"Carpe Diem, Amate Draco"

Dicha was up before the sun as usual, but today she wasn’t going to work. In the gray light filtering through the closed shutters of her room’s window she dressed, not in the uniform of a counter-tending shop girl but in a far more practical outfit designed for hiking. Once dressed, she pulled the basket out from under her bed. Its dry wicker creaked a little, and she froze, though the noise was far too soft for her parents sleeping in the adjacent room to hear. The thing was heavy, laden with what Dicha had stored inside the day before - two loaves of good, thick bread, a half a wheel of cheese, a clay bottle of wine, and some sausage, along with a ceramic-bladed knife and a thin blanket.

Carrying it in front of herself with both hands, Dicha crept out of the room and made for the front door of the house, ears straining for any sound that would indicate that her parents or younger brother were awake. They would be expecting her to be heading off to the shop at this time of day, and the basket would give away the whole game.

After what seemed like forever, Dicha reached the door, and then she was past it. With a sigh of relief, she padded quietly toward the village’s north edge, homing in on the tall, white-barked Hava tree that stood not far from the last buildings, the pre-determined meeting point. Its thorny crown stood out against the partially-lit bulk of the mountains beyond, mountains whose equally white peaks were the winter snows’ last refuge from approaching summer.

Cade was already there when Dicha arrived, and the eastern horizon’s orange color suggested that dawn was imminent. He was pacing nervously when Dicha caught sight of him, and that made her smile. The boy was a year older than her, and far more cautious by nature, and though she found his constant worrying more than a little annoying at times it was at least as endearing as it was bothersome.

A moment after she saw him, Cade turned to pace another lap and saw her, and his thin face broke into a smile that completely wiped away the worry. “Dicha. There you are.” He stated the obvious. “I was beginning to think we’d been found out.”

Dicha dashed the remaining distance to her beau and set down the basket next to the roots of the old Hava tree. She put one arm around Cade’s shoulder, standing on tip-toe due to their difference in height. “If I’m going to get caught for doing something, I’m gonna get done doing it first.” She pointed farther into the woods, up the ground’s slope. “Now, c’mon.” She picked up the basket and put it into Cade’s hands before disengaging herself from him and, beckoning, jogging up-slope. Cade, no longer visibly worrying, but instead grinning slyly, followed, carrying the basket far easier than Dicha could.

After ten minutes, the pair slowed to a walk, letting the early morning quiet dominate the scene. Summer wouldn’t begin for weeks yet, but the trees and undergrowth already had most of their summer greenery back from winter dormancy. Most of the forest’s more dangerous plants would have their various vine tendrils, sticky traps, and maws ready for “customers” for almost a month, so the trip was more or less peaceful. Dicha dropped back to walk abreast with Cade, and the boy took the hint and encircled his fingers between hers. There was no real path through the woods, but Dicha didn’t worry about getting back - every child in the village was taught from an early age to follow that big Hava tree home if they got lost.

As the sun rose a bit, the two began to break the silence - Dicha did, anyway. Cade was an excellent listener, but he rarely said more than he needed to. Dicha liked that about him - he was the sort of person whom she felt could be trusted with any secret. The small talk eventually petered out, though - Dicha’s interest became regularly drawn to things she saw around her, and Cade seemed to prefer watching Dicha’s face light up as she spotted things of interest to filling the silence.

The forest finally started giving way to the scrubby, boulder-strewn terrain of the upper foothills about two hours before midday, and here Cade hesitated at the base of a dead Jeinu glue-tree. “Dicha, this is a bad idea.” He said. “Master Vourk said that anywhere bad enough to kill Jeinu trees is bad enough to kill people.” He kicked one of the dry, hard puddles of sap around the base of the stump, and the hardened stuff cracked open, oozing watery rot and a foul, deathly smell.

“Cade...” Dicha took him by the arm and pulled gently. “Master Vourk says a lot of things. Do you really think people come from another world, or believe the stories about dragons living far underground?”

Cade hesitated. “... No.” He replied hesitantly. ”They’re childrens’ stories. There are no such thing as dragons.”

”Exactly.” Dicha caught Cade’s gaze and held it, smiling confidently. ”Jeinu trees are tough, but everything dies. Look, there aren’t any trees at all farther up.”

Cade still didn’t look happy about it, but he did start walking again. Dicha knew he’d cheer back up - after all, she was nearby. She’d always found herself able to keep Cade in high spirits.

Now out of the thicker growth farther back, the two could see up the slope a longer distance. This part of the mountain was scattered with prickly burst bushes and the occasional colorful Legh shredder, but these plants’ hazards were short-ranged even at the peak of the season and were easily avoided. The ground was between these covered in patchy snapgrass, harmless enough as local plants went. Ahead, Dicha saw that the ground leveled off again at the base of a jagged, broken cliff face. She led Cade toward that, determining it to be a good place to stop. After all, it was an hour or so before midday now, and she was quite ready to stop.

As soon as the pair arrived at the cliff face, Dicha bounded ahead and seated herself on a large rock to save herself from the annoyance of sitting on snapgrass, patting the gray stone next to her. “This is perfect!” She gestured around to the cliff, scattered boulders, and flat stretch of snapgrass. ”No-one around... perfect weather... all day to ourselves.”

Cade took the hint and set the basket down in the grass, then stepped over and seated himself next to Dicha, casually putting his arm around her shoulder. ”And look, you can even see the village.” He pointed, and Dicha followed the gesture to a familiar white crown far downslope, next to which she could see a cluster of roofs barely visible around the canopy of the ever-present, predatory forest. ”We’re only, what, six miles from it? Five?” He said, as if to reassure himself, and gently drew Dicha closer to his side.

She didn’t resist the embrace - far from it, the girl’s face grew a sly smile and she turned to face Cade, their faces in close proximity. ”Far enough.” She whispered, and Cade took the hint (he was getting better at that) and kissed her.

Dicha responded enthusiastically, by Cade’s reaction a bit more so than he was expecting, and accidentally bowled Cade over and off the rock, despite her small size and slight build. The two were so tangled in each other that she fell too, and both landed heavily but harmlessly in the snapgrass. Dicha felt dozens of the plant’s stalks crush under her weight, and of course the surviving stems snapped their coils at both of them, but snapgrass couldn’t even draw blood on a newborn with its strikes. Dicha had to laugh, both at the plant’s futile snapping, and at herself and Cade for falling. Soon Cade was laughing too, and rather than get up they just lay there for several moments, the laughter subsiding to chuckles, and then petering out entirely. Dicha stayed perfectly still, laying on her back, until the snapgrass’s primitive reactions subsided, content to stare up at the clear midday sky and the cliff looming over her. She focused on a shadow near the top - a hollow, or perhaps a cave?

Cade rolled over then, stirring the grass back into its bothersome fit of fruitless stinging, and got to his knees, offering a hand to Dicha to help her up as well. She took it, letting Cade help her to her feet, then without missing a beat, she jogged a few yards farther back from the rock face and craned her neck up to look at the shadowed spot. From the new perspective, Dicha was sure the shadow was a cave. ”Hey Cade, think we can climb to that?” She pointed.

Cade looked, shielding his eyes from the sun. ”I suppose?” He replied cautiously. ”If we get hurt this far from town...”

”Cade, you can’t always think about the worst case.” Dicha walked back toward him while he was looking up toward the cave, and put her arms around his neck from behind. ”Come on, think of the view from up there. And the privacy.” She drew out the last word suggestively.

Cade didn’t need to be hinted in this direction twice. ”I suppose that climb won’t be too bad.” He said with mock resignation.

Dicha kissed the back of his neck and let go, grabbing Cade’s hand as she ran around him and pulled him toward the cliff face. Its jagged, irregular surface, she decided, would make the climb more of a scramble, and she was already mentally mapping a path up the outcroppings and ledges in its face.

Dicha had scrambled up to the first ledge large enough to sit on, about eleven feet up, before she realized Cade was still at the bottom, standing over the picnic basket with his arms crossed, looking up at her Dicha pursed her lips in thought - she’d forgotten the bulky container, and it seemed a shame to have to leave it.

Cade, though, pointed past Dicha and picked up the basket with his other hand. ”Put it there.” He stepped below her and held it up as high as possible. It barely reached the height to which Dicha’s feet dangled. Seeing this, Cade tossed the basket up the last two feet to Dicha’s waiting hands. The weight nearly wrenched her from her perch (which elicited a gasp from Cade), but Dicha just laughed and got the basket into position, then climbed up to the next stopping point.

In this manner, the pair juggled themselves and the basket all the way up to the shadowed spot Dicha had spotted. Exhausted from the climb, they sat for over a minute at the mouth of the opening, looking out over the mountainside and the wooded hills below. Eventually, Cade started unpacking the basket, spreading out the blanket and taking out the food Dicha had packed. While he did so, Dicha rose to her feet and walked a few paces back into the cave, curious as to how far it went. As she moved farther from the light streaming in the entrance, she became aware of another source - a faint, golden illumination from around the cave’s curvature. ”Cade, there’s light back there.” She said, turning around.

Cade cut off a chunk of cheese and got up, meeting Dicha part-way inside to see what she was referring to. After a moment of letting his eyes adjust (during which time he munched on the cheese in silence), Cade nodded. “Yeah. Maybe it has another entrance farther up?” He suggested.

Dicha shook her head. ”Don’t think so. Come on, let’s look.” She put her hand to one wall as a guide and, with careful steps, proceeded toward the light.

”Dicha, wait...” Cade started, but apparently decided she wasn’t going to be deterred and followed, equally carefully.

After about twenty steps in almost pitch-darkness, when even Dicha began to worry that the next step would put her foot into a hidden chasm in the rock, the tunnel again began to lighten. As Dicha finished navigating the curved tunnel, she saw that the light was coming from around another bend a little ways farther in, this one tight and abrupt. In addition to the light, which looked to be as bright as a bonfire but not flickering, she began to notice heat - not unpleasant as much as soothing. Dicha inched up to this abrupt corner and peeked around to see what the light was coming from.

The chamber beyond was bright - dazzlingly so, and the heat that bombarded her face was stifling, somehow without losing the soothing character that it had farther back. Dicha saw a silvery ovoid object sitting in a depression in the center of the space, surrounded by a ring of glowing, coruscating yellowish crystals - the source of the golden light - their points all facing in toward the ovoid object. To Dicha, the ring looked like nothing more than the nests built by egg-hens owned by some of the villlagers. The object itself was smooth to the point of being reflective, like the constable’s ceremonial armor, but dotted with splotches of matte brown, almost like rust. Not that any constable would ever let his ceremonial garb rust.

A touch on her arm reminded Dicha of Cade’s presence. She pulled back from the corner and turned to face him. ”What’s in there?” He whispered.

”You tell me.” Dicha stepped back, and Cade took a turn glancing in for a long moment. When he turned back, he had an expression of characteristic worry on his face, which Dicha frowned on. ”Let’s go, Dicha.”

”What?” Dicha put out a hand to stop him. ”What is it?”

”Looks like a nest.” Cade replied quietly. ”For something big.”

Dicha nodded excitedly. ”I thought so too!” She pushed past Cade. ”Too bad it isn’t. Nothing lays eggs that big.”

”Dicha, wait - ” Cade tried to grab her arm, but missed, and Dicha, swimming against the heat-thickened air, headed toward the ring of crystals.

Up close, Dicha got a better sense of scale. The ovoid was about as high as her knees, and the crystal ring, though irregular, came up to perhaps two thirds of that height.

”Dicha!” Hissed Cade from the entrance. ”What are you doing?”

Dicha turned around to respond. ”Cade, there’s nothing dangerous here.” She smiled reassuringly, beads of perspiration from the heat forming on her forehead. ”Look.” With a deft hop, she was inside the ring, and when she turned back to Cade he had a look of horror on his face. ”Oh, come on, Cade, there’s nothing that lays eggs this big and we both know it.” She reached out and rested her palm on the ovoid object, withdrawing it immediately when it proved to be as hot as a stockpot over a cook-fire. ”Ow.” Dicha muttered, nursing her slightly singed palm.

The ovoid shuddered, and Dicha could feel it in her feet. She stepped back in surprise, and the cuff of her pants snagged on one of the crystals, bowling her back over the ring onto her back. The crystals were hot too, and Dicha could smell the cloth of her pants singing before she rolled her legs onto the stone floor.

”You all right?” Cade asked, at her side in an instant, heedless of the danger, offering her a hand to help her up.

”Yeah... It moved.” Dicha said to Cade, more curious than afraid still, as he lifted her to her feet. ”Careful, it’s all hot.” She gestured to the crystals and the egg-like object.

Just then, the object made a rattling sound, and its silvery exterior became a spiderweb of cracks. Dicha and Cade both looked at it, just in time to see the shattered pieces of the shell break apart and fall away from something covered in yellowish goo and squirming.

”It was an egg!” Dicha gasped in amazement, not really feeling any fear of anything that was just born.

Cade, though, tugged her back. ”Let’s go. Now.” He pulled Dicha back.

”Wait, let’s see - ” Dicha started to protest, but a warbling chirp from the squirming thing interrupted them both. A long, snouted head on a spindly neck rose from the morass, still dripping golden ichor, and fixed two huge eyes on Dicha. Underneath the fluids, the creature’s head was covered in shiny, silver scales.

Untangling itself, the ungainly creature clambered over the crystals, seeming to ignore their heat, slowly approaching her. It had four legs, a serpentine body ending in a long tail, and two batlike wings folded up on its back. Dicha recognized the shape immediately, though it was Cade who hissed its name. ”Dragon!” before pulling Dicha back again. It wasn’t very large - perhaps five feet long, most of its length being neck and tail.

”Cade, wait.” She pulled her arm from Cade’s grasp and held her hands out to the creature, which cocked its head curiously. Despite the stories of these creatures destroying whole villages, Dicha thought it was rather adorable. ”I’m not going to hurt you.” She said, in the same tone she used for talking with young children in the shop.

The dragon seemed to understand, because it closed the distance and nuzzled its nose against Dicha’s hand. She flinched, expecting it to be as hot as the egg it came from, but found its skin to be no warmer than the air in the chamber, though it did leave her hand and forearm smeared with sticky goo.

Dicha giggled a little, shook off the goo, and stroked the top of the dragon’s scaly head gently. It responded with a chirped pleasure note and wrapped its body around her legs, extending its head up to allow Dicha better access to continue. She looked over to Cade, who wore what she thought was a rather comical confused expression, his brow furrowed as his brain processed what he was seeing. ”Okay, so Vourk’s right about some things.” Dicha admitted. ”But he’s not gonna believe this!”

This story written for Klazzform's Short Story Competition on dndonlinegames.com.

"The Ends of Worlds"

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. None of us set out with this end in mind. By the time anyone finds this, if anyone finds this, I will be long dead, along with the rest of us few who remain but someone’s got to tell our story. I suppose there’s no-one left to remember it now if we don't take steps to do so. It's the story of how Earth died, and our part in killing it.

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.