Vanguard Word Update

I've redone the ending sequence to Vanguard. I've pasted it below. I felt that having them act all heroic and dash into line of the fire without a care for their safety, and ending up saving the station like badasses didn't really fit with my themes of anti-war sentiment I was going for throughout the story, So i've added some depth to Cadell's thought process and his guilt about killing, and changed up the end. Let me know your thoughts as always.

For reference, this edit starts right after the moment Cadell's team has secured the shipyard's bridge, and learned about the overloading reactor.

***

Cadell’s communicator beeped, and the Captain’s voice chimed into his helmet. “This is the Captain, outstanding work Corporal. Hold position while I send you relief.”

“Hold on, Sir, we have one of the station’s personal here, and she’s got some bad news for us.”

He explained what Eleanor had told him, holding his helmet camera up to the bridge controls so the Captain could verify the situation with his officers.

“Crazy bastards,” Vonstock snarled over the channel. “Why haven’t we noticed the reactor was about to blow?” the Captain demanded. “There would be warnings, alarms.”

“The Feds uploaded some… virus to the grid,” Cadell explained. “Turned off every failsafe so we wouldn’t notice anything till the last second.”

“And let an entire platoon walk into it,” the Captain added, morbidly. “Get your team out of there immediately, Corporal.”

“Wait, Sir, we’ve got a way to fix it,” Cadell interjected. “Eleanor says the reactor can be operated manually, we just have to get to it.”

“We have are no teams close enough to get there within a feasible timeframe, Corporal,” Vonstock countered. “There’s no other option, I’m pulling everyone out.”

“Wait, seriously?” Hunter asked, joining the channel. “There’s hundreds of people on this station, we can’t just abandon them!”

“Then save who you can, Private, and get your team back to your shuttle,” Vonstock snapped.

“We can make it,” Samiha argued. “The engine room is not far, and our shields will help us be swift.”

At that moment, the metal walls over their heads rumbled, as though a grenade had been detonated somewhere nearby.

“Explosion on the aft section,” Captain Vonstock reported. “The power grid is failing, team eleven get back to your shuttle for immediate exfil.”

“Screw that!” Hunter said. “Sir,” he added, addressing Cadell directly. “We can make it. W wcan’t just leave these the whole crew for dead!”

“Get your team in line, Corporal,” Vonstock added. “Save who you can and get out of there, that’s an order.”

“Kith’sla?” Kazlu asked. “What do we do?”

Cadell was conflicted, muttering a curs under his breath. The mission brief stated that two hundred and seventy people worked on the station at the time the Confederates had seized control, there was no way one platoon could corral that many people in such a short timeframe. It was a lot to sacrifice, too much in Cadell’s opinion. And yet if they tried to get to the reactor, he’d have to bring Eleanor with them, put her in danger again, and if they were too late, she and his friends would die too.

“What are your orders, Kith’sla?” Samiha demanded. “We are out of time.”

“Damnit all,” Cadell grumbled. “Elevens, secure the civvies, we’re gettin’ out of here.”

“Sir!” Hunter argued, but August cut him off across the channel.

“He’s right, Hunter, it’s too risky to keep going. If the radiation won’t kill us, the detonation will.”

Cadell felt like a lead weight had grown in his chest, turning to watch as his alien companions gave him a curt nod each. Eleanor and the other hostage, a man in engineer fatigues, were ushered forward, but Eleanor struggled against Samiha’s arms when she passed the body of the one she called Steven.

“Wait, wait!” she pleaded. “We can’t leave him like that. Bring his body, please!”

“The living take priority over the dead,” Samiha mumbled. “There is nothing to be done about him.

Eleanor sobbed in her arms as the alien pulled her to her feet, Cadell watching the scene with a heavy heart. She was right, they couldn’t weigh themselves down with a corpse, but that didn’t mean he agreed with the sentiment.

“Kaz, keep the Fed on a tight leash,” he said. “Don’t let him out of your sight."

“Yes, Kith’sla,” Kazlu replied. She jabbed the officer in the back using the stock of her gun. “Move, human.”

“You’ll never make it off the station,” the officer chuckled as he started moving. “I’ll see you all in hell.”

The party rushed back down the steps of the bridge, returning to the control room. The place was in ruins. Blood, bullet casings, bodies, everything had been scattered all across the room, turning the bridge into a canvas of death. Combat was nothing like Cadell had ever imagined. It was a desperate, messy experience, and if Cadell had his way, he never wanted to take part of it again, his eyes lingering on the Confederate who’d nearly stabbed him to death.

August dismounted the heavy gun, turning to follow the group. They kept the officer and the two civilians in the middle, with Samiha at the front with Cadell, while Hunter and August brought up the rear. Kazlu was roughhousing the officer as he protested and struggled against his bindings, but his complaints fell on deaf ears.

“Pick up the pace!” Cadell urged, the group backtracking their progress through the hallways. He could hear gunfire off in the distance, but it had a distinctly lessened quality, and there was silent pauses between where only his thumping boots were there to fill it. The rest of the Alliance was evacuating, and he hoped at least some of them had secured civilians of their own.

They scooted past the four soldiers they’d ambushed on their way to the bridge, Cadell covering one angle while he motioned the group on. The light strips overhead flickered, plunging the hallway into brief flashes of darkness.

“Power’s failing,” Eleanor said. “We’re running out of time.”

“Let’s move, people!” Cadell said, and the group broke into a pace between a run and a power walk.

As he joined the group, the officer twisted his leg, and he fell out of Kazlu’s grip and hit the ground hard. Eleanor’s leg caught on his chest, and she fell too, only her reaction was more convincing than the Confederate’s.

Kazlu hauled him up as though she were plucking a troublesome dog by the scruff of the neck, shoving him not unkindly to his feet. “Do that again, and I’ll leave you here,” she growled, her giant eyes flashing.

The Confederate was unfazed, throwing back his head and laughing. “Can’t very well pry information out of me when I’m dead, can’t you? Isn’t it just ironic that you are trying to save me, at the expanse of your rebel friends? You must be so disappointed with yourself.”

Eleanor was helped up by August, and they continued on. The delay had only been a few seconds, but that was a significant timeframe in the current circumstances, and it wasn’t the last time the officer tried something. At another turn he tried to make a run for it, managing to slip out from Kazlu’s grasp and start sprinting back the way they’d come. When they’d secured him, he began to talk about how the Alliance was doomed if they could sacrifice so easily. His words hit Cadell more than he cared to admit. Kazlu had to clamp one of her giant hands over his mouth to shut him up.

The hallways seemed to twist and turn forever, and after a few minutes he could hear no more sounds of fighting in the distance. The rest of the platoon was probably already in their shuttles, and team eleven was the last one’s left on board. The idea made Cadell shudder.

The final intersection at last came into view, Cadell remembered the right-angle lead straight into the T-intersection where the airlock was. Cadell led the way, and as he turned the corner, he heard an electrical whine. He glanced up the corridor, seeing an open airlock door maybe ten meters ahead. He could see the berth beyond through glass windows, but there was something between him and it that blocked his view.

A chest-high tripod stood in the middle of the aisle, and mounted on top of it was a rotary gun, a triple-barrelled weapon poking out of a mechanical housing the size of a car battery. It was mounted on a turntable, which clunked and whirred as the barrel swivelled to aim at Cadell’s chest, a red laser dot appearing on his armour.

The whining tone shortened out, giving way to automatic fire as the wireless gun opened up, its muzzle flashing yellow points of light. Cadell would have been mowed down right there if Samiha hadn’t grabbed him by the arm and hauled him back behind the wall, the rounds ripping holes through the wall at his flank.

“Are you okay?” Samiha asked.

“Y-Yeah,” he said, giving Samiha an appreciative nod. “Thanks to you.”

“It is my duty to protect,” she replied. “What is that thing?”

“Sentry gun,” he said. “It’s a wireless platform that shoots anything that isn’t registered as a friendly. Read about them back on the Hub.”

The sentry gun stopped shooting, having no targets within its sensor range, but the shooting didn’t stop. Cadell heard more gunshots tear into the hallway from beyond. The sentry gun wasn’t alone.

“These humans are insane!” Kazlu said, shoving the officer to the ground and placing a knee on his back. “This entire place will be destroyed at any moment, and they still fight us?”

“Anyone willing to dir for the Confederation is a radicalised lunatic,” August replied. “Just look at this one. He’d rather let himself and everyone else die if it meant a loss for the Alliance.”

“We must keep moving,” Samiha said. “I will deal with this sentry.”

She made to step forward, her shield at the ready, but Cadell raised a hand.

“Hold up, those are fifty cal rounds it’s shootin’, don’t risk it. I’ll throw a flashbomb first, overload its sensors.”

Cadell reached for one of the grenades on his belt, letting his coilgun hang on its sling as he primed the fuse. The metal capsule had a red button on one end, and Cadell thumbed it, tossing it around the corner without exposing too much of himself.

He heard the grenade bounce along the deck a couple times, and then there was a sudden flash of light, so harsh that he could see afterimages when he blinked. The gunshots ceased, too, leaving a strange moment where there was no external noise.

“Now!” Cadell said. Samiha took the corner, Cadell following after. August and Hunter hung back, protecting the civilians, who were the only things worth saving as of this point.

The sentry turret voiced its targeting whine, but the barrel didn’t track towards Cadell or Samiha, its sensor suite overloaded by the flash. Cadell aimed and fired at the legs of the tripod, cutting one of the legs with a burst of coilgun rounds, the sentry tipping over with a loud clank of metal. There were two Confederates flanking the gun, hands on their visors, their momentary dazes cut short as Cadell and Samiha put rounds in their chests.

Another pair of soldiers were hidden around the left side of the T-intersection, revealing themselves when they heard their approach. They opened up, but their bullets didn’t penetrate Samiha’s barrier, and the alien fired around her shield in retaliation, killing them with brutal efficiency.

Cadell’s heart missed a beat as the fallen sentry elicited another targeting tone, the turntable still functional enough to move the turret. The gun rotated, but Samiha slammed her clawed foot down on the housing, Cadell watching with a mix of awe and horror as she crushed the rebar like it was wet paper.

“Clear!” Cadell called. “Everyone into the airlock! Go, go!”

A conduit down one of the hallways made a fizzing sound, a stream of sparks popping out from one of the walls. Another rumbled vibrated through the floor. The place was coming apart.

The civilians darted through the pressure door, August and Hunter following, Cadell helping Kazlu with the officer. Samiha was already inside, and there was a scattering of glass as she smashed one of the pressure suit lockers with her weapon, tossing the equipment to Eleanor.

“Put this on, quickly,” Samiha urged. Hunter helped the other hostage put on his suit, both eager to protect themselves against vacuum exposure. The same could not be said for the Confederate.

The officer pulled away, struggling as Kazlu tried to make him step into the leggings, every wasted second bringing them closer to destruction.

“Get him in that suit right now,” Cadell ordered. “We’re runnin’ out of time.”

“I am trying,” Kazlu muttered. Even with her superior strength, the Confederate was smaller but nimbler, and he wasn’t making it easy for her.

“Just leave him,” Hunter mumbled. “Let him die with everyone else.”

“There’s the rebel spirit!” the officer cackled. “I knew it would come out eventually! You think I’m willingly going into an Alliance torture chamber, guess again.”

“Be still, mealworm,” Kazlu grumbled. She succeeded in putting him inside the suit leggings, but she had to unbind him to get his arms through the sleeves, and when he was freed, he lashed out with a savage punch, one that bounced off Kazlu’s helmet with a sound like a gong. “somebody help me with this creature.”

“On it,” August replied. He came over and turned the Confederate around with all the gentleness of a friend trying to get someone’s attention. When the Confederate opened his mouth, August filled it with his fist, decking his jaw with an audible crunch. The officer’s head went limp, his eyes glazing over.

“Done,” August said, passing him over to the alien. Kazlu nodded in gratitude, and then pulled him into the suit. Once the industrial-grade helmet was secured, Kazlu gave a thumbs-up.

“He’s ready,” she reported.

“Good, open the door, August.”

The cycle of the airlock seemed to stretch on forever, until at last the outer door opened, and the group piled onto the exposed deck of the berth. The industrial suits in the airlock came with magnetic boots, the civilians struggling with effort to keep up with the squad. Kazlu elected to carry the officer over her shoulder, firefighter style.

Their shuttle was pulled up a short distance from the airlock, its vector nozzles hissing gas as it drifted as close to the walkway as the pilot dared. The troop ramp was open, and a man in trooper armour was stood just inside, waving them inside.

Eleanor and the other civilian went first, Samiha hauling them up, the humans weighing nothing in the vacuum, and much easier to handle in her giant arms. Hunter followed them up, then August and Kazlu with her unconscious charge.

Samiha clambered onto the ramp, turning to hold out a hand, and Cadell took it. She helped him into the compartment, temporarily weightless as his boots left the deck of the shipyard and then touched the ramp.

“We’re on!” Cadell called into the radio. “Get us out of here!”

“On it,” the pilot replied. The ramp started to ascend, Cadell stepping away before he was crushed. He held onto a nearby seat for balance as the inertia threatened to throw him around the shuttle like a pinball.

As the shuttle banked away, the shipyard turned into one of the viewports, filling it up with its bulk as the shuttle adjusted course. As the others strapped the civilians down onto the couches, Cadell walked over to the port, clutching at an overhead railing. Minutes ticked by, and with each one the weight in his chest deepened. It seemed there was more time than the Captain had led him to believe, and he wondered how close they’d have gotten to the engine room by now.

As if to answer his thoughts, all the lights of the main habitat powered off, and a series of detonations travelled up its rounded flank, several core systems overloading. Modules broke apart to soar into space, fires suffocating in the vacuum. One of the berths was cut off at the neck, the giant skeletal structure separating from the main body. Metal chunks continued to pluck away from the shipyard until almost a third of its bulk had been severed, and then there was a sudden flash of white.

Cadell had to cover his eyes with a glove, slivers of stark light weaving between his fingers. The flash sustained itself for seconds, and when Cadell could look again, all he saw was the aftermath of a nuclear detonation. Fingers of fire branched from the space the shipyard had been, surrounded by clouds of fumes and shards of black steel.

He was vaguely aware of his friends standing by his sides, the five of them standing there and watching the ruins of the shipyard drift into the void in silence. Even Eleanor and the other hostage had no words to say.

Cadell felt Samiha’s hand fall upon his shoulder, but her touch did little to settle the cold stab of guilt in his gut.

“There was nothing that could be done,” she said softly, staring off into space.

“Yes there was,” he answered, and the truth of it silenced her.

From behind them came a muted cough, and from his seat on the couch, the Confederate officer cocked his head, looking past the squad at the spot a shipyard had stood. He laughed through a cracked jaw.

“You have only yourselves to blame for that show,” he said. “I warned your Captain I’d do it, but he didn’t listen. I gave you a chance down there, but you chose to do things the hard way. The Confederacy never bluffs, and it’s your fault for not listening.”

Cadell whirled on the man, boiling with a sudden fury beneath his heavy armour. He crossed the compartment and wrenched off the Confederate’s helmet and tossed it to the ground. The shuttle had pressurised during their flight, but suffocating him in vacuum wasn’t Cadell’s intention.

He lifted his pistol out of its holster, flipped it into a reverse grip, and lamped the officer across the nose with such ferocity he felt something in the handgun give. The Confederate’s laughs became hoarse wheezes, and blood dripped from his nostril in a thin ribbon. Cadell lamped him again over the brow, the man’s head shooting to the side, exposing a cheek which Cadell decked with his fist.

He heard someone shout his name, but Cadell didn’t’ register it, taking hold off the officer by the throat. Someone grabbed his shoulder, but he ignored it, thrusting the man against the bulkhead, his head slamming into the metal hard enough to make it ring.

“Leave him be!” a voice said in his ear, and he recognised it as Samiha’s. Her grip on his elbow was strong, and he saw a flash of teal feathers as Kazlu took the other arm. They wrenched him from the officer, who’s chest hitched with wet gurgles. Whether he was laughing or choking it was hard to tell the difference.

Cadell struggled against the Balokarid’s grip, tears of anger wetting his vision as they separated them. As Samiha pinned him to the bulkhead, all the fight left Cadell, that weight in his stomach draining him of all strength.

“Y-You’ll pay for that,” the officer snarled, pointing an accusing finger. “I am a ranking officer of the Confederacy, you can’t… you can’t treat me like that. I’ll have your head for that, Corporal!”

Samiha saw that he was no longer struggling, and she slowly released him, Kazlu doing the same. Cadell found himself bundled in Samiha’s arms, the Balokarid turning him away so he couldn’t look out of the viewports.

“Do not listen to him, Cadell,” she whispered. “He set the reactor off, the blame is his alone. We saved who we could.”

But we didn’t save enough, Cadell thought. He wrapped his arms around her waist and closed his eyes. The image of the destroyed shipyard was burned into his vision. 

-xXx-

Cadell leaned against the Liberator’s observation port, the endless stretches of space rotating beyond the pane of glass. High above, the thin, blocky profile of the Restless Freedom took up a portion of the view, pulled up close enough that he could make out the weapon arrays bristling from its nose. He had been watching shuttle craft zip back and forth between the ship and the ruins of the station for about an hour now.

He recalled from the briefings before the raid, that fifteen squads had been deployed to the station. Less than ten minutes later, the Captain had put out the order to evacuate. Rescuing the civilians had been one of their primary objectives, and on average each squad had brought roughly four people with them back to the carrier. That meant around sixty of the station’s crew had been saved, just over a quarter of the shipyard’s population. Search and rescue teams had yet to find any life pods.

A devastating result. Cadell had left the Hub excited, eager for adventure, but now he just felt dead inside. All his days at boot camp, all the months spend on the Hub training, none of it had even come close to preparing him for this scale of death. He’d barely said a word since he’d lashed out at the Confederate officer, and his team was just as silent, his four companions waiting around nearby as medics tended to their wounds.

Somewhere behind him a door slid open, and Cadell felt a presence beside him. He turned, finding himself side by side with Captain Vonstock, Cadell raising his hand in salute. As much as the weight in his stomach bothered him, he’d be remiss to forget his salutes.

“At ease, Corporal,” Vonstock said. “How are you holding up?”

“Just fine,” Cadell muttered, turning back to the window. Vonstock watched him for a long moment, then reached into his pocket, drawing a lighter and a cigarette.

“We’re all feeling down in the dumps after the op, Corporal,” he said, flicking his wrist and drawing a flame. “Lying won’t do you any good, especially after what happened in your shuttle back. The Fed was not happy at all about having a broken jaw and nose.”

“I’d do it all again if I could,” Cadell admitted. “That’s no lie, Sir.”

That got a chuckle out of the Captain, the man taking a draw and letting it out in a cloud of smoke.

“I understand where you’re coming from, Corporal, but you have to understand the wider impact of losing your temper. You took the Fed as a prisoner of war, you can only rough him up to a point. Word ever gets out about how a Corporal bashed his face in, the Inner Reaches will use that as a weapon against the Alliance.”

“Yeah, well, I just watched hundreds of people die, so forgive me if I seem a little pissed off, Sir.”

His tone was a little out of line, but Cadell hadn’t been thinking straight for the past two hours, and he wasn’t about to stop now. He expected a reprimand, but the Captain just sighed, taking another puff of his cigarette.

“I’ve been commanding starships for a long time,” Vonstock began. “Nearly ten years by this point. I’ve seen as many battles as I’ve had hot meals, do you think I won every time? Do you think none of them were without casualties? You must always look ahead in war, you can’t let the weight of the dead slow you down, or your enemy has already won.”

“The Confederate’s have won,” Cadell argued. “They’ve crippled the Alliance in this sector, took out one of our yards and most of its crew with it.”

“A lost battle doesn’t constitute a total defeat,” Vonstock said. “We may have lost infrastructure, but we have neutralised three Confederate frigates, one corvette, and captured all remaining survivors. You even managed to secure a ranking officer, who my colleagues suspect was second in command of the Confederate strike group. His intel will be invaluable to us. There is also the matter of your training.”

“My training?”

“The program of integrating mixed-species units, remember? The Hub Senator’s will be interested to see how you handled yourselves during the operation, and I can confidently say the Balokarid shield technology was invaluable to your efforts. If only we had more of them for every squad, the protection of those barriers would be invaluable. Rest assured I will pass on my praise to Lieutenant Marek when we return to the Hub.”

Cadell had to concede that maybe the day wasn’t a complete loss. Completing the program had been his friends’ top priority, and it seemed like they’d passed it, even if the mission had been a failure.

“Get some rest, Corporal,” Vonstock said as he turned away. “And think on my advice. It’ll get easier with time.”

Cadell wasn’t sure he liked the idea of becoming used to defeat, but he nodded in understanding, the Captain departing the way he’d come. A while later, and he heard someone else approaching, and this time he had to look up to meet them in the eye.

“Hey, Samiha,” he said.

“Hey,” she replied, and together they watched the shuttles cruise by the viewport. For a long time that was all they said, al they needed to say, until Samiha eventually broke the silence.

“Are you well?” she asked.

“The knife didn’t go that deep,” he replied, gesturing to his bandaged stomach. “I’ll live.”

“You know I was not talking about your wound,” she said. “Cadell, are you well?”

“I… don’t know,” he admitted. “I keep thinkin’ about how we could have done things differently down there. The reactor took a while to go critical, we… we could have gone down and done somethin’ instead of runnin’ away.”

Her heavy hand came to rest on his arm, Samiha peering down at him with those amber eyes.

“Going would have been next to suicide. We had no way of knowing if we could even fix the reactor, and Eleanor was a communications officer, not an engineer. There was no guarantee she would have fixed it, and bringing her further into danger would be irresponsible.”

“I suppose,” Cadell admitted. “We fucked her over enough when we got her friend killed during that hostage situation.”

“That was the Confederate’s fault,” Samiha insisted. “I saw one of the solders put a gun to his head. It was his choice to kill an innocent, not ours.”

Cadell wanted to say that they’d been warned, he’d only died because of his choice to rush the bridge, but he kept his mouth shut. It was in vain, however, Samiha seeming to read him like a book.

“You once told me to share my burdens,” she said. “Now I ask you to do the same. Do not take the fault of this mission all by yourself. Your decisiveness and bravery ensured we all made it out of that place alive.”

“I don’t know about bravery,” he chuckled dryly. “I don’t know if you heard, but half the time I was screamin’ my lungs out. I was terrified the second we left the shuttle.”

“But you did not let it rule you, yes? You kept your head, you kept giving us orders, you kept coordinating our efforts, and we secured our objective in a reasonable time. By all rights nobody could have asked for better.”

He wanted to argue with her, but he wasn’t sure why. She was trying to cheer him up, who was he to deny that?

“It’s nothing like the sims, is it?” he asked, remembering how he’d used his coilgun to burn the flesh of the soldier who’d tried to stab him.

“It is not,” Samiha agreed.

“I think I get it now,” he added, glancing up at her.

“What do you mean?”

“You told me that war is a process of turnin’ the innocent into the guilty, remember that? Well, I ain’t feelin’ no shortage of that right now.” When Cadell dreamed of what his first fight in the war would be like, his enemies never cried out in pain or begged for mercy, and defeat was never on his mind.

“You have grown wiser since the day I met you,” Samiha added. “You are naïve no longer.”

“I’ve also thought about what you said that night we… made love,” he added. “How you wanted to transfer. I was bein’ selfish at the time, but I see you had a point all along. I think you leavin’ is right decision.”

Samiha’s feathers drooped, her head cocking to the side.

“I was worried to death about you,” he added. “Every time you were shot at, it could have been the end of you, and that kind of fear just don’t belong in a war. You should transfer to another platoon as soon as we get back to the Hub.”

That last bit was hard to get out, but he forced the words to come in an emotional stammer.

“N-Not that I want you to,” he added. “I’d love nothing better than to stay with you, but we’re emotionally compromised, aren’t we? It’s not fair on either of us if we stuck together.”

“Mitch…” Samiha murmured, her hand returning to his shoulder.

“It’d be better for both us, in the end,” he mumbled. “Just promise you’ll visit every now and then. Maybe when we get some shore leave, we can go to that steakhouse, catch up.”

“Mitch, stop it.”

He went to say more, but then his world went red as Samiha wrapped him up in her arms, drawing him into her soft bosom. Her familiar scent filled his nose, Cadell fighting to pull away so he could look up at her.

“W-What are you doing?” he asked. “Samiha?”

“Just stop it, you fool. I am not going anywhere.”

“B-But I thought…”

“I cannot abandon the one I love,” she whispered into his hair. “Don’t you dare ask me to, you fool.”

“L-Love?” he stammered. “You said you couldn’t fall in love with me, Samiha.”

“And I have clearly had a change of mind,” she snapped, as though annoyed by his point. “I have thrown so many chances at happiness away,” she continued, clutching him harder, as if fearing he would escape her grip. “I can do it no longer, Takeela would not want that be how I live the rest of my life.”

“What about when you said you didn’t want another death on your conscience?” he asked. “We almost got caught in a nuclear blast today. One day our luck will run out.”

“Then I will delay it as long as I can,” Samiha insisted. “I am your shield, and your mate, Cadell. If I left you now, what kind of person would that make me?”

Cadell shook his head against her armour. Why was he even arguing with her? They had completely switched their standpoints since their night together, the audacity making him chuckle into her slim torso. Slowly, he moved his hands across her curvy waist, linking his hands across her back.

“If you’re sure,” he said.

“More than anything. I have lived a life of pushing others away, and look where that placed me. I made you distrustful of me, and I very nearly ruined this bond between us. I want to sustain it, and if I have to fight every Confederacy soldier in order to do so, then that is what I will do.”

Cadell turned to look up at her, her beak seeming to lean down toward him from far away. Their foreheads touched, Samiha gently closing her eyes as she probed him for a kiss.

He thought back on all the events leading up to this point. He’d left bootcamp ready to fight for freedom and glory, and he couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been to believe the propaganda. He remembered his father’s disappointed face when he’d told him the news, and Samiha’s comment when she said that working the land was a noble task. Both had been right in their own ways, and for a heartbeat he regretted not listening to either at the time.

But he was a farmhand no longer. He was a trooper now, and he’d killed for the Alliance. There was no going back. The loss of the shipyard was a bitter thought, but next time would be different. The program had been a success, and the next time the Alliance deployed, there would be more Balokarids in the team compositions, and their shields would make all the difference.

And of course, he would have his friends and his lover by his side. For a precious moment, as he returned Samiha’s warm affections, the weight in his stomach was lifted.