Aftermath Read Free

strike, and we’re done. But she flies like other people dance, and even negotiating the burn as we fall planetside, she manages to skew us away from the incoming barrage. I can only watch; I’ve done my part, and the rest is up to Hit. Her constant maneuvering makes for a rocky reentry; she can’t calculate the best angle and take care with the ship hardware, so I watch the ground sail toward me at insane speed and fight the urge to close my eyes. The flagship shoots wide, its missiles zooming past us toward the ground. Ha. Missed.
    The clouds whip past, and the tiny dots on the ground resolve into lines, then trees; the green-and-brown patchwork sharpens into the lines of my mother’s garden. In the distance I glimpse the blue shine of the sea, but several alarms flash red, and a low whine fills the cockpit. The small ship rattles as if it might break apart entirely. I do shut my eyes then.
    Our vessel goes into a low roll as we near the ground; impact flings me forward, but the harness catches me. I’ll have bruises to show for this most recent bit of insanity, but that doesn’t seem like enough damage. I should have new scars. I risk a look and find we’re upside down, but more or less in one piece, outside the hangar. I don’t know who’s more surprised, Hit or me. She flashes me a triumphant grin and a high sign.
    “Pretty fragging good, right?”
    “Maybe the best I’ve ever seen,” I admit.
    She winks. “I won’t tell March.”
    We’ve burned out the stabilizers, but otherwise, we did remarkably well. Maybe only a tiny ship like this one could’ve gotten past the vanguard of the Morgut fleet. I imagine the rest of them lost in grimspace, trying to interpret the new signal and failing. They’ll die there, no matter how powerful they are or how indestructible their dreadnaughts.
    “Does the comm still work?”
    “It should.”
    I set it to Tarn’s personal code and bounce a message at the highest priority. “Don’t let any Conglomerate ships jump. They won’t be able to interpret the new beacon frequency without instruction. Give coordinates for a central meeting point and instruct them to make their way via long haul. Doesn’t matter how long it takes . . . It’s better than being lost. I’ll explain everything fully when I see you.”
    Not content with toppling the closest thing we had to a stable government, I’ve now crippled interstellar travel. But it was for a good cause. I’m still positive I did the right thing, no matter what they do to me later. If it means prison time or execution, I’m not sorry. Someone had to make the tough call, and I was there.
    The doors are jammed from the rough landing and don’t respond to the computerized controls, so Hit and I kick our way out. Before I exit, I snag the small survival pack that’s included in ships like this one. My limbs still feel weak as I pull myself up; I’m not prepared for the wreckage that greets us. Oh, not from our ship. All around us, the jungle burns, black smoke swirling toward the sky. Stone rubble constitutes all that’s left of the villa, just a bombed-out shell with broken walls rising no more than two meters anywhere. Cracks web the foundation, charred black, and I can smell death in the air. It’s not a scent you forget.
    “They weren’t shooting at us,” I realize aloud.
    Hit shakes her head. “I should have realized. Those weren’t ship-to-ship weapons . . . though if we’d been hit, they would’ve vaporized us just the same.”
    As we rocketed toward the ground, the bombardment began. What I’d taken for lasers being fired at our stern had been photon missiles from the flagship, aimed at decimating the ground. The wrongness hits me then—because we left, we lived. Survival feels like cowardice.
    I can’t see the point in destroying such a beautiful, defenseless place, but I’m not Morgut. Maybe this devastation serves their master plan, or it’s simple retaliation for our defiance. Millions of