Considering the nature of future combat, what the fuck were humans even doing out here at all?

Amaro noticed the change of situation first, she'd been monitoring a camera, and called for me when she saw that the pair of hamsters who had been watching our personal fusion reactor set down their weapons and stand up so they were in full view. We toggled the view from one camera to another, and the scene was repeated all over the base, hamsters laying down their weapons and walking away, toward the airfield. Vulture gunships coming in to land, crews getting out, leaving the doors open, and walking away. We barely had time to speculate what was going on before all our zPhones beeped at once. The cavalry had returned. Our allies the Kristang were back in command of space around Paradise, and the Ruhar forces on the ground had surrendered. For now, anyway.

CHAPTER SEVEN    COLONEL

UNEF flew in a half dozen Buzzards a couple hours later, we’d spent the time searching for survivors and assisting the wounded. To my relief, we found an Army captain who took command, and I went back to following orders.

Three days later, in the morning there was a violent thunderstorm while I was working on a clean-up crew, after the rain stopped and the sun came out to raise steaming clouds off the airfield tarmac, a private found me and said that I had orders to report to Major Perkins at the admin building. Major Perkins? What the hell was she doing here, she’d told me she’d been assigned to the Indian sector. My thought that this couldn’t be any good for me.

"Sergeant Bishop reporting, ma'am." I was a bit out of breath from running up the stairs.

Major Perkins looked at me a moment in surprise. "You couldn't have cleaned up? What have you been doing?"

I glanced down at my soiled and sooty clothes, and my dirty hands with blackened fingernails. "I was told to get here on the double, ma'am. I was helping move, uh, debris off the runway." Debris that included shattered Buzzards with human remains still aboard.

"Oh, hell, Bishop. I didn't intend for you to run all the way here, dammit. Sit down.” She looked as tired as I felt. “How you feeling?”

“Numb, ma’am,” I answered honestly. “Like you told me, I was laying low here, on convoy duty, and then, blam, all hell breaks loose.” I shuddered involuntarily, thinking of the crater that was the DFAC. “Why the hell did they hit the DFAC? A couple minutes different that morning, and I would have been there.”