Chapter Text
Vassili Cruz was in the first wave of the CAUL’s joint defensive fleet, scrambling together from the disparate factions in response to the threat of Ericht Samaya. He was a veteran Caragor pilot, in service of the SAL’s military police since he was eighteen. He’d flown sorties against pirates, Earthian separatists, organized crime, and more than a few civilian uprisings during his career, and that had all been before the war.
The old saying went, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” And Vassili hadn’t really loved his work - he’d liked it, but it was always just a job - until recently. Until the war. He hadn't, by this logic, worked a day since then.
Suppressing barely armed, half-starved people was easy, but there was no fun or challenge in it. Not like the days at the academy, a secondary institution to Asticassia, where the competition was always fierce and the talent pool deep. He’d wanted to join Cathedra, in those days, but hadn’t quite made the cut. The League had been choice number two, and not a bad one as those things went. But now Cathedra was on the margins and he was here on the frontlines, ready to meet the infamous Gundam Aerial in battle. So who was the silver medal now?
He tried to temper his expectations. To not get too caught up in the romance of this sort of thing. Gundam Aerial was dangerous, certainly. Beyond the rumors about what had happened on Luna (which he was skeptical of), he’d reviewed the footage of the Gundam at war exhaustively in the hopes of a day like this. One on one, he had no doubt she’d make short work of him. He was good - almost an ace in his own right - but he was under no illusion that he could go toe to toe with a living weapon like that and emerge in one piece.
But he wasn’t going to fight her one on one. He was part of a damn fleet. The vanguard, one thrown together in haste, but even so it had assembled with greater efficiency than he was used to, working for the SAL. At his side were his colleagues, more than he’d ever seen at any one battle. At his back were battle cruisers and even a carrier. And more were coming in, even as Aerial drew closer. Other fleets were assembling, too, further down the defensive line, interposing between the enemy and Mars.
And Aerial was alone. Intel suggested that the NEU was not supporting the Gundam. It had a number of those automated Mobile Suits with it, more than the average, but even so. The entire NEU’s main fleet had struggled to gain and hold ground around Mars for months, and now one Mobile Suit and its drones thought it could turn the tide by itself? It was hard to see this as anything but a suicide run. Which was odd; he’d never known a machine to be suicidal before, but there were stranger things in heaven and Earth.
He just hoped that he’d get to take a shot at the thing before the combined might of the Benerit and SAL wing defenses tore it apart.
“Contact,” a voice over the radio came. “Gundam Aerial has entered visual range. Prepare to engage.”
Vassili checked his instruments. Zoomed in with his primary camera. And there she was. Only a dot on the black horizon, for now, but drawing closer at surprising speed. Slowly, the dot expanded into a cloud. The cloud into shapes. Vassili squinted, checking again to confirm what he was seeing. Not a cloud. A swarm. Or a flock. Or… a ring? He could barely see the shape of individual Gund-Nodes flying in tightly compressed proximity, spiraling as they approached in a great, circular mass. Like looking into a tornado from above. And at the center was a burning mote of light. A pupil of blue fire, blazing hot.
Before his eyes the pupil of this great, spiraling eye lit up gold. Then bright and burning red.
Vassili reached for his weapons array. But he died before his hands could close around the controls.
–
The thing that Olcott liked most about ballistics was that they were big. Properly placed, a 200mm Heat Round could punch through most any hardpoint on a CAUL Mobile Suit, whose armor was primarily designed to protect against beam weaponry, necessitating latticework at a nearly microscopic scale. Like hitting a suit of chainmail with a cannonball.
It was even better in space, where air resistance was a non-issue and, properly led, you could hit a target anywhere in the system in theory. Like Olcott was doing now, carefully watching the flight path of his target, the enemy squad’s so-called ace, as he and his wingmen pursued the members of Squad Caturix as they fled with their ill-gotten gains in tow.
His position couldn’t be called a proper lurk, exactly; he wasn’t behind any cover, or even braced against any solid matter. He was floating in open space, in the same spot where he’d been for about two days now, waiting with nearly every system powered down. This rendered him little more than a slightly too-warm clump of matter, easily mistaken as a bit of visual noise against most long range sensor arrays. His rifle, possibly the biggest slug thrower usable by an MS like his modified Zowort Heavy, was already locked into the approximate field of fire, requiring only minute corrections when the time came to take his shot.
He’d only get one; without attitude thrusters ready to engage, the shot would send him into a spin that would take precious seconds to connect, leaving him a sitting duck for return fire if he didn’t put it right through the enemy commander’s co*ckpit.
That was all he’d need. He wasn’t in the habit of missing, and the enemy suit’s defenses wouldn’t automatically detect his shot in time. That was the other thing Olcott liked about ballistics: they were small. Against more solid forms of attack, like missiles or ship-scale railguns, modern Mobile Suits had exceptional detection software protocols, and countermeasures that could deal with the threat through evasion or neutralization without the pilot even needing to consciously deploy them. But even a Mobile Suit scale bullet was smaller than newer systems were trained to detect, and their countermeasures couldn’t do much to stop them before they were danger-close. The enemy might see a glint of light from the muzzle flash, but Olcott had his back to the sun so it was unlikely, and even if he did, few pilots would be able to react in time. Even if that time was measured in long, slow seconds. Plural.
Olcott’s son, back when he’d been alive, had once complained about his math homework, questioning where that sort of knowhow could possibly be useful in real life. Olcott had answered that if you wanted to calculate the precise timing needed to place a round of ordinance exactly where it needed to be across distances measured at astral scale, you’d better be good with numbers. His boy had called him a weirdo. Fair enough.
Olcott counted down. Watched the distant drive plume of the enemy draw in closer to the retreating Squad Caturix and the seized cargo hauler, the Dunsinane. He recalculated as the enemy adjusted their course, equations interlocking and spooling out before his eyes. He adjusted the aim of his rifle. Then, at the last possible instant, he fully activated the Caturix’s systems and took the shot.
The bullet, a tungsten-tipped round loaded with an internal heat charger similar to that of his lucky knife, leapt from the barrel and flew across the vast night. If he missed, it would maintain this speed for the rest of time; less than a crawl on the cosmic scale, but fast enough to destroy most things of human make. But even as his Zowort, the Caturix, spun from the force of the shot, he knew that he wouldn’t.
With one of the secondary arms affixed to the Suit’s back, he reached out and snagged the shell casing before it could pass out of reach. Placed it in a little munitions pouch he kept attached to the Suit’s hip. There were Spacians on his squad these days, and they got a little uncomfortable at leaving debris in space. It was the least he could do to minimize the shots he took and clean up the casings. Keep morale up.
He engaged his attitude thrusters and corrected the spin, returning to his original bearings just in time to see a burst of light as the bullet tore through the enemy’s co*ckpit, likely reducing the man within to a gory spray. Olcott was glad they wouldn’t be sticking around to salvage the enemy’s machine: washing that out would be a hassle.
“Damn! What a shot!” Charon exclaimed through the radio, right on cue. “You’re in rare form today, Olly!”
“No I’m not,” Olcott said. Then, “Olly?”
He could hear the sly grin in her reply, “Trying out pet names. Considering…”
“Don’t,” he said, both because he hated pet names, and because this was an open channel.
It wasn’t exactly a secret that he and Charon were sharing a bunk (finally), considering the close quarters the squad had to keep while on mission, but it was still embarrassing to talk about so openly, dammit.
Too late. The radio erupted into ribald chatter, his team cheering and chastising him. “Boss, you’re so cold!” “Oh no, Daddy yelled at you, Charon!” “I could’ve made that shot too!” “Boss!” “Boss, did you pick up the casing like you promised?” etc.
Olcott groaned, and was debating whether to start handing out latrine duty, when Charon interrupted the chaos.
“Hey! Hey shut the f*ck up, kids!” she said in her “Mom” voice, being rewarded with instant silence. “We’ve got new orders from the General coming in. Transmitting.”
By the time Olcott finished reading through the new instructions, and the overall appraisal of the situation unfolding in CAUL space (“FUBAR” to use an old-fashioned term), his team was already getting to work. The bulk of them were already burning to the next rendezvous point to play their part in the General’s scheme, but a small detachment of Olcott’s hand-picked elite were, per the instructions, continuing on the original mission, boarding and prepping the Botanical Transit Vessel Dunsinane for the role that it would play in one of Nika’s many contingency plans. They’d been doing this work for a while now, reluctantly missing out on the Mars campaign to raid the borderlands of humanity, and they moved with the graceful ease of long habit.
Olcott was allowing himself a moment of pride in the men and women under his command, a feeling not unlike when he’d been a father (one of the more wholesome reasons that his people called him “daddy” when they thought he couldn’t hear them), when another transmission came through. This one bore the obvious signs of a hijacked signal, complete with the familiar whine and hiss of underlying static.
“Du Noc,” Olcott said.
Then, to his surprise, a different voice, a man’s, answered, “Heeeey. Not quite, but I’m calling on her behalf.”
Olcott’s eyes narrowed. “Who is this? How did you get this frequency?”
“With difficulty,” the young man grumbled. “Even with Norea’s help. My name’s Elan, her boyfriend. Hi!”
Olcott’s scowl deepend. Norea had, of course, told him about Elan Ceres - or Elan Nemo, now - and explained that they were… close. She hadn’t said anything about a “boyfriend”, but that wasn’t the most important thing happening right now.
“Is she safe?” Olcott asked, a bit surprised at himself for doing so. At the tension in his voice.
“Oh, yeah, she’s the most dangerous thing in the room as always. She’s just behind the firewall right now, so I’m acting as go-between. Can I give you her message? Because I’ve got a bunch more calls to make and I’m really exposed right here.”
“Go ahead.”
And he did, explaining what Norea was worried about and how he could help. Olcott had to admit that the boy impressed him; he must have received some kind of training in infosec and covert actions for how clearly and efficiently he was able to give the shape of the situation, and in a way that could be perfectly deniable if they were overheard somehow.
Olcott considered the request. For Norea to ask him for help, the need must be dire. She was always proud to a fault, placing an outsized amount of her own self-worth on her ability to handle anything the world threw at her. She’d never once asked him for help in their time serving together, even when she really should have just from a tactical standpoint. Sophie had been the same. Olcott found a slight, wry smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. The girls were all grown up, it seemed. Changed in more ways than one, certainly, but still alive, and stronger than they’d ever been. He’d matured too; the pride that welled up in his chest would have once been something to deny or push down, but in his old age he found that he could let himself indulge in a bit of sentiment. Just a little.
“Okay, I’ll be there.”
“Fantastic! Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to…”
“Hold on a second,” Olcott said. “You know that I trained Norea since she was a little girl, right? Taught her everything she knows about piloting.”
“Oh, sure. And you did a great job. She’s almost as good as me!”
Olcott smirked. “Sure. Point being, I practically raised that girl. Which kind of makes me like a father to her.”
“O…kay?”
“Which means,” Olcott said, enjoying himself despite how embarrassing this would be if anyone found out, “That since you’re dating my ‘daughter’ we should have a short talk. Man to man. So listen up...”
It was a bit of a cliche, what he was doing, and one that Norea would not appreciate, but with Naji gone, somebody had to pick up the slack. Besides, Olcott figured that he deserved to have a little fun. A luxury, but one that he had time for.
–
Rosemary Waller, who was among the last to die among the CAUL vanguard fleet, was glad she never paid a cent on her debts. She’d instead gone into her compulsory military service with the CAUL - a choice between debtor’s prison and enlistment is no choice at all, really - under the assumption that she probably wouldn’t live to see the war’s end. An assumption that was proving prophetic as she watched the instruments of her ship, the Danube, struggle to comprehend what was about to happen to it.
In fairness to the mostly outdated aid and repair vessel - one of the many adjutant ships for the Patrician, a heavy carrier vessel and one of the prides of the joint CAUL fleet - she was also struggling to comprehend what she was seeing through the external camera arrays. It was a maddeningly obtuse sight, rich with biblical awe and terror to the point where she was almost more curious than afraid.
The host of Gund-Nodes, spiraling like a storm and a flock of birds at once, loomed into visual range with Gundam Aerial at the center. With her appearance, the captain of the Patrician gave the order to battle stations for the vessels and Mobile Suits, the ship’s cutting edge tactical assessment protocols painting realtime schematics of the battlefield, complete with ideal ranges and the estimated range and field of fire for the enemy, transmitted to each vessel. The Danube also received this data, of which it was Rosemary’s job as a technician to parse and summarize to her own captain, in order to position itself safely while making ready to render aid where needed. The allied line closed tight, barring Aerial’s path to Mars through interlocking fields of fire measured at the inhuman scale of space, represented on the miniature readouts as a blanketing green area, the enemy’s probable field of fire shown in dull red arcs beginning from the rapidly approaching central point of the Gundam itself, represented as a pale white dot.
That dot grew closer, approaching the field of deadly green. Its own range far short of the mighty CAUL fleet. Closer.
“Weapons ready,” the Patrician’s captain said to the fleet. “You may fire when you have-”
The swirling storm of the enemy, in its slow, grinding rotations around itself, suddenly lit up as one, a blindingly brilliant azure surrounding a boiling, seething red star. Instantly, Rosemary’s readings began to rapidly spool across the screen, obscured by multiple error messages as the system tried and failed to recalibrate around the unexpected phenomenon. Aerial was well outside of its optimal, or even effective range. Well outside the range, even, of the fleet itself. And yet the storm’s rotation sped up to a blurring, frenzied whirl as a wall of blue light erupted forth from its hundred weapons. A crashing tide that swallowed the sky, blotting out everything but that point of blood red singularity at its center. The simultaneous, sustained bombardment chewed through the fleet in real time, before Rosemary’s eyes. Approaching at speed. Coming right for her.
She was glad she hadn’t paid those f*cking vampires one cent of her debt. She was glad she’d spent every last bit of her military pay the second she earned it. She’d lived more these last three years than she had over a lifetime of being a good, responsible citizen.
Rather than try to meet her death with any measure of that wasted responsibility, she decided to go out on her terms. So she sat back, kicked up her feet, and managed to give the surprised captain of the Danube an indolent shrug before the light took her apart.
–
“The CAUL vanguard fleet has been routed, General,” Godoy said.
He stood at Nika’s side, hands clasped behind his back, keeping the same polite distance he’d maintained with Prospera Mercury. If his true leader’s ignominious and sudden retirement bothered him, he showed it very little, falling into the patter of his work with perfect equanimity.
Probably that was how he coped with the stress. Much like Nika herself, she recognized in the taciturn giant a person for whom work was a comfort.
She nodded her acknowledgement and then, feeling a little peevish, added, “You can sit, you know.”
He smirked. Slightly. “Thank you, General, but if it is the same to you, I am more comfortable standing.”
“Suit yourself,” Nika grumbled, rubbing at her left eye.
It was really starting to bother her, feeling both itchy and numb, somehow, in her skull. Worse, with each development in Aerial’s approach towards Mars, the Datastorm was pitched into chaos all over again, like someone dropping boulders into a pond. From orbit. The tension headache alone was torture, but the added vertigo was giving her an absolutely apocalyptic migraine.
It wasn't even a useful pain, the kind that focused the body and woke the senses. It was sickening, nauseating, and worst of all distracting.
Her ability to influence the outcome of the ongoing battles was minimal. Communications were extremely dicey, even with so much infrastructural power devoted to bolstering the connection. She'd given her orders, received confirmation from most of the active team leaders, and had established a few stable, one way signals from those leaders to give updates at times intervals.
It was the best she could manage. And it wasn't nearly enough.
The tactical map, a projected 3D hologram of the system, buffered, shuddered, and then refreshed to reflect the new intelligence. The CAUL Vanguard Fleet, once a swarm of red pips thicker than flies on carrion, was scattered like dust before the hurricane of Gundam Aerial. Additional fleets were assembling even as Ericht drew closer to Mars. Her progress was little more than a crawl, but at so large a scale any visible movement represented a shockingly fast approach vector. She would be on the CAUL’s second line in a little under an hour at this rate. Poor bastards.
Nika grimaced, a pang of either headache or conscience spiking behind her silvery eye. Her good eye, the one that could see things besides a chaotic, fractal tempest of blue, took in the rest of the tactical map, further towards the outlying CAUL territories. There, orders of magnitude smaller and scattered like a light snowfall, were the myriad of squads that made up the Dawn of Fold’s two-pronged war effort.
Nearer to Mars, the majority of the forces were withdrawing in all directions, abandoning the siege. Nika sighed to see this, lamenting all of that hard and brutal work gone to waste. Not the most painful part of this ongoing crisis, but a frustrating one to accept: The Mars campaign was dead, and Ericht Samaya had killed it.
The primary order she’d given to the fleets was to engage in a fighting retreat, consolidating only once safely beyond contested territory. It was necessary. Chasing sunk costs was the ruin of many a lesser engineer, but even knowing that never made the decision to abandon a once promising project easier. Further out, the outrider squads, part of Nika’s contingencies, were similarly engaged, though they were moving towards the action for now to rendezvous with the Mars fleets. Their flight paths were sloppy, drawing perilously close to corporate arcologies, CAUL fleet docking ports, and other such targets, provoking responses that led to a number of battles that, frankly, didn’t need to be fought.
Just as Nika had planned.
Each of these skirmishes were of little consequence in the grand scheme of things. Brief battles with few casualties on either side and little meaningful damage to enemy infrastructure. Because that was the point; to hassle, annoy, and vaguely threaten the multifarious corporate forces that made up the CAUL, drawing away and slowing down squads that would otherwise be rushing to join the defenses against the approaching Gundam Aerial. Making them late to the party. These splinters were small - barely noticeable individually - but there were many such delays occurring all at once across the system; tiny stresses and fractures on the enemy war machine that made it that much more brittle. That much more vulnerable to the crashing hammer of Ericht Samaya.
As Sophie had said, the only way they could win this was to ensure that everybody else lost. By weakening the initial defensive lines by attrition, they ensured that the enemy would sustain heavy losses and fail to meaningfully delay the invading Gundam, necessitating a greater level of panicked reshuffling of forces to compensate further down the line.
It would also goad Aerial herself into greater aggression, encouraging her to press the advantage. To keep the momentum she’d so long craved. Stressing her systems to the limits of their tolerance, hopefully at the same time that the CAUL finally got their sh*t together and consolidated their final defensive bulwark. By the time Suletta arrived.
They had to ensure that Aerial failed to breach that final line. Failed to take or destroy Mars. But they also had to see to it that the CAUL’s victory was a pyrrhic one, exacting such a heavy toll in lives and materiel that they could not mount an attack against the Earth right away. And they had to do it all without directly involving themselves in the battle proper. It was an impossibly delicate balance to maintain, and the fact that it was working so far spoke to the skill and ability of the NEU soldiers more than any genius of leadership on her part.
She was as proud of them as she was ashamed of herself. Because even if it was all indirect - all deniable - it did not change the simple fact that Nika Nanura-Fardin was engineering the mass slaughter of thousands. Intentionally exacerbating a battle into a full on catastrophe. She, who had once so righteously admonished Sabina about unjust means and just ends, who had once so confidently renounced those who waded in blood to reach the distant shores of utopia, was now herself drowning in an ocean of it. Piling the bodies of her enemies higher and higher to stand in defiance of the heavens.
And that wasn’t even what she was most concerned about. That was reserved for the machinery beyond the tactical map; the beating heart of Quiet Zero where Ericht Samaya had once served as the fulcrum and power source. A cluster of Monuments had replaced Gundam Aerial in this regard, but Ericht had taken all but the bare minimum for her rampage, leaving the station crippled and unable to interact with the Datastorm in a meaningful way.
Which was why Sophie had insisted on entering the mechanism herself. And Sabina within Sophie’s co*ckpit. Her two wives were, even now, being bound into this terrible machine whose true functions were understood only by Prospera Mercury and Notrette Rembran. Nika had done her best to fill the gaps in her knowledge. To study the mechanism and understand the risks.
She thought - thought! - she could operate it safely. To restore some access to the Datastorm, allowing them to reach out to Ericht. To protect Sabina and Sophie from the ravages of that ethereal realm that even now churned and gnashed maddeningly before her silvery eye.
But she had to concentrate. She had to think clearly. And the throbbing, sickening pain in her skull was making that impossible.
Quietly, Godoy set something down on the console at which Nika worked. A familiar thing that she hadn’t expected to see by itself. But then, its true owner had little use for it at the moment. Prospera Mercury’s skeletal mask; adjusted slightly for Nika’s size, but still bearing the telltale scratch in the metal from when Nika had hurled it across the study.
Nika looked at Godoy curiously.
“It is, primarily, a medical device,” he explained calmly. “It blocks interference from the Datastorm and offers relief from symptoms of SPG.”
“It isn’t mine,” Nika protested.
“For now, it is,” Godoy said.
Nika hesitated. Reached out. Her fingertips hovered over the mask as though she were afraid it would burn her. She took a breath. She could make herself think of this as a mere device; a bit of machinery with no other significance. But that would be cowardly.
Godoy was right. Prospera Mercury was no longer the master of Quiet Zero. No longer the Witch Queen of Earth. Nika was. And she had already set the stage for her great ritual of sacrifice. The only thing she could do was to face her sin without flinching. With both eyes open.
Nika Nanaura-Fardin donned the witch’s mask, and after savoring the relief that immediately washed her pain away, she returned to work.
–
“Nope, f*ck this,” Alistair Alberts said to himself.
Then, before he could second guess, he turned in the opposite direction of the incoming Gundam and burned as hard as he could. Running away like a coward.
He could barely hear the indignant orders to return to formation from his CO, or the subsequent empty threats to fire on him and court martial him and skull f*ck his pets when he ignored the order. His ears were full of his hammering heartbeat, and the imagined disgust of his father and brothers, shamed beyond enduring by his disgraceful, selfish abandoning of his post.
Alistair came from a long line of soldiers. Rather than sign on with any one corporation, his family had, for generations, opted to serve the Benerit Group in a more general sense, taking orders from whomever was at the head of the conglomerate (which, in practice, mostly meant Delling Rembran) as elite warfighters, second only to Dominicus in skill and dedication. It wasn’t the group itself that the family honored with their service; rather it was to the idea of service itself. To the institution of war; of soldiery. Not mercenaries. Never that. They were more like the Spartans of old. The knight errant. The elite whose place in history was writ in the sword, not the pen.
Or that was the bullsh*t that Al had been forced to listen to his entire life. Growing up in a constant state of tension and violence, training to fight since he was old enough to walk. Nevermind that he hated every minute of it, or that his brothers had used the family ideal as little more than an excuse to kick the living sh*t out of him at the slightest pretense. It was just what he did; no other choice.
Until Gundam Aerial had snapped him out of the patriotic fugue, and he’d realized with a start that he could just… leave. It didn’t feel at all like he’d expected, to turn off his communications array and just run the f*ck away from otherwise certain doom. He didn’t feel the weight of his ancestry crashing down on him, nor an annihilating shame at the disgrace he embodied. He felt… great, actually. Lighter than air. Clear-headed in a way that he hadn’t been in… well, ever.
Why had it taken so long to realize this? That he didn’t owe the CAUL sh*t, much less his life. What did he care about who was in charge at the end of the day? It wasn’t like he was friends with President Mercury, or with anybody else at Asticassia for that matter. There was no good reason for him to be here at all except that his family was always here at moments like these, but he didn’t even like his family!
So… f*ck it. He’d go to Langlands. They were taking people in, and there were rumors that they had work for people with his skills. He’d always wanted to go to the carnival. He’d always wanted to do a lot of things that, he realized, he was now free to do.
He checked his camera array to make sure he wasn’t being pursued. And he was, sort of. Not by military police or pilots from his former unit, but by others who had seen him withdraw and had, apparently, decided that it was a much better idea than facing down a rampaging god. He grinned; smart fellas.
His grin fell when, beyond them, he saw the battle begin as Gundam Aerial came upon the second defensive fleet.
They put up a better fight than the vanguard, having learned the range and area of the enemy’s beam tornado (for lack of a better term) they were able to position themselves to disincentivize its reliance on a massive, singular attack from beyond their range. Not that Gundam Aerial and its drones seemed to care; the storm of Mobile Suits burned forward, crossing oceanic distances of empty space in seconds, it and its drones weaving through the fleet’s barrage with inhuman grace. The whirlwind of Gundnodes split around a burst from one of the Destroyers, scattering from a tightly packed vortex into a biting, ravenous swarm. A hailstorm crashing violently against the defenders. Bursts of beamfire erupting in great, dazzling arcs that cleaved through entire squads. Some of them went down, but far too few. They were too fast. Too aggressive. They didn’t act like drones at all, but like ace pilots in their own right.
And even this was dwarfed by the ferocity and destructive power of Gundam Aerial. The child-god of Earth was a patchwork ruin of a thing, its body bending and contorting at such odd angles it seemed a wonder that it didn’t snap itself in half. If there’d been a pilot in that thing, the maneuvers alone would have smashed them to a pulp. And it was glowing. Or… no. It was leaking Permet energy, great clouds of wispy red light trailing behind it, spilling like fog from its joints. Trailing its head in a great red mane, like a wave of burning red hair. It was so bright, so distinct, that Al could trace Aerial’s passage through the second fleet even as the CAUL ships began to explode, one after the next as it roared through their ranks.
Al looked away from the destruction, feeling that if saw any more, the angry god would punish him for the transgression. He and the other deserters did not look back again.
–
It wouldn’t be long now.
Mars was close. Once a spec of dust among many, it had grown with each massacre - distance measured in bloodshed. Dust became a marble. A marble became a ball, about the size of the old rubber one she and her dad had played with back on Folkvangr. Ericht could still remember how it felt in her hand; the lingering smell of rubber on her skin even after playtime had ended. The way that dad had made her laugh and laugh by rubbing it against his head and making his hair stand on end from the static.
She wondered if Suletta would be there on Mars, waiting. She wondered if she would get there first. She wondered if Suletta was coming at all. She wondered… what would happen if she did?
Maybe Ericht would kill Suletta.
Maybe Suletta would kill Ericht.
She was down two monuments. The first had overloaded during the barrage that annihilated the CAUL vanguard fleet. The second had been hit by a lucky shot from one of the capital ships, upon whose shattered hull she now stood, watching the twinkling lights of the next crop of poor, dead fools rushing to form ranks in their own funeral procession. What would happen if they were all somehow destroyed, along with the thirteenth monument; the one that served as her unbeating heart? Would she go back to being a helpless, semi-conscious ghost within the machine? Or would she die?
How did she feel about that?
She felt something, but she couldn’t remember the name of the emotion. She barely even recognized it as such, so much greater (or lesser) was she than she’d been at the beginning of this fateful day.
“Alphie,” she said. “You and the others don’t need to fight anymore. Protect the Monuments instead. Can you still form a defensive field?”
“Of course!” Alphie replied crisply. “We’ll guard them with our lives!”
That idea alarmed Ericht, and she shook her head sharply. “No. You all need to live. You have to live.”
“But-”
“You have to!” Ericht snapped. She was angry; that at least she could recognize. But why? What was making her so…?
The thought was interrupted by, surprisingly, a shortwave signal from the third defensive fleet; the biggest of the bunch by far. She could see the ripples of the transmission in the Datastorm even before the audio signal came through. The voice on the other end was choppy, but familiar. And the last one she expected to hear.
“Ericht Samaya, this is Vice President Guel Jeturk of the Benerit Wing. Do you read me? Repeat, this is…”
“Guel Jeturk! Hey, bud!” Ericht said cheerfully. Or that’s what she was going for, anyway. “Fail at anything interesting lately?”
Rather than rise to the bait, Guel replied, “Nothing interesting, no. You’re more talkative than I remember.”
“Maybe you’re just a better listener,” Ericht replied, amused. “So what’s up? Calling to offer terms of surrender?”
“Not exactly,” Guel said, an undertone of tension belying the affected ease of his words. “Though I do have an offer for you.”
“Aaah, a young pilgrim offering a petition,” Eri murmured officiously. “Speak, boy.”
“This has gone too far, Ericht,” Guel said. “Too many people have died today.”
“It’s funny; I don’t recall hearing you guys saying that sort of thing when you were the ones doing the killing,” Ericht mused.
“You’re not wrong,” Guel said, his grimace audible even with the static. “And my friends and I are trying to fix that disparity. But we have to resolve this first; without further bloodshed, I hope.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Ericht said. “Give me Mars.”
“I can’t do that,” Guel replied somberly. “The League has control of the facilities on the planet’s surface. They’re refusing to do a full-scale evacuation of ‘operationally essential personnel’.”
“Gosh, that’s too bad,” Ericht said, utterly unsurprised by the League’s callous depravity. “Bit naive of them to think that’ll stop me now, though. I’ll tell you what; you and that big fleet of yours step aside and I’ll do what I have to do quickly. That might convince them to be a little more conscientious.”
“I can’t let you do that, either,” Guel said. “Those civilians are under our protection. I’m asking you, person to person, Ericht. Please turn back. Stop this.”
She sighed. Waste of time. “That’s not much of an offer. It sounds more like a prayer. And I’m not really in the mood to answer those right now. Now if that’s all…”
“No! I… this is my offer. You want the fleet to disperse, right? And I want you to turn back. There’s no reason to sacrifice so many lives in a dispute like this when we both know a simpler way.”
Ericht was confused for a moment, then she laughed. Or she would have if she could remember how. “Guel Jeturk, there's no way you're about to say what I think you are.”
“Ericht Samaya,” Guel said, his voice trembling despite his efforts at bravado, “I challenge you to a duel.”
