Chapter 2 - Aftermath

Stevo. 12

The night was long; it was altogether too long. Yet, at the same time, he was dreading the rising of the sun.

There was a reason that armies throughout history had chosen dawn as the best time to launch their attacks. Firstly, your opponent would be tired, either having stayed up all night maintaining the defenses - as his squad had been forced to do - or just simply from getting up early and not being fully awake yet. Secondly, it allowed them to attack with the rising sun at their backs. Firing into a horde of onrushing enemies was daunting enough, but doing it when half-blinded by the sun made things all the more complicated. His situation, however, was compounded by the fact that he was inarguably surrounded. The sun rose in the West on this planet, so manning that part of the defenses was straightforward, but he didn't have the manpower to maintain security for the East, North, or South orientations at the same time. The simple fact of his reality was that any sort of organized attack on his position would be difficult - to the point of being suicidally impossible - to repulse.

He could hear them, even in those small night hours, scuffling around in the trenches surrounding his makeshift fortress. He hadn't heard a word being whispered from them all night - impressive on its own, now that he thought about it - just the rustles of movement. Of course, his mind could be playing tricks on him, but with an overwhelming command of the beach in every direction, the notion that the rebels had not surrounded him and his squad was too absurd even to consider.

To make matters worse, the temperature had plummeted. That didn't affect him; his fully enclosed armor maintained his temperature perfectly. But Angel had been forced to toss her helmet, and all of her body heat was escaping through her head; even over the twenty feet between them, he could see her shivering. The cold was already starting to leech her strength; once that was gone, the tiredness would set in. Once she had crossed that line, her usefulness as a sentry would be drastically reduced. The ability to stay alert when tired was what training was for, but that had its limits when competing against basic human biology. In a worse condition was Lt. Almark; she was only wearing a flight suit with no thermal retention properties whatsoever. He didn't need to be a medic to see that she was in a bad way.

Her legs had stopped bleeding, but that wasn't necessarily a good sign. Between the damage suffered by them in the crash, the broken bones, and the multitudes of other injuries sustained in the crash, coupled with the sub-zero temperatures, her body was starting to prioritize blood flow away from her extremities. The crush injury might have been enough to warrant amputation on its own, but the cold and the enormous delay in getting her to a medical facility were starting to change her condition from serious to critical. Her face was drained of all color, the phrase "white as a sheet" given more and more meaning with every passing hour, and the only movement he had seen from her in a while was the bone-rattling shivers as her body tried to fight back the cold. It seemed almost cruel not to let her sleep, to escape the pain and the frigid night air, but he knew that the moment she dropped off would be the last time she would ever be conscious again.

That meant that the abject misery of her condition was being endured while fully awake and without the slightest drop of pain relief.

Yet, she hadn't complained once. Not even a whimper of the unimaginable pain she must have been feeling. Not a groan, not even a loud sniff. He could only silently admire her astonishing bravery and resilience, even if he did doubt she would live to see the sunrise.

"How's she doing, Mac?" He whispered over his shoulder to the heavy gunner who was offering her a mouthful of water from his canteen while checking the tourniquets that he had tied around her thighs to limit the bleeding.

"She's grand, Sarge," he smiled, trying to keep spirits up. "A warrior through an' through. Get 'er patched up an' we'll make a Marine out of 'er yet."

Emylee winced against the chuckle and then a much larger one as she swallowed down a mouthful.

"Sorry lass, drink up. I know it's cold, and I know it hurts, but we need to keep yer fluids up," he said sympathetically.

"It's okay," Emylee said, trying to stifle a groan but still managing to look up at him with big, grateful eyes. "I'll be fine; I've been through worse scrapes than this."

Stevo smiled, ever-impressed by the woman's bravery. It was a feat that he would struggle to match if their roles had been reversed. "A'right, love, let's not get carried away," Mac chortled back before patting her gently on the shoulder and walking in a stoop closer to the Sarge. "She's nae looking good, Boss," he whispered. "If the blood loss and the crush don't kill her, the cold will. These assholes know where we are; any chance of getting a fire going? Not like it's gonna give away our position."

Under normal circumstances, the answer would be a very emphatic 'no,' but the simple truth was that Mac had a point. The attack would come; it made no strategic or tactical sense for it not to. Every fiber of his being knew that they were surrounded, outnumbered, out-gunned and that it was only a matter of time before they were attacked. When that attack came, they would be overrun in very short order. If, by some minor miracle, they survived that first assault, one artillery strike - even one as inaccurate as normal bombardments usually were - would end them in moments. They had the smallest amount of cover, no food, no water, no medical supplies, and half of his company had no way of fending off the bitter cold. On the other hand, any source of light would silhouette each of them against the darkness, but even that normal consideration was offset by the absurdly inaccurate nature of the pot-shots being launched toward their position, not to mention the fact that the enemy already knew exactly where they were.

"Do we have anything to burn?" he asked tentatively

"Aye, there's some driftwood around, 'nuff to get somethin' small goin'," Mac nodded.

Stevo sighed and looked around again. "Fuck it, it's not like our position can get any worse. Keep it small and keep it close to the column. May as well go out warm, right?"

Mac grinned and nodded. "That's the spirit, Sarge." His ham hand clapped him on the shoulder before he shuffled his way back closer to Emylee and started to construct the miniature fire.

"Angel," he called over as quietly as he was able, looking at her as she covered the gap between two pillars on the northwest corner. He waited until she looked toward him. "Pull back from there. The light from the fire will make you look like Union Square. Get yourself warmed up. I'll take watch."

She was about to argue, say that she was fine, and offer to share the burden of standing guard over all of them, but one longing look at the fire as it grew under Mac's tender care was all it took to crumble her resolve. She nodded gratefully, secured her weapon, and shuffled back toward the fire.

********

Bethany 1.

There was barely a shudder as the freighter's landing struts finally made contact with the ground. Bethany Jenson, the pilot and captain of this particular freighter, glanced over at the G-force indicator and nodded to herself. It was a game that merchants and captains had played for centuries; flying around space, navigating shipping lanes, maintaining port speed with unerring accuracy, that was all well and good, but the true test of a pilot was how gently you could set your ship down after all that wellness and goodness was finished. The truest tests of a pilot outside combat. It was a nuanced balancing act, full of micro-adjustments and subtleties that took a lifetime to master. It was impossible to get a perfect score; the laws of physics and the conservation of momentum simply wouldn't allow it. There was always the slightest of flickers on the G-force indicator when even the gentlest movement of the ship was arrested by its contact with terra-firma. The game was simply to make that flicker as small as humanly possible.

A pilot's best score for the month would be uploaded to the merchant guild's pilot pool, and the winner would take the pot. Ten credits to enter with the chance to win tens of thousands. She'd won once, with a particularly lucky landing on a low-grav planet with high winds. Both of them contributed to making the G-counter tick up by an almost imperceptible degree, far exceeding her natural abilities as a pilot, but that didn't matter. The count was the count, and after the guild had verified that the device or its measurements had not been tampered with in any way, the credits appeared in her account, and she had enjoyed a stunning vacation on Capricorn—all thanks to a little wind and a little finesse.

Still, though, she would love to win it on a normal-grav planet one day. She was good, but she was far from the best. Some of the readings that had won previous months' pools had been astounding. For someone who had spent her entire life dreaming of flying, it was one of those little things that allowed her to measure her success. A few years ago, she had been transporting a trader from Port Texas to Proxima-Centauri and had tried to explain the game to him. Traders and freighter captains were different breeds, with traders preferring to set up shop in one spot and let business come to them, while the merchants guild made their money transporting cargo and travelling to find the best profits, but what set him apart from her - at least in her mind - was when he scrunched up his face and asked: "why?"

But then the differences between the people who asked "why" instead of "why not" had always been a perfectly useful way of categorizing humanity.

She shook her head to herself as she powered down her ship and settled back into her inordinately comfortable and insanely expensive pilot's seat. She would never understand some people, and some people would never understand her, but with almost forty years of life under her belt, that was a reality that she was fine with. Listening to the atmospheric engines cycling down, she flicked the switch to vent the cooling systems and opened the refueling port for the ground crews. "You all ready, Cap'n?" a deep voice came from behind her.

"Just about, Dick," she replied, spinning her chair around to meet her number two as he stepped into the cockpit. Richard, or Dick as she liked to call him, was a solid crew member, her only other crew member in fact. The Long Haul, her freighter, wasn't a small ship, but it wasn't massive either. With most of the systems being run automatically, a second member of the crew wasn't strictly necessary, but it made life easier. It was also company for those longer treks out into deeper space. Dick had only been on board for eight months, but in that time, he had shown himself to be reliable and trustworthy - probably the only two real requirements of a first mate aside from a lack of desire to murder her in her sleep - and more importantly, he was a good technician. He was probably not quite good enough to be called an engineer, but he was up to the task of keeping the ship in fairly decent working order. He was big, he was imposing, he looked like a man who could handle himself in a fight - despite never having seen him fight to prove that assumption - and, when pushed, he could hold a conversation, barely. She had certainly worked with worse people. "Cargo all ready to go?"

He nodded, looking out of the windows at the sprawling dock surrounding them. "Yup, everything's ready for the port grunts to unload once you've made the sale."

"Excellent, nice job," she smiled as she stood up and stepped over to the weapons rack. Most ports in the Imperium were safe enough, and Port Collins, one of the sprawling starports on the third planet of the Caspian System, was no exception, but it always paid to be cautious. "Once the gophers have gotten everything offloaded, you'll be off the clock. I'm not planning on shipping out til morning, so... I dunno... Have fun or something."

"I'm sure there's a bar around here willing to take my creds," he nodded absently, his eyes still taking in the sights around the ship.

She chuckled and shook her head as she strapped her belt to her hip, checked her laser pistol, and tucked it into the safe embrace of its holster. "Alright, I'll let you know when everything's done, and then, once the offload is finished, you're good to go."

Dick nodded again but didn't answer.

She chuckled and patted him on the shoulder as she left the cockpit. "Good chat, Dick."

The long haul was designed in much the same way as most other freighters: a long, single-story living section that fed into the cockpit, all of which sat astride the yawning cargo bays beneath. The airlock and docking port were on the top deck, but being planet-side meant that the ground was a good forty feet below her. It was far easier and faster to climb the access ladder down into the cargo bay and exit through one of the massive bay doors that were currently being retracted into the ceiling.

She breathed in deep. Her ship had a fairly decent air recycling system, but there was nothing quite like that first breath of fresh, crisp, natural air. She allowed herself to enjoy it for a few moments, basking in the cool air refreshing her lungs, and rolling over her skin. She smiled to herself and stepped out into the sprawling mass of Caspian III's starport. To say that it was a glorious day on this part of the planet was something of a redundancy; having spent her entire adult life amongst the stars, almost every day on a planet was a glorious one. Rain didn't bother her; neither did snow, nor the heat, nor the cold; as long as she could stand under the sky and take that deep breath of clean, free air, it was, in a word, perfect. Today, however, was particularly stunning. The dual suns of the Caspian binary system were blazing majestically above her, the first a pale yellow and the second a bright white; the light bounced off the ice rings that circled the planet and bathed its inhabitants in a pleasant, temperate warmth.

This, however, was not one of the jewels of the Imperium. There were no vaunted and vaulted marble edifices, there were no monolithic skyscrapers of glass and titanium towering toward the heavens, and the streets were as crowded as they were dirty. It was perfect.

Set in an enormous circle, the docking bays of Port Collins were laid out in ever-expanding concentric rings that surrounded the central terminal. Inside the functional grey dome was the main security office, and beyond that was the primary traders' bazaar. Dotted at every entrance to and from the great dome, heavily armed soldiers kept a somewhat indifferent yet somehow ever-vigilant watch over the passing crowds while other groups of their comrades-in-arms wandered throughout the masses. Dotted between them were the easily spottable customs inspectors, usually a man with a holo-reader, flanked by a handful of guards marching purposefully up to recently landed starships. It wasn't uncommon for her ship to suffer through a routine inspection, but with nothing to hide, she was happy enough to let them get on with it. Today, however, it seemed that their interests lay elsewhere.

Unmolested by planetary bureaucracy not only meant more time to enjoy the weather, but less interruption as she made her way to security and on to find her contact. More than a dozen tons of silicon in her cargo hold would fetch a tidy profit, with a great deal being forwarded onto Caspian's electronics manufacturing industries. If she could find a good price for some Rigellian Rum, she could load her cargo hold back up for an exceptionally healthy profit on her return trip to the core worlds. Desperate buyers could always be found for luxury goods like that, especially in the capital, where political shin-digs would work their way through a few hundred bottles of the stuff in a single evening.

Failing a haul of Rigellian Rum, there was always the option of filling the Long Haul with the manufactured goods that her hold full of Silicon would doubtlessly be invested in. There were more than a few shipyards on the route back home, and she was sure one could be found with a shortage of whatever stock she happened to be hauling. It wouldn't be as profitable to her, and it wouldn't be as fast, but it was a hell of a lot better than a freighter full of nothing. If all else failed, the rebuilding efforts on Sigmus IV weren't a huge distance out of her way, and those poor bastards were in desperate need of just about everything.

Finally stepping out of the cargo hold, she made her way toward the main concourse. She had been lucky, by normal standards, to have been allocated a berth on the inner ring of the landing docks; it meant a much shorter walk to security. Some of the more distant spots were several miles away and needed a dedicated hover shuttle to ferry passengers and crews back and forth. But that shorter walk meant less time in the fresh air, and she was in no particular hurry to get back on the road, so to speak. Still, twenty minutes after her first step, she passed through the doors into the shadowed nightmare that was port security and joined one of the queues.

This was the part of the job she hated. She loved the flying, she enjoyed the bartering with traders, and she didn't mind the sometimes-weeks-long flights in relative solitude. No, it was the fucking queuing. In an age where information could travel several hundred times faster than the fastest hyper-drive speeds, it was amazing to her that humanity had not come up with a better solution to border and customs controls. At least this queue was moving.

The only upside to the ludicrous tedium of queueing to get through security was being witness to the odd bit of drama. She had seen it all over the years. Men caught trying to walk contraband through the checkpoints, people with fake IDs, people on the Imperium's wanted list, hell, there was even that time when one of those quat, hairy Maruvians had used a holo-emitter to try passing off as human, then walked through the security scanner and got electrocuted by the thing. She had seen arrests, she had seen people comically try to flee back through the terminal to their ship, only to be tackled by burly men in body armor; she had even been present at a shootout or two, and she had been hit on by more than a few optimistic border guards. She wasn't sure what was worse. But she supposed that the life of a freighter captain couldn't all be glamor and excitement. With the sort of sigh reserved only for those aware that a long wait was ahead of them, she rolled her neck and let her mind wander.

To give the border guards of Port Collins credit where it was due, her mind didn't get a chance to wander very far before she found herself at the front of the queue, staring at the face of a young, cute, and barely post-pubescent man in a peaked security cap. "Documents, please," the man said, having not even looked up.

"Sure, here ya go," she smiled politely and handed over her Merchant Guild ID and the registration for the Long Haul. She could have been petty, she could have complained about the wait, she could have blamed the guard for ruining her good mood, but decades of doing this had taught her that these security guys could make her day a lot longer if she pissed them off. Besides, this kid looked like he had only just learned how to shave, so it was safe to assume he wasn't responsible for the staffing levels or organizational efficiency of an interstellar starport.

He picked up the registration and scanned the tag into his holographic interface, then checked her picture on the ID to the captain's details on the ship's details, then turned to check it against her appearance. It was odd, just like countless officials over the years, the customs guard before her had seen her face on the ship's credentials and again on her ID, but they never seemed to actually see her until they looked right at her. Bethany was a good-looking woman, maybe not quite elevated to the dizzying heights of "hot," but she took care of herself and took pride in her appearance. More than that, men seemed to be intimidated by attractive, well-dressed, regal-looking women; a dressed down freighter captain with no makeup and her hair pulled back into a loose ponytail seemed to be much more achievable. The guard's eyes widened a little as he took her in; his back straightened, and his lips curled into a fairly attractive smile. "Um..." he fumbled his words as he tried to compose himself. "What is the purpose of your visit to Fort Collins?" he finally said, trying to look professional and aloof while succeeding at neither.

Bethany smiled. A genuine one this time. She had been single a long time, so fucking herself to release on some stranger was not beneath her, and if this guy was a decade older, she might have considered it. But he had that look that just screamed, "I would show you the time of your life... until you got naked, then you would have to show me what to do, 'cause my game, experience, and general understanding of human anatomy ends there!"

"Business," she replied politely. "Should be heading back out tomorrow." pre-empting his next question.

He nodded and tapped her responses into his system. "Any packages, bags, or luggage being brought through security with you today?"

"Nope, just me."

He smiled again, "Port Collins has the right to inspect any ships using our docking bay with or without the presence of the crew. As the Captain, you will be liable for any contraband found in these inspections and can face up to 25 years imprisonment if found guilty of trafficking or smuggling offenses. Can you confirm you understand for the record?" She had heard that script more times than she could count, but she was a clean Captain and had nothing to worry about.

"Understood, loud and clear." she nodded. Being inspected in an Imperium port wasn't just routine; it was expected. But she understood the need for the spiel. "Is Jango's still open?" she enquired in as friendly a voice as she could, asking after a certain beverage-serving establishment she had enjoyed on her last visit to Port Collins a few months earlier.

"Yup," the guard smiled, "It's still going. I'm actually headed over there after my shift." He added with a somewhat optimistic smile and a less-than-subtle glance at Bethany's cleavage.

"Maybe I'll see you there then...?" she smiled at him as he handed back her documents.

"Err, Tony..." he answered with a nervous grin, "Tony Albright."

"Thanks, Tony," she winked, tucking her ID and Freighter documents back into their pouch. "See you later."

"Later, Ma'am." His eyes followed her as she headed toward the main concourse and the traders' emporium, his attention only yanked back to his job by an impatient cough from the guy who had been behind Bethany in the queue.

She chuckled to herself and strode on.

Every major port in the Imperium had a marketplace like this. They may have varied in size and grandeur... and general odor... but they were all more or less the same. If you were lucky enough to land a contract directly with one of the big industries or with the planetary governor themselves, you were usually allowed to land directly in the destination city or in one of the sprawling industrial complexes dotted around the planet. But if, like Bethany, you just had a general cargo you wanted to offload, that meant finding a buyer, and those buyers knew where to congregate to get first dibs on the newly imported goods. Over the years, those merchants had grown their little stores into large, well-presented offices where all manner of cargo could be bought and sold without ever having to leave the port facilities. If a captain was in a rush, they could have their old cargo unloaded, their new cargo loaded onto their ship, pay the extra to receive priority refueling privileges, and then be back in orbit within two hours of landing.

Bethany had never found herself in that much of a rush, though. She liked to savor her visits planetside, especially ones to worlds like Caspian III, with its clean air, pleasant climate, and lack of conflict. It was the closest thing to a Core-World-ambiance as could be found this far beyond the Inner Ring. More than that, it would almost certainly be her last proper rest stop before having to traverse the desolation of the Hudson Expanse to get back to the core worlds at all.

Usaf was a man who could accurately be described as larger than life. His enormous character and booming voice were only matched by his towering height and his barrel chest. Bethany imagined that he looked like the lovechild of a three-bell prize fighter and a younger version of Santa. The man looked like he could pick up a hover truck with less than a passing effort and yet exuded nothing but warmth and friendliness. Of course, the latter of those qualities was one to be wary of when found in a trader. Killing someone with kindness was a very effective way of wiping out their bank account, too.

If the man's size and affable character were not enough, he had the memory of an elephant. It had been more than six months since they'd had even the most fleeting of contact, and yet his booming voice echoed over the office only a few moments after she passed beneath its archway. "Bethany, my most precious of captains!" he beamed at her, stepping out of his office, arms spread wide and almost dancing across the foyer toward her. "You look even more ravishing than the last time your presence graced our humble bazaar." he wrapped the comparatively tiny cargo hauler up in a bear hug for the ages. "Did you miss me?"

She'd met the man twice, once six months ago and the first time a little more than a year before that.

She chuckled and hugged him back. "Hey, Usaf, it's good to see you, too."

"I know you have brought me something good; what do you have for me?" he said, that mammoth smile still on his face as he released her.

"Processed Silicon, sixteen tons."

She couldn't tell if the way his eyes lit up was through genuine mercantile excitement or if it was an astonishingly effective act designed to fill naive captains with ill-advised and unearned confidence. Either way, it worked. "Oh, the joys of working with a professional!" he gleefully exclaimed. "Come into my office, and we can discuss terms... Comecomecome!... Dimitri...." he called out to one of the younger-looking clerks. "...a bottle of our finest white, as soon as you can."

Bethany arched an eyebrow. Remembering her name was impressive after all this time, but remembering her favorite drink from one celebratory glass on her first visit was pretty incredible.

"Now," he said, ushering her into his large, glass-walled office and holding out a leather chair for her, waiting for her to sit before he moved to the other side of the enormous mahogany desk that took up most of the floor space. "What are you looking for me to take the whole lot off your hands?"

"Two point eight should see me suitably ... unencumbered." she offered, leaning back into the chair. This was another one of the games; she knew it, he knew it, but they played it anyway, all whilst pretending they weren't. Most traders offered a ridiculously low price, and then the captain had to haggle their way back up to something more realistic. Usaf was one of the rare breed that let the captain dictate the price and he tried to work them down. She knew that he knew that she had added a few hundred thousand credits onto the value of her cargo, but such was this timeless dance.

Usaf seemed to pause for a minute, his eyes losing focus as he looked to be considering it. "And do you want credits for this, or would you like to buy cargo for your return home?"

"Cargo would be ideal, but it would depend on what you've got available... and the price."

Usaf nodded again, spinning in his chair to face his computer interface. "And where is the Long Haul headed next? Always plenty of money to be made running relief to the poor souls of Orpheus IV." He looked at her speculatively.

"Not this time, I'm afraid. I'm heading core-ward."

If it was possible, his eyes lit up even more. "If you would be willing to accept two point six, I could make it worth your while."

She'd spent years working on her poker face, and all that self-control suddenly came of age. Her entire cargo was worth two point four-five at a push. But she somehow managed to keep a lid on the blossom of excitement bursting in her chest. "I'm listening, worth my while, how?"

The smile never left his face as he leaned back in his own chair, the leather and the steel itself creaking under the enormous pressure. He steepled his fingers. "A much less upstanding courier than yourself was due to transport a shipment for me last week but didn't show up. I am under contract and will suffer a great blow to my reputation if these goods are not transported to the capital on time. The contract is valued at three million credits, three point five if it is there within the fortnight. What I am offering is that I hand this cargo to you, and you cash it in for whichever amount you are able to get for it, and in return, I take your cargo off your hands and sell it myself. I should get the full two-point eight for it, so I will only lose two hundred thousand credits. If I don't make the delivery, the cargo is worthless, and I lose it all."

Bethany drummed her fingers on her chin. "Nothing illegal?"

Usaf laughed. "No, I believe they are parts for ancient automobile combustion engines. A museum piece, if I understand. Something about the reliance of a Robin, I don't know. Apparently, the Emperor himself will be viewing the exhibit."

"Ah, that explains the time limit."

The massive merchant nodded. "What do you say?"

"Tell you what," she said, sitting up a little straighter. "Throw in a few tons of Rigellian Rum at cost, and you have yourself a deal."

Usaf clapped his hands together in celebration. "I will make it five tons just as a thank you to my new favorite captain... Ah, Dimitri," his booming voice echoed around the office as the clerk entered with the bottle of wine and two glasses. "Your timing couldn't be better. Thank you!" He turned back to Bethany after pouring out the clear liquid from a bottle that probably cost more than her nav system, "To our mutual good fortune."

She raised the glass, smiled at the gesture, but more at the fact that she had almost doubled this haul's profits, and took a sip.

********

Stevo.13

It was hardly a roaring fire, but the heat it gave off was enough to fight back the bitter night cold of the beach. The groans of the wounded had faded over the course of the long hours of darkness as more and more men succumbed to the cold and their injuries. The deafening silence that pervaded the air, only partly punctuated by the lightest of breezes, was mercifully banished close to the fire by the crackling of the dried driftwood that Mac had been able to find from within the confines of their makeshift fort.

There wasn't a huge amount of it, and if their encirclement lasted for another night, they would have a problem or at least would need to mount some sort of sortie to find more. But by that time, they would have more pressing issues. Angel had stopped shivering; the color hadn't quite returned to her cheeks, but she was looking much more alert than she had been before the fire had been lit. Almark, on the other hand, had been in serious trouble. Stevo knew that crush injuries were at least as dangerous after the fact, if not more so, but none of the surviving members of Bravo Squad were anywhere near trained enough to do anything about it.

Assuming that the damage to the Lieutenant's legs was the full extent of her injuries after a crash of that severity sounded absurd even to him, though. From the brief look Mac had taken, there was already bruising around her abdomen, and her breathing was labored. Stevo was no expert, but that screamed internal bleeding to him. The fire may have warmed her up and raised her body temperature, and the tourniquets had stemmed the blood flow and delayed the release of those toxins from the crush to her major organs; but there was still a long list of potentially lethal ailments that could have been inflicted on her during the crash which could end her life at any moment. Adding to the soul-crushing sense of impotence of their situation was the fact that every moment spent staring out at the motionless dead of night, was another moment closer to the point where she lost her valiant fight for life. Yet, try as he might, he couldn't think of a single thing he could do. Even having radio comms would have been useless, not if the fate of Duck was anything to go by. Help wasn't coming, and they were surrounded by a vengeful enemy who must have lost thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of their comrades to people just like him. Mercy was not something he expected to find in abundance when the time to fight finally came.

And without it, the chances of Emylee seeing another sunset were almost non-existent.

Mac, his armor being as intact as Stevo's own, had taken up watch on the opposite corner of the almost-square-shaped cover that surrounded their position, the shape dictated by three fallen columns on the North, East, and West sides. The south side remained almost entirely exposed, but a small mound of sand - presumably made up of material excavated to make the trenches - provided some measure of cover on this open flank. Mac was on the Northeast corner, peering out along the beach with his rotary cannon at the ready. Stevo was on the Southwest corner, by far the most dangerous position. Between them, they were able to see the approaches to the fort on all sides and, despite their hugely diminished numbers, could lay down an astonishing level of fire onto any advancing enemy, with Angel essentially held in reserve to back up whoever needed her.

Stevo's eyes scanned the darkness, but they were close to useless, even with the lowlight amplification function of his helmet. His keenest sense was his hearing, and with some clever settings activated on his GUI, he was largely able to filter out the crackling noise of the fire to focus his attention on listening for any movement. The problem was that there was a lot of movement from pretty much every direction. Even men wearing the almost comically inferior armor the rebels seemed to be using would be hard-pressed to move around silently in a trench. There was the rustling of sand, there was heavy breathing, there were the little knocks of weapons being handled, and voices seemed to carry the furthest, but there were precious few of those, which seemed odd in itself. Above it all, that dull, bass, ephemeral groan from the countless wounded who hadn't succumbed to their wounds floated around the battlefield.

All things considered, Stevo would much prefer to have been sitting on a beach in Hawaii.

The hours ticked by, the digital chronometer on his HUD counting down every single minute as each dragged interminably into the next. Waiting for something would always make the clock tick more slowly, but waiting for something as terrifying as the prospect of one's own death was like its own form of torture. He found himself wishing they would just get on with it or maybe even attack himself; the death of him and his Squad was practically pre-ordained at this point, the only question left to ask was the manner in which he would meet it. Huddled down in his bunker, beating off one stampeding assault after another over open ground - because that is what they would have to do if they wanted to breach the cover of their fort, at least until they called in the artillery strikes - or in his happy place: hunting. Stalking through the trenches in whichever direction he saw fit until one lucky bastard landed the shot that would kill him; either way, he would be taking as many of them with him as he could. He was a Marine, he was a warrior, and when the chips were down, that was about as good an end as he could ask for. Meeting his enemy on the battlefield, weapon in hand.

There was, of course, only one problem with that plan, and she was propped up against the western column with mangled legs and probable internal bleeding.

"How are you doing, ladies?" He called over his shoulder in a whisper, only barely loud enough for them to hear.

"Oh, not so bad," Angel smiled back, "a night on the beach under the stars. It's like being on vacation."

"Neighbors are a bit noisy, though," Emylee added her own quip, "and the room service is shit. Don't get me started on the flight here or that landing."

"I could go get someone from management if you like," Stevo chuckled. "Drag them up here and make them answer for their shoddy service."

"Nah, fuck 'em. Let 'em come to us. I can write them a strongly worded letter later." Emylee winked at him, again astounding him with her resilience against what must have been overwhelming pain. "If you see someone wandering around with a cocktail, though, send 'em my way."

Stevo and Angel both snorted out a laugh. It felt good. The dark humor did nothing to ease the weight on his mind, but it did seem to make it a little more manageable. "Well, give it an hour or so, and if I haven't seen anyone, I'll go hunt down that cocktail for you myself."

Almark giggled again, but Angel didn't. She knew what that meant and had been following the subtext of the conversation in the way that only a seasoned and situationally aware Marine could. She held his gaze, her face a mask of mixed emotions, ranging from supportive but grim determination right through to terrified pleading. His eyes shifted to Mac, who was, in turn, looking back at him over his shoulder from his position of cover.

Both of them were fighters, and neither one of them - like him - would have stopped their progress through the trenches if it hadn't been for the rescue of Emylee. Even if the Lieutenant was perfectly willing to charge the enemy in one last stand, she was physically unable to, so charging off to fight would mean leaving her to die. It would be leaving a man behind, and that, as a Marine, was something he simply couldn't stomach doing. It was grating enough that there were thousands of unrecoverable dead marines on the beach as it was, and not being able to bring home the fallen members of his squad was like an icy cold grip squeezing on his heart, but to leave one alive... that was unconscionable.

The fear in Angel's eyes was not a fear of death nor the fear of pain. It was the fear of having to walk away and leave Emylee to her fate. It was the fear of having to live with that decision - and the guilt that came with it - for the rest of her life. Be that decades or mere minutes.

Almark, of course, was completely oblivious to all of this, she just thought that they were having a joke to make light of the situation and make her feel better. He glanced back over to Mac again; Mac held his eyes, cast a look at the injured pilot, then back to his sergeant... and softly shook his head. He wouldn't leave her to die, and Stevo wouldn't order him to.

Stevo offered a soft nod back, then flicked his eyes to Angel. "Screw it," he said, forcing a smile onto his face for Almark's benefit. "We're on vacation. Sand, sea, and hopefully some sun soon. They're gonna have to get security to kick us out. 'Cause WE AINT LEAVING!" he yelled the last part out into the darkness.

"WE AINT LEAVING!!" Angel and Mac both roared out defiantly at the night.

"WOOO... VACATIONNNN!" Emylee shouted with an almost delirious laugh. "BRING ME A COSMO.... AND A BANDAID!"

Stevo was chuckling loudly, resigned and committed to holding their position until the end.

"I WANT A RIBEYE... MEDIUM... WITH THICK-CUT FRIES AND A BEER!!" Mac shouted.

"MINE'S A MIMOSA." Angel craned her head back and practically screamed her order at the heavens above the peels of laughter.

Stevo was about to add his own when a footprint spontaneously appeared in the sand a few meters away from him. He frowned at it, his order dying on his lips. He frowned at the next one, too. And the one after that. It took him an embarrassingly large amount of seconds to realize what it was he was looking at, but by the time he spun his rifle around, it was too late.

Three men shimmered into existence next to him, one of them the owner of the footprints he had spotted; the other two were behind him, and the barrel of a rifle was pressed to the back of his head. Now in his eye line, he watched as two more shadowy figures faded into being either side of Mac, their weapons pointed at him, and another two appeared behind the cover that Angel and Emylee were leaning against, both of them leaning over it to level their weapons at the women.

Emylee looked up at them, the pain, the blood loss, and no small amount of bravery pulling a delirious smile onto her face. "Oh, heyyy! So, it's one Cosmo, please, one Mimosa, a medium Ribeye with thick-cut fries, and a beer from my friend over there..." she pointed at Mac, "... And whatever Sergeant Cutie wants, too. Do you take credit? I left my chit in my other bikini. I'm good for it, though. Oh, and get yourself something, too; call it an apology for making a mess of your lovely beach when I crashed my plane into it."

It was hard to tell the expression of the spontaneously appearing stealth troops, given the opaque faceplates of their helmets, but there were a few glances between them. Angel, on the other hand, gawked at Emylee for a moment and then burst out laughing.

Stevo, to his credit, had other things on his mind, or more accurately, had another thing pressed into the back of it. His rifle was aimed at the infiltrator whose bootprints he had seen; one squeeze of the trigger would put a hole the size of a grapefruit through his chest; as soon as he did, though, the other two would open fire, and there was no way for him to survive that. Mac was massively out of position. His cannon was propped onto the top of the cover on the opposite corner, and his two ambushers were inside the perimeter at his four and seven o'clocks. He had zero chance of even attempting to move his weapon before he would be killed, let alone a chance to get a shot off himself. There was the question of if Mac's heavier armor could shrug off a hit from that range, but he was almost certain that his couldn't. Angel was in the exact same position, just that her target was directly behind her and her weapon was leaning against the column beside her. Out of the seven men who had snuck into their fort, it was only possible to hit one of them, and in return for that, all six of his friends would open up and wipe them out.

These thoughts passed through Sgt. Taylor's mind in half a heartbeat, but that is all it took for him to notice one glaring fact of their situation.

They hadn't been shot yet.

"Easy now," A voice came from behind him. "Finger off the trigger, and lower your weapon slowly."

Mac was facing away from him, looking back out over the beach, but Angel was looking right at him. Her look, now that she had finished laughing, had a single simple message painted on it. 'I'll follow your lead.' Stevo sighed and shook his head, reluctantly pulled his finger out of the trigger guard and slowly lifted the barrel of his rifle toward the sky, and lowered it - butt first - onto the deck before letting it fall to the ground.

"Good," the voice said. "Now lace your fingers behind your head and get onto your knees."

"No," Stevo answered calmly while he put his hands behind his head as instructed and turned around to face his captor. "If you are going to shoot me, then I am going to die on my feet."

The man tilted his head at Stevo, both of them staring at each other in silence for a few seconds that seemed to stretch out forever. "We don't execute our prisoners unless they leave us no other choice," the soldier finally said with something that sounded like a sigh. "Order your man over there to stand down."

Stevo glanced over his shoulder. His heavy gunner hadn't moved a muscle. "It's alright, Mac, stand down." Mac's shoulders slumped as Stevo's voice reached him, and he slowly lifted his hands away from his weapon, allowing it to be caught by one of his captors before it fell off the column.

The man looking at Stevo turned and nodded to the two others around him, both of them almost silently stepping over toward Angel and Emylee, standing a few feet in front of them and covering them with their weapons. The two men who had been on the other side of their cover started to climb over the column and into the fort.

"So, um..." Emylee started, her voice a little more slurred than it had been a minute before. "I think I'm dying." A deep, wet-sounding cough punctuated the last word, and a trickle of blood started to run out of the corner of her mouth just before she started to pitch to the side.

"Emylee!" Angel shrieked, diving toward her to hold her up.

A single shot rang out.

Stevo flinched and spun around, his guard flinched, everyone flinched, but nothing else seemed to happen. Until Angel groaned.

Stevo's eyes snapped to her in horror. The side of her chest, just above where her right breast would be, had now been reduced to a caping, glowing hole. Blood was already spilling down over her armor, and her eyes were rolling into her head.

"HOLD YOUR FIRE!" Stevo's guard yelled. "Mason, the fuck are you doing?!?"

"I thought... fuck. I thought she was going for her weapon!" The shooter, assumably Mason, stammered.

"What the fuck happened to not executing prisoners?!?" Stevo spun back around to glare at his guard, ready to pounce on him and rip his throat out with his bare hands if that was what it took. But the man wasn't there; he had already run past Stevo, leaving the sergeant completely undefended. He dropped his weapon onto the sand next to Angel and pressed his hand onto the wound.

"Get the fucking medics here. All of them!" he barked at one of the other men, who instantly nodded and turned away, speaking into a radio that must have been built into his helmet. "God fucking dammit! You!..." he spun back to look at Stevo. "...keep pressure on her wound."

Stevo didn't need to be told twice. Forgetting - or perhaps ignoring - the fact that these men were his enemy, he raced over and dropped to his knees beside Angel and replaced the man's hands on the open wound. Pressing hard enough to staunch some of the bleeding but not hard enough to compress and collapse what was left of her lung. The guard, blood all over his gauntletted hands, reached behind him and started pulling bandages and a hypospray from a pack on his back. He pressed the ball of bandages into Stevo's hand, letting the Marine push them into the wound while he prepared the injection.

"Sarge," Angel murmured as she slipped closer and closer to unconsciousness.

"Stay with me, Vasquez." Stevo held her eyes. "Don't you quit on me!"

"I'll be watching you..." she whispered as the syringe of the hypospray was pressed to her neck. "... with the others."

"Fuck that, Marine!" Stevo barked back. "You do not have permission to die!"

Angel's eyes rolled further into her head before finally closing.

"Fuck!" the rebel soldier spat, tossing the hypospray aside and checking for a pulse. "She's still with us." he finally said before looking over his shoulder. "Where are those Medics?!?"

"There!" one of the other men shouted, pointing out over the cover. "Over here!" he started to wave. "Two down!"

Two. Fuck, Stevo had forgotten all about Almark in the confusion and spared a glance over to the slumped body of the beautiful pilot. She was motionless on the ground, slumped to the side with a trickle of blood flowing from her lips, but he could see the light rise and fall of her chest. She was still breathing. That was more than could be said for Angel.

Suddenly, a group of men burst into the fort, a few of them carrying stretchers, all of them carrying packs with the standard red cross on them, and none of them were armed. Three of them immediately moved to Emylee, while another three started to surround Angel. He was pulled out of the way, his hands immediately being replaced by one of the medics.

He was on his feet in an instant, spinning around and driving his armored and enhanced fist into the face of the man who had shot her. He didn't hesitate; he didn't care if it got him killed. He was pissed. "You son of a bitch!" he roared as the Mason was knocked off his feet, landing in a crumpled heap on the sand.

The rest of the rebels - with the exception of Stevo's guard and the medics - all raised their weapons. "Hold your fire!" the guard, clearly the leader of the rebel squad, shouted before turning to Stevo. "Easy. He was owed that one, but that's enough!"

Stevo didn't move; he was just standing over the prone body of the man who had shot one of his Marines, fists clenched into balls, practically daring him to get back up so Stevo could kill the bastard with his bare hands

"Mason! Get your ass back to base. I'll deal with you later!" The rebel squad leader almost growled before turning to the sergeant. "They'll look after them," he nodded to the medics and the two fallen women. "But I need you and your man over there to come with me. You cause problems; the medics can't do their jobs, so it's in everyone's interest for you to behave. Now, are we going to have any more problems?"

Stevo watched Mason crawl away for a few meters, then pull himself to his feet and walk out of their makeshift fort before he let his shoulders slump, and then he glanced back up to Mac. The heavy gunner, at some point during the excitement, had taken off his helmet and was looking at his fallen squad mate with an expression that would probably haunt Stevo until his dying day. Finally, their eyes met, a silent moment of understanding between them. Mac nodded softly

"We'll cooperate." Stevo finally replied with a nod of his own.

"Alright, come with me." All of them watched as the women were loaded onto stretchers, and the medics started carrying them out of the fort and toward the top of the beach. "Let's get out of this fucking cold."

Stevo blinked. Only a few minutes ago, he had been considering an unwinnable last stand and a heroic final charge, death seeming an almost guaranteed finale of the night. Not a single ounce of mercy had been shown by the rebels in the fight until now, and yet he was being taken captive. His brow furrowed as he started to walk, following behind the rebel squad leader with Mac falling in beside him and his two guards bringing up the rear. Nothing about this invasion made sense, at least until you included the possibility of jaw-dropping levels of treason. Either the Imperium had been stabbed in the back for this mission to have gone so wrong, or - an option that was looking more and more likely with every new unanswered question - the Three-Eight-One, Bravo Squad included, had been betrayed by the very people they had been sworn to serve.

Either way, someone was going to die for it. Justice for his fallen friends and comrades demanded nothing less.

The only question was who.

********

Jim. 2

Jim Edwards strode determinedly into the comms room of the Morus I mining station, the subdued murmurs of the miners and their families fading away to near silence as he closed the door behind him. He pulled out the chair next to the broadcast station and sat down, Mike - the mine's foreman - pulling up a chair next to him.

"You okay?" Mike asked him quietly.

Jim snorted out a huffed laugh as he started activating the remote uplink to the interplanetary comms network. "Is anyone okay? Are you?"

"Don't do that, man. You know what I mean."

Jim stopped and took a breath, turning to face Mike. The man was in his mid to late forties, but a lifetime of back-breaking labor in some of the most inhospitable environments known to man had made the man look like he was made out of partially bleached leather. His face was a patchwork of scars that left furrows in the growth of silvery-grey stubble, but his eyes were as sharp and piercing as Jim had ever seen them. Everyone was feeling the pressure. Anyone who said they weren't was either a liar or crazy, but people like Mike were diamonds; sure, they felt the pressure, but it just made them stronger.

Okay, maybe not diamonds, but they were, at the very least, coal.

Jim was not coal; he certainly was not a diamond. Jim was, at best, putty. He bent easily; he found change normal, and he moved and adjusted under pressure to find the form that fitted best. He was malleable and durable without ever being accused of being strong. Whereas Mike and his ilk were unmoved by pressure, Jim was changed by it, reformed by it, but just like Mike, Jim remained unbroken.

But Milke was right; Jim knew what he meant. Aspirations of leadership were not something he ever felt, especially after Grace had died. He got up, he did his work, and then he went back to his hovel to be with his daughter. It was a life that many people would turn their noses up at, but it was his, and Abigail was the only thing in the galaxy that meant a damn to him; and every moment with her was a blessing that Grace would never get to experience.

Mike was a miner; he spent his life underground. He could tell you everything there was to know about rock density and the load-bearing coefficients of every ceiling brace in the entire complex. But those were skills he had picked up in the decades he had been honing his craft. Where Mike was experienced, Jim was educated. He was well-spoken, and he looked the part. The only reason he hadn't been promoted to management years ago is because he didn't want it. But it meant that when the shit had hit the fan, when people had started dying around them, he had been the one people had turned to represent them in the negotiation with the big bosses. He had been the one they had all turned to when it came to rationing out the food and water fairly. He had been the one they had all turned to when it came to organizing the work details, trying to dig them out of this pit.

In trying so hard to avoid responsibility, he had become one of them, one of the miners, the large, passionate, caring extended family who could go entire years without ever seeing the sun or tasting unrecycled air. The people around him, hundreds of them, had rallied to support him when Grace died; they had helped with Abigail at every chance they got, and they had loved him and cared for him like a brother. They had taken the time to know him, and in knowing him, they had seen his strengths. Now, they were relying on his strengths to keep them alive, and if he was being honest with himself, he had no idea if he was up to the job.

He sighed and looked down at his feet. "I don't know if I'm okay, Mike," he said quietly. "I don't know if I can do this."

"You're already doing this," Mike said, less with a smile and more like it was a statement of the obvious. "I know you never wanted to be in charge, and I know nobody ever asked you, but you are the only person who could do it. If it makes you feel any better, I don't think anybody could handle the situation better than you have been."

"I'm responsible for... how many lives?"

"A little over two thousand, on the last count."

"Jesus... two thousand people who'll die if I mess this up."

"You're looking at this all wrong, man," Mike smiled. "All of them, all of us, we are all already dead. None of us are gonna make it out of here alive. If you royally fuck this up, nothing changes, we're all still dead. But if even one person in there..." he tossed a finger over his shoulder and back toward the central cavern, "...makes it out of here alive because of you..." he shrugged. "You can't lose, but you'll never win if you don't give it a shot, and you'll never be able to live with yourself if you don't try. We're trapped in here; our food won't last forever, neither will our water, and they could drop that cavern on our heads at any moment. Even if we dig ourselves out, we have no way of breathing on the surface and no way of getting off world. Someone has to talk those assholes into backing down and letting us out, or we need to find someone else to help us. Tell me there is another person in here better at talking to people around than you are."

Jim opened his mouth to speak, but a sudden flash of inspiration burst into his mind. He frowned as he let his brain put the pieces of an idea together.

"I know that look," Mike gave a snug, self-satisfied smile. "You've got a plan."

Still frowning, Jim started to think out loud. "What is the most important thing to them?"

"The company?"

"Yeah."

"Money," Mike answered without hesitation.

"Not... necessarily," Jim answered slowly as if rushing ahead with his thought process would scare it away. "Making money is."

Mike scrunched up his face being rather certain that was the same thing, but Jim wasn't paying attention.

"The company's a business, like any other. They have to balance making money with the mines thay have now, but also, they have to be able to bid for new mines in the future. None of these mines are going to last forever, and ours isn't the only one. I would bet major body parts that if they are doing this to us, they would do it to all the other mines. So, if we got our message to them... get the other mines to force a stoppage, that would turn this from a local dispute to a newsworthy event. If the media got hold of the story, that would damage the company's reputation and affect its ability to bid for future contracts. 'Mining company murders their own miners,' or hell, simply 'Mining company can't control its workers and can't be relied on to maintain quotas.' That would certainly be taken into account by the government, and that's the sort of thing that can ruin a business."

Mike's face was still scrunched up. "I'm not following."

"We don't contact the company; we send our message, our story, to everyone!"

"Oh shit, you mean, like, embarrass them into doing somethin'?"

"What's the worst that could happen?"

"They could flatten the mine to shut us up?"

"True, but as you just said, we're all already dead anyway, and I don't know about you, but I'd rather be turned to jelly by millions of tons of rock in a millisecond than slowly starve to death over weeks."

Mike thought about it for a few seconds but then just shrugged. "If you think it's a good idea, then go for it."

"Just like that, huh?"

"That's why you're in charge," Mike smiled. "I'm not sure many of the other people in here would have thought of that, and we're getting nowhere talking those assholes into backing down. So, do we just broadcast?"

"No," Jim shook his head. "As soon as they detect a live transmission, they'll just destroy the uplink. We need to record this in one go and send it out as a burst transmission. Even if they hit the uplink afterward, it would be too late; the message would be out."

Jim watched as Mike half nodded and half shrugged. He had no idea what half of those words meant. Mike was a miner; he knew more about his craft than any three other people in the complex and had risen to the rank of mine foreman for good reason. He knew what he knew. But where Mike differed from the vast majority of other people Jim had met over his lifetime, Mike knew what he didn't know and was happy to defer to people who did. "Well, I guess the floor is yours, Jim." Mike clapped him on the shoulder, stood, and headed out of the office.

Jim took a deep breath and turned himself toward the main comms interface, tapping the buttons to prepare a recording to be sent later. He cleared his throat, pressed record, and looked up at the display.

"My name is James Edwards; I work at the Morus I mining facility on the edge of the Hudson expanse. Like everyone who lives and works here, we have spent most of our lives in the dark, mining the raw materials that the Imperium needs for everything from starship construction to home appliances. There are men, women, and children here. There are veterans, rehabilitated convicts, priests, doctors, and families. Some of our children have never seen the sun. We are loyal to the emperor and to the Imperium; we pay our taxes, we do honest, hard work... and we are being murdered by the company we work for, for the crime of asking that we be provided enough oxygen to be able to breathe. We need your help... before they kill us all."

********

Stevo. 14

The haunted faces stared at him, a score of them so far, but every now and then, the guards would bring in another one or two, then reactivate the security forcefields, and leave again. Stevo wasn't staring; Stevo was pacing. His feet were apparently intent on gouging a crevice into the dusty concrete floor with each of the laps of their communal cell.

It had taken about an hour to get from the beach to the rebels' forward command post and another hour after that to get to here... wherever 'here' was. An underground complex several miles away from the landing zone and deeper into the heart of the Island they had landed on. He had no idea of its size or its layout, just that they came through what appeared to be the main entrance cut out of the face of a sunken ravine's walls, left through a guarded security station, and straight into this makeshift holding area. The door and the walls were all surrounded by a powerful and impenetrable force field that was the equivalent of a few feet of solid titanium armor. Stevo had punched it once out of frustration; that had been a mistake.

Each of the new people brought in had survived the same horror show that he and Mac had; there had been three Marines already in there when they had arrived, all of them sat silently and motionlessly on metal-framed cots that had been lined up against the wall. One of them had looked up and acknowledged their arrival; the others had just kept staring at the floor between their feet. They looked broken.

Stevo knew exactly how they felt.

Every blink, every stray thought, every time he let his focus slip for more than a second, his mind was filled with images of his men behind killed. Big G's smile, just before that bolt had vaporized everything above his chest. Rev's quiet stoicism and unbreakable belief that his faith would see him through, one way or another, and his body vanishing in that verdant green ball of fire. Ryan, his cockiness to the point of arrogance, hiding a sharp mind always looking to learn. Stevo had no idea if he was even still alive. But it was Dusky - that look on her face when her terrified eyes found his as she dragged her shattered body to safety - and Angel - her last words as her eyes rolled back - that were the weights he could already feel crushing his normally strong mind. There was no escaping the guilt, the self-recrimination, or the pain. It was a loss he felt down to his bones, and it had cored him. He was a hollow shell of the man who had landed on that beach.

Mac seemed to be doing marginally better, but that was perhaps because he hadn't said a word since they had been captured

There was nothing Stevo could do for him or for any of the other men brought in as the hours ticked by. He was watching, in real-time, men and women succumb to the PTSD that would doubtlessly blight the rest of their lives. What could he possibly say to ease that? There were psychiatrists in the core worlds who lived in very big houses and drove very expensive hover-cars, with more money in the bank than a navy admiral, all of it earned from helping soldiers work their way through years of therapy to overcome the trauma of exactly this type of event. "Snap out of it" didn't seem particularly effective compared to that.

Men and women - marines one and all - stared into nothingness or quietly sobbed at the full weight of what had happened and the magnitude of the fact that they had survived when thousands of their friends and comrades hadn't.

Suddenly, the force field lowered, and an armed guard stepped into the room, standing aside as three more men and one woman were led into the holding cell, followed by two more guards. "I want to speak to your CO!" Stevo barked at the guard who had stepped in first."

The guard, his face plate as opaque as the men who had captured them, turned to look at Stevo. "Captain Warralow is overseeing the recovery effort on the beach, Sergeant. Sit tight. She will be with you in a few hours."

Stevo had been expecting hostility, a brusque, maybe even aggressive response, so he was more than taken aback by the civility of his reply, let alone the almost deferential regard for his rank. It kinda took the wind out of his sails. "Look, I just... I need to know the status of my injured squad mates."

The guard looked at him, then glanced around the cell at the rest of the captives and sighed. "You seem to be the senior ranked officer in here..." Stevo bit back his usual 'I'm not an officer; I work for a living,' retort and kept listening. "...If you can maintain order in here, I will see what I can do." The guard finished. Stevo looked back at the other Marines and nodded. "Good, what are their names?"

"Corporal Angel Vasquez and Flight Lieutenant Emylee Almark were captured with me, and Private Ryan O'Malley lost a leg not far from the water line on the West side of the beach."

The guard nodded and shouldered his rifle before lifting his arm to look at the holo interface on his vambrace, tapping a few times with his fingers. "Vasquez and Almark are both in surgery; that was the last update two hours ago. They were both still alive then. I'll know more next time the medical staff updates the system. I don't have anything for O'Malley."

Stevo sighed and nodded, "Thank you."

The guard glanced around the cell again. "If any of the others have names they want me to check, tell them to pass them to you, and I will see what I can do next time I come back. But the medical staff don't update the system very often; they're a bit busy, and not all the wounded can be identified. Body recovery won't start until all the wounded are brought in, and that's gonna take a while. If you can sit tight for a little longer, I will have food and water brought in for you."

"I would appreciate that, corporal," Stevo nodded gratefully again after taking note of the chevrons on the man's arm. To Stevo's utter astonishment, the guard saluted him.... actually saluted!... turned on his heels and left the room, the force field reactivating a few seconds after he had gone

"I... I have a name," A soft voice came from behind him,

"I do, too," another said. Stevo turned back to look at the cautiously hopeful faces of his fellow captives.

He nodded. There was nothing else he could do other than wait for more news about the rest of his squad, and these Marines were just as worried about theirs as he was about his. Helping them didn't seem to have a downside, killing time and putting a few frayed minds at ease, or at least keeping them occupied for a little while. "Okay, one at a time. Give me what you have."

He sat down on one of the cots, offering the closest thing to a smile he could manage to the first of the Marines to approach him." I... I watched them all die," the young man before him said, unable to reach his eyes. "Only two of us got through that first barrage. The Sarge, he... there were pieces of him all over me... he was just gone. We ran, we left them there, there was nothing we could do..."

"I know, son." They weren't just platitudes; Stevo had done the exact same thing to the remains of the four squads under his command. Running away from a fight was one thing; leaving your men to die was unforgivable to a Marine, but bailing on an area where your comrades were already dead, making sure the same didn't happen to you... there was neither shame nor dishonor in that. "You did the right thing," Stevo nodded to the distraught-looking man. "If you had stayed, you would have been killed too; everyone here got the fuck out of dodge when the bombs started falling. None of us would be here if we didn't."

"You ran?"

Stevo shook his head softly, suddenly noticing that he had the undivided attention of everyone in the room. "A Marine doesn't run, not when his brothers and sisters need him. But they were already gone; there was nothing we could have done for them, and I don't know about your sergeant, but I would have been waiting in the afterlife to beat the shit out of any one of my men who sacrificed their lives for the sake of my corpse."

The young man snorted. "Yeah, he would've been pissed if we got ourselves killed for nothing," he frowned. I... Thank you, Sarge. I hadn't thought of that before now."

"So there was more than one of you that got out of there? Sorry, I didn't get your name."

The young Marine nodded. "Yeah, it was me and another guy, Malcolm Malone. We were just running, one blind turn after another, explosions all around us. I turned around, and he was just... gone. I went back to look for him, I tried to find him, but I got lost in those fucking trenches. Next thing I knew, about fifty rebels had me pinned down, and I had to pull out. I don't know if Malone was hit, or if he got turned around, or if he took a different trench to me... I just..."

"It's okay, Son," Stevo nodded, "Same thing happened to us. And I still didn't get your name."

"Sorry, Sir. Private John Walker."

"It's good to meet you, Private. I'm Sergeant Steve Taylor, but everyone calls me Stevo."

Mac snorted, "He calls himself Stevo; everyone else calls him Sarge."

Stevo chuckles. "That's Dylan McCaffery or Mac. He was my heavy gunner." Mac offered the gathering group a small wave.

"You both got out?"

Stevo nodded, "Yeah, my sniper, too, Angel. She was shot when we were captured. We pulled a pilot out of a downed Broadsword, too. She was in a pretty bad way, though, they were who I was asking about."

"You gave three names, though." Another voice said from somewhere in the group. Stevo smiled a little weaker. "Yeah, Ryan. Ryan O'Malley. He was a rifleman; Mortar took his leg off right after we got off the dropship. We left him in cover while we advanced; he was stable and manning our comms. We haven't heard anything from him since they went down."

"What wave were you in?" A third voice asked, someone sitting closer to Mac and behind Stevo.

"First wave, extreme left flank. Right on the end of the line."

"We were in the center, first wave." Walker nodded.

"We were on the left, too, but the third wave," the third voice said. "Attached to 4th battalion headquarters. I was there when the Major was hit."

"Major Jennings?" Stevo asked, turning to face the third voice. Another younger man, although not as young as Walker. The man nodded. "We were headed your way when we got captured."

"The first hit landed right on top of him," he said, his eyes looking at some invisible spot on the ground. "I don't remember much after the second hit; I must have been knocked out. It was dark when I woke up. I was the only one left, and rebels were already checking the bodies. I didn't even get a chance to fight."

"What's your name, Private."

The third man smiled, "It's Jennings, too. Mark Jennings."

Mac blinked. "The Major wasn't..."

"No," Jennings shook his head, pre-empting a question he must have been asked countless times. "No relation, just a coincidence, but everyone called me Little Jen because of it."

"Well, Little Jenn, Do you have any names for me?"

He shook his head. "I don't know if anyone got out, short of giving them every name in the unit..."

Stevo nodded in understanding.

"Why are you helping them?" A sharp voice echoed from further back into the room. "They are rebels, they're traitors! They Killed our friends, and you are playing nice with them! Why aren't we trying to break our way out and get some fucking revenge?!?"

The sergeant sighed. This is what he was afraid of. "What's your name, Son?"

"I'm not your fucking Son!" The soldier barked as he leaped to his feet. "You are conspiring with the enemy, and that makes you a God-Damned traitor, too!"

"Hey, asshole!" Mac stood to match him. "Don't..."

He was cut off with a single raised hand from Stevo. "It's okay, Mac. He's right. I am cooperating with the rebels. Given our situation and the fact that I know they have two of my Marines in their custody, apparently rendering medical care, I don't have much of another choice." Stevo said calmly. "But let's hear it... Corporal," he said, after checking the rank on the man's arm. "What's your plan? We don't know where we are; we don't know the strength of the enemy forces in this base, let alone in the area around it, we don't know what weapons they have, we don't have any, we are trapped behind a forcefield, and they still have our friends. But go ahead, I'm all ears." He finished with a gesture toward the standing Marine.

"I don't fucking know!" he raged. "The next time that asshole comes back, we overpower them and take their weapons."

Stevo pretended to consider this for a moment, then looked around the room. "There are twelve of us, and so far, there have only been three of them each time; all three of them are armed. How many of your brothers here are you willing to sacrifice to get your hands on those weapons? And let's just say you get them, then what?"

"We are fucking Marines, they are weekend warrior rebels. We could easily fight our way through them, find a comms uplink, and call for support!"

There was silence around the room.

"He doesn't know," Jennings said quietly.

"What? Know what?" the man eyes Jennings suspiciously. "What don't I know."

"Well, I guess that brings us to the big fucking elephant in the room, then, doesn't it? What's your story, Corporal? How did your invasion go?"

The corporal glared at Stevo, seemingly having the wind in his sails challenged by Stevo's utter refusal to rise to the accusations being levelled at him, even if they were made in ignorance and frustration, but he eventually started to speak. "I was with the tanks, third wave, right flank. We were having electronic issues before we even left the carrier, by the time we landed, our comms were shot, but we got on with our mission anyway. We advanced up the beach until we got to the first line of Marines and started laying down fire support on the bunkers. My commander said we needed to reestablish comms with the infantry and ordered me to track down a Marine officer. One of the logistics squads could lend us a working radio for the rest of the mission."

"You were the gunner?" Stevo asked.

The man shook his head. "I was the driver. The tank couldn't go anywhere until we got more orders anyway; the commander was picking out targets, and the gunner was shooting, so I was the obvious choice to go get the coms unit. It took me ages to find someone who could help. The fourth wave was landing when I was working my way back to the tank. With the backup from the rest of the armored brigade, our whole crew got to work on patching the coms unit into the tank systems. Something went wrong, though; one of us must have shorted out the electronics cos the tank suddenly lost all power and hit the deck. It even fried the new coms unit. The commander decided that the tank was a loss and ordered us to link up with the Marines on the ground, help the wounded, or whatever.

"We grabbed our gear and bailed. I don't think it was thirty seconds after we got to the trenches that the artillery hit. It seemed like every tank other than ours was hit; the bombs seemed to jump over us, skip us entirely, and then start hitting the trenches ahead of us. By the time we got up there, there were only a handful of Marines left. Then the rebels attacked... there were so many of them... the three of us each picked up a rifle and started shooting. We fought for hours, but they just... kept coming. Marines started to go down, one after another. Micky, our driver, was hit in the face; there was a Marine corporal there, he had taken command when the sergeant was killed, and he ordered us to withdraw. I followed the others, stopping at every trench line to provide cover to the men still pulling back... I .. I never saw the commander after that. We just kept running and shooting, men dropping all around us.. Until I was the only one left. They cornered me in a dead end..."

"And you surrendered," Mac finished for him, having sat back down to listen to the man's story.

"Yeah," the dejected-looking marine followed his lead and dropped back onto the cot.

"So you have no idea what actually happened then." Stevo sighed.

"What do you mean?"

"Your tank didn't lose power 'cause you shorted it out," Mac started. "All of them went down at the same time."

"There were these... fuck, I don't know what they were," Walker carried on for him. "Like these pylon things that had been buried in the sand. The colonel landed and ordered all ground forces to activate their pings. As soon as that happened, those pylons rose out of the beach, hundreds of them... they released some sort of energy burst. Knocked out all comms, shields, the electrics on the tanks..."

"The shields and long-ranged comms on the air support as well," Stevo added. "And it didn't 'knock them out,' it shut them down. Completely."

"What, you mean like an EMP?" The stunned-looking corporal asked.

Stevo half shrugged. "Yeah, I guess. Except it didn't affect the HUDs in our armor, and our weapons still worked fine. The fighters could still fly, too; they just didn't have shields and couldn't talk to anyone outside their own wings. But we all know that our gear is all EMP-shielded."

"It wasn't an EMP," the owner of the second original voice said softly. The rest of the group looked at her. "Sorry, Lance Corporal Michelle Cameron, I was one of the comms officers with 1st Battalion headquarters; I was at LZ four, between the center and right flanks."

"Good to have you with us, Lance Corporal." Stevo nodded to her. "You were saying about an EMP?"

"Yeah, sorry, but you're right, it wasn't an EMP. Even if our stuff wasn't shielded against them - which it all is - that isn't how EMPs work. They would have fried everything. Even the powered joints in your armor would have stopped working, not just the computer systems. The planes would have been falling out of the sky, and not just ours, but theirs too. No weapon on the beach aside from ballistic ones would have worked, and the rebels were sure as shit shooting at me. EMPs are indiscriminate; they would have fucked their systems just as much as ours, and it's impossible to target them against a certain side.."

"I feel you have a theory knocking around in that head of yours." Stevo prompted as Cameron fell silent.

She sighed and nodded. "I think it was a forced shutdown pulse." She looked around at the group, but Stevo was sure that his face displayed the same unfathoming expressions as everyone else's did. "Look, we all know how shields work; they absorb energy from incoming rounds and feed it into the capacitor systems. Take too many hits, the capacitors overload, and the shield shuts down until that energy can be vented, then the shields can be recharged. But if the shields didn't shut down, the capacitors would burn out and would destroy the shield system completely." She looked around again to make sure everyone was still following her. "I think that the energy spike released by that pulse was designed to completely overload our shields and fry the shields."

"Okay, sounds reasonable, but how does that explain the comms going down and the tanks losing power?"

"It doesn't... The power in a tank can only be shut off remotely with a shutdown frequency."

"That's right," the angry corporal nodded, "It's a security thing to make sure they can't be used against the Imperium. But that is, like, a two-hundred-digit code."

"Yeah, it is." Cameron nodded, leaving the implication hanging over the group. "There is no way they could have stumbled onto that. They had to have been given it. But the rebels being given tactical information like that would also explain the comms. The power surge wouldn't have touched those either. They would have to have been actively jammed, meaning they needed to know the exact frequencies we were using."

"You're forgetting about the Ping," Stevo added, already knowing the answer to this particular question.

"What do you mean?" Cameron squinted. "What about it?"

"Did it strike anyone else as odd how that artillery strike was so accurate? I've been around the block a few times in my career, but I have never seen artillery hit with anything like the precision the rebels managed. They were given the frequency to our ping, too. They knew where we were down to the inch."

"They could have pre-sighted the trenches, though," one of the other captives offered.

"And still manage to land shots on the heads of almost every marine? Not to mention hitting every tank with a working comm?" Stevo countered. "Let me take a stab at this. You," he pointed at the angry corporal, "didn't have a comm unit in your tank. It was already faulty, so you never received the order to activate your ping." The man nodded, "You," he pointed to Jennings, "said you were knocked out after the second hit. I bet your comms unit in your helmet was damaged then, just like mine was. They lost the signal and couldn't target you. Mac didn't activate his, because he was right next to me when I activated mine... How many of the rest of you didn't follow the order to ping?"

"I didn't," Walker answered, "Me and Malone were on the firing line, we were too busy beating back the rebels. I just assumed someone else on the line would do it, and their contact would be close enough to me to keep us safe when the destroyers opened up."

"I didn't activate mine. I was too busy patching the data stream back to fire control," Cameron murmured, looking deep in thought.

"Anyone else?" Most of the people in the room raised their hands. "And if that is not enough proof," Stevo went on, "Angel, my corporal, the one whose condition I asked about, took off her helmet and tossed it toward the rebels when we figured it out. No prizes for guessing where the next plasma bomb hit."

"My god," Cameron had her hand over her mouth.

"Now, Lance Corporal," Stevo turned to her. "You are our resident communications expert; tell me how hard it is to hack that system."

"It's not just hard, it's impossible." Cameron shook her head. "It's not just crazily encrypted; it's a closed system. You would have to already be inside it to be able to even add data - like a location - to it. But you would need to have, Jesus, ultra-classified level access to be able to receive the data. That can't be the work of a hacker or a spy, it... fuck..."

"What?" the angry Corporal was back on his feet again. "It what?"

"It can only be a traitor. Someone sold us out. Someone high up."

Stevo looked over his shoulder at Mac. He knew the same things Stevo did. "Which brings us to the next big question," he looked around. Did anyone see any medevacs coming in?"

A few of the Marines opened their mouths to speak, but invariably, they would pause, frown, close their mouths, and shake their heads. "I d... don't understand what you mean. What are you saying?" Walker asked.

Stevo sighed. "Before we were captured, we pulled a pilot out of a downed Broadsword, carried her to cover, and stuck with her til we were captured. She was still conscious. She told us that one of her wingmen was hit and bugged out back to the carrier."

"Yeah, that's pretty standard for fighters," Cameron nodded

"She radioed in when she got there... She told Almark, the pilot we rescued, that there were people... on the carrier.... Killing the pilots who returned. And then someone shot her while she was still on the comms."

Silence fell around the room as the full implication of that information started to slowly set in.

"No... No, It can't be, they wouldn't," the angry corporal stammered, dropping back onto his cot. "She's lying! She has to be."

"Why?" Stevo shrugged. "What possible reason would she have to lie about that? She had been hit. She was going down. Why would she take her chances on the beach when she could have evacuated back to the carrier?"

The angry corporal, like a few other silent members of the group, were hugging themselves, trying to ward off or comfort themselves against the reality of their situation. Stevo doubted it was working, but none of them raised any more arguments against the idea. Deep down, each of them knew - as Stevo did - that the entire Three-Eight-One being sold out by the Imperium itself was the only way to explain what had happened to them.

"Why?" Jennings finally said. "Why would they do that?"

"I don't know," Stevo shook his head, "And the only way we are going to find out is if the rebels tell us. Which is one of the reasons..." he turned to look at the angry corporal, "...I'm playing nice with them."

The man looked up, held his eye, and then nodded in understanding. "I'm sorry for my outburst. I just..."

"It's alright, Corporal. We're all feeling the pressure. Can I get your name now?"

"It's Sam. Sam Wooly, no prizes for guessing what my nickname was."

"Sheep?"

"Cardigan?"

"Blanket?"

"Bah, Bah?"

The silly ideas seemed to lighten the mood, and "Sheep" was confirmed as the correct answer among the quiet peals of laughter.

********

Michaels. 5

Reality seemed to fade into being as his eyes slowly opened. His eyelids felt heavy and sluggish, his mouth and his lips were parched, and swallowing the paltry amount of saliva in his mouth seemed to take an extraordinary amount of effort, but slowly, his awareness seemed to return to him. He remembered where he was; he wished he didn't, but he remembered everything. He braced himself for the pain, the same pain that had blanketed his last bout of consciousness, and for a few merciful seconds, the agony seemed to leave him alone.

And then it didn't.

A deep, rasping groan seemed to pull itself from his lips, a sound that took his ears completely by surprise, so much so that he wasn't sure it had come from him for a few seconds. It sounded alien, distant, and - for lack of a better word - broken. For a man who had spent his entire adult life needing to be very sure of the power of his own voice, it was an oddly disconcerting experience.

"Easy there, Colonel," a disembodied voice echoed into his ears. "Have some water, slowly now."

Michaels groaned again as the rim of some description of plastic cup was pressed to his lips, and the cool water flowed over his tongue. Of course, his bone-dry throat didn't respond the way it was supposed to, and a violent and painful cough ripped through his chest as his lungs tried to expel the new liquid intruder.

Coughing up the few drops of water that seemed to be intent on drowning was a herculean task. It felt like gallons of water were being pulled out of his lungs with every agonizing clench of his diaphragm. Each cough could be measured on the same scale of pain as a sledgehammer to the ribs would be; he could feel the veins over his temples bulging, and his body seemed to demand to be sat up straight to avoid any more risks of drowning, despite it apparently being in no condition to be able to do so. Every part of his nervous system fought against every other part, and every one of his bodily instincts seemed totally at odds with the seemingly catastrophic levels of damage done to his body.

It came as something of a surprise, then, when a strong hand pushed itself between his back and the bed and pulled him into a sitting position, not only with relative ease but with a markedly less amount of pain than he was already expecting.

"That's it, get it up," the voice said again. There was something at the back of the Colonel's mind that was starting to think the voice sounded strangely familiar. "Breathe. Take your time; you've been through quite an ordeal."

Yeah, no shit. He felt like he had been dropped onto the planet from orbit without the use of a dropship and then been run over by a tank instead of being inside one. Everything felt like it had been broken. No, not broken... smashed. He felt how he imagined a plate to feel after a Greek wedding.

"How much do you remember, Andre?"

Michaels kept his eyes closed. He didn't trust them not to try to leap out of his skull if he opened them. "How many?"

"I'm sorry?"

"How many of my men were killed?"

There was a pause before the voice sighed. "Too many. Survivors are numbered in the very low hundreds, and most of them are wounded."

Yup, he was wrong. His injuries didn't feel like a sledgehammer caving in his chest; that did. The world seemed to collapse in on him, the sheer weight of it all. There had been twenty thousand men in formation before him on the carrier... Twenty Thousand... and now there were only a few hundred left? It was too much, it was too big, it was...

A thought ripped him out of the way of that fall into the yawning pit of despair. He frowned at it "How do you know my name?" He asked slowly; Michaels could count on two hands the number of people who knew his first name and even fewer who he tolerated using it to his face. All of them were either dead or lighyears away.

The voice paused, seeming unsure how to answer that. Michaels, in no mood to play those sorts of games, decided to cut through the theatrics and force his eyes to open. The sunlight seemed to assault every single one of his ocular nerve endings, searing the brightness of the morning into his retina, the shock of which sent another blistering wave of nausea-inducing pain through his skull. The room spun, but he forced himself to swallow down on his stomach's desire to give his last meal an encore appearance, and he forced his eyelids to stay open.

In a feat of strength and self-discipline that would astound most people, Michaels pulled his gaze to the figure standing beside him. It was like his eyeballs were being dragged through gravel and broken glass, but he did it anyway. The man standing beside his bed was shadowed against the brilliant, torturous light of the window he was standing before, his outline hazy, his features indistinct, even as the blurriness and the shadow started to clear.

Slowly, one feature at a time, the haze started to clear. A hospital room, surprisingly clean and modern looking - at least as much as his last memory on the beach suggested it would be - but standing between him and the window, his hand on Michaels' back and that plastic cup in the other one, was a ghost.

"Valdek?"

"In the flesh." Serge Valdek nodded his head.

"But... you're dead. The rebels ambushed your fleet. They killed you."

"Did they?" The Admiral smiled. "I hope I don't need to quote Mark Twain at you."

"Who?"

Valdek rolled his eyes. "Ancient Earth author. He's the one who said, 'reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.'"

"Oh," Michaels frowned. "I thought that was Daniel Radcliffe,"

Valdek snorted. "Still need to get you started on a monthly suppository of culture, my friend. No, Daniel Radcliffe was the guy who shit himself at the Superbowl about 500 years ago."

Michaels' eye twitched. They seemed to be getting off track. "What are you doing here?"

The smile faded from Valdek's face. "I'm sorry I couldn't tell you. I... defected, Andre,"

The colonel felt his jaw fall into his lap. Valdek was the golden child of the Imperial Navy; he had won more victories than almost every other admiral combined. He was personally responsible for a string of stunning victories, including the one that had kept Michaels alive in the space about Sigmus IV while the colonel was on the ground fighting. That had been more than thirty years ago, and they had been friends ever since... or at least Michaels had thought so. But this... this was a level of betrayal - both of the Imperium and of himself personally - that beggared belief. "But... why?" It was the only question he could come up with.

There was a pause. "You know why."

"No!" Michaels almost growled, shoving both of Valdek's hands off his as if they were burning him. The plastic cup crashed to the floor, splashing the remains of its water over the former Admiral's pants. "I don't know why. You're a fucking traitor! I went to WAR for you! Thousands of my men are dead... for YOU! And here you are, alive and well and working for the fucking rebellion!"

"They know I'm here." Valdek said calmly, never breaking eye contact. "The Imperium, the emperor, they know I'm alive..." he clarified for Michaels' shocked expression. "... and they know I'm here. There was no fleet action; I was never attacked. I told them exactly what I was doing and why."

"They told us you were dead. Attacked while..."

"Running a convoy," Valdek scoffed. "To Orpheus-fucking-IV, because that made sense. Why wouldn't the Imperium's golden boy Admiral be in command of an unarmed civilian flotilla that somehow got turned around and wandered into the badlands, where a rebel fleet just happened to be waiting for him? C'mon, Andre, I know you better than that. You questioned the official story, even if only to yourself."

Michales clenched his jaw, snarling at the Judas before him. But the Judas had a point, the story hadn't made even a remote amount of sense when he heard it. He was loyal to the Imperium and to the Emperor, but he was perfectly capable of seeing the faults in the system, and the endless shitpile of propaganda and bullshit was the tip of a very large iceberg. No, he hadn't bought the story that Valdek had been ambushed while running a relief convoy, but he hadn't questioned for a moment that he was dead, nor had he doubted for one second that the rebels had killed him. It had never occured to him that one of his oldest friends had betrayed everything Michaels held dear and true.

He frowned.

If Valdek had turned coat and defected, he knew the man well enough to know that he wouldn't have snuck out in the night like some criminal. He would have gone with his head held high, as loudly and publicly as possible. Admittedly, the "publically" part of that would have probably ended up being "not very," Michaels doubted more than a handful of members of the upper command structure would have known the truth. It certainly wouldn't have reached as far down the chain as Michaels. But it didn't take much deep thinking for the extrapolations to start falling into place.

"We weren't sent here to kill the rebels, were we?"

Valdek shook his head. "No," he answered softly, letting his friend come to the truth himself.

"And you didn't want to be captured and sent back to the Imperium for trial and execution..." Michaels continued, the accusation still thick in his voice. "The shields, our comms, all of it. You gave them everything they needed to stop yourself from being taken by us,"

Valdek arched an eyebrow. "How? I wouldn't have had access to that information for one of my own fleets, let alone someone else's."

Michaels' frown deepened. That was a good point.

"If you're going to understand this, you're never going to be able to do it thinking like a Marine Colonel," Valdek offered after a long silence.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"They've trained you to think the way they want you to think. See the way they want you to see. Someone is a friend or an enemy. An enemy who used to be a friend is a traitor because there is no legitimate reason anybody could have for willingly turning their backs on an Emperor who is as close to a living god as any of us will ever know." Valdek said, taking a step back and lowering himself onto a metal-framed chair behind him. "But you see it, don't you? You see the lies, you see the endless, fanatical mission to hide the truth and bury it beneath what the Imperium wants you to see. You may not be able to see it, but you know that what you can see, isn't it."

"You sound like a fortune cookie."

Valdek snorted out a laugh. "I guess I do. So you tell me. How did the last mission of the Three-Eight-One go so terribly wrong? In fact, let's start earlier than that. How do I know the name of your division at all?"

"One of the survivors told you."

"A battle-hardened Marine would give classified details to a treasonous former Imperial Admiral... or to anyone, for that matter.... Come on, Andre. Tell me all the things that went wrong, all the things that didn't add up. How would I know, for example, that your battle interface didn't work in your tank? That the commanding officer on the ground went into that battle completely blind. Could survivors have told me that?"

"What? How did you..."

"Do you think that it's because someone up the chain of command wanted you blind?"

Michaels blinked.

"Would you like to see the map of the battle you commanded? A real one?" The Admiral didn't wait for an answer. He reached into the inner breast pocket of his trenchcoat and pulled out a rolled up, portable holo projector and rolled it out onto the end of Michaels' bed. Without saying a word, he sat back down and waited for the projector to activate. In only a few seconds, a shimmering topographical map - the one he should have had access to in his command tank - started to rotate lazily in the air.

Michaels' eyes slowly started to widen as the details that couldn't quite be appreciated on a two-dimensional, incomplete map started to become painfully obvious. The beach, with its towering cliffs on either side, was quite possibly the worst conceivable place to launch an assault. More than just the terrain, the enormous network of trenches and reinforced bunkers spread out like a shattered pane of glass along the top of the beach told a story of its own.

One that said that on an Island of more than 25,000 square miles, the entire rebel army seemed to have miraculously guessed and then prepared the exact landing point of the Three-Eight-One attack.

Valdek leaned over and tapped an icon on the display, and the map came to life, an accelerated account of the battle playing out in painstaking detail over the display. The air wings coming in, the first MAC rounds hitting the flak guns at the top of the beach, the wreckage of destroyed dropships crashing into the ocean and the surrounding hills. The first waves landing, then the second's, then the third's. Then his.

Then things started to go wrong.

The energy pulse. The rebel strike craft swarming over the map, and then the artillery barrage. Michaels watched in horrified fascination as thousands of blue dots, each representing a single Marine, were blasted out of existence with extraordinary efficiency. Then, the red swarm washed over the beach. As the hours played out over the space of minutes, he was able to see the last holdouts of Imperium forces by the gaps in the red tide. But one by one, they started to fall.

"Tell me what you see," Valdek said as the battle drew to a close.

Michaels could only stare at the map in stunned silence.

"You had access to our sensor readings. The ping..." he said slowly, "the whole system was compromised. We..."

"You already know that," Valdek snapped. "Tell me what was missing. Tell me what you see!"

Michael frowned, replaying the battle over and over in his head. "Where was our support?" he finally asked, the realization starting to dawn on him like a crisp winter sun. "The air wing at least should have been reinforced... and where were the medivacs? They should have been landing non-stop throughout the engagement to evacuate the wounded and provide gunship support."

Valdek nodded. "This... isn't going to be pleasant, but you need to hear it."

He reached over and tapped another icon on the interface.

"...fuck are you doing?! We are friendlies! Oh, Jesus!" Gunfire rattled around the background of the audio file Vadlek was playing for him, a woman's voice screaming breathlessly into the comms. "Fuck, Mario, No!... Shit, shit, shit! All fighter wings, this is Scimitar One, stay away from the carrier. Ground crews are executing all returning pilots, I repeat, we've been betrayed!" More gunfire rattled through the background. "Get the hell out of here! Save yourselves, warn the others before... Argh!" The channel was cut off mid-scream.

"We intercepted that from one of your air wings," Valdek sighed softly.

The color had drained from Michaels' face. "The map, access to our systems, the lack of support, no medevacs, executing our pilots... They sent us here to die!... why? It doesn't make sense! Why would they send us to be slaughtered?"

"Think about it, Andre," Valdek finally answered the increasingly horrified and frantic-looking Michaels. "What would have happened if you had won here?"

"I don't know, the rebellion would have been destroyed?"

"Well, no, the rebellion isn't just on this planet, but you're thinking along the right lines. The Imperium tells the people that the rebels are killing war heroes and ambushing supply convoys to the long-suffering colonists of Orpheus IV, so they locate the rebel homeworld... the exact thing they told you... and send in the Marines, probably using the excuse of friendly civilians being the area to rule out an orbital bombardment, as if that has stopped them before... and then the Marines win... war over, right?"

Michaels nodded mutely.

"So then, how would they justify the military expeditions they have planned for the future?"

The colonel's jaw finally fell open in understanding. "By wiping out a Marine division, the rebels get turned into an existential threat, and 15,000 dead marines is all the reason the people need to support the Imperium's call for unconditional war."

Valdek nodded. "And the public is none-the-wiser that the rebellion isn't just a handful of wayward and treasonous criminals, but almost every system in the entire Spiral arm of the Imperium."

"What!?!"

"Two hundred and thirty-two colonial governments have seceded from the Imperium, Andre. And the people have no idea. Just that there is a rebellion."

"But that's.. Almost ten percent of the entire Imperium."

Valdek nodded. "And ten percent of the population can't all be criminals; they must have a legitimate cause to leave. Not even the Imperium's propaganda division can spin that one, so news about the whole thing has been suppressed."

Silence fell on the room. Michaels' mouth opened and closed itself as questions came into his mind, only for the obvious answer to dawn on him before he had a chance to ask it. Valdek knew his friend well enough to let him work these things out for himself.

"Why did the rebels go along with it?" Michaels finally asked. "This information falls into their laps; they know it's a trap; why did they play along?"

"What was the alternative?" Valdek asked with a huffed breath. "It was a win-win situation for the Emperor. Either the Marines win, there is one less rebel planet, and they try the tactic again on the next, or the Marines lose, and the call for unending war goes out to the massed baying for revenge."

"But..." Michaels' brow furrowed again after another few quiet moments. "Why did you defect?"

Valdek's soft smile faded. "Because the Emperor killed Danijel."

"Dan, your son?" Michaels asked as his eyes widened, any thoughts of a headache well and truly gone.

Valdek swallowed hard. "What they did here to the Marines, they did to the Navy at 16-Liyra. Vice-Admiral Wainwright told me. He was ordered to attack a rebel fleet, a full battlegroup against a handful of cruisers, a few destroyers, and a squadron of corvettes. They were under orders to block all rebel comms, issue no warning or demand to surrender, they were to make an example out of a rebel fleet that was threatening an Imperium colony. Wainwright, of course, followed those orders. When the battle was finished, the 'rebel' fleet was completely destroyed with the loss of all hands... Wainwright was then supposed to leave and let the Internal Security Division handle the cleanup, but he was curious and scanned the destroyed rebel ships. It was part of the 8th home defense fleet. My son was aboard the ISS Birmingham."

"Jesus, Serge. I'm... I'm sorry."

"A few days later, the news broke. The 8th defense fleet had engaged an invading rebel armada and destroyed it over 16 Liyra with the loss of..."

"A handful of cruisers, et cetera," Michaels finished for him.

"They called them heroes. Said they made the ultimate sacrifice for the security and the safety of the people of the Imperium." Valdek spat, his eyes welling up. "But it was a lie. Their own people murdered them. Wainwright was quietly removed from his post for scanning the wrecks. He would probably be shot if they knew what he had told me."

"Do they?"

"Know?" Serge looked up. "I don't know. My credentials don't really allow me access to the Imperium comm networks these days."

Micheals nodded slowly before guiding the conversation away from an understandable, painful subject. "So the Imperium is quietly dealing with a secession crisis that the public doesn't know about. And to justify a conflict on the scale that would be needed to destroy the rebellion, it is orchestrating atrocities committed by the rebels as a call to war."

"I'm sorry it was your Division, Andre," Valdek sighed as he nodded.

"I'm sorry, it was Dan, old friend. He was a good man."

"Yeah," Valdek forced an agonized smile onto his face as a tear rolled down his cheek. "He was."

********

Bethany. 2

"Tragedy in the outer rings!" the deep, masculine voice of the news anchorman announced on the screens built into every wall in Jango's bar. "Fifteen thousand of the Imperium's Marines, the entire 381st Division, Massacred while on a routine training exercise!" The growing murmurs of outrage rippled through the bar as Bethany turned on her barstool to watch. The entire crowd in the usually rowdy Jango's bar had been hushed to silence as the news broke. "With me now is General Marius Kincaid, commanding officer of the 381st. Thank you for joining us, General."

"Thank you for having me, Jeremy." A haggard and drawn-looking older man in a full dress uniform appeared on screen for a moment before the handsome face of Jeremy Freeman filled the feed again.

"General, I can't imagine the grief you are dealing with at the moment, but please, in your own words, can you tell the people at home what happened."

The General took a deep breath and nodded. "The 381st was one of the finest Divisions I have ever had the privilege of leading. A better-trained and more dedicated group of men and women couldn't be asked for, or even imagined. The day I was appointed as their commanding officer was one of the proudest of my life."

"I can tell they meant a great deal to you, General." Jeremy nodded sympathetically

"I am a military man, Mr. Freeman," the General nodded. "I chose to serve the Imperium instead of starting my own family, but the men and women under my command were like children to me. Yesterday, as part of their ongoing training and combat readiness program, they were simulating an assault on a fortified position on the planet of Garros II, an uninhabited planet on the inner edge of the outer ring."

Jeremy nodded again, paying rapt attention as was every single patron in the bar around Bethany.

The General swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bouncing visibly above his stiff, formal collar. "At approximately 1500 hours, local time, communication between the ground forces conducting the simulation and its support fleet was lost. At 1630 hours, the Admiral in charge of the naval forces ordered a detachment of the fleet's crew to fly down to the planet to reestablish contact with the Marine expeditionary forces under the command of Colonel Andre Michaels. They reported back that the entire area of operation had been destroyed in a single, massive explosion, killing the entire 381st Division."

"Oh my god," Jeremy gasped, as did almost every set of lips in the bar. "How?"

"Investigations are still being carried out, but preliminary tests show evidence of a massive Anti-matter explosion in the area where they were conducting their landings. We are, I'm sorry to say, able to confirm that there were no survivors and a devastating amount of damage has been done to the local area, hindering our investigation."

"General Kincaid. I hate to be the one to ask difficult questions, but how did the rebels even know about this training exercise?"

The General shook his head. "That is a matter for the investigation, but - and please forgive me for speaking out of turn - it is clear that this attack against peaceful Imperium forces had been planned well in advance of the exercise, meaning that they were given the classified details for it by someone on the inside."

"Are you saying there was a traitor involved in this massacre?"

"Unfortunately, that is exactly what I am saying, Jeremy," the General almost growled. "And when... not if... when we find out who they are, they will be subjected to the full measure of the Emperor's justice!"

"Yes, as they should be," Jeremy nodded. "General, please allow me to be the first to offer my deepest condolences for the loss of your men in this most cowardly attack. I think I speak for everyone when I say that the people of the Imperium are behind you and wish you luck in your investigation."

"Thank you, Mr. Freeman."

"General Kincaid, thank you for joining us today."

The wall of sound that usually filled bars like this one seemed to descend on the room as soon as the report had finished. Most were in outrage and indignation at such an attack being carried out by traitors and rebels. Some in whispered horror at such a huge number of Marines being killed so callously, but already, there were one or two raised in calls for war. Bethany doubted that the local recruitment offices of the Imperium Navy would struggle to reach their quotas for the next few days at least.

With a troubled smile on her face, Bethany turned back to her drink, picking up the stem of her glass and swirling the colorful liquid around in it. There was one very large flaw in the Imperium's official story: she had passed through the Garros system on her way here, and there was no sign of an Imperium fleet anywhere near it. But then, maybe the location of the real massacre was being kept hidden for other reasons. Either way, it didn't matter. War could be said to be on the horizon most days in the Imperium, but she recognized the first sparks when she saw it, and judging by the increasingly rowdy mob in the bar - a scene that was doubtlessly being mirrored in thousands of other establishments throughout Imperium space - a war against rebel cowards was exactly what they would be getting.

But most of them had never seen war, not up close. Perhaps a few people in this room would follow up on their boastful, alcohol-induced pledges to join up the next morning, and perhaps a few of those would make it to the front lines, either in the Fleet or in the Marine Corps. Those brave few would learn very quickly that no sane person ever wishes for war after they have seen one up close.

Bethany had seen one up close, and she had no desire to repeat the experience, no matter how justifiable. As reasons to commence the wholesale slaughter of their fellow man went, though, the massacre of an entire Marine Division was certainly up there.

On a more personal and pragmatic note, though, war was both good and bad for business. It meant a massive ramp-up in demand for some of the more exotic cargos, and with an increase in demand came an increase in profits. But it also meant more security checks, more queues, and a huge chunk of space was about to become very dangerous territory to work in.

Still, she had her hold full of cargo, and thanks to the ever-pleasant Usaf, she would be in the core worlds a few million credits better off. With any luck, she could ride out the war with little hops between planets well within the fortress of the Inner ring.

She looked up and around the bar as she drained the last of her drink; a familiar face appeared in the crowd as he approached. "Hello, Tony," she smiled at him.

"Miss Jenson, fancy seeing you here."

She chuckled and gave him a once-over glance. The kid scrubbed up well.

"Can I get you a drink?" He asked hopefully.

Bethany sighed quietly. With war probably only a few days away from being openly declared, she could find herself extraordinarily busy for the foreseeable future. It could be months, maybe longer before she found herself on a friendly planet for long enough to enjoy herself.

"No thanks," she smiled at the young guard's crestfallen face. "I'd prefer you sober when you fuck my brains out. C'mon, let's go." She grabbed the stunned kid's hand and dragged him out of the bar. If there was ever a time to get some stress-relieving dick, it was now.

Besides, maybe blowing Tony's mind would be fun.

********

Histories and Lore

Aside from the obvious need for a faster-than-light engine to accelerate mankind's expansion into the stars, there were a few key pieces of technology that were, perhaps, even more important in humanity's great leap forward.

There were, of course, the obvious things. Things that sci-fi writers had hypothesized about for centuries; water and oxygen recycling systems, artificial gravity deckplates, some form of beyond-sight sensors, and navigation computers capable of handling the intricacies of slip-space travel. But there were still more pieces of technology that many of mankind's early dreamers had not taken into account.

The first issue to be overcome was that of communication. Pre-slip space travel, every single form of communication employed by this fledgling race - from radio communication to fiber optics - traveled, literally, at the speed of light. By definition, this meant that any ship using a faster-than-light engine was traveling faster than any signal it was broadcasting. It was faster to send a ship to deliver a message than it was just to send one. In many cases, it was much faster.

The nearest strategically important star system to Sol was Alpha Centauri; it was a little under four and a half lightyears away. A standard civilian ship could make that journey in just over six hours; a military vessel with top-of-the-line tech could do it in five. A standard broadcast signal, however, would take a little under four and a half years. Hence the name of that measurement of distance. It is the distance light could travel in a year; the standard signals traveled at the speed of light... ipso facto... four and half years to deliver a message when a ship could do it in six hours.

The solution to this was called the Ansible system. The Ansible was a long-theorized piece of fundamentally unachievable piece of technology, able to transmit unlimited amounts of data over any distance, near-instantaneously. Simple physics, of course, rendered that idea moot, but the name was just exotic enough to stick.

The actual Ansible system was a network of interconnected comm buoys dotted around Imperium space at regular intervals, each one containing a massive singularity reactor. A standard signal was used to send a message from the point of origin, let's say Earth, to the first buoy, where it was compressed into a data stream while a computer plotted the course it would need to take through the buoy network to reach its target. The data stream would then be charged with superluminal tachyon particles harvested from the singularity and then blasted out into space in the direction of the next comm buoy. The speed of the signal would degrade over such huge distances though, hence the need for there to be a network of buoys. Each one would collect the data stream, recharge it with particles, and then send it on its way. As the technology was streamlined and advanced, as all technology does, it became possible for the delay to be measured in fractions of a second when a signal was sent over the entire length of Imperium space. A distance that meant a message received today by conventional signals would need to have been transmitted before the Dinosaurs were walking the earth.

The second piece of technology was dramatically introduced to mankind after the Archimedes incident, only a few decades after humanity ventured en masse into the stars. The story, as it is told, says that one of the first manned missions to Dione, one of Saturn's larger moons, suddenly disappeared. It became one of the mysteries of man's early space adventures in the same vein as the Mary Celeste. Five years after its disappearance, the Archimedes was finally found.

The entire crew had been eviscerated.

After a long and exhaustive investigation that considered such imaginative causes as a terrorist plot, and attack by a hostile alien species, it was discovered that the ship had flown into a near-invisible cloud of hyper-velocity micro-meteorites. They had punctured the hull in several hundred places and, like a shotgun blast at close range, had reduced the crew to the human equivalent of Swiss cheese.

Of course, these days, it is easy for us who know better to find such obviousnesses as self-evident, but it must be remembered that centuries of pop culture had convinced the neonate spacefaring species that space was, in fact, completely empty. Just an unfathomably vast void, punctuated by the odd star system and the pretty colors of passing nebulae.

There are countless hazards floating around the vacuum of space that makes space travel incredibly dangerous; those dangers are increased massively the faster a ship is traveling. From those same clouds of micro-meteorites to combustible gasses in nebulae to miniature black holes right up to wandering comets and vast fields of stationary yet still dangerous cosmic dust. Hitting a particle of rock the same size as a grain of sand will still put a hole in the strongest of hulls if it is traveling many times the speed of light.

To combat these, the repulsor or deflector shields were invented. Deflector shields, however, are nowhere near powerful enough to protect against modern anti-ship weaponry. These shields are present on every classification of stellar vessel, from the lowly shuttle to the massive Super-Carriers, and variants have been found on vessels of every single other space-faring species. They are designed to protect a ship from anything that would normally threaten the hull, deflecting it away from the ship as it travels through space. Just like defensive shields, it is almost impossible for any solid matter to pass through them, and the more velocity the object has, the less chance it has of penetrating the shield. As weak as these shields are, they are still powerful enough to stop a round from a MAC cannon at close range and, as part of any fleet combat action, would need to be taken down by energy weapons before ballistic weaponry can be brought to bear. It is one of the reasons why ballistic weaponry is relatively rare in a ship's arsenal.

This shield, however, is always active. Even when the craft is docked, and should not be confused with the much stronger and infinitely more complex defensive shields that are activated during naval engagements.