Chapter 62
Three hours after the last blackship died, the Accord declared war on the Shine. They launched their invasion twelve minutes later.
They attacked every major shipyard and battleship that decades of intelligence-gathering could find.
Some they missed – deep-space blacksites and inter-system muster points – but they had the strategic flexibility to adapt.
The Accord had enough reserves to fling across the stars to counter the flailing of any half-singed survivors.
This attack wasn’t their full strength, not by any means – it was just a slap across the mouth.
It was hard to estimate casualties. Big numbers were thrown about. Far too big to have any real meaning. In the end, it was a picture that conveyed some of the scale of the thing to the minds of Accord civilians, watching on commcast hundreds of light years away.
The image was of the MMV Executoria, the largest and proudest of the Shine battleships, as it burned up in the atmosphere of Yu-mdo.
Escape pods pinged off its sides like fleas off the back of a longhorn cat, creating a slight graininess to the image.
Most of those pods also died, launched too late, their angle of descent through the planet’s atmosphere too steep, plasma gnawing through broken heat shields.
The Executoria was already dying before it began to burn, the blasted holes in its side having created enough force to slowly spin the vessel like a corkscrew as it descended, as if it might bore its way through cloud and sky.
The friction of its fall scraped away the metal of its hull in a trail of blazing sparks, snapped off modules, and finally cracked its spine in two.
It didn’t explode dramatically as it fell.
Rather it fractured into ever smaller parts, which picked up speed as gravity drew them in, creating an orbital ring of fire around the planet that burned for days and rained shards of metal down on the world below.
Very little of this metal struck anything habitable – Yu-mdo was mostly sea and arable land – but Shine propagandists showed images of dead children and shattered homes nonetheless, in an attempt to raise anger against these unprovoked invaders from above.
Some people rallied.
Most did not.
In the great cities, the Unionists emerged from their hiding places.
The twin suns were painted on the walls, the names Sarifi, Glastya Row, Cha-mdo were whispered, then muttered, then chanted in the streets.
The Accord didn’t bother to land troops; didn’t send anyone to invade.
They destroyed the Shine’s battlefleets and then sat in orbit, watching, waiting.
The cost, they concluded, of trying to send in occupying forces would be too great. Hundreds of thousands would die.
Hundreds of thousands of Accord soldiers, they meant.
Better by far to let the Shine tear itself apart.
Those of the Executorium who had made it to orbit in those first chaotic moments mustered what fleet they could from the remnants.
A little battle group of two frigates and a cruiser made it as far as Haima, where they threatened to nuke the whole planet unless the Accord sued for peace.
The Haima called their bluff, and after a tense stand-off of four days, marines boarded the Shine ships and took most of the crew alive, and without a fight.
On Nitashi, the Shine did kill a city.
Later investigations found no specific order had been given.
No grand plan was being fulfilled, no tactical advantage was gained.
It was the act of a small group of middling-senior officers who’d been stationed on the planet for the best part of ten years, who’d found the bodies of their juniors pinned to the wall, strangled with their own intestines.
Officers who’d had their loved ones threatened, their children held at gunpoint, blood thrown against their doors.
These same officers had, for every one of theirs who’d died, ordered the execution of ten more, but that was just business.
That was just war. If only their enemies would understand, if only they’d get it into their thick heads that the way of peace was of submission and obedience, none of this would be necessary. None of this needed to happen.
These officers were not thinking especially clearly by the time the Accord came to Nitashi.
They were as divided as the two minds of Rencki, when qe had been a fighting ship. One mind knew they were mad, divorced from all logic, reason or humanity. The other mind knew only blood, and that mind had the greater weight in their equations.
Thus: they killed a city. The city’s name was Ahrmret.
Only eighty thousand died in the initial blast. The remaining quarter of a million casualties died in the following days, from thermal and radiation burns that had blistered away their skin; from dehydration and starvation as the aid missions struggled to find a way through the rubble, struggled to raise tents, struggled with the sheer volume of the wounded, the dying, the dead.
It’s pointless.
It’s pointless.
It’s pointless, said the doctor.
All of this.
Everything we do.
All of this.
We can’t stop anything.
We can’t make enough of a difference.
It’s pointless.
The death of Ahrmret was the end of the occupation of Nitashi.
The Accord launched missiles from space against the remaining barracks and strongpoints of Shine occupation on the planet, oblivious to collateral damage.
Who cares who lives and who dies any more, the admirals said, so long as this thing ends. Not us. Not the people back home.
The Shine fought harder on Nitashi than it did on its own world. The soldiers there were used to death, had forgotten that there was any alternative. The Accord did what it had always done: it armed the Yeh’haim, and let them take the responsibility for slaughter upon themselves.
And I flew across the dark.
First I Piloted for Rencki, bringing supplies to the orbital blockade of Tu-mdo.
It was the first time I had been back to my home planet for…
… I couldn’t remember how long.
I looked down from orbit, and it seemed ordinary, patches of light and seas of dark, an anticlimax after all this time.
I did not land on the planet’s surface.
Instead, we listened, as the world ripped itself to pieces.
Unionists rebelled against Management, Management sent in Corpsec, Corpsec turned on Corpsec, Venture on Venture.
Some cities declared independence – started their own Ventures or their own Collectives or whatever the latest fashion was in the crazed raging that was a world breaking apart.
There were rumours of massacres, of course.
Civilians thrown into mass graves.
Bombs dropped and cities burning.
And still the Accord did nothing.
I transferred to a smaller ship, a courier vessel flitting between a dozen blockades and battle sites with cargos of encrypted data and senior officers who gave no name.
That way, I could be in the darkness more, in the quiet place, in the still place that felt like home, not having to think, not having to engage.
On one jump out to Ber-mdo we were intercepted by a scraggly remnant of a Shine patrol, swinging out from the craters of a blackened moon. Our little courier ship was lightly armed; I told the captain that, if she wanted, I could make our attackers die.
“I suppose we should,” she sighed. “I suppose it’s our duty.”
Threading through the dark, in and out of arcspace faster than a computer can track, precise and neat and ordered, jump-and-fire, jump-and-fire, until our enemies are dead.
Funny word, “enemy”.
Enemy implied that we cared about them, implied some sort of deep emotional relationship born from anger, vengeance, fear.
I supposed they were my enemy, the people I had just killed.
At least, they probably thought of me that way and it seemed polite to try and equal their sentiment.
I wondered whether the crew of the dead ship had believed in what they were doing, had screamed and whooped at the idea of killing us, or if they’d just followed an order because they couldn’t think of any other way.
In the dark, I call out to my creator.
Are you there?
Do you see me?
Am I interesting to you now? Did you mean for me to become this?
Nothing answers.
Nothing ever does.
And then, nearly two years after the Accord destroyed its fleets and blockaded its worlds, the Shine came to an end.
Yu-mdo was the first planet to turn, a government of national unity crawling out of the rubble of its shattered cities and broken fields.
Everyone agreed that this was not a coincidence, that the Accord had clearly been working towards this outcome in the background for years, and indeed, lo, the first elected minister of said authority was a Shine exile who’d lived the last twenty years on the Eyrie, and who spoke Mdo-sa with an accent that was slightly hard to place but whispered other, other, other.
Rebellions broke out against her as soon as she offered terms of surrender to the Accord. This time the Accord did land troops, to take the rebellion out – in support of the government of Yu-mdo, they added. In support of our new allies and friends.
Ber-mdo went next, then Tu-mdo.
The same patterns, the same surrenders, mutterings of peace, flares of violence, offers of support, aid, reconstruction.
“With the end of the Ventures and the destruction of the Executorium,” declared someone – another dignitary who claimed some sort of Unionist affiliation, someone dirty enough to take control, palatable enough that the Accord didn’t mind – “we can focus on what matters. We can focus on saving our world.”
Oh yes.
In all the fuss, in all the fire, I’d almost forgotten.
There is a black edge of destruction washing through the galaxy, sweeping towards the planets of the Shine.
It has already killed Adjumir, Cha-mdo, and still it’s coming.
It’s coming.
The end of the world, again.