Ren was still half-asleep when Adam started talking to her. She realized it right after she answered a question he hadn't even asked out loud.
"Mm."
"I wasn't talking to you," Adam said.
"Then stop talking out loud." She rested her forehead against the table next to her mug. "You do that. You start thinking inside your head and then half of it leaks out."
"Do I?"
"You've done it as long as I've known you."
Adam went back to his conversation with Sage.
Leave them where they are. Powered down, untouched. If a survey team checks this sector, I want it to look exactly like it did yesterday.
[ Understood. ]
Start on the designs, too. All of them. You have the human database, whatever is left in the lab, and an advanced production line. Figure out what we can actually build and take it slow.
[ Nine is asking for an objective. ]
It's asking?
[ It needs a parameter. If you don't give it one, it will pick whatever interpretation is closest and run with it. That's the exact logic that built ninety-one thousand androids nobody asked for. ]
Adam thought about that for a second.
Tell it we're not building a weapon. We're building something to protect the future.
[ That will work. ]
Ren raised her head. "Are we keeping Brandt in the dark?"
"For now."
"He's going to be pissed."
"Let him. He'll get it eventually."
"Fair enough," Ren said, and put her head back down on the table.
Nine hundred kilometers south, nine days into what the Commission was still calling a "mopping-up operation," Commander Ivo Tarr sat in his tent trying to explain to an IEC official why he wanted to pull his troops back.
"You want to retreat from a position you captured four days ago," the official said.
"I want to withdraw from a position they let me take four days ago," Tarr replied. He was sixty-one and sounded like a man who was tired of repeating himself. "There's a difference."
"They didn't give it to you. You fought for it."
"I walked onto it. There was nobody there," Tarr said, pointing at the map. "Look at the eastern approach. Two days of fighting, and on the second day, they just packed up and left. Now look here." He moved his finger to a dry basin. "Nothing in it. No plants, no supply lines, no water. Yet they threw four thousand soldiers into that empty hole and fought like it was their capital. I lost fifty-one men taking a useless ditch."
"So they made a mistake."
"They don't make mistakes like that."
Mirelle Delacroix stood by the tent flap holding a coffee cup. She looked out at the camp and spoke up without turning around. "He's right. You should listen to him."
The IEC official looked annoyed that she was involved, but leaned back. "Go on then."
"They aren't defending the belt," Tarr said. "They're buying time. They'll hand over any piece of dirt as long as it takes us a week to secure it, and they'll die over useless ground if fighting for it slows us down. That isn't a defense strategy. It's a stall tactic."
"Stalling for what? They only have two sectors left."
"I don't know."
"That's not much of an argument, Commander."
"No, it isn't," Tarr admitted, rubbing his tired eyes. "I've been doing this longer than you've been alive. Losing looks like this, sure. But desperate, losing armies make careless mistakes. These guys are just making every mile more expensive."
Mirelle took a sip of her coffee. "How much time do you think they've bought?"
"That's the big question, isn't it?"
Nobody had an answer for her.
Behind the field hospital, a terrible card game ran almost every evening.
The rules had been modified so many times that nobody outside the core group could follow them. Half the deck came from a completely different set with strange suits, and they were betting cigarettes nobody could even smoke inside the sealed tents. People played anyway. It was the only routine thing happening on this part of the front.
Emrik Sund walked over and sat down on an empty crate. He was an L8 but everyone treated him like a normal person because he liked it that way.
For a while, nobody said anything. Then the dealer, a Solan medic in her twenties who looked like she hadn't slept in a fortnight, looked up. "Do you know how to play?"
"No," Sund said.
"Want me to explain it?"
"Not really."
She dealt him in anyway.
Sund was fifty-one and looked every bit of it. Up close, he looked far less imposing than he did on the official posters. He had an old habit of rolling his left shoulder every few minutes, even though he technically hadn't had a physical shoulder in years. He lost four hands in a row on purpose, then accidentally won the fifth, looking genuinely annoyed that he'd won.
Eventually, someone asked the question everyone always wanted to ask him.
"Does it hurt? Turning into light?"
"No," Sund said.
"What's it feel like?"
Sund paused long enough that the game quieted down.
"It feels like dispersing," he said slowly. "You're still there. You can see everything around you. You just can't touch anything, and nothing can touch you."
"That sounds awful," the medic said.
"It's actually very peaceful." He played a card. "I've been living with it for a long time."
They played for another hour. Sund lost most of his cigarettes.
The enemy ship broke through the dust clouds on the eleventh day at four in the afternoon.
Tarr was out on the eastern line when the sky suddenly went dark, cut off by a massive metal ceiling hovering at nine thousand meters. The ship was two and a half kilometers long, its underside already glowing open.
Before Tarr could radio a warning, the comms relay went dead.
What happened over the next fifteen minutes was chaotic and brutal. Almost nobody who had a clear view of the whole scene survived it. Heavy beams rained down from above, vaporizing the landscape.
The ridge that allied squads had fought four days to secure was melted down to flat bedrock in less than a minute.
Tarr managed to pull two hundred soldiers out from the eastern perimeter. He remembered screaming at a young soldier who refused to abandon a supply truck, and he remembered the heat of the melting ground radiating through his boots. He remembered looking back once and seeing the secondary forward base simply gone.
Most of all, he remembered one terrifying detail that he couldn't stop thinking about afterward: the enemy ground forces weren't pushing forward.
The enemy hadn't been stalling to save their territory. They were stalling to force humanity's L7s to stay in one place.
When the trap sprung, Sund had already been in the air for eight minutes, zipping across the battlefield and pulling people out of the fire.
He moved with an easy, effortless speed. He would cross four kilometers in a second, grab three confused soldiers, drop them in a safe zone, and vanish again. Enemy fire passed right through his body without harming him. He was a Logia type, pure light, so physical attacks meant nothing.
At 4:08 PM, he flew directly beneath the main ship.
The trap went off. Forty-one power emitters, buried deep in the sand a week prior without anyone noticing, activated simultaneously in a three-kilometer ring.
Sund later said the worst part was how mundane it felt. One second he was weightless light; the next, he was just a solid man standing in the sand. There was no warning. His very first thought wasn't fear, but surprise that his boots were touching the ground again.
Before he could finish the thought, a heavy beam severed his left arm at the shoulder.
Sund collapsed into the sand. He tried to transform back into light, but the suppression field held him solid. He tried again, but nothing happened. With the ship hovering directly overhead, he knelt in the sand for four long seconds, pressing his remaining hand over the bleeding wound.
Emrik Sund had a technique he had only used four times in his entire life, and never in front of the public.
He didn't just generate light, people always got that wrong. He stored it inside himself, keeping it compressed like a quiet fire day after day.
He released all of it at once.
Tarr was thirty kilometers away, facing the opposite direction, when the ground beneath his feet lit up bright as day.
It wasn't a standard blast. Everyone who saw it said the same thing: a thick pillar of pure energy instantly cut upward, punching clean through the two-and-a-half-kilometer warship before anyone could even process what happened. The ship was simply deleted, and the beam kept going, punching straight through the heavy dust clouds and out into space.
High above the planet, eleven more enemy ships had been waiting in orbit. The attack caught the fleet, melting everything to slag.
Nobody on the ground knew they were up there until this attack, and it was only confirmed four days later, when the Commission managed to launch a drone through the gap in the clouds. The drone survived for nine seconds, just long enough to send back a photo of high orbit filled with floating debris moving at high speeds.
The enemy forces retreated within the hour.
Humanity pulled back too, because they had no choice. Both sides had taken more damage in fifteen minutes than in the previous four months, and neither had enough forces left on their feet to push the advantage.
The field hospital operated without a break for two straight days.
Mirelle Delacroix was brought in on the second morning, arguing with the orderlies from her stretcher. They thought she was fine until the medics cut her armor away and saw the extent of her injuries. She had been caught in the open when one of the ship's beams hit her position. She was going to survive, but that was all the doctors would promise for the first four days.
Sund stayed in his physical form for eleven straight hours afterward.
That had never happened before, and he didn't talk about it. But at three in the morning, the medic from the card game found him sitting on a wooden crate outside the medical tent, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his left sleeve hanging empty. She walked over and sat down next to him.
They sat in silence for a while.
"I'm going to be bad at this," Sund said eventually.
"At what?"
"Everything. Opening doors. Using cutlery." He looked down at his empty sleeve like it belonged to someone else. "I haven't had to live as a normal, physical person in a very long time. I'm going to be terrible at it. I already hate that part. Then people will flock to me trying to help and pity me."
The medic thought it over. "You could always just be an asshole to everyone."
Sund let out a short laugh, wincing as it pulled at his chest. He fell quiet after that, and she stayed sitting with him until the sun came up.
Back at Sector Nine, a sudden tremor shook the ground just after four in the afternoon. It knocked over a stack of metal trays in the newly finished canteen.
Nobody knew what caused it. The southern relay line went down and stayed down. Adam stood on top of the perimeter wall for a long time, staring out at the dust sky, which had turned an unnerving color he couldn't name. Eventually, he went back inside to work; there was nothing else he could do.
The casualty list came through the next night at 9:30 PM.
Adam read it in the elevator. When he reached his floor, he stood outside his apartment door and read it a second time, hoping it would change. It didn't. He opened the door and walked in.
Ren was sitting on the floor under the window, a bowl of food in her lap. She looked up and set the bowl aside.
"Who is it?" she asked.
"Four Level 7s."
"Adam..."
He crouched down beside her and handed her the tablet.
She scanned the screen quickly. He watched her eyes move across the text once, twice, three times.
"It says wounded," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
"She is tough," Adam added.
She nodded slowly, staring at the screen. "It doesn't say how bad."
"No."
"They never say how bad." She handed the tablet back and wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. "Right. Okay. I need to call someone. Who do I call?"
"I'll figure it out."
"No, I should do it, I just don't know who—" She stopped herself, taking a breath. "Sorry. Yeah. You find out."
He started to stand up to handle it, but she caught his sleeve as he moved past. Instead of leaving, Adam sat down on the floor right beside her, and the call waited a bit longer than needed.
AN: If we get to 100 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 300, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123