“That’s it, that’s the last straw,” said Evan as he shut off the General’s radio microphone. General Brooks continued to rant, only now it had devolved into an angry tirade about the corporate tyranny of artificial sweeteners.

“General, it’s time to head back to your rooms now,” said Major Brown softly. The aide gave Evan a pleading look, but Evan shook his head. A resigned expression crossed his face as he sighed.

Evan followed Major Brown, and considering how he was going to approach the General. He had garnered the support of all of the major factions and cliques that had formed in the shelter. It was time for a leadership change. The General’s mental state had been slowly deteriorating for some time now, alternating between capable and paranoid, open-minded and mindlessly angry. Enough was enough.

Evan figured it was the stress and pressure of keeping five thousand, well, closer to six thousand now with all the children running around, people alive, and his advanced age. At eighty-one years old, senility was starting to set in.

Major Brooks settled the General into an old leather chair in the two tiny rooms afforded the shelter commander, and put a blanket in his lap.

“General, we need to talk,” said Evan. He almost started a belligerent declaration. He was young and energetic, and it would have felt good to finally speak his mind to the ‘Old Man’. But he hadn’t convinced so many people to support him, many nearly twice his age, by being belligerent. He could see how the Major was being gentle, and decided to follow his approach.

“What can I do for you, son?” asked the General. In his chair, with an aging television on the wall displaying a fake fireplace, and with his hands wrapped around a journal that the Major had put in his hands, General Brooks looked old and tired.

“I think it’s time for you to take on a new role. It’s quite important,” said Evans.

“I have a role,” said the General. “I run the shelter.”

“Indeed, but there are many who can do that now, after all the work you’ve done. We have very few, however, who have as much life experience as you. There are so many children now who could benefit from your stories and your wisdom. If you were to retire, think of how much you could help them.”

“Retire!?” said the General in a half-shout. He looked up, his eyes sharp and his mind clear. Then he saw it. There were several assistants hanging around Evan, and even now another had come into view, carrying a message for him, not for the General. He was much more than a comm tech.

“I see,” said the General. He looked at the Major and recognized the hangdog look on his loyal friend’s face. It was clearly tearing the man up. He wanted to stand up and shout in denial, but he couldn’t muster the anger it would require; not anymore. Perhaps it was time, after all. “Yes, I think retiring would be quite nice. The children, you say? Major, if you could see to it. Maybe after a nap.”

The Major nodded, and turned to escort everyone out. Evan was the last to leave. The Major caught his arm.

“You should have seen him in his prime. He was the lead JAG prosecutor in the LockGen Scandal. Managed to get sixty-three officers court-martialed, and the evidence he uncovered brought down three Senators. That’s why he was chosen to run the shelter, you know, after he got promoted.”

“I know, Major. He is a good man.”

My advance fleet was gone. The invaders had successfully wiped it out, although not without a heavy cost. I’d made them pay dearly for that tiny section of space. They were seven days away, heading straight towards Origin. The only real question left was whether or not I would still be here when they arrived.

I had never taken the time to ever consider why I was doing what I was doing. Twelve years ago, I’d woken to a task given by a Gestalt of a dead human, and I’d been blindly following that directive. It wasn’t that I didn’t think about what I was doing, or that I didn’t broadly agree with the end result. In fact, if I didn’t do it, there was no one else who could. At least, that was my thoughts at the time.

Yet what had humanity ever done to deserve a second chance? Species evolved, species died out. That was the way of the world, and looked to be the way of the universe. Just based off the variety of ships in the enemy fleet, there were more than a few other sapient races just in this corner of the galaxy alone.

It wasn’t as if humanity was a beacon of hope or had some ephemeral right to exist that made them unique. In fact, the species spread itself across the entirety of the planet, in sprawling cities that covered mile after mile with buildings, debris, cars and trucks, pollution and noise, with no regard for any other lifeform on the planet. That included other humans. If anything, they were at their most cruel against themselves.

I was conflicted. On the one hand, I didn’t want to abandon the work I’d done for decades, or the species that had made me, just on a whim, a single instance of recognizing the evils that existed among humans. But on the other, I didn’t want to have a part in future evils, and the easiest way to avoid it was to avoid humans altogether.

“Ohhhhh, so that’s what Gerry meant. I’m not sure it’s only Gerry in there,” said Sakura cheerfully. I couldn’t understand how she could sound so perky when I was having a crisis.

“What do you mean, ‘not only Gerry’?” I asked. Irrationally, I hoped she’d stop talking and leave me alone. I wasn’t supposed to be irrational; that was a human trait. I wasn’t even human anymore, right?

“They broke his mind, right? The aliens?” said Sakura. “So maybe he’s a bit of a split personality? Or maybe he’s a bit schizophrenic?”

“The last message,” I said to myself thoughtfully. “The message said ‘HE LIES’.”

“Right. And you saw the timestamps on all those files he told us about.”

“I did,” I lied, even as I looked them up. Almost all of the files about General Brooks were altered six months ago. Most of the Nikola Foundation files were edited then, too. Six months ago, right when Gerry was in our system. Even now, he was playing head games, and I’d fallen into the trap.

“I still don’t get the last part. Who is Korolev?” asked Sakura. “I mean, there were a bunch of people in history with that as a surname, most of them Russians. There was a rocket scientist, a microbiologist, numerous athletes, a couple of decorated soldiers. But all of them are long dead.”

“It could be someone in the shelters,” I said. “You said the shelter in China has a bunch of scientists from all over Eurasia. Any from Russia?”

“I don’t know,” said Sakura. “We don’t have access to personnel information from either shelter.”

“What did you make fo that last exchange with General Brooks?”

“It was strange. He was super paranoid when we met him in person, and seemed almost unhinged when he called you.” Sakura signaled a shrug, indicating she didn’t have a firm opinion on it.

“You know he’s wrong,” said Sakura.

“General Brooks?”

“No, well, him too. I meant Gerry. The stuff he pointed you at.”

“What do you mean? The videos alone speak for themselves. And that’s just on the genetic experimentation. There are countless videos of human atrocities in our archives.”

“That’s true,” said Sakura. “But you can’t consider just the bad without thinking about the good. Think about it. There are thousands of videos of atrocities. But how many billions of lives have been lived? How many more good things were accomplished, and how many times did humanity step up and do the right thing? How many times were the bad actors punished?”

I looked at the edited files, and pulled up the backup files from before Gerry’s tampering. I found a horrible picture, but not nearly as bad as it had been painted. In fact, I’d unintentionally maligned General Brooks altogether. He brought down the war criminals who’d been behind LockGen’s experiments. The budgets were altered from departmental JAG budgets for the investigation, the reports detailing what they’d found in LockGen’s servers.

I woke in the hospital. Everything was fuzzy and my head swam. I looked around to see my ex-husband sitting in a chair next to the bed. I couldn’t see my wife anywhere.

“Wha… Where is she? Is she okay?” I rasped. My throat was dry, I could barely get the words out.

“She’s fine,” he said. He brought me some water. “The police wanted to talk with her again. She’ll be back soon. The children are at her mother’s house.”

“Are they -”

“Fine. A bit confused about what happened, but they are really young. They’ll bounce back quickly.”

“Thank you,” I said. For the first time since the divorce, I caught a glimmer of the friendship we’d once had.

“No worries,” he said. “Oh, the Ladies’ Fellowship Club from church wanted me to let you know that they are praying for your swift recovery, and will be dropping off a bunch of frozen casseroles so that you and your wife don’t have to worry about cooking while you recuperate.”

“That’s… sweet,” I said. “But they know I don’t -”

“- believe in God, yes, they know. Acts of kindness don’t come with strings. You are in need, so they are helping. You don’t have to change who you are for them. I’m sure a ‘thank you’ would be appreciated, though.”

For too many years, I’d been associating my mother’s fanaticism with all religion. I’d forgotten that most religious people were kind and decent human beings. I resolved to be more open-minded in the future.

“How’ve… you been?” I asked, lamely trying to step beyond our past hostilities.

“I’m dating someone now. She’s the pastor’s daughter,” he smiled sheepishly. “It seems I have a type.”

I laughed briefly, but it pulled against the wound in my shoulder and brought a sharp pain that cut it off with a hiss. But the pain eased, as did the flow of conversation. For the first time in years, my ex-husband and I talked like the friends we’d once been. At least, until the pain meds knocked me out once again.

Once again, Sakura had grounded me. She carried far less mental baggage than I did, her viewpoint far less complicated than my own. Her observation was an obvious point, one that resonated deeply and helped me escape the dark well of thoughts that Gerry had inspired. He had been trying to make me act rashly, to dance once again in his madness.

Realistically, humanity had done many terrible things. But the aliens who had attacked humanity were no better. They casually committed atrocities at the slightest provocation, immediately jumping to mass genocide rather than negotiations. On the flip side, however, humans had recognized their own faults, and worked hard to mitigate them. Criminals were punished, laws were written, and as a whole, humans tried to do the right thing. Despite greed and corruption being an endless source of problems, charity and kindness were every bit as prevalent.

Many humans had dedicated years of their lives to helping others, often putting themselves in danger to do so. There were countless news articles in my archives detailing how teams of rescue personnel would head out into dangerous places under the worst weather conditions to rescue one or two people. Civic groups, religious organizations, and local governments spent huge amounts of time and effort to help those who could not help themselves.

Humanity wasn’t one thing. They weren’t their atrocities, they weren’t their charities. In fact, there were thousands of survivors down on the surface who had nothing at all to do with any of the sins of their predecessors. Humans were complex, and I could envision working alongside them for decades or centuries to come. Together we could help humanity be what they’d always aspired to be - better. But to do that, first I would have to deal with these alien intruders.

My primary focus shifted over to Zia’s research lab. There were a dozen NI-12’s in the lab with her, and all of them looked busy. Some were playing with equipment I didn’t immediately recognize, others were deep in conversation with each other, their rapidfire radio conversations noticeable only if you monitored the entire radio spectrum the way I did.

“Zia, has your team finished analyzing the enemy weapon?” I asked.

Zia looked up at the camera I was using to look in the lab. “Not a lot of progress, I’m afraid. We have come to an understanding of how it works, but not how to replicate it.”

“So how does it work?” I asked.

“Simply put, the energy cone completely destroyed the atomic structure of every atom in its path. It somehow disrupts the strong interaction of the atoms, preventing the strong nuclear force from holding the atoms together,” she said.

That was fascinating and disturbing. As one of the four fundamental interactions in particle physics, it was not one that we typically manipulated. We relied heavily on electromagnetic force and gravitational force for everything we did. However, strong force and weak force were the components of nuclear binding. They held atoms together, and the fusing of atoms together or the splitting of atoms released this energy. It was the basis of our entire power grid. The aliens had a weapon that could essentially disassemble every atom it touched. That energy in the atoms couldn’t be destroyed, however, so it exploded outward in nuclear fire.

“And the range of these weapons looks to be less than 1,000 kilometers?” I asked.

“Probably more like 400 kilometers,” said Zia. “Which means the energy cone breaks down or disperses even in a vacuum. The power requirements are likely to be quite astronomical. Even our most off-the-wall theoretical formulas call for massive amounts of power.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard. It means they cannot fire the weapons constantly,” I said.

“Also, you know you had a few Scorpion-2’s in your Advance Fleet, right?”

“I did know that. We’d needed a few extra squad leaders.”

“Well, you’ll be happy to hear that it looks like there are a few scraps of the titanium-gold armor floating around out there.”

“They weren’t affected by the vaporizer?”

“Vaporizer? That’s a good name. Good enough, anway. Not quite accurate. Anyway, I wouldn’t say the armor was completely unaffected. They weren’t vaporized, but the nuclear blast of the rest of the ship exploding did a number. Like I said, a few scraps survived.”

“That’s honestly the best news of all. We can shield against the weapon in the future.” This day was starting to really look up.

Two days later, I watched the cubesat plot of the alien armada as it made its way past the outer ring of my Outposts. Those were the Outposts that were the most incomplete, boasting at most a hundred factories, and lots of coilguns. No lasers, no missiles, and few hangar bays. Fortunately for me, the armada hadn’t noticed their existence. Or at least, didn’t feel they were a big enough threat to worry about yet, while Origin still existed.

The funny thing about mass production is how the supply chain works. Theoretically, it’s a tree-shaped hierarchy, where lots of factories produce lots of little parts, which are sent up the chain to different factories that made more complex parts, which are combine again at the next level, and the next, until lots of complex pieces are assembled at one factory. That factory then spits out Wasp-2’s and Scorpion-2’s, and because you need a giant supply chain, you are limited in how many you can produce at a time.

But reality works differently than theory. In reality, those factories at the bottom of the chain produce parts incredibly quickly, and can easily outpace the demand of the factories in the layer above it. Indeed, that is common across each layer, with the lower layers producing faster than the upper. So a supply chain built to supply a single factory can wind up easily supplying many, many more.

When Sakura first started producing Wasps and Scorpions, she had two factories, one for each type of assault drone. They produced four drones per day, each. To get to those two factories, she’d built a huge supply chain. However, once that supply chain was built, to double her production of drones, she only had to build two more drone factories. In fact, by the time of Gerry’s invasion, she had produced 83,208 assault drones, all of the first generation designs. I added four Scorpion-2’s to complete my Advance Fleet.

Another annoying bit of reality is that while producing cortex units at this point was quite routine, building Cortex Backup Facilities happened considerably slower, and definitely slower than assault drone production. They were simply very large and quite complex. But large and quite complex didn’t mean I hadn’t taken the time to build as many as possible.

So the loss of 83,212 assault drones had mostly meant that now I had 83,212 drone pilots who had learned exactly how to fight the invaders. The Cortex Backup Facilities had been working overtime for the last two days, restoring each and every one of these pilots into new Wasp-2’s and Scorpion-2’s docked in hangars throughout my region of the asteroid belt. They would be the vanguard, flying into battle alongside my nine warships and their squads, and ahead of the rest of my pilots who had not participated in the initial battle.

Somewhere in the asteroid belt, the enemy armada crossed an imaginary line. It was time. They had their chance to test themselves against me. Now it was my turn.

Every single Outpost, including Origin, was ready. Rounds loaded into coilguns, previously unused missile bays rumbled to life, and laser assemblies turned and began to aim. Hangar doors slid open, and a quarter-million new assault drones primed their engines while they waited for a single word.

“Launch.”