Perhaps though I should start at the beginning, with the draft. It was in the spring of 2562 when the Homeworld Authority started sending out the notices, and I was more excited than afraid when I got that message. The media centers had been blasting the news for weeks by then: that the colony set up at Alpha Centauri had declared its independence in radio messages only recently received by Earth. They’d declared the Authority a tyranny and dredged up to replace it some eight-centuries old philosophy from contraband documents that someone had smuggled onboard the colony ships. This obviously could not stand - the Authority bent its will to building the Colonial Pacification Fleet the moment that transmission was received.
They trained us for two years, at first on simulators and later in the newly constructed warships - hundreds of them. Eric Hadley, my ship, was of the most common class, so even before it was done I got trained on the guns of several of its sister ships. There was no rush - after all, the colonists had sent the transmission four-plus years before it got to Earth, and it would take a good nine years for any fleet to get there, but as far as the colonists knew, it would take closer to thirty. See, the Authority had come out with a new engine, much faster - it couldn’t break the speed of light, nothing could, but it could get to point six.
We set off to a great fanfare, the armada launching simultaneously from Earth orbit in an unrivaled display of engine flares, and we all felt good - surely no mere colony could stand up against the might of mother Earth. We all knew the orders - if the colony could not be intimidated back into control, it would be wiped out, and new colonists would be sent.
The trip was dull, at least for me - some of the men had psych issues, staring at nothing but black out the windows every day for so long. The medtechs were quick to medicate those, and they were never really the same after that, but at least they stopped panicking. I suppose with as many gigawatts of laser power and as many megatons of fission missiles as each ship had, this sort of thing was sensible - couldn’t have a gunner, or Director forbid an officer, going unstable. That could ruin the whole venture, painting a fireball so bright that the colonists couldn’t help but be warned we were coming. Even some of those who didn’t lose it started to avoid looking out into space where possible, as if superstitious avoidance of the reality of our location would save their sanities.
At least relativity was our friend. See, when you get going that fast, it slows your relative time, so onboard each ship the clocks only counted about four years. That was still a long time, of course, so every day we ran one, sometimes two drills, to keep our training fresh and to keep us busy.
Deceleration was more abrupt than acceleration - Admiral Mathis had instructed each captain to wait until the last possible minute to decelerate, as doing so would require turning each ship’s blazing engine-flare toward Centauri. Even through the compensators, you could feel the pull aft with every step. After a week of that, though, the fleet had slowed itself such that it could enter the Centauri system without overshooting.
They had warships of a sort there, even more than fifteen years before they could have expected us - a dozen or so fair-sized asteroids studded with gun decks and powered by huge, lumbering fusion drives. The Admiral called for them to surrender, but those asteroid dreadnoughts opened fire on us instead. The battle was furious, but short - the colonists’ asteroid battleships were tough and well-armed, but the Pacification Fleet outnumbered them fifty to one or more. We suffered steep losses, but it only took about half an hour of fighting to crack those asteroids open and rupture their reactor plants.
The asteroid ships had some sort of escape pods, so some ships from the Fleet took on a few survivors for questioning, Hadley among them. I never spoke to the prisoners myself, being only a gunner, but I heard the officers talk about them. The rebels were adamant, and despite their defeat none of them could be made renounce their rebellious ways and swear allegiance to the Homeworld Authority. Eventually, the Captain had them all executed for treason, and he had the crew watch.
I was surprised when the vidscreens at my post came on to show the condemned that one of them was a woman who must have been quite attractive before the bruises and other injuries inflicted during her interrogation. The Captain performed the executions himself with his sidearm, one at a time, and the woman was last in line. After each, he asked the remainder if they would renounce their rebellion. Part of me spent the whole spectacle begging that woman to take the opportunity, where none of her compatriots did, and another part spent it chiding the first part for letting physical attraction play a part in things - I’d seen other men punished for lesser conflicts of interest, when they were so careless as to let them show.
She looked the Captain in the eye as he pronounced her death sentence, and asked her one last time if she would relent. She took a shaky breath to reply, and my heart leapt as the Captain’s gun lowered a little. We all thought she was going to renounce the colony’s rebellion. The words that came from her mouth weren’t a surrender, though. Rather, she called out a rebel slogan, something about liberty or death. She looked like she was going to say more, but the Captain shot her immediately, and then emptied the rest of his gun’s charge into her charred corpse for good measure. When I went back to the saved replay of the execution ceremony later, her last words had been cleverly excised, and despite that being proper for such rebel poison I thought it somewhat a shame. She’d had guts, not to mention looks, and those were both things I could respect.
The colony didn’t put up too much of a fight after that. I suppose they were probably expecting us to land and take the place the old-fashioned way, but after having his order for surrender flatly refused, Admiral Mathis gave the weapons-free order. By laser and missile the remainder of the fleet turned every sign of civilization on that rock into glowing rubble, shot down every satellite and station that orbited it, and even turned the cannibalized hulks that had centuries before been colony ships into dust and slag.
Mathis and a few others went down to plant the Homeworld Authority’s symbolic flag in the dirt in the middle of what used to be the planet’s largest city. Mathis had one of the men take a vid-recorder and broadcast the whole thing to the fleet. In front of everyone, dressed in his yellow radiation suit, he unfurled the banner of the Homeworld Authority, with its wireframe-globe emblem, and stabbed the base of its pole into the charred dirt. It flapped gloriously for about ten seconds before the wind picked up and blew a cinder hail over the site, which didn’t bother the radiation-suited men, but did riddle the flag so full of holes that the thing looked more like the colors of the losing side than the winning one. The video ended there, with the ragged, burnt Authority flag, and Mathis standing beside it, gesturing at the cameraman to stop recording.
Lacking further orders, Mathis sent word of our success back to Earth, and ordered the fleet to prep for the long haul back to Earth. It took us a month to make what was left of the fleet ready for interstellar travel, but through scavenging the wrecks and the most damaged ships for parts we were able to do it. We all chipped in, taking shifts suiting up and cutting parts off of derelicts at the techs’ direction, or helping use salvaged parts to repair battle damage to still-operational ships. It was during that process that when a salvage team found the device.
No-one knew what it was, at first - the sealed, unmarked black box someone found attached to the computer of one of the ships that’d been split open in the battle. It had been buried inside a bulkhead right next to the computer core, plugged right into the back of the computer - and it wasn’t on any schematics of any ship.
What exactly it did no-one bothered to tell anyone as low-ranking as a gunner, but Mathis ordered techs on all the ships to locate such devices, and sure enough, they found one hidden behind the computer core of every single ship. Tech teams tore each and every one out, and each was jettisoned into space. We thought that was the end of it, and soon enough the fleet’s engine flares again pushed us all back into the interstellar void, back toward Earth. Most of us thought we’d return to a hero’s welcome - after all, we’d completed what we’d set out to do. The Homeworld Authority’s dominion was secure.
The return trip was a good deal more relaxed - Mathis ordered that drills would be reduced to once per week, and though we still had to be on duty the atmosphere was laid back, satisfied. After all, humanity had had its first interstellar war, and we were the returning victors. There weren’t near as many psych cases on the trip home, as I recall.
By fleet reckoning, we started to decelerate three days before my thirtieth birthday, but something like nineteen years had passed on Earth. What we did not expect was to be met in the outer system by newer, sleeker warships that ordered the fleet to halt. The new ships were no bigger than Hadley, and outnumbered thirty to one, so I thought them to be a sort of escort, or honor guard. Their ships and ours drifted idly while Admiral Mathis spoke with their commander. We all thought that this was just a formality, and that we’d be on our way home soon. When the order to fire on those ships, we were all surprised, and I’m sure many of us hesitated - but enough of the fleet trusted Admiral Mathis that our ragged opening salvo wiped out every last one.
It was then that the Admiral took to fleet-wide comms to explain what was going on. He told us that the black boxes he’d ordered removed from each ship were self-destruct mechanisms, and that the ships that we’d just killed had been sent here to broadcast the signal to trigger those mechanisms. Rather than welcome us home, the Authority had planned from the beginning to eliminate us to reduce the risk of us carrying home any of the colony’s infectious propaganda, according to Mathis. We trusted him instinctively, and the fleet moved as one again towards Earth. I’m not sure even Mathis knew why - we had nowhere else to go, of course, but it should have been obvious to us that the Authority would not let us simply come home after what we had done to its cleanup crew.
More ships scrambled to meet us, new, powerful things, but they were outnumbered - the Authority apparently hadn’t invested in as many warships after the Pacification Fleet had been launched. We took losses, but each wave of defenders burned and fell behind us, cooking in the fires loosed by their own ruptured reactors. Finally, the Fleet loomed over Earth itself, much as we’d loomed over the rebels’ world at Alpha Centauri. We were down then to about half the number of ships that we’d been when we’d decelerated into Centauri, but still the firepower that Admiral Mathis had pointed at the planet was staggering. We didn’t know that down there on Earth, thousands of missiles designed to repel a rebel attack were being readied instead to destroy us.
The Admiral broadcast a request for cease-fire, on open channel so the fleet and anyone listening on Earth could hear it. It was a long-winded, diplomatic affair, which ultimately was met with silence, followed by the peal of missile lock alarms on every ship in the fleet as Earth’s ground-based defenses sprung into action.
What did they expect us to do? Those of us manning lasers fired on the missiles before any order could possibly be given. We even got some of the things, but every beam continued on, past the advancing missiles, to burn the planet’s surface. As we desperately fired to save ourselves, millions below died. I think if we’d had a second to think about it, we might have held our fire, but we’d drilled for a decade on those guns, and instinct took over.
The Admiral’s orders came as we were firing our second salvo at the oncoming projectiles, and each ship swung into position to dodge at the last second, down toward the planet. The Authority, the Admiral hysterically explained into the comms, would disable its missiles when they were burning back toward the planet. They had to.
Just before the laser turrets recharged for the fourth salvo, Hadley executed its juke, using its main engine to blow right past the oncoming missiles before they could correct course. Not all the ships in the fleet pulled it off - several died in thermonuclear fireballs as scores of missiles found their mark. The remaining missiles arced around, turning to again seek the Fleet, and again we fired on them, this time the stray beams bit nothing but space.
As I lined up each shot, I heard the Admiral, still on open channel, begging the Authority for everyone’s good to scrub its missiles, that his ships were well into the upper atmosphere. No-one replied. Thinking back on it, I am pretty sure no-one was alive to - a lot of missiles came from the area around Central, so we probably cooked the Authority’s command center by accident with the first volley.
We fired and fired, eight salvos. Nine. I thought we’d get a tenth, but the missiles were too quick. We did good, too, but not good enough - I think had every beam in those last five volleys burned one missile, we still would have not gotten them all. About half of the missiles got through. Hadley was hit only once, and didn’t quite die, but from my turret I watched the fleet die a thermonuclear death around us and fall burning toward the already-scorched Earth, along with hundreds of missiles whose targets had already been destroyed.
Hadley, despite the damage, had enough left in her to limp into a stable orbit before the engines quit. A few of the other ships survived too, but not many - Mathis’s Lavorne, the fleet’s largest ship, seemed to have weathered the storm the best, but she was losing atmosphere from several large, gaping wounds and her engines were visibly sputtering. Besides Lavorne and Hadley, nine other ships pulled through, none unscathed.
We survivors turned our gazes down then, and watched Earth, the planet where we all grew up, die. Between the wrecks’ meteoric reentry and the radiation from hundreds of reactors and thousands of fission warheads, little was spared. Earth burned below us, and we few survivors could only watch.
That was two years ago now. We’ve been in orbit ever since, all eleven surviving ships docked and welded together to pool resources. As it is, we’ve got probably two months of supplies left. We’ve watched Earth’s death throes, watched blue and green turn to gray and brown. We’ve watched our world die.
Humanity’s not dead, not everyone. We still pick up signals from the Mars base from time to time, and there were probably still a few colony missions still in transit - but even if we had the power to get to those people they would never welcome us. After all, they can see what we did. So we stay in orbit around Earth, guarding its lifeless body because we’ve nothing left.
Of all the things to spend my time thinking about now, I find myself trying to remember that rebel woman's last words, the ones cut from the recording. She deserves to have them recorded somewhere. But I no longer remember, and no-one else that I've asked can either. It's strange, how that bothers me more than the fact that I'm going to die in a few months when our supplies run out.
Though, I suppose if there is any sort of afterlife I might get the chance to ask her about it...
This story written for Klazzform's Short Story Competition on dndonlinegames.com.
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