Quoted By:
“Pinpricks of white expand into amber globes. Antimatter starshine punches dazzling afterimages into my vision.
Nothing is left to chance. Major population centers are struck in triplicate. Hardened targets buckle under successive hits until they are stripped down to glowing mantle. Radioactive isotopes swirl in lukewarm seas, carried by the same currents that once seeded their depths with verdant life and then nourished it to sentience.
Below the polar cross, I watch hundreds of spawning creches wilt under the light of a stillborn sun. Soft-splintered glass floats to the ocean surface, forming snowy drifts the size of icebergs. In the warm southerlies, a yawning undersea reef cracks and buckles as two dozen shock fronts converge beneath its base. With deceptive slowness, the archipelago-chain collapses down into the murky depths of the planetary ocean.
When the light fades, my vision meets ash-chocked clouds and slate-grey oceans. Craters shine young and cherry-red, molten from the volcanic force of our bombardment.
And then I see rain. True rain. Rain liberated by the boiling oceans and carried by the turbulent updraft of thermonuclear detonation. It cascades back down in cold, quenching waves, washing over the resting place of thirty billion alien inhabitants and the sum total of their natural history.
The mission is complete. Our promise is fulfilled. Humanity has been avenged. And yet…and yet…
I stop myself. I turn around to meet MERRYGATE’s gaze. Her wireframe is still cherry-red from computational overload, and I can hear the roar of her server banks as they push waste heat into the RAIN’s radiator banks. The tang of heat-stressed plastic and overworked metal mixes with the cloying scent of blood and acceleration gel.
Before I manage to say anything, MERRYGATE places her static-laced hands on either side of my face, tiling my head towards a familiar patch of open sky.
My eyes dart across serpentine Hydra to wide-winged Corvus, from dim Centuari to valiant lupus-brothers. But my home-star is still blinded to me.
Sol is dark. Sol is blank.
MERRYGATE’s avatar rematerializes in front of me, her gaze steady. Slowly, she obscures the blank space with her hand.
“Not yet, companion. Not until we can see our home with our own eyes.”
- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, DECEMBER 13th, PERSONAL JOURNAL//VOICE DICTATION
