Quoted By:
>113+0+100
“I have spoken the words and mimed the motions; given myself to duty long before I understood what it truly meant.
But I think I understand now. As the RAIN’s acceleration constricts my vision into a narrow black tunnel, my mind reduces the situation down to its bare essentials:
An enemy before me and a home to defend. A friend beside me, and a weapon burning in my hand.
Humanity’s oldest test. Perhaps humanity’s only test.
The RAIN’s launch doors vent nitrogen coolant. Seekers stab at vacuum, returning a high-pitched lock-whine. The sampling needle pierces my hand for the fourth and final time, and I feel the staccato thump of a full missile barrage kicking out from the RAIN’s primary battery. MERRYGATE reports data backflow seconds after the last missile clears its launch cell. No more time. The momentum of her intrusion begins to fail as the probe brings the crushing totality of its computational strength against her.
And so, I push the engine even harder, and I remember that I am nothing more than flesh given life, life given mind, and mind given humanity. I respond with all the rationality and evenhandedness that my kind is known for: the sacrificial spite of Mars’ first colonists, and the stubborn tenacity of the six generations that followed.
Eight thousand kilometers. The laser emitters focus hard-UV on the probe until their excimer array flares cherry-red and undergoes catastrophic failure. Adaptive lenses deform and shatter, weeping molten glass into the RAIN’s burning drive-wake. I set the secondary launch bay to fire all four sensor-drones directly at the probe, their miniaturized fusion reactors set to critical overload.
MERRYGATE has given a part of herself. I have given a part of myself. And now the RAIN shares in our sacrifice – her eyes and ears blinded to eek out a final sliver of damage against our foe.
The missile barrage impacts. A trio of fusion detonations consume the probe and fuzz the RAIN’s sensors with fast-neutron radiation. A moment later, the antimatter missile dumps its entire submunition payload into a section of space no more than a five hundred kilometers wide. When they detonate in unison, the probe is immersed in a plasma field hotter than the core of an O-Type star.
