Chương 115: Chapter 108

"Shit." It's sometimes so incredible just how much exhaustion, emotion, and sheer meaning can all be condensed into a single word. Shit, indeed, Broadcast echoed Rette's sentiment as he brought Corona Three around in a lazy holding pattern around the wreck. Just pure muunyak shit this is. The Loyalist fleet was… well, not gone exactly, but not here either.

Broadcast would like to say they had beaten the Worlders back, but the truth was more accurate to the Loyalists having decided they had dealt enough damage and decided to cut their losses. Regardless, the 23rd Assault Fleet was left licking its wounds in orbit of the Shadow World, whilst shoring up its ranks in anticipation of another attack. And there were a lot of wounds. Most chiefly felt among the surviving voidcraft wings, however, were the loss of their motherships.

The Skiamachia had been a handsome Providence-class battlecruiser, one of those newfangled carrier variants fresh from the shipyards of Sy Myrth. Over two klicks long, with three bridges and enough hangar space for five LAC wings, the Skiamachia had been a fearsome creature. Had been. All that remained of Broadcast's home of merely two standard months was… nothing. A debris field in a patch of empty space. Did that drifting scrap of engine cowling even belong to the Skiamachia?

Did any of those frozen, bloodshot, floating bodies even once eaten in the same mess as he? There weren't even any escape pods to detect. Though perhaps that was a fortunate thing. Death by reactor breach was hot, quick, and painless. One moment you were there, and the next, fed into an expanding artificial star. As good a death as any spacer could hope for.

"We can spend all day looking for the transponder, Broadcast," Rette told him quietly, in their internal channel. Broadcast sighed, "Right." A transponder, somewhere out there, in there, hidden in the cloud of glinting, mocking scrap. That was all that was left of his home, his Skiamachia. All that was left of the some fifty-thousand souls he once called shipmates. It was crying out, that black box.

It was crying out, repeating its final distress call, tumbling end over end over end until it was either scooped up, or burnt up in Umbara's atmosphere. Captured within it, the final moments of fifty-thousand souls. Right then, Broadcast wanted nothing more than to find it, and shoot it silent. UMBARAN CIVIL WAR DAY 234"Good flying, Corona Squadron," came the gruff, low voice of Rear Admiral Etain A'baht,"You have landing clearance for fleet flagship Intrepid. Be advised; transmitting approach vector now."

"You have our gratitude, sir," the Boss replied.

"Do not be so eager to thank," the Dornean Admiral spoke frankly,"For I need every able pilot I can get." The connection was cut, and the Admiral's presence on Broadcast's HUD was replaced with vector lines.

"Well, that went just as well as we could have hoped," Missus mumbled.

"Just one more hop. One more hop," Bluebird repeated over and over like a broken holorecord–or well, a broken bird. Every Confederate starfighter pilot enlists into the LAC Corps with a standard contract of thirty mission sorties, with the option to renew it at the tail of their service. Though, Broadcast couldn't help but think, most do not serve all of it in a single war. And those who do, do not very often manage to survive long enough to even consider the madness of renewing it.

"I could really do with a hot caf right about now," Chaser sighed longingly. Now there was somebody who would already be putting pen to flimsi, if it weren't for the fact that he was here and not anywhere near an office of the adjutant general. Broadcast couldn't blame him; for all of its ups and downs, flying a starfighter was terribly exciting.

"Hey, Rette," he said in Corona Three's internal comms, "What do you think about another round?"

"You're kriffing insane." Broadcast shrugged non-commitally. Well, that settles it. To be honest, he was more than open to sign away another thirty sorties, given a long reprieve to spend his hard earned credits as he wished, but that was only if Rette would sign the dotted line with him. A new craft, he could work with, hell even a new wingman. But all of the CLACC's assault fighters were two-seaters, and Broadcast wasn't keen on working with a different backseater.

It would be like cutting off his working arm and stitching on an unfamiliar one. Maybe if they put Rette's memories in an astromech, he snorted at the absurdity of it, I could work with that I suppose.

"Eyes on, Broadcast." He blinked, "Roger. I see her." Fleet flagship Intrepid was appearing before them, drenched in the shadows of the Shadow World, and only identifiable by the glimmer of its running lights–and its friendly contact on the HUD. As their approach angle narrowed and the distant star emerged from behind Umbara's cloak of crimson, he could make out its round curves and smooth angles.

A Bulwark III-class battlecruiser was not built unlike a purrgil–a space whale–with its blunt, tumblehome prow, and its four massive variable-geometry maneuvering fins. The provided approach vectors led Broadcast to lift his nose towards one of two rectangular hangar bays sitting high on its twenty-five hundred klick long hull.

"Corona Squadron, deactivate your main drives," came the tired voice of an overworked flight controller,"and standby for tractor beam guidance." Broadcast did as he was bid, throttling down and letting the hum and vibration under his seat die to an uncomfortable stillness. It did not last long, however, for Corona Three was soon captured by an invisible hand, and pulled towards the hangar bay. He whistled a breath and released the stick, letting the bird's autopilot and attitude thrusters do the work.

That sense of well-earned reprieve, unfortunately, lasted no longer than the time it took for him to set Corona Three down on the well-lit hangar deck. As the cockpit popped and stuttered open, Broadcast could already feel his gut sinking at the sight of it all. Or rather, the lack of it. It was as if Corona Squadron had the entire deck to itself. Intrepid's one hangar deck could serve a whole flying wing; two-hundred forty starfighters, at least.

Broadcast could count no more than a tenth of that, dispersed in squadron clusters around the drearily empty maintenance deck. Even more depressingly, Corona Squadron's arrival did little and less to bolster that number. The Boss had flown into Flashpoint Umbarara commanding thirty-six elements in three flights. Only nine Drexls of Corona Squadron touched down on the Intrepid.

"Shit."

"Eloquently put," he said glumly. They were standing together on top of Corona Three, inspecting the damage as they waited for one of the maintenance droids to make their way over with a step-ladder. It was a wonder Corona Three was still flying. Much of the plating had been shorn off, revealing the naked voidframe underneath. The joints where the wingtips folded up had melted–fused together by the heat of glancing lasers. The larboard thruster was spluttering and coughing black smoke. The loud clang!

of a docking step-ladder came as a welcome distraction.

"Sergeant Thane Kyrell!" the B1 droid at the bottom of it saluted them, "Admiral A'baht is expecting you in the ready room." 23RD ASSAULT FLEET FLAGSHIP INTREPID This. This is good. Thane cupped his mug of hot caf, feeling warmth return to his stiff fingers. Dispensing with any sort of dignity or propriety, he allowed himself to slouch and all but melt into the armchair's fine leather upholstery.

He had not known how cold or numb or thirsty he was, as was the way flying in the void for an entire day treats your body.

"I will waste neither your time nor mine, or disservice your efforts with blitheness." Not good. That's not good. Rear Admiral Etain A'baht was a tall, stocky figure. He brought a certain presence with him, a cloud of sternness that followed him like a haze, one that made Thane sit up straight. His uniform was a modified one, accounting for the Dornean's spines and leathery skin, the hue of dark aubergine. A thick brush of quills bristled from his eyefolds, and from his shoulders.

His tone alone betrayed the severity of their situation.

"If we are to win this war, something must be done," he continued, travelling up the aisle until he reached the holoprojector in front, "I had been simply content with holding our orbit until Surface General Evir Derricote captured the Umbaran capital. Unfortunately, as you can ascertain, the circumstances have made a turn for the worse." No shit. Thane glanced around. Even with all the remaining squadrons aboard the Intrepid filling out the ready room, they could all fit in the first row of seats alone.

"Admiral, sir, if I may," Yendor Brethen raised a hand, "Is it true the Worlders were colluding out there? We may have been in the black, but we couldn't help but find the timing of the attack suspect." Beside him, Rette leaned forward.

"I had considered the possibility," Admiral A'baht allowed, "And it certainly is a possibility–an uncorroborated one. Our scoutships had intercepted no communications between the Worlder fleets. If Terrinald Screed and Firmus Nantz truly are working in concert, we have no proof of it."

"More likely that old shark Screed saw an opportunity, and took it," Captain Narra put in his two credits, "Try as we might, its not easy to disguise an entire fleet LAC division jumping to lightspeed altogether. With this, the Loyalists take out two birds with one fish; we crippled the Rezzie invasion force, and he uses the fighter absence to punch a hole in our blockade."

"Nevertheless," the Admiral continued, nodding affirmatively, "I do believe it will be wiser to plan around the Worlders cooperating with each other–if not exactly being a united force."

"Would they work together?" a voice from another squadron piped up.

"If there is anything Worlders hate more than each other," Cartha Phennir said loudly, "It's us Rimmers." A smattering of approving murmurs and whispers rose from the gathered pilots.

"Allow me to brief you on the situation at hand." He reached for the projector console, and a blue-scanned hologram of Umbara burst from its emitter in lazy rotation. At first, three rings of green contacts surrounded the planet, but multiple spearheads of red pins soon appeared from the nearby moon, assaulting the blockade all across the circumference of the Shadow World. As the pins maneuvered and the recording battled on, Admiral A'baht turned to address them.

"There is no doubt the Loyalists attempted to break our blockade. But we have defended our positions admirably, and with the timely return of our LAC division, managed to repulse the Loyalist fleet," his eyes narrowed as the red pins withdrew, only to reveal the gaping holes in the green-pin blockade, "Unfortunately, they had already done enough damage to make our blockade rather untenable. Furthermore, in the wake of the battle, our pickets have observed the Alliance fleet mobilising.

We have already engaged a number of Alliance scoutships attempting to test our defences. It is likely they will attempt to insert themselves–even without their invasion force–if only to revive the orbital contest." The green contacts on the hologram began convalescing, from orbiting rings into condensed geostationary orbits above key theatres planetside.

"I have made the decision to redeploy our remaining elements together, rather than maintain our now over-stretched blockade," he pointed at the hologram, "Namely, concentrated above Separatist-aligned regions planetside. Regrettably, this will open up avenues for the Worlder fleets to insert above their own aligned regions, but I consider the redeployment a necessary measure to salvage our positions.

If there is any silver lining, it is that the Alliance has no ground forces in-system to speak of, thanks to you all."

"And the Loyalists?" Captain Narra questioned. The Dornean Admiral's eye-quilled flattened against his temples, "Terrinald Screed keeps his cards close to his chest, I am afraid."

"This is gonna be another Atraken, isn't it?" Rette murmured, seemingly to herself. An uneasy silence fell over the ready room, rife with pursed lips and shifting glances. Thane leaned into his seat. For two months, he had fought tooth and nail against the Worlders, taking the black almost every other day, all to buy time for their ground armies to capture the Umbaran capital. For Admiral Etain A'baht, and indeed, many spacers in the fleet, they had been fighting for near an entire standard year.

They had managed to save the fleet against the Loyalist ambush, but little good that was if Loyalist boots hit the dirt anyway. It was a bitter taste indeed, one that was not defeat, but could not be called victory either. Thane raised a hand, "Sir, can we expect reinforcements to relieve us?"

Even the stoic Admiral seemed uncertain, "Supreme Commander Tann has promised to redeploy the–" he caught himself, as if reconsidering his words, "– a fleet, which she promises will sweep away the Loyalist and Alliance fleets both." He raised a hand to silence any hopeful whispers, "Ground troops, however, prove less forthcoming.

General Derricote's surface army already represents the single greatest concentration of manpower on the Great Kashyyyk Branch, and what little remain are needed to maintain system garrisons."

"What about the reinforcing fleet?"

"It is an… independent variable," the Admiral seemed uncomfortable to speak further on it, "With little surface assets–if indeed, any at all–to speak of. All of FG Indrexu's assault fleets have already been redeployed to the Hutt frontier, and are in no position to come to our aid. We must work with what we have."

"Little good our reinforcements will do if the fascists boot our boys on the ground off-world first," Kay Karno muttered, just loud enough for them to hear.

"I am in agreement, Lieutenant," Admiral A'baht said, manipulating the projector again, "Which is why I have taken the liberty of discussing our next steps with General Derricote. Simply put, we see little other recourse than to take the Umbaran capital as expediently as possible, before the Worlders can reinforce their surface positions." The Umbaran capital was the fig leaf of justification.

All three of them–the Confederacy, Republic, and Alliance–were here at the invitation of the Umbaran 'government', or rather, a faction claiming to be the legitimate government. The moment one of the factions cease to exist, their backers would no longer have any legal justification to continue prosecuting the war… and indeed, open themselves to retaliation from non-participant powers who were observing the civil war with vested interest. For the Worlders, that meant destroying the Umbaran Separatist government.

For them–the Confederacy–that meant capturing the Umbaran capital and dissolving the Rootai council.

"... that end," Thane tuned back in to the briefing, "We have devised a plan. Which is why I hope for all of your cooperation." Rette leaned to him, "Must work with what we have, huh?" Thane glanced around at the handful of surviving pilots again, "Not much to work with."

"Now hold on here," Kay raised an eyebrow, "There are, what, thirty Drexls here? Less than even a full void wing. If this is all you need to take the Umbaran capital, why haven't you already?" As if in response, the hologram zoomed into the planet, the projection translating onto the 2D surface of the wall. There, drawn in blue-scanned contours, was the Umbaran frontline.

Over two-thousand and five-hundred klicks of mountain, plains, rivers, and hills stretching from sea to sea across the breadth of an entire continent. The battle lines were thus drawn, a thousand miles of trenches and fortifications; cities, bases, and airfields. Dots appeared on the Worlder-side of the battlefield, inconspicuous at first, but soon expanding larger and larger until they near-fully enveloped the entirety of the enemy frontline. Fifty circles, he counted, at least.

But Thane's thoughts were interrupted by a sweat-soaked palm grasping his arm. Rette was staring, wild-eyed, at the projection.

"We had hoped," Rear Admiral Etain A'baht said regretfully, "for a clean campaign. We are here, after all, not as conquerors, but as liberators. That said, the Supreme Commander has made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that Umbara is not to fall to Worlder hands. General Derricote and I agreed, that with the little choice available to us, that a limited first strike against the Worlder-lines would allow us to–""Limited first strike?" Rette's voice was strangled.

Thane winced as she tightened her grip on him into a deathly vice. She looked near ready to shoot to her feet. The Dornean Admiral's attention was turned towards them, "Yes, madame, a limited first strike. No more than necessary to liquidate enemy assets on the battlefield."

"Sir." Rette was still staring at the projection, her gaze moving over the circles, "This… this is thirty-thousand square miles of slagged earth. I don't think this is limited."

"In the best interest of security, only the snubfighters available aboard the Intrepid will participate in this operation," he seemed to ignore her, "But according to our calculations, it is enough. Each one of your Drexls will be mounted with a pair of hundred-megaton guided fusion bombs. One under each wing. You will use Umbara's consistent, heavy cloud cover to fly undetected towards your designated drop zones over enemy lines, and release your payloads in the designated window of time. If all goes well…"

The Admiral nodded at the projection. Thane's heart stuttered. A radioactive wasteland stretching from sea to sea, leveling the entire enemy frontline. The projection evolved–first arrows, then the units following through. The symbols–droid army divisions, spearheaded by the 41st Legion-in-Exile. Units unaffected by, or able to advance through the immediate fallout with impunity. Thane could see it now, in his mind's eye.

While the Loyalist and Rezzie forces were still reeling from the surprise raid, General Evir Derricote would blitz through their collapsed lines and seize the Umbaran capital on the other side of the scorched belt.

"To this end," Admiral A'baht nodded at Captain Narra, "I do believe a field promotion is in order. I would have all remaining voidcraft here folded into the Intrepid First Void Wing. As the most senior pilot commander present, I would make you the Wing Commander, Captain Narra."

"... You can't be serious," Rette said, first at the Admiral, then at the Captain, "Boss, I'm not gonna glass a planet, even one part of it. You can't make me. You can't accept this."

"I gotta agree with Rette, Boss," Kay was grim as she clasped her blue hands together, "There are cities in the line of fire. Civilians! Thirty-thousand square miles of… of people! We ain't Fleet Group South here. Hells, we ain't even the Loyalists." Captain Arhul Narra was staring blankly in front of him. When it became obvious he wasn't going to reply, Admiral A'baht opened his mouth to speak–but Cartha beat him to it. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"It's a lawful order," Cartha carefully placed his cup down, "He– we –can't refuse."

"Knowingly reduce the span of a continent into a sea of radioactive tritium?" Rette laughed disbelievingly, "Of course we can refuse! What can the Admiral do? We are the only pilots left on this ship!" Mutterings rose from the thirty-or-so pilots in the ready room. There was a split, that was certain, between those that would fly the hop, and those moved by Rette's argument against it.

Unmoving in his seat, Thane could only guess as to the fraction of the split, but to be honest, he couldn't see any other alternative. The Admiral's plan was as good as it gets, with the circumstances. From the looks, Yendor was as conflicted as he.

"And what happens if we don't?" Cartha retorted, "The fascists land a million men planetside, and the war goes on for an eternity. We had all the time in the world when we still commanded the sky, but now we've already surrendered half the orbit. We–" he gestured around, "–all three sides–are just gonna keep pouring lives into the furnace. I'd rather we vaporise three million Worlders now, than waste another million Rimmer lives fighting this war that should have already ended."

"Oh, go screw a bantha, Chaser," Kay swore, "It's not three million Worlders that's skin on my back; it's that we're bombing the very people we're trying to liberate!"

"People that are going to die anyway if this war continues," Cartha shot back, "You think it's a picnic down there, Bluebird? General Derricote's pushing towards the capital anyway! You think they'll survive the creeping barrages, the air raids, the droid army? They've already had a year to relocate. Those that haven't–they're in bed with the Worlders, no doubt, and that's no skin off your back, isn't that right?"

Rette did jump to her feet then, releasing him from her vice, "Well, I'm not going to be the one who pulls the kriffing trigger! We are not! Isn't that right, Broadcast?" Her head snapped down towards him, shooting the most withering look. Thane cringed, and it was his turn to grab her wrist, "Look, Rette–""You can't be kriffing serious!"

"No," she tried to pull away, but he held firm, and his voice was firmer, "No, Rette, I really am. Think about this, the Admiral doesn't want to do this any more than we do, but what choice do we have?" Thane looked at the Dornean, and he returned an approving–if not exactly pleased–nod. Thane then looked at Kay, as if to prove his point.

"We–yes, we –are the best way to do this," he told them as calmly as he could, "We are just pilots. We're tools. And if one tool doesn't work, they're gonna pick up another to do the hop. If we don't fly…" He took a deep breath, "… then the Admiral can always move a Providence over-orbit and conduct an indiscriminating missile barrage." Missile barrage. A thick, heavy silence followed in the wake of it. Kay made a strangled sound as if she had just swallowed something painful, and Rette…

Rette looked at him like he had just stabbed her. And it made Thane feel like shit. Like he actually had stabbed her. But it was a truth, and he wasn't going to jump around the point trying to validate her–she knew him well enough to know when he is bullshitting, anyway. Nevertheless, some thirty heads turned to the Dornean Admiral at once, as if seeking confirmation for his bold claim.

"General Derricote had been insistent on prosecuting an orbital bombardment for some time," Admiral A'baht admitted, to muffled gasps, for they were liberating a world of Rimmers, "But I had talked him down. Indeed, you are not our first option–rather, you lot are my second option, a lucky break, one could say."

"What was your original plan, sir? Might I ask," Yendor questioned.

"As Sergeant Kyrell posited; bringing the fleet to bear," the Admiral confirmed, to more muffled gasps, "But there was a problem, one that I have wrestled with since coming to this blasted world. The Shadow World is, unfortunately, shrouded in shadow. Its atmosphere makes precision scoping from orbit nigh impossible. A missile barrage, or indeed, a bombardment of any kind, can not be prosecuted with any level of expedient accuracy.

We will be just as likely to hit our own troopers than we are to hit the enemy, not to mention the collateral damage. Not to mention how much attention a battlecruiser would draw, no less an entire bombardment squadron."

"This plan," he continued, gesturing to projection, the circles painted on it still pulsing ominously, "was only considered when I realised I had gathered enough pilots to feasibly execute it. Only sixty fusion bombs, each well-placed to deal the most damage to enemy military infrastructure, enough to collapse their lines…" And cities.

"... and little else. There is still succour I can give you, Lieutenant Karno, save for my most sincere promise that I have weighed the lives at stake. Thirty fighters. Any more will increase the risk of alerting the enemy to a stealth raid. Sixty fusion bombs. Any less will reduce the chances of General Derricote's army from breaking through. I will make this call. I have made this call. I ask nothing more of you than to prevent the deaths of so many of our countrymen to be in vain."

"Shit." Kay collapsed into her seat, rubbing her face so tiredly, "Just…"

"Shit." Rette ripped her wrist out of his clasp, her fists balled into fists and her shoulders all but vibrating with anger. She reclaimed her chair too, spine ramrod straight and staring straight ahead and refusing to meet his eye. Thane sighed. It wouldn't last, he knew. She was a different person in the cockpit. They all were. In the cockpit, the hop was all that mattered. If they were to fly the hop in the first place.

"Boss." Yendor nudged Captain Arhul Narra's shoulder. The Boss could have been carved from Jelucani fogstone, then, as statue as he was. Thane could've sworn the Captain had not moved an inch the entire time, much less say a single word.

"Boss. It's your call. If you're flying, we're all flying." Yendor said. There was a begrudging silence, but not even Rette or Kay did anything to naysay his assertion. And, as if swept up in the mood and the tension, all the other pilots–who had never ever even heard of Corona Squadron before, likely–were now hanging on the next word to leave the Boss' mouth too. If he felt the pressure, he did not show it. Not that he ever did. But, after what felt like a small eternity, did he finally open his mouth.

"Fuck it," thus said the Boss, "Let's go end this war." UMBARA, SHADOW WORLD It was a dark pearl ringed in crimson, where sunlight shattered on its thick atmosphere into a bloody corona. As Corona Three descended into the cloud cover, Broadcast felt as if he was putting on a blindfold. The turbulence came on all at once; a full-body assault of rain and slate and hail that pummelled against his shields in a continuous drumwell he felt up through the yaw pedals and into his bones.

The fighter jumped and shivered and shuddered, water vapour streaming off the control surfaces in white sheets as the heat of insertion boiled the weather around them, and for a time the canopy was nothing but fire and fog and the ill murk that clung to Umbara like a zeyd-cloth cloak. Then the fire died, and there was only the fog.

"This is Wing Commander Arhul Narra," the Boss crackled on the comms, his voice arriving in fragments through the atmospheric interference,"All elements, level out and maintain altitude until you reach your respective targets. Remember the hop; the moment we go under the cloud cover, the enemy will be scrambling whatever fighter intercept they have. Don't rush, stick to your chronos, and we should all descend at the same time. Paint your targets, drop your sticks, and get the hell out of there."

"Radio silence is now in effect." A pause, then:"See you all back on the Intrepid." Broadcast leveled the nose, pulled the throttle back to a cruise, and looked out the canopy at absolutely nothing. The weather of the Shadow World was unlike any other. Its clouds were more or less a ceiling, total and featureless, extending from horizon to horizon without gap or variation, that choked out the sun and moon and everything else in heaven.

Below it, he knew from the briefing charts, there was more cloud, and below that the sky, and below that the surface. He flipped his HUD to surface navigation mode. The scope gave him attitude, heading, and a terrain-following radar return that was currently resolving the surface of Umbara as an undifferentiated mass of topographic data with no detail useful at this altitude.

He had two bombs, each one a hundred megatons of guided fusion payload, hanging one under each wing in the positions where his torpedo racks had been before the deck crew of the Intrepid had swapped them out. They were large, heavy, cumbersome, and made his bird handle like utter muunyak poodoo… but you live with what you get. And Broadcast got a damaged bird poked full of hastily patched holes, carrying two eggs under its wings that he couldn't be more glad to be rid off.

"Heading oh-five-seven," Rette said in her working voice–only quieter than usual, as if there was actually something else on her mind, "Maintain this speed and altitude for eleven minutes, then descend to ten-thousand metres."

"Roger," he replied simply, "Oh-five-seven."

"..."

"..."

"I'm still not sure about all… all this," Rette finally said to fill the silence. Broadcast couldn't help but frown, "I get how you feel, Rette, but… if it isn't us, it's gonna be someone, something else. It's not like I think Chaser has the right of it, promise, he's just… he's just into it."

"And you? You're not into it?"

"Like I said," he shrugged, "The hop's going to happen anyway. Better it be us that does it."

"People like us, we hold the power of life and death," Rette suddenly told him, like she was reciting a book or script, "Every time we have a finger on the trigger, we have a responsibility to ask ourselves: will doing this save more lives than not?"

"Oh," he remembered. He remembered the Warlord aboard the Independence.

"I know."

"Maybe it's because he gave me the slice," she laughed at herself, "But when the Admiral presented the plan… I just thought of those words, I guess. I thought that there was no way we were saving lives by–" she choked, "–by vaporising millions."

"We don't know if it will."

"He made it sound like a principle. As if it was a question that if you asked honestly enough, the answer would be clear." Broadcast watched the chrono tick down. Six minutes until the next maneuver.

"That's the sort of high-minded talk the top brass say to themselves to keep themselves justified, I suppose," Thane told her, and told himself, "We're just pilots. We didn't do the math. Admiral A'baht did. And he decided–and I believe he decided the right way. Did you see him? He didn't wear the face of someone who found it easy, or someone who didn't care, or someone who knows what they're doing is wrong."

"Well, I could be wrong," he shrugged again, heaving a great sigh, "But if I sit here and decide I know better than he does, from this seat, with what little I know… I'm not making a moral decision. I'm just making a different decision, and calling it more moral because it makes me feel better about myself. Don't you think so?"

"You called us tools," Rette pointed accusingly. He laughed, "You know what I mean." The chrono ticked down.

"I know," she was quiet again, then, "I just… shit, I'm just doing this because you are doing this, I can't let you fly without someone watching your back. Whatever happens, happens. I'm with you through to the end. Promise." He nodded, smiling, though she couldn't see it, "That's way more than what I could ask for." The chrono hit zero.

"Descend to ten," she ordered, as if the conversation had never happened.

"Descending to ten," he pushed the stick, and the nose down. The cloud layer thinned. The dense, featureless overcast gave way with something more ragged–cloud wisps trailing past the canopy rather than enveloping it, the turbulence coming in shocks rather than something all-encompassing. Broadcast caught a glimpse of something far below, a faint neon glow, diffusing through the weather.

"Bearing oh-two-two," Rette gave the next heading, "Fly for nineteen minutes at speed. We'll then descend through the base of the cloud cover to acquire visuals on the targets. I'll paint the drop, and the guidance package should do the rest." The nervousness he hadn't felt beforehand suddenly came on all at once. He thumbed the trigger, as if rehearsing the drop.

Rette will paint both targets, within eighty-klicks of each other, and he will drop both bombs simultaneously, and, if the plans hold up, all sixty bombs will land at the same time. Sixty hundred-megaton tritium fusion warheads. The same kind of shit they use to fuel battleship reactors. The same kind of shit used to maintain the artificial stars at the heart of every warship. The shit they'll be using to drop short-lived suns on enemy army–and everything with the ill-fortune to be nearby.

The crater will be half a klick deep, and over two klicks across. Everything within four klicks of the explosion will be immediately non-existent, and everything within ten klicks will be vaporised soon after. All non-reinforced structures within thirty-two klicks will collapse from the shockwave, and the sheer heat will have all living creatures within seventy-five klicks suffer the complete removal of their skin. The chrono reached zero for a second time. Thane took a deep breath.

"Entering final descent," he said. As soon as they were visible, they could expect enemy fighters scrambling to meet them. He eased the nose down, reduced power, and let the altitude bleed. Eight thousand. Six. Four. The cloud base came apart around them in fragments; first fluffy islands, then breaks, then a gap wide enough to see through, and then they were below it, and Umbara revealed itself. The Shadow World was by no means dark, he then learned.

The jungle canopy below them was bioluminescent, vast stretches of it glowing in blues and greens and pale violets that pulsed with the slow rhythm of something living, the light rising from the vegetation in a diffused radiance that made the surface of Umbara glow from like an ember.

Between the jungle and the sky, the cloud cover above them reflected the bioluminescence back down, doubling it, so that the whole world existed in this strange, beautiful, self-generated light that owed nothing to any sun and needed none. And cutting across it, from horizon to horizon, the trenchworks. They appeared first as hard, straight lines imposed on the organic curves of the landscape, the dark lacerations of excavated earth running in long zigzag patterns that he could trace from above.

Then, as his eyes adjusted, the lights: the muzzle flashes of field artillery running their barrages in both directions across the line, the distant strobing of lightfights between forward units, the steady burn of airfield approach lights on both sides of the front.

A shooting star ripped across the surface below and he tracked it for two seconds before he identified it as a heavy artillery round, and then another followed it going the other direction, and then several more, and the whole length of the front was alive with it, the slow, continuous, utterly ordinary violence of a ground war that had been going on for a year and would go on for longer still if nothing changed. The towns and cities were visible further back. Both sides.

Lights; the warm ordinary light of people existing in buildings, going about whatever version of ordinary existence was possible in a city fifteen klicks from the front line. He could not make out the cities themselves at this altitude, only their light, and he was grateful for that, and hated himself for being grateful. It will be painless, he told himself. He could only hope that was true.

"I have the target grid," Rette said. Her voice was a flat, careful thing.

"First target is bearing oh-seven-eight, eleven klicks. Second target is bearing oh-five-three, seventy-four klicks from the first."

"I'm painting them now." Two markers appeared on his HUD. A pair of three concentric circles, hovering over points just behind the trench system that the targeting assessment had identified as the highest concentration of enemy military infrastructure within the designated strike zone. Command posts. Armour staging areas. Artillery batteries. Airfields. The like. He also knew what else they contained, just on the edge of the radius. He forced himself to ignore that.

"Eyes on," Rette told him, "We have a solution. Your call."

"There should be X-wings or Sickles coming to meet us now," Broadcast commented distantly.

"The rest of the void wing should be dropping their payloads now as well," Rette replied sternly. As if she was saying'this is what you wanted, so do it.' Broadcast looked at the first red circle on his HUD. He looked at it for a long time. Will doing this save more lives than not? He did not know. He had told Rette, honestly, that he did not know, and the honesty of it had not made him feel better, and it did not make him feel better now.

But he had also told her that someone had to decide, and that he believed the Admiral had decided the right way. But maybe that was a cop out, maybe that was just him saying someone ordered me to do it, so I did it. Maybe he really had no spine at all. Will the blood be on the Admiral's hands, who ordered him to pull the trigger, or would it be on his, who pulled it? Thane pursed his lips.

"Shit." He pulled the trigger. Two quiet thumps–the lurch of the bird as two-hundred megatons were released onto their guided paths. Then hauled Corona Three around, kicked the throttle all the way forward, and pulled on the stick until they were racing out of there as fast and as high as his Drexl's rattling voidframe could take him. Rette said nothing. She was already counting, her chrono running on the time-of-fall. He climbed, and he ran, and he did not look back.

Not even as the clouds closed over them again, swallowing Corona Three back into the grey, and Broadcast pushed the nose higher and climbed through it. There was nothing but the black, the fog, the turbulence– There was a light. It was light, a bloom that appeared at the periphery of his canopy, far below and behind, pushing through the cloud cover.

He saw it in the cockpit instruments first, the electro-photo receptors registering a light-level spike that pegged their measurement ceiling and stayed there, and then he saw it directly, a white-gold radiance rising through the overcast like a second sun igniting inside the planet. The fireball blasted through the cloud cover forty-three seconds after release.

It did not part the clouds so much as disappeared them–the thermal bloom of a fusion detonation rising at several hundred meters per second, a sphere of superheated plasma eight klicks across at the moment of emergence, its surface temperature in excess of ten-thousand degrees, hot enough to ionize the atmosphere around it in a shell of electric blue that gave the fireball its outer edge a bruised, violent corona.

The fireball rose and expanded simultaneously, the plasma sphere fattening as it climbed, and the clouds evaporated around it, water vapour flashing to superheated gas in a ring that spread outward from the rising column at the speed of the thermal wavefront, opening a wound in the overcast three-hundred klicks across within the first minute. And through that wound, for the first time in Umbara's recorded history, moonlight, starlight fell upon the Shadow World's surface.

Where Corona Three was once flying in heavy cloud cover, it was now flying in the open sky. A great pillar then rose to meet the wound. The stem rose through the gap the fireball had made, a column of superheated debris and vaporized earth and atomized material that had been solid matter sixty-seconds ago, climbing through the atmosphere without slowing, until it punched its way into the stratosphere.

The cloud head began forming at altitude in mushroom shape, the suspended debris and condensing vapor spreading outward in all directions at the stem's apex, the head growing as more material was drawn up into the column and expanding laterally as the energy dissipated upward. Fifty-three kilometres.

The cloud head reached fifty-three klicks before it stopped climbing, its crown touching the edge of the mesosphere, a black crown a hundred klicks across visible from Corona Three's altitude, its height a further twelve klicks of roiling, black-lit debris. It was less a cloud and more a structure, a permanent-seeming thing, as fixed and substantial as a mountain range, built in sixty-seconds from the energy of a small star scaled down to fit inside a weapon. And then the second one rose. And then the third.

And then they kept coming. One by one northwest to southeast, the pillars rose. Sixty of them, climbing through sixty gaps in Umbara's cloud cover with a regularity that was almost processional; one horizon, then the next, then the one after, the sequence of detonations walking across the continent below them in the order the Intrepid 1st Void Wing had flown their attack runs, each new column catching the reflected light of the others and adding its own to the illumination.

The cloud cover, which had blanketed the Shadow World since the beginning of time, was coming apart. Not everywhere–the overcast was too vast for sixty detonations to unmake it entirely–but in sixty places simultaneously, sixty shafts of silvery moonlight were falling through sixty circular wounds in the permanent dark. And the heavens were visible from Umbara for the first time, lifted there upon sixty great pillars of black smoke rising to the edge of space.

And at their base, where they met the earth, did the fires burned, and the fires burned, and the fires burned. Rette was completely silent from the backseat. Thane looked at what they had done, and felt something. It was not pride, not horror, not grief, not satisfaction. But it was something –a combination of them all? Or none of them? He looked at the pillars, and at the gaps in the cloud cover, and at the moonlight coming through, the stars twinkling in the faraway distance, and thought: we did that.

Not the Admiral. Not the Confederacy. Not the abstractions of war and politics and strategic necessity. We did that. The RWR screamed.

"What the– DEFEND!" Broadcast was already moving. Left yaw, nose down, full throttle, the Drexl's airframe groaning under the break as the missile track crossed his scope from behind. Rette punched the chaff and flares and wings of fire and flechettes exploded from his bird's wings as he swung it around to face whatever was coming. The missile ripped through the empty space where they once were.

"What have you done?" There was a roar through the comms, belonging to no voice or signature Broadcast knew.

"Do you? DO YOU KNOW!?" The voice raged on.

"The people of Umbara, do you know what you've taken from them? Those were cities. Those were people–Rimmers, like you claim to be–and you reduced them to ash so your droids can march through the crater."

Through the smoke and the dark and the bioluminescent ruin of what had been Umbara's surface, a flight of Suncutters bursting through the base of the nearest pillar; through the roiling black stem of the mushroom cloud itself, streaking out of the radioactive column trailing vapor and debris and burning with a hard, furious purpose, their leading edges glinting like the blade of a reaper's scythe. And Broadcast was uncomfortably certain he knew what for.

"I need tags, Rette!"

"Working on it!" He couldn't fight them. He had no missiles, no fish. In a damaged bird, against a Suncutter, much less a squadron? No way. No way. Broadcast turned tail and ran, as hard as he could push her.

"The Alliance came to give the Umbarans a choice. You denied them that. You denied them everything." Five of them. Then eight, then twelve, then thrice that. And they all split off into pairs, presumably to hunt down the fleeing elements of Intrepid's void wing.

"Rette!"

"... Shit." Oh, how much I hate that word.

"They're in the registry!" she cried, and she could have shook his shoulders if she could have done so.

"Do not engage!" He narrowed in on the pair of Sickles climbing after him. And they were gaining ground.

"Which ones!?"

"ALL OF THEM!" Shit.

"Tell me. What do you have to show for yourselves? Blood? A ruined world? Oh, wait, you don't even care why you're here!"

"Damn, damn, damn you SEPARATIST SCUM!" The RWR screamed, loud and piercing and shrieking through his skull and bones. Two more missiles racketed off the Sickles, and Broadcast saw the blade of the reaper come down. – – CAUTION – – \\ ALLIANCE TO RESTORE THE REPUBLIC - ROGUE SQUADRON \\