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[X] Give her time and go check on Reizay, who's sitting in one corner curled up

You walk over to one of the lifter's cabinets and pull out a cleaning kit. A Gardenite's regeneration is good enough that first aid is rarely a problem, but in skin countermeasures and the like need to be kept clean. You activate the hot cloth on one and rub it across your face, pulling out dirt, blood and layers of your skin that have been burned away by the blast. In the kit's mirror you see silver scabs forming where the burns went deep. You doubt you'll be turning off pain suppression before you reach friendly lines.

Reizay looks up as you offer her another. She takes it, wipes her face, then gets out a makeup compact and begins to touch up. It's a little ridiculous in the field but it seems to make her feel better.

"You okay?" you ask gently.

She begins to rub the hot cloth over her arms. "I was never very important back home. I was just, just another student security officer with some skills. I don't know why I was picked for this–" she takes a deep breath. "I was never very important." she says again.

You reach out and tentatively pull her into a hug. She accepts it though you see her eyes flick around to make sure nobody is paying attention. "I don't remember much, but we couldn't have done this without you. You're really good Reizay. I don't know if you know how good you are."

"I always wanted to go out on a grand adventure." She mutters into your shoulder. "This is all I ever wanted. I don't know why I'm so scared and–"

She breaks off and begins to cry silently, carefully blocking the rest of the cargo bay out with your body. You pat her back, doing the things your body remembers doing with dozens of crying soldiers and operatives. With talented young people you recruited to kill and die.

You'd never ask them to do anything you wouldn't do yourself after all.

"Steady." Alex says. You shake the half memory away as Reizay recovers herself.

"Thanks," she says. "I need to redo my makeup."

You let her go and sit back. The lifter's pilot comes on. "There's a ton of Nephilim air activity. It's enough orbital has engaged. We're going to need to put down and hide."

"Copy." You say. There's forest below, high alpine pasture. The lifters drop into a clearing, static fields smothering dust and debris. There's a brief spark as the forcefields earth, but you're probably too far from the enemy for them to detect it. On the lifter's feed you can see a battle going on high up, orbital bursts and brief, darting forms of Nephilim craft fighting a large scale battle with the fleet.

The Nyxians stretch their legs by deploying patrols and a perimeter, leaving you mostly alone with your team, the commandos, and the other prisoners you've found you're avoiding. It's chilly in the gunship. The sun is setting. It seems oddly early. You're not really used to these northerly latitudes. Startling anyone would choose to live on a place like this.

Miri is looking better, her skin burns cleaned out and regenerating. Both of her stand awkwardly, looking at one another. They push their hair back with the same gesture.

"Your infowarrior tells me we're both identical." She says, in chorus, then trails off. Both are silent for a moment, then both resume, then one. "Like, our mental signature."

"Psychodynamic signature" Reizay says from deeper in the queue. You're aware of the concept. It's one of the basic ways to check mental integrity, the 'shape' of a mind generated by a technical process which is not particularly interesting.

"Yeah, our PS is identical but, when we were in the sim we didn't react identically." She looks at her doubled team. "None of us did."

"There's a tolerance for variation or it wouldn't permit identity across time even in normal circumstances," says Reizay. "Maybe the simulation introduced subtle differences in inputs, but I didn't see any evidence of that and I don't know why they would… unless it was just a form of psychological torture." She shrugs. "From what I was able to comprehend of the logs all the simulations were symmetrical and so were the forks of your mindstates. But then the symmetry… broke…"

She trails off having the same thought as you and as both of Miri.

"What did you see out there?" you ask her.

"I mean. Just a lot of fighting and weird architecture." Miri looks over at herself. "Dead and wounded Nephilim machines, incomprehensible high energy conflicts and structures. And structures built using Nephilim techniques and styles but with the Nephilim symmetry broken."

"How'd you get caught?"

"On the way out of the epicentre. It was funny. Like, the Writer calls them 'the Horrors' and they make your skin crawl, but they also never bothered us. The darkness would fill in a valley but it never did anything to us. Like it didn't care. We got careless because of that, and the Nephilim got us. But now I'm thinking maybe the Emim got to us first."

"There's no reason to think it was intentional if they were otherwise ignoring you," says Reizay hastily. "And your behaviour is within normal identitarian tolerances. Both of you. You can have a closer inspection when you get back to civilisation."

"It's fine, it's fine." Both Miris wave her off. You don't know whether it is fine, but it's sensible to pretend it is until you're out of the zone. So you keep going on a different topic. Business.

"The Emim, 'Horrors', or whatever you call them. Do you know where they're coming from?"

"From the observatory." The other her says.

"We don't know that." The first protests.

"No, but it's true." The other Miri says. "There's a clear zone around the area where the Nephilim just won't go. And then beyond that there's tons of Emim pockets."

You feel Alex's interest again, sharp. "Do you think you could get us in there?" You ask, or maybe Alex does. You're not sure if her desires and yours are entirely separate now.

"Sure. It's getting through the Nephilim perimeter that's hard. The fastest way would be using the aviation, but it'd be dangerous."

[ ] Override Alex. This is too dangerous. You need more info on what's going on.
[ ] Fly in after the space battle. There'll be a break in Nephilim air defence after that.
[ ] Go in by ground: slower but safer.

[X] Fly in after the space battle. There'll be a break in Nephilim air defence after that.

"We don't have time to waste," you say. The cleaning unit closes around you briefly, and the layer of dirt and blood on your body is removed, then replaced with a fresh tactical sleeve. You step free to make way for the next person and begin to redo your makeup. "We need to get to the observatory and the time after the space battle while the Nephilim reorientate might be our only way in. I won't ask everyone to go with us."

"You'll need a guide." Miri says. "I– we're coming." She glances at the rest. Several others nod. About four in total. They look better now, scrubbed and in fresh tacsleeves, hung around with weapons rather than the kneeling, masked prisoners.

Banara pops up on a window. "I'm coming too."

"You're a battalion commander."

"We have a unit committee. I was just elected as speaker because I know Luyu real well."

One of the pilots comes back. Her overlay says her name is Shendra. "You want to fly into the Zone?"

"Is it a problem?"

"The Lifters are a little big. We've got components aboard for an insertion dropship, you'd be better off using that if you don't mind the lack of comfort."

You look over at the Luyu who was wounded, who's now wearing a freshly replicated prosthetic. "Don't even think of leaving me." She says. "I'm good to go." The others look at you as one, a united front.

You blow out your breath: "I wouldn't leave you behind for this. Anyone in armour, let's move and get the aeroscouts assembled."


The insertion ship is a thin, bar shaped cross with a bulbous front section and a long trailing back, its front thin and contoured and black with radar absorbant material. Its stealth package is a composite of Garden, River and other alien technology brought from more distant or lesser known sources, capable of defeating even Nephilim detection systems at least some of the time.

The inside is not comfortable, a long thin set of standing racks that lock in the full twenty four woman element. You're flying low, just above the point where the wake would pick up dust, just you and an automated gunship. The gunship is high up and ahead, your eyes in the sky.

Above, the space battle has mostly died out, with only an occasional cloud of missiles still dropping. The Nephilim air defence is mostly quiescent now; fighters fallen back, surface to air systems rearming, sensors rebuilding from massive SEAD strikes. Gardenite forces have also withdrawn, leaving a falling belt of wreckage dropping towards the atmosphere. In the middle, the broken arrowhead of a wrecked major hunter killer tumbles towards the ground, a last missile aimed at the Nephilim below.

Below you, the scrub plains have ended, replaced by a thick old growth rainforest of massive trees. Occasional ruined settlements and desecrated shrines break the waves of the sea of green. Mountains, still snow capped, rise in the distance.

There's a distant flash of a nuke. One of the Miri chuckles. "Looks like we got some licks in for that hunter killer."

The other, quieter one checks the map. "We're coming up on the edge of the zone now. This is going to be the dangerous part."

The dropship heads down a valley, now moving at about tree top level. You access the sensor feeds and see the searching red beams of enemy radar swinging across the valley from ahead. You're flying in through what should be a gap in the enemy coverage, an area hit by one of the missiles dropped from orbit, but there's still some left. The dropship swings into the beam, tacking like a sail boat as it aligns its far more radar stealthy nose at the enemy collector, then pulls onto a new vector to re-establish distance as masking terrain interposes itself.

"If we're detected," you ask on the ship channel, "how quickly will we know?"

"When we get missile approach warning." Shendra says. "Or when we wake up in the next life."

Above you, the gunship disintegrates. The pilot curses and the craft drops, and your brain gives you a moment's vertigo before the combat system clamps down on it. There's the trill of an alarm: a pair of missiles, launched in mirror symmetry.

"We're made." Shendra calls. "Hang on!"

The dropship points itself directly at the munitions and then the engines cut out. A line of decoys spit out from the back, igniting at a short distance, flickering holography that looks, for a moment, more real than the craft under countermeasures.

It almost works. One missile flies past but the second figures the play as it drops past the more visible sides. The dropship's engines come back on and the pilot briefly hits the ground to orbit boosters.

The warhead detonates below. A big one, something like a fusion bomb. The blast wave slaps the dropship into a tumble and for a moment the forest is coming up way too fast, then you see a road and the dropship pulls hard down the notch, just clearing the ground.

"We're not out of this yet!" The dropship accelerates again as another wave of missiles rip over the mountains, a saturating barrage this time, meant to kill you even if it needs to flatten the whole valley. They curve towards you from all angles, each pattern beautiful in its symmetry. The end of the world is a sparkling mass of red trails.

And then, very suddenly, the enemy radars blink off. Munitions spiral for a moment, then slam into the forest without detonating.

"What the fuck?" Shendra mutters.

"It's the observatory." Miri says, drawing attention to an element of the forward view. You can just see it on the craft's sensors, a great black spire rising up ahead. "It's right ahead."

The forest thins out ahead, becoming a more built up area. Dozens of bell shaped towers surrounded by lower, red and white houses which remind you of ancient illustrations of homes on old earth. The buildings here are not desecrated the way that the Nephilim did to the ones below. They appear pristine, quiet, still.

"I'm going to put the bird down." Shendra says. She guides the ship into what looks like a town square. The doors open and you drop free, the bird moving up and away almost as soon as you're out and deploying. "I'll find a safe place to hold up and make repairs." Shendra tells you. "Not sure how we're going to get out of here, but I'll try to come up with something."

"Copy." You look around at the silent down. The shadows are starting to lengthen. Night is drawing near.. "Good luck."

Around you, the team are breaking out their bikes. The town around you seems so perfect and undamaged. Not even the windows are broken. Gardening drones move across the grass, keeping it cut short.

It's quiet.

"I don't like this place," Alex says.

What to do now?

[ ] Head directly for the observatory
[ ] Search around the town for any clues as to what happened here
[ ] Look for a place to hole up until dawn
[ ] Plug into the local informational system to see if you can get access to local data