Sarah had called me from her flagship, the Dancing Pixie, for a strategy meeting, after I'd sent word that I wanted her to gather her fleet at Pluto before we moved on Earth. Naturally she had questions, and while I had answers, I also had more than a few concerns.

"Okay Rickshaw," she said when I took her call. "What's the idea?"

"Your fleet had no trouble taking any of the planets you went after," I observed as I looked over the battle reports that Cai was helpfully filtering into a numbers set that highlighted massive gulfs in Nephilim fleet numbers and Solar fleet numbers. My own fleet had also been able to take most of the planets without a fight or a significant loss of life. Whatever the Solar Empire was doing was not helping them hold onto planets.

"It was weird," Sarah said. "They almost never fought and when they did I stomped them without any trouble. All those tiny ships and they were beating the Wardens? I don't buy it something's up there."

"I'd agree but I also have better access to the Collective's database," I told her. "The Wardens were also kind enough to give their records of the fights up to now to us. The Alliance would soften the Wardens' ships up and often render them inoperable and the Empire would swoop in with their smaller ships and take prisoners or end lives. After that, they'd turn the prisoners over to the Alliance for ransom and destroy the rest of the ships with well-placed explosives or collision courses with each other or stars."

"They killed civilians?" Sarah demanded.

"According to all the reports we were given, all ships that had civilian tags surrendered and were taken prisoner while ships with military tags were forced to fight," I answered. "It still isn't right to kill indiscriminately like that, but that's what we'd be doing if no one surrendered to us."

"I wanted you here with me to take Earth for different reasons," I told her. "I think that Earth left token defenses at all the other planets to either forcefully bleed our forces and ships, or to waste our time with having to take each planet. So we're jumping ahead to Earth right off the bat, and I'm expecting to walk into an actual fight with all those ships that the Empire was supposed to have. Nearly sixty thousand ships in total with maybe fifteen thousand split into pieces across thirty planets. If those numbers are right then we're looking at about forty-five thousand ships with only a few of them hitting the tonnage that puts them on par with our ships."

"You can't take out forty-five thousand ships with only thirty thousand yourself?" she teased.

"If you want to take a whack at that, then be my guest," I offered. "I'll stay here and observe for next time."

"So we're expecting to jump into a fight with more than a few starships that are all going to be dedicated to defending Earth and we're hoping to minimize loss of life?" Sarah said dropping her smile and turning serious. "Too bad we don't have good non-lethal options."

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"Never expected to need them but now I've got a lot of ideas running through the R&D pipeline," I told her. "We can't stop this fight until we have it all up and running though so we're going to have to do our best to place our shots right and time it all well enough that we lower the casualties. I'm also thinking of having the shuttles rush through with squads that are going to make their way to the bridges on each ship and take control."

"And if they can't get to those?" Sarah asked. "They're going to be defending those bridges with their lives and our people didn't sign up to fight Humans, they signed up to fight Scourge. I've had more than a few Wings and Principalities come to me because of that."

"Then they'll begin to sabotage key areas of the ships," I said. "Engines, weapons, power control, communications. They'll have options to look into. As for the people that come to you and raise issues with fighting Humans, I'll take care of that before we get into this fight. I've been struggling with that myself."

"Thank you," Sarah said quietly. "I couldn't think of an answer that made me a hypocrite when they asked me. I don't like having to fight people when I know that I'm supposed to protecting them."

"We'll get through this," I assured her. "It's just a matter of toughing it out and not losing sight of why we fight."

"Why didn't they just send diplomats to your summit?" she asked. "All this is just a loss of life and there's no real reason for it. Everyone knows that you're not in the business of killing for fun, why wouldn't they want to avoid a fight?"

"Cai messed up," I answered. "When I took Eden, the admiral in charge of the fleet there didn't recognize me and actually told me to my face that I was dead or just gone. He had to pull up whatever file the Empire has on me to find a picture and then he realized it was really me. I asked Cai about it later and he told me that he'd just tagged the message I'd told him to send out with the Deva Collective's seal rather than signing my name. That means that no one knew that I was back and the Nephilim were the ones calling the summit. They just thought that the Collective was finally trying to stop the war peacefully. Since the Empire and the Alliance were winning, they didn't care to respond to a peace summit. They just thought they could weather whatever storm we're bringing to them and that made them pull back most fleets and forces to take up defensive positions at key planets."

"You mean that all this could have been avoided if Cai had just signed your name?" Sarah asked incredulously. "You've got to be joking with me, Rickshaw."

"I wish I was or that was true," I told her. "Just having my name wouldn't guarentee that the summit would have ended with a treaty or something. There was no guarentee that everyone would have shown up whether my name was on the message or not. For all we know, it could have made things worse. Besides, Cai did the right thing in my eyes. I wasn't sending that message as Rickshaw James, I was sending it as the Chief Protector of the Deva Collective. All using my name would have done is add credibility or something."

"I'm still pissed that we don't even get the chance to see if it would have stopped this," she said unhappily.

"That's just the way the cookies crumbled," I said, shrugging. "Now lets get ready to jump into whatever shitshow we're going toward."

"You want me to take the upper and loser flanks while you hammer the middle or the side flanks?" she asked.

"I want you to focus on running ships to the ones I open holes in," I told her. "I'm tansfering command of the carriers to you and taking some of your destroyers and gunships. The faster we take them all out of the fight, the faster this is done. We've been lucky so far, let's hope the good lady looks on us favorably again."

"Good luck out there," Sarah said before cutting ending the holocall.

"Good luck to you too," I said. "Cai send orders, we're moving on Earth."