we’ll dig it up eventually.”

“That’s it? You’re not… going to demand I give you some of my marines to help you dig?” Julia smiled. “Maybe stop a construction project for half a year while you take their robots to go digging for it?”

Cynthia shrugged. “I did file a proposal for more equipment. I suppose you’ll get to it when you get to it.”

The scientist had changed. Julia wondered what it was. Her overnight kidnapping by the moonies.

Or…

Perhaps it was Julia who had broken her. Forcing her to keep the secret. The threats.

She felt a well of guilt threatening to spill. Julia stared at her a bit longer and grunted. “I suppose so.”

“We’ll need to find roughly where it is first anyway. It probably fell around the same time the Precursor civilization did. Based on that, we can try to figure out where the ground level that used to be here would migrate.”

Or maybe Cynthia was simply more interested in something else than a rusty old pipe. If the Dustballium could rust. That seemed unlikely.

“So the foundry… it made this space pipe, not helmets?” Julia asked. “What about the ballistic helmet remains we found in the facility?”

“Well, it…” Cynthia looked uncomfortable for a moment. “No, it likely made helmets too. At the end.”

“At the end?”

“At the end. It clearly wasn’t designed to only make helmets. It was probably supposed to be just to make Dustballium. Then, it was repurposed. When they needed to.”

“When they needed to.”

“It didn’t help them much, I don’t think.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

125 million years ago

“They’re here!”

“By the creators…”

Xenilath’s reflective eyelid snapped shut, filtering the ultraviolet glare as she stared into the cloudless sky. A massive cylinder hung above the horizon.

It was still far beyond the atmosphere, but it was already visible to the naked eye. A dark, silver-gray shape the size of a small moon, one end gleaming where it caught the light of their sun. It didn’t appear to be moving.

“They’re finally here,” she whispered.

“Help me get the equipment inside!” a coworker yelled. He had both arms wrapped around the handle of a heavy storage crate, his feet slipping in the soft sand as he dragged it toward the factory entrance.

“What’s the point?” someone else said. He stood beside an abandoned cart, staring upward. “We’re all dead anyway.”

“Inside!” another worker shouted. “Get inside! The walls might protect us!”

“Hasn’t helped anyone anywhere else,” the cynic muttered.

A gust of hot wind swept out from the factory, carrying dust, machine oil, and the smell of the chemical ponds. Loose sheets of packing material tumbled across the yard. Somewhere far off to her right, an unattended machine chirped.

“If anything, die with dignity,” someone said with a shaking voice. “The damn eaters… Don’t give them the fear they want.”

Xenilath looked again at the cylinder in the sky. In that moment, she decided that if she was going to die here, she wasn’t going to do it screaming like a coward.

Not like the people in the recordings.

She grabbed the other end of the crate. Its metal handle burned against her paws from sitting in the glare of the system star.

“Lift.”

Together, they hauled it through the entrance.

Only a few workers were still at the factory. Most had gone home to be with their clans, to crowd into the underground shelters and pretend that a few meters of dust and metal, living or not, was going to protect them from the coming apocalypse.

Xenilath didn’t have a clan, so she was here.

The inside of the factory was darker and cooler, though the air was thick with the smell of hot metal and insulating resin. Ventilation fans rumbled in the ceiling. This place built this planet. Made it the way it was.

This planet wasn’t particularly populated. No anomalous astropolitical positioning. No complicated entries in the history of the civilization. No rare resources, bar one. The substance of life. The millions who lived here were the bare minimum necessary to support that simple yet critical mission. Xenilath had lived her life here, as many before her did. For a hundred generations, this planet had supplied the water that made comfortable life possible for eighteen billion souls in six neighboring star systems.

Some billions fewer now, now that the eaters were here.

And now, the factory had been reopened and repurposed to churn out implements of war. Half-finished products and critical equipment lined its dimly lit hallways.

A squad of soldiers had gathered in the production chamber. They surrounded Xenilath’s supervisor, their weapons still slung across their chests, and all of them were shouting over one another. Xenilath left her crate by the wall and jogged over.

“What’s going on, Supervisor?”

“Xenilath, come here.” Her supervisor warily waved her closer with both arms. “Maybe you can make these soldiers see sense.”

“No, you make your supervisor see sense!” their leader snapped. His uniform was streaked with dust. The dust of the planet, it got everywhere. “We need your equipment!”

“It’s over,” the supervisor said, his voice strangely calm. That was scarier than the shouting. “It is already over. Don’t you see?”

He gestured toward the rows of workstations.

“What good will a few helmets do you? We are not a mass-production line. Never have been. These are custom units for the super-marines who went up to sabotage their ship a few weeks ago.” He dry-laughed. “And where are they now? Dead. All dead. Nothing can stop the eaters. Nothing.”

“Anything will help,” the squad leader said. “Don’t give up yet. They might still attempt a landing here—”

Her supervisor slowly shook his head.

“What for? There’s nothing useful down here, as far as they care about. No command bunker. No defense batteries. No launch facility. Just a water pipe that goes up and up, for planets that are already dead and those that will be soon.” He spread his arms. “There’s nothing here they want. The only thing they’re here for is you and me.”

“Just because you’ve given up—” the squad leader began.

Blaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggg!

Xenilath flinched as the air-raid alarm blared through the chamber, covering up whatever the soldier was going to say.

Thump.

The heavy doors ground and then slammed shut. The impact shuddered through the floor. Horizontal bars behind the door locked into place one after another with deep mechanical bangs.

For a few seconds, no one spoke.

Xenilath stared at the sealed doors. They were a pace thick and made of living metal. She noted idly that if they were going to break, it was going to be the hinges that gave.

However thick the door was, it wouldn’t help them for what was coming.

“See?” her supervisor said quietly. “They’re not landing. There’s nothing here they want… Only what they want dead.”

The soldiers exchanged glances. A younger one tightened his grip on his rifle.

“Hang on,” the squad leader said. He raised one hand to the receiver. Static crackled from it between voices. “I’m picking up something from orbital defense.”

“What?” Xenilath asked.

Hope blossomed in her chest.

Had someone stopped them?

Had one of the defense fleets survived?

The squad leader listened. The hope died in his eyes before he even spoke.

“What?” Xenilath demanded.

“They’ve launched. At us. Twelve.”

Her supervisor closed his eyes. “Planet killers. One for each pipe.”

“No,” someone whispered.

Xenilath saw the truth settle over the soldiers.

Two of them turned to one another and embraced, military decorum forgotten. One buried his face against the other’s shoulder, consoling themselves in their final moments. Another lowered himself to the floor and began murmuring the old creation prayers under his breath. More joined him.

The squad leader remained standing. He straightened his uniform, adjusted the strap of his rifle, and stared at the sealed door as though he still intended to fight what came through it.

Xenilath wanted to say something.

She didn’t know what.

She thought about her dreams. An entire world inside her. And millions of them, one for each life across the planet.

Would anyone even remember her? Remember this place? She didn’t have an answer for that.

“The electronic dampener,” she muttered, staring up at the ceiling.

“What?” the soldiers turned to look at her.

She glanced back at the squad leader. “This facility… we have an electronic dampener upstairs. It’s only activated when we process the living metal foundry. If—if the eaters are to come… it might slow their war machines. Buy us some more… time.”

She felt lame even as she suggested it, expecting them to ridicule her.

“Good idea,” the squad leader said seriously instead. He nodded his head approvingly. He gestured at two of his soldiers. “Go upstairs and turn it on. Anything can be the bit that helps.”

“It’s on the top floor. There are signs. You won’t miss it.”

“Thank you, worker.”

“For what?” Xenilath asked.

He shrugged without an answer.

They simply stood there, the distant voices in the soldiers’ radios getting more rapid. She tried to block them out of her mind.

Boooooom.

The sound of the pressure front arrived first, rolling through the ground and into her bones.

Dust sifted from the ceiling. The lights went out. The red emergency strips lit up for a brief second, then went out. She didn’t even have time to register that it was because of the newly activated electronic dampener.

“Was that it or—” someone began.

The entire factory lurched upward.

Xenilath felt her feet leaving the ground. Then, she felt no more.

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