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.
