Once Gahn is confirmed to have been given clearance, they were mobilized to leave Ulminh as soon as possible. The planet’s government wanted Lym off-world immediately, despite persistent sympathy from the populace. There were a variety of reasons, ranging between not wanting to appear as though they were willing to harbor such a clearly dangerous force, and also the actual fear of having said unknown danger on their hands. Gahn’s troops and fleet was organized in order to sell the image of them being able to properly “contain” the ancient threat.

  By the early morning hours of the next day, all of them have left Ulminhan orbital space and are now currently traveling superliminally, the trajectory of their daily lives having changed in a matter of hours.

  Gahn finally begins cooling down from his agitation, after a hectic and chaotic thirty hours with little sleep. Returning to his quarters, he at last allowed himself to sit down on his bedside, rubbing his eyes and head, exhausted from the ordeal.

  In many ways, he found himself lamenting the situation. He understood that it was a matter of great importance and urgency that only a person of his authority could properly handle. Nonetheless, certain personal feelings wringed at his mind. Suddenly, a national crisis is laid before him, presented by none other than his old, troublesome friend, Vertan. He tried to reason with himself that perhaps this issue would have risen eventually in some other, likely worse, possible way. But the personal irony to him at the moment is too great to ignore.

  Meanwhile across the ship, Vertan could only manage a last minute message back to his mother. Though, perhaps once again from her perspective, maybe he won’t be away for so long, after all. The thought gave him at least some peace for what lay ahead.

  Looking around his quarters, he is suddenly reminded of when he first embarked on such a journey with Hilgo, over a standard decade ago, for the Special Expeditions. This time, however, nonexistent became the feeling of excitement and adventure. Rather, he felt this foreboding sense over what’s to come. Not necessarily impending doom…just that something was coming, that he couldn’t quite pin yet. His mind thought back to the protests recently. They weren’t about her, but it seemed to slowly feel that way. He wondered how much of this truth had managed to spread, if it remained the truth at all.

  Looking out his door’s eye hole, he could see Lym held in the strongest, thickest, and highest security box to possibly confine her in. Within that box, he could see her chained up in all sorts of ways, and she was kept in a kneeling position with her legs bound and her arms cuffed. Outside, armed troops nervously stood guard, sometimes occasionally trying to sneak in a glance at the strange and foreign woman. Vertan could sometimes overhear their whispering rumors, most of which varied wildly in assumption.

  How foolish it all looks, Vertan thought to himself. This, the flagship they are in, and the multiple frigates, carriers, and the research vessel surrounding it whilst they are in transit, are all meant to show the Coalition that such a “dangerous and volatile asset” is contained and in their control. Necessary, but nonetheless stupid to him. He knows Lym can break out and instantly destroy everything if she feels like it.

  He knows what he witnessed. If this woman is anywhere near like her brother, then she isn’t trapped here with them. Rather, they are all trapped here with her.

  Peering closer through the eye hole, Vertan barely makes something out across the ship. Lym seemed to be looking straight at him through the door. Upon closer inspection, it appeared to him that she was blinking in a pattern, her red mechanical eye more visible from the distance than her biological one. Slowly, he realized that she was attempting to send him a message in standard kasun code, and he began to individually decipher each letter.

  L…o…o…k…b…a…c…k…

  Look back?

  Confused at this, Vertan instinctually turns his head back towards his room, and almost jumps from shock when he sees her powered armor suit simply standing there, where it wasn’t before.

  “Hello, Vertan,” it says.

  Vertan finds himself bewildered by this, and his face widened with confusion.

  “Wh—what?!” he exclaims.

  “Hey, calm down, it’s alright,” the suit says again in Lym’s voice. “It’s just me.”

  “How did—what—,” Vertan stammered as he regained control of his breathing. “Are you controlling your suit?”

  “Yes,” the suit answers back. “I’m mentally linked to it.”

  “How did you get this thing in here? I thought we left it back at my place—?”

  “Well the moment I heard we were leaving, I had to make sure our things came with us. So I had it scan all your work, left a note for your mother, and then snuck it into this ship.”

  “You could just do that? You can control this thing that far away?”

  “Not really. It felt like I was trying to write with my feet.”

  “Do they know—?”

  “No, don’t worry. You’ve seen it invisible before. I’ve also disabled and looped surveillance at certain times, including the one in your room right now.”

  “Wait, but your navigator, haven’t they taken that, still?”

  “I also have a mental connection to that. So far, it’s coming with us, just on a different ship right now. Not that they could do anything about it.”

  Vertan was silent for a moment as he absorbed all of this. Amazingly, through nearly impossible odds, Lym had managed to make short work of it without anyone, including himself, ever realizing.

  “I was just going to let you know,” says the suit again.

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  “You said you wrote a letter for my mother?”

  “To explain our leave. I watered her plants and folded your clothes, too.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I thought it necessary.”

  “No, I mean—”

  A gulp.

  “I mean, I don’t really understand you. Why do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “The things that you do? Why do you choose to protect those protesters? These things for my mother? What’s in it for you?”

  Silence.

  “What do you have to do with those people? Nobody obligated you to do all of that. You could have just run through the whole planet and set everything ablaze, but you didn’t—”

  “Is that all I am to you? A weapon of mass destruction?”

  “No, I—”

  “I know that even though you know more than others, you still expect things to go a certain way with me.”

  “I know what I see, alright? How can I deny the deaths at the hands of your brother? How can I deny that you caught tank shells barehanded yesterday? I don’t know, maybe it’s in your nature, like how it is with the rest of us to have a nature—”

  “Are roses known for their beauty, or their thorns?”

  “What?”

  “Answer me.”

  “I—I suppose their beauty. Even across many galaxies, they’re a symbol of love.”

  “Is it the fault of the rose that it had to evolve thorns? How do we know the rose wanted thorns? What I would give for us to be seen as people, and not as weapons.”

  Vertan was silent at this.

  “When I first landed here, I couldn’t believe how beautiful it all was. The clear skies. The smell of fresh soil. The sunlight shining through the trees. I had never seen trees and grass before. I could only feel it in my bones that perhaps an indescribably long time ago, my ancestors once did, too.

  I have never tasted food so good, or drinks so sweet. I have never met people so carefree. I have never met children filled with such hope and joy.

  We haven’t culturally changed in eons because we so desperately wanted to protect the identity that we had left, no matter how advanced and evolved we became. Perhaps a part of me thought I may never see home again, and came with it, the urge to protect the beauty here.”

  The room fell silent, and once more, it was just the suit standing there as its pilot knelt in chains just outside.

  *****

  From within her confinement, Lym continued to kneel, chained in her position.

  It may as well all be pretend-play to her. She had already instinctually grasped the structural integrity of everything in the entire place the moment she got there, and knew that she could tear her shackles off like wet paper any moment she wished.

  But for now, she needs to keep up with the display. In comparison to the things she had previously gone through, this wasn’t too bad. It certainly beats the time she had to camp in the same sniping position for three years on a scorching moon.

  From outside, she could hear the voices of the guards.

  “Shift change!”

  “Finally, some relief. This bitch’s starting to really creep me out.”

  “It ever sleep? Those eyes have always been wide open.”

  “Come on now, at least call the bitch a ‘she’.”

  A chuckle and some snickering.

  “Hey, pipe down! What if she hears you?”

  “What’s she gonna do about it? She needs us to get her shit back.”

  “If you can be on good terms with the nuke, you make sure you’re on good terms with the nuke!”

  “Alright, whatever man. Take care, have fun.”

  “Hmph. If you can hear us, lady, don’t kill me!”

  In her mechanical eye, she could still see Vertan in his quarters through her suit. Though he was lying in his bed, she knew that he hasn’t slept since. She had finally relented on interfering with the room’s surveillance and returned the suit back to invisibility, though nonetheless, it must continue staying put without leaving. It would stir too much trouble being noticed.

  For a moment, she allowed herself a minute’s worth of half sleep, the most amount of rest she has received in millennia. She was fortunate to have her suit shoulder some work in keeping watch as her mind slows its functions. What passes as only a minute to others, felt more like hours to her.

  In it, dreams of her memories swelled up. The last time she saw her brother’s face, her last living kin, was before they descended their separate ways on the enemy’s logistics core. She had slowly watched his vital signs diminish from orbit, as she likewise wreaked endless destructive havoc to the billions before her.

  In her deployment before this, she had been court-martialed for her inaction. A few seconds’ worth of hesitation cost the lives of her platoon, forcing them into suicide-burns to prevent capture. She and her brother were given their final mission as a redeeming punishment thereafter.

  And then, before that, came the endless horror she had known the entirety of her life, until it grinded itself into a dull and banal normalcy. Endless war across endless worlds and time. Was there ever a period without it? Even within her ancestral memories, for as far as her mind’s eye could see, she couldn’t make out a single era of peace.

  Perhaps the most terrifying for her, were times of genuine capture. The occurrence of these were far before her time. But within those ancestral memories and inherited experiences, it was described that the enemy always came back stronger after capturing even a severed arm, let alone one of them whole. And what they fought could only be described as akin to fighting a haunted remnant of a former sibling. The essence of their fallen could be felt, trapped within the oppressor’s war machines, bastardized beyond meaning.

  And so adaptation became quick. The war began to be pushed back, spread far and thin, prolonged to attrition. The arms’ race likewise accelerated exponentially.

  The chances of defeat faded and diminished, but with it, so did the hope of victory.

  *****

  Mother Zviedal returns from her out-of-province trip to visit an old friend, and finally reenters her home by the coast.

  Stepping in, she sighs. Once again, her son isn’t there, and is likely off doing whatever it is he is usually doing. She tried to reason with herself. He’s a fully adult man now, after all. He has his own life. She should consider herself fortunate that he still visits her so frequently, after all.

  But, a widow with no living relatives, she finds herself clinging to the little she has left.

  Looking around the place as she unpacks, she finds herself pleased with the state of the house. Her plants appear healthy. The house is tidy and clean. The laundry is neat and folded.

  A letter is left on the table.

  As she read through its contents, her heart sank.

  This has happened before.