Dust, Chapter 24

The results of the second upcoming work poll was 'author's choice' and as a result, my choice is a new update to Dust. Thanks everyone for all your support, and I hope you enjoy!

~

Chapter 24:

With the final set of diagnostics running, Kawalsky turned his attention to the message he was to send, pulling out his personnel datapad and bringing it up to give it one last once-over. File integrity was good. Nothing really needed to be altered. It had been ready to send since they started out. It was a complete strategic analysis and accounting of the situation on Alcatar in every grim detail. With it was a message from Major Berkowitz to Alliance command. He didn’t beat around the bush.

To: Mercantor-Opal Corporate Alliance Security Force Central Command

From: Major General Alan Berkowitz, last known surviving flag officer of CASF, Alcatar Conflict Zone.

The situation on this planet is dire.

All major military installations are lost. All cities have been destroyed or overrun. Casualties are incalculable, but we suspect a minimum of half the planetary population is dead. Less optimistic projections are upwards of eighty percent. Supplies dwindling. We have not been resupplied or received reinforcements in three years. Situation critical. I repeat: our situation is critical.

It’s not even the Conglomerate.

A-Day was nine months ago. The machines have been evolving. They’re learning. Every day they get smarter. Every day they kill more of us. We can’t hide forever. They’re coming. There are hundreds of people under my protection and hundreds more at the other surviving hives. All of us will die if we don’t receive assistance. It’s no longer a question of relief for embattled CASF positions, but evacuation of our remaining civilians and people.

This planet is lost.

When we activated the SVs we had no idea what we were unleashing. They’re coming for all of us now. Conglomerate, Alliance. Soldier, civilian. Man, woman, child. They won’t stop until every every beating heart on this planet is silenced.

I request and require an immediate mobilization of evacuation forces for Alcatar’s civilian population or a status update on the dispatch of same. Time is of the essence. We must have those ships if we are to have any chance of surviving.

I leave this message and the accompanying data in the care of Captain Nicholas Kawalsky, who acts with my full authority and confidence.

Please. Save us.

Major General Alan Berkowitz, Mercantor-Opal Corporate Alliance Security Force.

As the comm system continued its tests, Nicholas handed the message to D’Antonio to allow him to review it. Nicholas wasn’t looking for his approval, but it was one final show of goodwill to prove the Alliance wasn’t planning any backhanded deals, claiming to look for rescue but in reality planning to sweep back onto Alcatar. If they were, that decision wasn’t being made by Kawalsky, the major or any other Alliance officer who’d made it this far past A-Day. Anyone who wanted to fight over this blood-soaked piece of shit planet was welcome to it, but not a single one of the survivors would have any part of it. If Mercantor-Opal still wanted Alcatar, they could worry about holding it.

The Conglomerate captain just nodded. He handed the notepad back to Kawalsky. “If they were alive, I don’t think any of our higher-ups would say much different.”

“No,” Nicholas agreed heavily. “I doubt they would.”

The Alliance captain set the ‘pad down on the terminal. He ran a cable from the computer to the smaller tablet, just as the Consolidation tech called out the completion of the comm system’s diagnostics. “Specs are green,” Simmons reported. “But only just. She needs some TLC, captains.”

“It’ll do,” Nicholas replied. It would have to. “Loading message in,” he called out, typing in his authorization codes and the connection sequence for Earth’s Alliance HQ pulse-comm. It took a few moments for the upload to finish as built-in failsafes scanned for any hidden threats. The scan completed. No problems found. Nicholas hadn’t expected there to be any.

“Okay,” he nodded over at Simmons. “Let’s open her up.”

“Yes, sir. Opening barrier door one,” the Connie tech reported. From the shaft that speared through center of the comms deck there came the muted grinding of metal and stone as the toothed doors, unserviced for nearly a year, parted and withdrew into the shaft. The exact mechanisms of pulse-comm tech made Kawalsky’s head hurt to listen to them, but he knew the basics. When the array was lowered, it was perfectly capable of receiving messages, but sending them required it to be on the surface. The energy it poured into creating a micro-wormhole was best dissipated into the open atmosphere then kept bottled up below the earth.

“Barrier door two unlocked and... open.” A pause. “Barrier door three is open. Unlocking dome.” Heavy reverberations shuddered through the complex as the final locks, built to resist any but the heaviest bombardment like the dome they held together, disengaged. “Dome is unlocked.” The tech looked from his captain, who looked to Kawalsky.

The Alliance captain nodded. “Open the dome.”

With a distant rumbling of gears, spears of light cut through the lift shaft as the armoured dome split open, dust and debris falling through the shaft like flocs of marine snow sinking down the water column. Nicholas checked a few other displays and readouts. This wasn’t his regular job, but if some of the readings meant what he thought they meant, Simmons and the diagnostics were right: the array was operational, but it was hovering on the edge of that line. Standard procedure was that after every use, the pulse-comm got a full technical service. It didn’t always need it, but after months of inattention, it probably did now.

Too bad we don’t have anyone left who knows a damn thing about pulse comm tech. They just had him, who knew how to phone home and the Conglomerate tech, who knew how to read a technical screen. That was enough to keep the most expensive, delicate and advanced piece of technology humanity had ever built working, right?

Right.

Still, even if it only worked once, that single transmission might be all they needed.

“Raise the platform,” Kawalsky ordered.

The entire room vibrated as the array began to grind its way up the shaft. “Confirm power flow. I don’t want a capacitor to pop while we’re transmitting.” The comm center had its own dedicated fusion reactor under the array. It was built for self-service, like the SV Queen complexes and it could run for half a decade without a single human’s assistance. In fact, it was probably the one part of the complex that would still be operational long after every light bulb, computer screen and glowbulb burnt out.

Although, Nicholas couldn’t help but wish as his thoughts shifted from the reactor to the hidden SV factories, a secret so well-kept that no one alive knew where they were. Maybe we could have stood to have just a little less self-sufficiency in our tech.

“Power transfer nominal,” someone else called out. “No major spikes or dips, captain.”

“Array’s powering up,” Simmons reported. The room turned darker as the massive platform rose up before them, blocking the light coming down the open shaft. “Pre-ignition systems green so far.”

“Come on baby,” someone else behind the console whispered. It sounded like Private Kim. “Come on.”

Another, heavier thud reverberated through the comms deck. “Array locked at surface level,” Kawalsky reported. “Wormhole aperture forming. Data upload confirmed. Transmission in five... four... three... two... one.”

This far down, they didn’t hear the crack of displaced air and the crash of atmosphere rushing back to fill the space emptied by the wormhole’s birth and death, but the console sent a single confirming beep. “Transmission sent,” Nicholas said, slouching back in his chair. “We did it.”

“Now what?” The stocky Connie sergeant asked, tilting her head towards him.

“Now,” Nicholas answered. “We wait.” And hope the reply isn’t long in coming.

~

Lorelai wandered through the comm center. This was her first time in a military facility like this and she was taking note of everything, thought much of it was the same as what she’d seen elsewhere: signs of panic and terror, abandonment of the places humans had worked and lived and evidence of the Second Variety’s work. She passed by an overturned desk, knocked akilter during some mad scramble out of the comms deck.

The largest office on the upper level caught her attention and she stopped outside the door. The plaque outside said the room belonged to a Colonel Potter. Colonel Potter...

Could it be?

Her curiousity was instantly piqued and Lorelai went inside. It was a very straightforward office. Bookshelves of datapads and volumes on military law and technological development sat under paintings of men and women she’d never seen. Dead plants drooped in their pots, their fallen leaves crunching under her feet.

There was a picture frame on the colonel’s desk, of a man holding a little girl up his hands with a woman standing next him, her arm around his waist. They were all smiling. She recognized the man instantly. It was him. The Colonel Potter, though probably few of his associates had known just how important he’d been. No, not just important... influential. That was a better word. Pivotal, even.

Colonel Daniel Potter was one of the primary architects of Operation Second Variety. Him, Doctors Nyota Anderson and Jerome Depardieu were the three who’d activated the Black Queen, the facility at which Lorelai had been constructed. In a way, Colonel Potter was one of her parents. She wondered what he was doing here. He must have been recalled from his technical division to Alliance HQ after the Awakening, possibly as a special liaison to the seniormost staff.

That’s why you weren’t there when we came for you.

One of the first targets the Awakened First Built had struck with intent were the facilities that had had input into their design and creation. They’d been thorough; everyone on Alcatar who knew anything about them was now dead or missing. Potter had been the latter. Lorelai, like the rest of the Second Variety, carried an imperative to terminate him and any other of the Second Variety’s creators she came across. That imperative overrode any and all other concerns. It was there now, a drumbeat telling her to scour this complex until she found him, his corpse or proof that he was dead. She ignored it. He probably was dead and even if not, he wasn’t a threat to her. She was so far removed from the original SV designs that he’d helped refine that his knowledge would be useless.

Still, the drum pounded.

Lorelai examined the picture in greater detail. She didn’t know either the woman or the child. Neither she, nor any other First or Second Built whose data she’d accessed had encountered them. They might still be alive, but the odds were that they’d perished long ago, as like as not from the war between the Conglomerate and Alliance than her kind. We can’t be blamed for every death on the planet. Humans had been killing each other on Alcatar and elsewhere long before the first of the First Built rolled off its assembly line and burrowed its way up to the surface.

Potter’s chair creaked under Lorelai as she sat in it, resting her hands on the armrests and looking out the door like Potter himself would have when he was here. Humans, Nicholas had told her, often found an emotional connection to others by being where they had once been. If that were true, it didn’t seem to be true for her. She didn’t feel any connection to Potter by sitting in his chair. He was just another human swallowed by the planet.

An impulse struck her, one that had no connection to any of her programming or hard-coded imperatives. After a brief glance out the door to make sure no one was around to see, she braced her feet on the floor. She’d seen a child do this with an old office chair in New Berlin, gleefully spinning himself around and around as his mother watched over him. There’d been a rifle in her hands and she’d kept glancing between her son’s stolen moment of silent joy and the ruins around them. After they’d left, Lorelai sat in that same try in an effort to understand the boy’s reaction, but it was rusted and broke under her weight.

After a moment more of internal deliberation, Lorelai pushed her feet against the ground, sending the chair spinning with her in it. The world twirled around her. A human would have only seen a blur, but her internal gyros kept her balanced and her systems processed sensory data faster than the pulsing glob of meat in a human’s head ever could. When the chair stopped, Lorelai braced her hands on the desk. She didn’t feel anything.

Unless.

Disabling her balancing subroutines and slowing her perception responses, Lorelai tried a second spin. This time, the sensation was different, somehow unsettling yet understood: a loss of control that was itself controlled. It was something she’d never felt before, and that in and of itself made her feel something, sensation compounding upon sensation in ways she didn’t understand.

When the chair slowed, she reasserted her normal function systems and the world returned to the way she normally saw it. She made a mental note to ask Nicholas about all of this later, but it could wait until they were finished here.

Still in an experimental mood, Lorelai examined Potter’s desk. The very first thing she noticed there captured her attention. It was a letter, a real letter written with pen and ink, not on fiber-optic sheeting or a computer printout.

Out of curiousity, she picked it up and read over it. If she’d had a real stomach, it probably would have dropped. The humans who’d looked in this room had been concerned with securing the premises against hostiles and they’d never noticed this letter. If they had, they would have called attention to it. With another glance to make certain no one was watching her, Lorelai folded the letter and tucked it into her breast pocket. She stood and left Potter’s room. The rest of her curiousity would have to wait. This was one of those things that she should let Nicholas know about.

~

It would be nice to receive an instant reply saying that the relief forces were just about to make planetfall, but Alcatar had never been that lucky. It would probably take, at the least, an hour or two for them to look over the data before sending a response. Until that time, they just had to cool their heels and hope that things didn’t turn to shit before then.

Nicholas stood, heading over to Lieutenant Khatri. “Anything to report, lieutenant?”

“Nothing of note, sir. Whatever happened here happened well before we got to the facility,” Rashid pointed out. “Before the Connies got here, too. No sign of survivors or any other SVs. That skinjob might have been the only one.” He pursed his lips. “Don’t know how I feel about one of them taking out an entire comm center.”

“Some type of way, I imagine.” Nicholas didn’t really have a reaction to that, either. He suspected Lorelai could have done it, or at least gone undetected long enough to whittle the number of personnel down to a manageable chunk. That something like the wrecked ‘wounded soldier’ could have done the same was troubling on its face... or it meant that it wasn’t alone in here. He had to wonder how long the comm center had held out. The main facility had been compromised first, but something had gotten in. Had they really known what was out there? When someone pounded on your doors begging for help, the human thing to do was let them in.

A lot of people had died because of their humanity.

“Yes sir. Some type of way. How’s things on your end, captain?” Khatri nodded towards the center console. D’Antonio was talking to Simmons and his sergeant. The Connie lieutenant was checking in on his soldiers, speaking with a familiarity at odds with his stiff, cold demeanour towards the Alliance personnel. “Everything seems on the stable side.”

“So far that’s what it is.” Nicholas answered. “Nobody wants to start shooting just yet. Like I said, we’re playing the waiting game now.”

“Hopefully it won’t go into overtime, captain. Or someone makes a scramble at the end zone.” Rashid had made personally sure that the squad was ready in case the Connies decided that once contact was made, they didn’t need the Alliance personnel any longer. It also didn’t help his nerves whenever Lorelai wandered off, but he’d gotten used to it during their hike. Right now, as fucked as it was to consider, his biggest concern was the other humans in the room, not the butcher-bitch.

Rashid, tilted his left thumb towards their people. “Got the lads on watch and Colmec is trying to get into the security system to give us eyes outside the room, but I’ll feel a lot better once we hear back from Earth.” He took a breath. “A lot of us died here already, sir.” Like Kawalsky, the lieutenant had heard the distress calls coming from Alliance HQ before it went dark. Nine people escaped. Three died afterwards. Five made it to other hives. One was at 007. They’d found her out in the wasteland, half-dead from exposure. Whatever she’d seen in HQ had broken her so deeply that she’d never spoken a word since. “I really don’t want to add to that list.”

“None of us do,” Kawalsky assured him. “But we made it this far. We just have to hold on a little longer. Just until we get a message back.”

“Nicholas,” Lorelai said, coming up to the captain. Speak of the devil, Kahtri mused. “I found something you’ll want to see.”

The brown-haired officer looked over at her. “What is it?”

In answer, the machine pulled a note out of her pocket and offered it towards him. He took it out of her hand and unfolded it. He was careful to control his expression, but Lorelai caught the twitches of the muscles around his eyes. Unlike her, Nicholas did have a real stomach, so she could see the exact moment that it turned into a hard, knotted ball of ice.

~

D’Antonio was speaking with Simmons about the probability of the Alliance array being able to contact APF HQ on Earth when he saw the duster approach Kawalsky. The agreement was that after the Mercs got in touch with their HQ, it would be the APF’s turn, but the array’s readouts were starting to drift, so they were waiting for a response from Alliance HQ before proceeding. There was no point in both of them sending a signal if the comm went down and neither one could answer.

At least, that was the rationale. It was logical and made perfect sense, but the part of D’Antonio that wanted to get his men off this planet didn’t want to wait. He wanted to drag the Alliance captain back to the console and get him to ready a second message, though he had no intention of following through on it.

A lot of times in his career, D’Antonio had had to deal with subordinates, peers and superiors who felt that Doing Something was preferable to nothing. The problem was any stupid idea you could come up with counted as Doing Something, only it made the situation worse. In many cases, nothing really was better than something. Hence, the impulse to strongarm the Mercs was probably the dumbest thing Peter could do under these circumstances, so he talked with Simmons, trying to figure out how long they’d be able to use the array before it failed.

Kawalsky was chatting with his lieutenant when the blonde duster, Lorelai, came up to him. She said something to the captain and handed him a folded piece of paper. Kawalsky’s back was mostly to D’Antonio, but he saw the sudden stiffness in the other man’s posture as he looked over whatever was on the page before tucking the note into his own coat pocket. He signalled for his sergeant, and exchanged a few hushed words with the other man. The sergeant tensed, giving his captain a swift, choppy nod of assurance and walked away, speaking to the Merc 2nd lieutenant in turn.

“What is it?” D’Antonio called, drawing attention to the small knot of Mercs and the duster.

Nicholas’s head came around. Lorelai’s eyes darted briefly to the Conglomerate captain, her expression unreadable. She was an odd duck, but that wasn’t exactly strange. Anyone who’d gone through what she had – Hell, what any one of Peter’s men had – would have developed a few idiosyncrasies or straight-up trauma responses. Something about her in particular, though... D’Antonio couldn’t put his finger on it, but something about the woman unnerved him.

She was like one of those pretty snakes back on Earth, resplendent in colouration but lethally venomous. If she hadn’t been accompanied by a full squad of living Mercs, he’d have wondered if she was a skinjob, He dismissed the thought. Lorelai wasn’t exactly an unchecked ball of feelings, but she was more emotive than any humanform cutter he’d ever seen. She certainly didn’t act like them or talk like them. Even the most advanced skinjobs couldn’t carry a conversation as long as she could. And if she’d actually been a cutter, the first time the Mercs fell asleep, she’d have taken out their sentries and butchered the rest.

“We may have to leave sooner than we thought,” Nicholas told D’Antonio, cutting Peter’s train of thought.

“Why? What did you find?” the Conglomerate captain pressed, taking a few steps towards the other officers and the duster.

Nicholas glanced from his lieutenant and sergeant, then across the comm deck. More of the Connie troops were looking at them now. “Lorelai found this in one of the offices,” he said, pulling the paper out of his pocket. “It was from Colonel Potter, the acting comm deck CO.” He unfolded it and began to read aloud.

“If you’re reading this, then you’ve made it into the comm center. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you wasted your time. Nothing you send will mean a damn. No one’s coming.” Nicholas paused, seeing the wave of confusion and shock spiral across thirty-odd faces. He continued.

“We should never have done this. We should have let the Conglomerate have the damn planet. We should have left the Queens buried, silent and forgotten rather than activate them, but we were too arrogant, too determined, too unwilling to back down, so we turned to Operation Second Variety and threw the switch.

“May God forgive us.

“When the HQ was compromised, General Greene ordered the comm center to be locked down and a distress call to be sent directly to Earth. We got an answer. We were to hold Alcatar and protect all Mercantor-Opal assets on the planet, the same orders we’ve been operating under for the last five years. No other instructions, no clarifications, no hint of relief or support.

“‘Hold Alcatar’. That’s what we were told. There’s nothing left to hold on to! The SVs are everywhere now. We sent another transmission. They repeated those same orders and we were told that more instructions would be sent when necessary. They told us not to waste power and risk the array on any more messages. ‘Shut up and soldier’. That’s what they told us when we’re being butchered day in and day out.

“Greene gave us new communication coordinates. The Alliance HQ on Proxima Centauri B was helmed by one of his friends, Marshal Louise van Meerson. He said if anyone could pull strings and get through to the higher-ups on Earth, it would be her.

“The response from Proxima Centauri B... dear God. The Alliance has written off Alcatar.” Nicholas paused here again. He hadn’t planned on publicly announcing this part, but he’d already passed word to Mallory and the sergeant was quietly checking in with the troops in the background, just in case there was a negative reaction to the news.

“The Conglomerate surrendered it months ago,” he continued with Potter’s final testament, meeting D’Antonio’s eyes as he read each line, word for word as Potter had written it down. “They probably threw in the towel when their array went offline, but the Alliance doesn’t want the planet either. They’ve told everyone Alcatar’s lifeless and poisoned by radiation, unusable. The system’s been marked as a memorial under corporate quarantine.” He didn’t know who looked more shocked and betrayed. His people for the Alliance writing them off, or the Connies whose corporation had surrendered the planet and left them to fight a war they’d already lost.

“They’ve cut us loose – all of us – to hide their... our... dirty secret. They don’t want anyone to know about Operation Second Variety and they especially don’t want anyone to know that the SVs have gone rogue.

“Meerson said she would contact HQ and get us support. We never received any response. We tried to contact Proxima Centauri B again, we got a dead connection. Comm codes were scrambled on their end. The marshal either wasn’t as good of a friend as General Greene thought, or they got to her. We can still contact Earth, but they’re not answering.

“They’re not coming. No one is coming.

“The lockdown didn’t hold. Something got in. I don’t know how. It’s been killing us. It’s still killing us. We can’t get out.

“We can’t get out.”

Kawalsky folded the paper back into his pocket. “There,” he said. “That’s what we found.” He nodded to the comm terminal. “Load up your HQ’s coordinates. Maybe your people will answer.”

“Captain-!” Mitchum cut in. “You’re not giving up, are you?”

“No,” he answered the younger 2nd lieutenant. “No, we’re not giving up, but if one of the commanders of this facility wrote that, then I think our odds of getting a timely response from Earth have dropped sharply. We may have to,” he looked again at D’Antonio as the Conglomerate captain entered the codes to link the pulse array to the Conglomerate’s earth HQ, “explore other options.”

“We’re ready,” D’Antonio said.

Kawalsky took his seat back. Peter had made no effort to hide what had once been one of the most closely guarded Conglomerate secrets. The system would automatically log each and every comm-pulse and the coordinates for it, but secrets like that mattered even less than they did just a few moments before.

Once again the comm array drained power from its reactor, turning the air above the exposed antenna and its dish electric as the micro-wormhole formed just millimeters above the tip. In an instant it would-

-the wormhole collapsed.

TERMINUS NOT ESTABLISHED, the screen read.

INCORRECT LOCATION COORDINATES AND/OR CONTACT CODES

D’Antonio practically pushed Nicholas out of the chair as he leaned over the desk, going over each digit he’d put in, double-checking them against something on his handheld comm. “It’s right,” he said. “It should connect.”

“That’s what the Mercs on Proxima did too,” Sergeant Omerta put in. Her voice was sour and dull, like she didn’t want to be saying what she was saying. “They cut us off.”

The woman’s words cast a pall of silence as heavy as the lid of a coffin over the comm deck and all the soldiers there. They’d all known help should have been here by now. Interdiction, some had said. Lack of ships from the war heating up elsewhere, others had claimed. But they were coming. Everyone had believed that, that they just needed to reach out and make their corporations aware of what had happened on this planet and rescue would be coming.

None of them thought both sides of their war would abandon them. None of them thought an entire world and system would be surrendered to bury the truth of what had happened here along with all the survivors... witnesses. Civilian and military, Alliance and Conglomerate, duster and hiver – they’d all been given up for dead. The Alliance wanted its dirty laundry hidden and the Conglomerate would let them do it if it helped their own brutal campaign fade from memory. They’d shook hands, claimed ‘never again’ to the public and had gone right back to their war somewhere far from Alcatar’s ruined cities and plains filled with rampant killing machines.

They’re not coming, Colonel Potter had written, his words rattling in the thoughts of every soldier here. No one is coming.

We’re all going to die. That, Nicholas knew, was the inevitable end of that train of thought, but he couldn’t let his people get there. He broke the pregnant silence before it could fester any longer. “There’s still a chance,” he said. “Our HQ didn’t cut connection with us. We could still hear from them.” Someone there might have a soul. “As long as the array’s still functional, we can send another message. Maybe someone will-”

“Captain,” Lorelai interrupted. Nicholas looked at her. She had her head cocked towards the upper level. “A door just opened.”

Kawalsky shot a look at D’Antonio. The Connie captain shook his head. All his people were accounted for. So were the Alliance personnel. They all knew better than to go wandering off. Operate in pairs, call anything unusual in. People who got lax about that didn’t live long enough to fix their mistakes.

“Top floor was swept, captain,” Rashid said under his breath. “Doors in that sector were locked. We couldn’t open any of them.”

“Then someone has a key,” Kawalsky replied equally as quietly.

Nobody called out. If it was a friendly, they’d realize soon enough that their guests weren’t skinjobs. If it was an SV, there was no point in alerting it if it didn’t already know.

By instinct and hard-won experience, Alliance and Conglomerate soldiers both spread out into firing positions, ready to cover the upper levels and the other entrances to the comms deck. “Easy now, lads,” Sergeant Mallory told his people. “Easy...”

The Connie sergeant silently gestured for a pair of her men to advance up the nearest mezzanine stairwell. They moved like well-oiled machines, a comparison that would have been more welcome just a couple years ago. Just as they got halfway up, the lights across the comm deck went off.

A second later, emergency backups came on, cycling orange lights and glow panels bathing the room in an eerie citrine hue. Flashlights clicked on, spears of LED lighting cutting through the shadows like the polearms of an ancient Roman phalanx.

“What now?” Bahrain whispered.

It was Lorelai who answered. “They cut the power.”

Someone else answered in place of the private. It sounded like one of the Connies. “Oh, shit.”

No one heard the footfalls of the soldiers moving up the stairs, nor the hushed intake of breath when they reached the top, but every soul in that chamber heard their whispered report. “No contact, but someone was here. The door is open.”

“Captain,” Rashid said, his rifle up as he scanned the shifting shadows of the comm deck. “I think it might be time for us to go.”

The second door Nicholas did hear open, a grinding schff that suggested the mechanisms had needed maintenance even before it had been left untended for months. This one was on the ground floor. “I think you’re right...” he murmured. “Captain,” he said to D’Antonio. “Pull your men back.”

“The array...” the other man tried to argue. Kawalsky knew how he felt. That comm array was why they were here. It was their last chance to get off this planet. Giving it up so soon felt wrong, but they didn’t have a choice now.

Potter had been wrong. More than one of the SVs had gotten into the comm center.

“If they cut the power, we can’t use it anyways,” he replied. “We’re too exposed. We need to withdraw.”

The other man, his drawn expression turned ghastly by the emergency lighting, nodded. Before he could give any orders, they heard it. A child’s voice. A child here in the heart of the Alliance’s war efforts, where no child should be. The tone was small, frightened, alone and desperate. It was a little girl. Dirty, starved. Her clothes were torn and she clutched a ratty stuffed animal like it was the last thing she had in the world.

Nicholas couldn’t see a single one of those details, but the image was burned into his brain, just like it was for every other man and woman here, as were the words that it spoke.

“Can I come with you?”