This was awkward, to say the least.

I'd been all vim and vigor, setting forth with all due haste content in the knowledge that the ship's comprehensive sensors had me covered, there wouldn't be any unpleasant surprises along the way, and if there were, I'd know from the damage to the local surveillance.

Not that whatever lay ahead wasn't still unpleasant, just less of a surprise.

It took the wind out my sails to find that the Promises Kept's security robots were both vicious and very efficient at their job, when I arrived at the place where the intruders had ingressed, it was all over but for the cleanup.

I stood awkwardly, with my railgun still shouldered, as a glorified roomba in a fetching shade of yellow happily emitted a jaunty tune while putting the last of the corpses within a body bag, and then handed it off to a waiting manipulator arm which flew off to incinerate it, or maybe chuck it out into space.

They hadn't lasted all of 5 minutes.

I played the footage back, while gingerly looking for anyone who might have gone invisible, maybe for a bomb they'd left behind.

The recording showed a squad of Space Marines arrive by teleportation. I recognized the signs, if the sudden arrival of heavily armed men in the interior of the ship accompanied by a blue flash of Cherenkov radiation was better explained by anything else, I didn't see it.

I'd heard rumors, the Reality Anchor was the pride of the CCP, and the Americans had their portable teleporters, hardly in mass production, but coveted assets for when you absolutely had to send a team of humans somewhere in a jiffy. I must stress they're rare as hell, even a top-tier Force Recon platoon hadn't had access to one, it would have made our lives much easier in Moshowitz. I suspected that even if they had one, the suppression field radiating from the UN ship, of Chinese origin, with the lobotomized brain of Dr. Shen inside, that was acting on the entire planet would squelch their plans. It made me feel that it was a shame that Centaurs didn't have access to metahuman powers, that single ship hard-countered them, for all that it was irreplaceable, with the good doctor unable to make any more. Let's hope you don't hear about a new vessel carrying the neural tissue of another doctor with a very similar name, though I don't think mine would be good for anything but a mantelpiece.

Yeah, about the Marines. There had been two squads actually, the first had the bad luck ending up in a not particularly important compartment of the ship, so our buddy Iskra had just teleported them back out, in the middle of the debris field. Ouch.

The robots had mopped up the rest, they'd have been quicker, but they'd held back so as to not damage the rest of the ship. I pitied the poor bastards, it's not like in the movies, showing up aboard a vessel that hadn't been utterly immobilized and rendered inert was a bad idea indeed. The Admiral could flood the place with rads, the active antimatter engines let him pick his poison. Maybe vent some of the exceedingly toxic and corrosive waste produced by other systems. Set the internal gravity generators to a spin cycle. The list was endless in length and sadism.

If I had to do something this foolhardy and absolutely had to send humans, I'd send them with a fucking nuke. But these lot seemed to have been told to try and take the ship intact, and had gamely paid for it with their lives.

Alright, job done, show's over. I'm going to sleep.

You're still here? I'm hurt that you didn't believe me.

"Right, sorry for the inconvenience Dr. Sen. Come over to the bridge, we're safe, for the moment, we're removing the fluid so that the crew can head to their stations. The others aboard can head for the lifeboats and strap in just in case. There's enough time to try and figure out what's going on."

I trudged over reluctantly, glad the gravity was back on again. I was really put out, I'd gotten used to solving my problems with violence, not having others solve them for me. It made me feel small, insignificant, next to the quasi-godlike power wielded by a starship and her captain.

I passed a few of the crew along the way. Their combat stations were distributed throughout the ship, a measure of redundancy in case something took out a chunk. The Admiral would remain on his throne, it was built to his specifications. Nobody told the other UN delegates about the assault, it wouldn't do to panic them, at least more panic than they already felt. I sometimes forget that the average UN employee spends their entire career behind a desk, even the Peacekeepers don't get shot at as often as I do.

Remind me to get checked for metahuman powers, I felt like I'd been absurdly lucky so far. Plot Armor, yeah, that would be a cool supe name.

The Admiral showed no physical response to my presence, but he pinged my lace and proceeded to key me in on the events of the past minutes and how things were evolving.

Things happened fast in active space combat. An actual engagement with guns firing that went on for a few minutes was unusually long, the majority of it was the tedium of maneuvering, testing your ship's drive against that of the enemy, seeking whatever passed for favorable engagements. Lots of posturing, bluffing the enemy with electronic warfare and disposable drones, then the burns as you entered weapon range, ships rocketing towards each other at velocities insignificant next to c, yet much faster than humans were built to understand. You only got ships approaching each other at those speeds when they happened to run into each other somewhere unexpectedly, or when our ships were trying to hunt the Centauri Von Neumanns escaping to other worlds. It's not just a matter of sensor range, because torchships are visible to the naked eye well past Jupiter, and the sharp ship sensors or orbital telescopes can see them coming from light years away. It's just that it's exceedingly difficult to catch them, since both sides max at out at the speed of light. Well, not strictly, because we have limited FTL and two wormholes.

Truly relativistic engagements were rather uncommon, since both human and Centauri ships usually needed to burn for weeks or months at max thrust to get up there, their drives were anywhere from 2 to 10 times better at accelerating, but even ours had drives that would look utterly insane to the first astronauts, who had to worry about silly things like orbital dynamics, gravity assists and the like instead of just gunning it in a brachistochrone trajectory from origin to destination. Well, there are still plenty of chemical craft around, but there's a reason that the average sticker price for a modern warship is about half a trillion dollars.

There, that's where all the money is going, and why I'm not sipping piná coladas on a balmy beach somewhere living off a hefty UBI. The anti-war protestors correctly pointed out that diverting even a small fraction of the thousands of trillions spent on blowing things up could arrange for practical post-scarcity, the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Communism we'd all been waiting for, but there was the small matter of the aliens next door. They're welcome to surrender first.

I watched the play by play. UN ships had slowly but menacingly begun encircling their USSF counterparts, outnumbering them 3:2. Decent odds, but the problem was that the Americans were in low orbits just above Mars, any engagement had a serious risk of destroying cities and killing millions. They'd showed no signs of budging, clearly content to use their hostages.

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Thus, an order was given to Taskforce Gangaputra by Fleet Admiral Gupta, this particular fleet under Indian command. They were to disperse, since clumping together didn't really help, so as to angle themselves in a better position to shoot at the USSF if needed without blowing up Mars. Further, they burned to stay in the planet's shadow, as far away as they could stay from the currently sunward Deimos, the orbital installation doing its namesake proud, its menacing aura deterring a fleet of proportions meant to saunter into AC with flags flying in the solar wind.

Not that you could just ignore it altogether by putting a planet in the way, it had plenty of weapons that could wrap right around, conventional missiles and antimatter warheads the least of them.

At this point, someone in the States put two and two together, concluding that I had likely been the whistleblower, and reacted in panic, throwing Marines to their deaths, perhaps in the hope of taking me alive, or killing me without the far bigger harm to relations that destroying a UN ship outright would cause. Maybe they'd suspected I was still aboard the station, even the murder of several hundred UN personnel could be put aside in the face of the demands of unity, but not a warship.

I did tell you they're precious. Most countries would be proud to have even one of their craft be worthy of the fleet.

As it stands, a smear campaign of titanic proportions was already being produced by the propaganda farms, attempting to sway countries on the fence. Right now, it was the unholy alliance of the two other secessionist states and China holding the line, pushing back as hard as they could. I was deluding myself if I thought they were doing it entirely out the kindness of their hearts. Van Der Waals had left New York, and a battalion from the Army had already taken up positions within visual distance of the UN Headquarters, or rather the several city blocks it had swollen up and encompassed, citing terrorist threats. Get it? They're the terrorists.

This was bad, I had initially felt an air of righteousness from shining a torch on the festering sins of Mars, but I'd be feeling much less so if I had caused a planet to burn. Even if I suspected the Patriots would have made full disclosure with or without me, I had been the hand holding the match, and while we weren't aflame yet, the smoke was rising.

"Standby. I don't know if this is good news or bad, but Turing just called out the US in the General Assembly."

Ouch. Chang would need sedatives to sleep again, I'd be happy to write a prescription if he promised to OD on it.

Gravity kept manifesting itself on occasion, our ship thrusters engaging to modify our nominal orbit and keep us away from Deimos, which was, like satellites are wont to do, steadily and implacably chasing us around the planet.

I'd like to think that we could have talked things out, perhaps found a peaceful solution to this whole mess. Maybe the heavens would open up, and some supe masquerading as an angel would descend bearing the holy scrolls that directed the US to relinquish its claims to USMA, them accepting it as a small price to pay to wash away theirs sins without a baptism in nuclear fire. More realistically, an honest referendum organized by the UN, hoping that everyone else thumbing the scales outweighed the heap of shit dumped on the other side.

Scarcely had the idea arrived in my mind when the Kill Star revealed itself, it had been there all along, right below our fucking noses.

I hadn't truly appreciated how big it was, while there were about twenty thousand teapots in the orbit between Earth and its neighbor, some wag's idea of a joke, yet nobody had been kind enough to leave a banana for scale. It dwarfed us, easily twenty kilometers long, and that's before it gracefully unfurled its petals.

All I could do was watch, that's all any of us could.

The only reason I had control over my sphincter was that it was clearly pointing away from us, down at the accelerating starships of the US Space Force, who could only look up to see a monster that outweighed almost all of them put together.

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The first sign of action was the thrum of gravitational waves, strong enough to override the minimal flux the ship generators were producing, since we were conserving the exotic material for maneuvers. It pushed away everything in orbit, visibly contorting nearby stars.

Did someone on the American side panic? Was it Turing that fired first? I suspect it was the Patriots, because a hitherto hidden facility equipped with a railgun on the Martian surface chose this moment to reveal itself, cloaked aperture opening to unleash a barrage of fire into the sky where deities faced off. It might have been Machina at work, the shot was just as supercharged as the last, or it might have been the human operators below making the installation give it all it had, because they sure as hell wouldn't be taking a second shot.

The projectile arced, ignoring the bruised atmosphere, and in moments, impacted on the field surrounding the Kill Star, one that had either been activated well in advance, or was fast enough to come online in the moments between the flash and the impact.

You didn't throw a rock at an elephant hoping to hurt it, but if pissing it off was your goal..

All hell broke loose, in the sense that even the Devil packed his bags and ran for shelter. The Kill Star was quiet just long enough for me to imagine that it wouldn't respond to the provocation, then it tore apart space so hard that it made the previous tides feel like splashes from the kiddies pool.

To their credit, the USSF forces were on the ball, throwing up their own defenses and firing back, but the self-propagating tsunami of gravitons scattered their shots, even light bent aside harmlessly. While gravity itself travels at c, whatever the Kill Star unleashed was slower, in the sense that there was a barely appreciable delay before the main charge detonated in the midst of the densest cluster of vessels.

My mom makes great spaghetti, even if she's unnecessarily ashamed that her Western cuisine is far superior to her native one. USSF ships make excellent spaghetti, three of them stretched so thin I could wrap my arms around them. Whatever power source they used, it wasn't an antimatter drive, because they didn't blow up, or at least not hard enough for anyone to care about. Another had been pancaked, turned into a flat disc flung hard enough to have hit Mars like a mini-RKV, or at least it would have, if the silent roar of mauled spacetime didn't compromise the integrity of its internal antimatter bottles, liberating exactly as much energy as demanded by E=mc^2.

I've described a lot of explosions today, and this one just about makes it to the top of the podium, though the race is far from over yet.

The other warships had been far enough away that many of them had been damaged instead of outright destroyed. A few stopped moving, drifting in eccentric orbits, crew and computers stretched into something that might be recognizable but was far from intact. If they made it through the rest of this war, the crew might get open casket burials.

The rest decided to go down swinging. I'd have cheered from the sidelines, if something, maybe one of the autonomous AI taking over from the far too slow crew, didn't decide that the UN fleet ought to be classified as hostiles too. Maybe they'd already been painted red in the IFF, and they'd just been holding fire.

Iskra teleported us, maintaining a mad cadence of hops that evaded the worst of the incoming projectiles. One of the ships must have had a precog aboard, because a jump to the middle of nowhere still resulted in a glancing hit, taking off weapon batteries and passing distressing close to the well shielded engines. One side of the ship had been scoured, venting the pure nitrogen atmosphere that was pumped in an attempt to mitigate risks from fires. I was glad the foam was back, even if I was still bouncing around, I had some cushion. Eventually, I came close enough to where the captain sat that a manipulator grabbed hold of me and dragged me through the viscous material and into one of the crew cocoons.

When warships like these throw down, it's usually from distances far further than the distance from Earth to the Moon, engagements from almost an entire AU, the distance between Earth and the Sun, were hardly unheard of, even if RKVs and missiles lacked accuracy at range.

This? It was a knife fight in a broom closet, so close I could fire my guns at the enemy if I thought that this would achieve anything. The question wasn't if you'd get stabbed, but when.

And now, after the gloves came off, it was just about time to deploy the precious cargo some of the ships have been saving up, the truly monstrous supes. The kind you were only happy to have on your side when they were fighting far, far away from home.