Whether it was stroke of luck, act of God, or by the grace of the crime lords who ran Bastion Station, Allison made it back to her fighter and loaded the empty lard cannister into a cargo bay and managed to get home without incident. Her homecoming wasn’t a happy one. Her emotional resilience was seriously compromised, and she wasn’t sure how to handle the loss of her Babu. The house was quiet when she went inside. There were counters full of comfort foods as was the case in New Alexandria when you lost a family member. Her father was eating some lasagna, her mother was trying desperately to organize all of the food. Robin who had never met this person everyone was so sad about was sitting on the floor playing with one of the dolls Allison had brought her home from Qual’sa. Aryna was helping Apiyo in the kitchen. The nargles were milling about unsure of who to comfort first.

Allison had the cloak she’d bought on the station clutched in her hand and the lard container under the other. She put the container on the kitchen table and walked over to Robin first. Figuring the confused little girl could use something to focus on. She kneeled and spoke softly from behind the eight-year-old who hadn’t noticed her yet.

“Hey, I brought you a cloak so you can play princess with it. Or… Maid Marian like the story I read you.”

Robin clutched the cloak and hugged Allison tightly. The noise of the child’s excitement alerted everyone else to Allison’s presence. Apiyo rushed over and hugged Allison. Then she put her hands on Allison’s cheeks and looked over her face.

“Praise be to Jesus, he brought you back to us safe and sound.”

Allison let her mother fuss over her. The teenager did what she always did when she was emotionally uncomfortable, she used humor.

“Well of course he did, do you know he’s my first cousin?”

Apiyo narrowed her eyes at Allison.

“Blasphemy? That is the thanks you give for him keeping you safe from all those people and things trying to kill you?”

Allison sighed.

“It would only be blasphemy if it wasn’t true, ask Aunt Maria.”

Apiyo threw up her hands.

“At a time like this you crack jokes. Do you take nothing serious? Your Babu is gone child.”

Allison’s mask slipped and her face fell. Her shoulders slumped.

“I was too late mom. I tried so hard to get there but… I needed… if I’d rushed I couldn’t have saved him and if I didn’t rush I couldn’t save him… I’m sorry daddy.”

Her dad put his plate down and rushed over to Allison. He pulled her into a tight hug and she started crying into his chest.

“Shh, baby girl, you did everything you could. If you hadn’t shown up, we would have lost a lot more.”

Allison saw a call coming in on her AR HUD. It was Maria. She sighed.

“I need to go; Aunt Maria is calling.”

He nodded and released her. Allison sniffled as she walked to her room and tapped the accept. Maria looked empathetic about her situation.

“Allison, I am sorry about Amani. He was a good man and an old friend. I remember when he was an ensign on my bridge. I would love to let you mourn in peace. Unfortunately, I am dealing with a few crisis’s related to you. Your being named heir is one of them. The council is… displeased. The board is ecstatic. The other is a bit more personal to you, pardon my language, but what the hell did you use on that hive? I am getting FOIA requests left and right, security requests to be read in on the new secret weapon by the entire joint chiefs of staff and the board and I still have no idea what they are talking about. I suspect I know what you did. I hope you did not.”

Allison couldn’t look at her aunt’s image and her eyes shifted away from the ancient vampire.

“I know where you were, and I have the reports of what happened to that hive.”

Allison finally snapped at her aunt and gave her the same answer she’d given Bit.

“I did what I needed to give our fleet a fighting chance, I won’t apologize for it. There is only one payload left and it is in a secure place. I used it twice, once on the station, once on the super-hive. I would do it again and I wouldn’t have any second thoughts.”

Maria let out a slow unnecessary breath.

“Allison. Bioengineering a plague to a specific species is a crime against humanity.”

Allison glared at her aunt.

“You think I had time to make it care what it was attacking? I know what I did. I know what it could do if it got loose on a planet. I watched what it did on the station. It was horrific and I will be haunted by it for the rest of my life.”

Maria sighed.

“Allison, do you know what the man who was primarily responsible for the atomic bomb said? ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ It comes from the Bhagavad Gita. A Hindu text. A warrior is conflicted because he faces foes from his own family. Vishnu teaches him a philosophy to overcome his moral dilemma and become the ultimate warrior. To some it is a heroic story. To me it is a cautionary tale, if victory costs you yourself, you have already lost. I have made the same mistakes you have. I saw only the problem and the straightest line to a solution. It cost me everything. It cost me my sister, it cost me my brother, it cost me millennia with my father. Yes, I won but at what cost? You did what you did because you felt it was the best solution in a long list of bad ones. You gave our fleet and our people a fighting chance. What I am truly upset about is that you made me complicit in it. Now if I cover up what you did, I am just as guilty as you. If I do not Eyre will never speak to me again and you will likely never see the outside of a prison cell. If I do, I have just condoned the use of the most horrific weapon ever used by a human.”

Maria held up one finger.

“My God Allison. You are seventeen years old. You should be worrying about boys and exams, and university. Not creating weapons of mass destruction.”

Maria rubbed her forehead.

“You have tied my hands. I do not know if it was teenage shortsightedness. You were scared. Or if you planned it. I know in my heart it was one of the first two but Dear God it was too easy to believe it was the third option. You do not have the last one on Eden, do you?”

Allison was almost insulted.

“No, it is nowhere near an inhabited world. I’m not stupid.”

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Maria gave Allison a look.

“Sometimes, sometimes you are so stupid it borders on suicidal, Allison. I know it is hard for you to understand but I love you like you are my own. I have watched you grow up. I have made sure you had every opportunity. Then you do something like this.”

Allison was getting frustrated.

“What? Saved four hundred million people? Made the bastards who killed my Babu pay? You act like I did this because I wanted to see if I could. The only way to deal with that signal is to kill the Queen. Once I realized the medical station and hive were a trap and that Ratoa was compromised, I knew that is where the Queen would be because that is the last place I was going when I left the station. I had two shots! Two! I had no portable antimatter containment vessels, nor could I guarantee a Queen’s death with a fricking memorial torpedo and conventional explosives. I tested it on the Sal’nash at the station to make sure my self-destruct trigger worked so I would not wipe out all life on Ratoa and then I took my shot. David vs. Goliath Aunt Maria, my rock was just a little more advanced, and a lot sharper. The only other choice was not to try at all.”

Allison clenched her fists and growled.

“I don’t make things just to see if I can, Aunt Maria. I’m not you. You think I wanted to do this? You think it was my first choice? I went through five different strategies in my head. This was the only winning play, I would rather not go to prison for life, but it that is the cost for saving four hundred million people and killing a lot of bugs I’ll do it willingly. I really don’t think the council would disagree with my actions, the board wants the Ratoan empire, so I doubt they’ll act against its new heir. There is no way the Primarch lets her little poster child go on trial for killing bugs. So, cover it up or don’t there is a long line behind you. I’m getting fed up with everybody using me and my image for their own ends.”

Maria would normally try to adjust Allison’s attitude, but she was starting to understand her niece was in a worse mental state than she realized.

“Allison, you are going to be mad at me for this, but I will be suspending your pilot’s license and taking you off active reserve status. You are being stood down as of this moment. You will turn in your armor and weapons to your father. He will secure them until such time as you are in a better place mentally.”

Allison’s eyes went wide.

“What? Because I didn’t meet your moral standards? You wanted me to ask the fucking Sal’nash to leave nicely? You need me. The Alliance needs me.”

Maria sighed.

“This has nothing to do with any of that. You are losing it Allison. You have gone through a lot of loss and trauma in a very short amount of time. You are hurting and you are lashing out. In a combat situation that makes you a liability to yourself and everyone around you. Your father will take care of any death notices that would have fallen to you.”

Allison wasn’t getting any calmer.

“They died on my watch; I need to do that. I can’t just go running to my father when something is uncomfortable. You’re infantilizing me.”

Maria leaned on her desk.

“No, I am doing what I have always done for your mother. I am protecting you from yourself. You are in no condition to even start to mourn what you have lost. How can you be expected to help others mourn? I have given you a lot of leeway because honestly when I was your age, I was expected to be a parent, a wife, the daughter of a senator. A general. For someone who grew up in the distant past it is easy to forget that seventeen-year-olds from this day and age are not as mature. Allison you are a tactical genius. You are brilliant in the cockpit. You are all that and more, but you are still a child. Do you really want to have an emotional breakdown while you are trying to tell a spouse and your soldier’s children how their partner and parent died bravely? You are barely holding yourself together right now.”

Allison’s lower lip was quivering, the fight was quickly leaving her.

“Do not repeat your mother’s mistakes. Enid God bless her, was a force of nature but she never stood still and let herself process loss. She would always find the next mission, the next monster to hunt, because then she would never have to think about what she had lost. It left her angry and bitter. Completely unable to sit still, she always had to be doing something. That is what you have been doing. So, stop, breathe, mourn, process your emotions or they will overwhelm you. You dealt the Sal’nash another crippling defeat. The cost was steep. Lick your wounds. Bury the dead. You are on indefinite leave for your mental and physical well-being. Take the time to pick yourself up. I love you go be with your family.”

Allison’s shoulders slumped in defeat. She really wanted to be furious, but she was just really tired. She collapsed onto her knees and just broke down sobbing into her bed. Her father must have been informed of Maria’s intent because he came in and got on his knees behind Allison and rubbed her back.

“I remember when you were younger, some boys were bullying you so you being you, even at four years old, fought back. Not with your fists, no, not with words either, no you hid under the play slide and while they were waiting you tied their shoes together. Then you pointed and laughed at them when they all ended up headfirst in the sand. Your teachers didn’t know what to do with you. They never have. They give you a problem and you find a solution they didn’t even think of. You’re what’s called a lateral thinker. Anyway, back when you were four, we had to keep you home. Not because you were suspended. There was no rule against what you did. I believe there is now. It might even be named after you… No, it was because you were upset about going because you thought your teachers were mad. I had some leave, so you and I went to Ohio Colony to look at the fossil museum. We had the best day… which we would not have had, if you hadn’t been avoiding school and I hadn’t been avoiding work.”

Allison sniffled and looked at her dad and gave him a strange look.

“Was there a point to that story dad?”

He shrugged.

“I don’t know, you seem so upset, I really just want to fix it. I’m sorry.”

Allison leaned against him.

“I miss him dad. How could he be gone?”

Her dad rubbed her shoulder.

“I miss him too. I thought he’d live forever. I imagined him calling your children little simbas. He’s not gone though. As long as we remember him. I know it’s cliché. You were always closer to him than I ever was. We didn’t talk much about things that mattered. He did something similar to me and I didn’t speak to him until grandma and your aunt’s funeral. Twenty years. He was a hard man and sometimes he charged right into it. He knew you loved him. He wouldn’t want you to dwell on what was said or done. He’d want you to move on.”

Allison leaned into her father and just closed her eyes. She woke up, tucked into her bed. Her mother must have changed her into one of her T-shirts because her armor was nowhere to be seen. She sighed and rolled over on her side and stared at the Athena prototype poster on her far wall between her ensuite and her walk-in closet. She had the urge to rip it down, but it passed. She pulled herself up and washed off the stank of thirty-two hours in a cockpit with skintight armor on. There was definitely a funk about her. She saw a notice on her contacts that school was closed for three days of mourning. She had a lot of funerals to attend on those days. She might not be allowed to do the death notices, but she was damned if she would miss their funerals.

Allison attended every single funeral for the men and women she’d lost when they were under her command. She went in full dress uniform to each. It took three days. Her grandfather’s memorial wasn’t for two weeks. It fell on spring break. It was being held at Alliance Headquarters on the parade field in New Amazon.

The teenage overachiever and workaholic was not handling her forced time off well. She started spiraling shortly after the last funeral. It had been the hardest. Griffon One, aka Carlos Natimbi, had taken his own life. Allison felt responsible. She’d made the call the have Bit autopilot him out of the operational field. Carlos was engaged to Anita Salam one of the pilots that died. His suicide note, which he’d sent to Allison apologized for freezing and said he could not live with thinking his absence had gotten Anita killed. He thanked Allison for her removing him from the fight and apologized that he was wasting his second chance. It kind of messed Allison up worse then she had been. She’d received it only seconds before he ended his own life.

Saturday morning found Allison sitting on Bit’s wing staring at a blank wall. The AI was in rest mode so Allison had the hanger to herself save for the lazy nargle who was curled up in her doggy bed snoring. She was wondering if the universe wouldn’t be better off without her and the monstrous things she brought into it. Anyone paying close attention to her would have realized she was slipping into depression; She wasn’t eating half as much as she should. She was forgetting her supplements, and she hadn’t showered in two days. Unfortunately, everyone around her was too busy to notice and Bit wasn’t speaking to her. Apparently being complicit in launching a bioweapon was a step too far for the Synthlin conscience.

Allison was thinking how easy it would be to get into Bit and fly into space and just open the canopy. She was pretty sure that was death that would stick. Of course she could just report herself to the System’s Alliance. They’d take care of it efficiently with a disintegration… no, they wouldn’t they’d just send her to Ratoa. Where they sent everything, they wanted swept under the rug lately. She was near her lowest point when she spied a discarded LSR data bundle on her worktable. It held the data on historic LSR FTL tracking data and hyperspace manatees migration patterns. She looked at Bit’s cockpit then back at the data bundle.