Aftermath - Ann Aguirre [13]
“Let’s move,” Hit says.
“Double time.”
Buoyed by hope, I speed into a jog. The day is bright and new as we break from the jungle, feet pounding over mud and fallen leaves. Droplets splash up, spattering my knees, but I can hardly get dirtier than I already am. There’s no benefit in slowing down, but I do pace myself, so I can manage the last kilometers as quick as humanly possible.
Flat farms occupy the no-man’s-land between jungle and city, but even those fields have been scorched. Blackened patches radiate outward, crops destroyed, homes decimated. We move past the destruction, but it doesn’t get better. As I jog toward what used to be the largest city on Venice Minor, even at this distance, horror steals my breath. No buildings stand; they’ve been reduced to chunks of stone and ash. Great pits have opened in the streets, a web of cracks raying outward. It makes our passage precarious, and more than once, Hit and I save each other from a painful fall.
The silence is oppressive. No birds. No people. I have never stood in ruins like these. Never. On Dobrinya Asteroid, where my fellow soldiers fought the Morgut and died beside me, I thought I knew the face of war. But this is a monstrous visage, the magnitude of which I could never have imagined. In time, the grasses will grow up through the rock, moss will soften the loss, and animals will nest here. If permitted, Venice Minor will erase all signs of human passage, and that would be better than the alternative, for when they’re done raining death from above, the Morgut will come down and build.
We can’t let that happen. They will not have this world; my mother gave her life to save it, and I will yield them nothing more. It ends here. Somehow. They will not take the war to New Terra.
.CLASSIFIED-TRANSMISSION.
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Mary herself must have been instrumental in your timely reply. Between the Ithtorians who arrived at Venice Minor just before the twofold catastrophe and the gray men hunting the Morgut in other systems, this war may be won, and at a lesser cost than I feared, all told.
Yet the lives were lost in such a way that it doesn’t feel like a regular battle, and there will be inquiries. Indeed, my comm is already alight with demands for information. I hardly know what I will say. I am ambivalent about the outcome. I have no doubt that Ms. Jax did what she thought best, but she is notorious for her lack of regard for authority. My constituents will wonder—and perhaps rightly so—whether there was a cleaner alternative.
I have reviewed the circumstances, and she did save lives on a grand scale, provided we can manage the prohibition on interstellar travel in the interim. That will prove no small feat, and will cost billions of credits as trade is restricted. But I would be a heartless man if I cared only for that aspect. I’m also concerned about the colonies that will suffer from a dearth of supplies, but they would be far worse off if they had Morgut dreadnaughts on the horizon. I am loath to punish a brave soldier for acting in such a fashion, but the public will accept no other outcome. So I fear I have no choice but to step back and permit the legal process to take place. Ms. Jax will take this for spineless disavowal, I have no doubt; she does not tend to see the world in subtle shadings. Sometimes I wish I didn’t, and that I had gone into my father’s business instead of pursuing a career in politics.
It will take the Conglomerate a long time to recover from all this. I hope I have the fortitude to steer the ship, as you put it, for so long. The government would not benefit from a change at this juncture, but I am tired. To address your question, at last, yes, it is hard. I am always on my guard. I trust precious few with any fullness. I suppose you could say the right hand seldom knows what the left is doing. None of my closest advisors know about you, dear Leviter. But instead of higher rank, I do dream, now, of days in retirement, where I will have earned