The reason I was aboard this probable suicide mission is that I'd promised Skippy to help him locate the Collective, and so far he'd kept up his end of the deal. Everyone else was aboard out of a sense of duty, or adventure. Foolish, maybe, but entirely honorable. My mother had cried her eyes out when I'd announced that, having just arrived, I was heading back up into space again for an unknown duration. My father had nodded, and shook my hand, and tried to look stoic, because that is the bullshit way men in my family have always been, and I bear-hugged him and we'd both cried. My parents were proud of me, without knowing what I'd done, all they knew is that I landed on the road in front of my parents' house in an alien dropship, and that duty required I go back into space quickly. There were no cheeseburgers on the grill this time, beef wasn't something that had seen the inside of my parents' kitchen recently, but there was chicken on the grill, a chicken raised in my parents' backyard, and it was delicious. My sister had to settle for a phone call with me, she was working in Boston, and she'd wished me luck, and asked if it was true that the Kristang were never going to appear in our skies again. Yes, I assured her, things were back to normal. If anyone could remember what normal had been, before Columbus Day.

Humanity had a Kristang troopship in orbit, now empty of Kristang and cleared of boobytraps. A troopship that could only be reached by old fashioned chemical rockets, because Skippy had insisted we couldn't leave even a single Kristang or Thuranin dropship behind on the ground as a technological leg up. "Your species went to your moon on your own, Joe, I'm sure they can get into orbit without our help." There were no Kristang left alive in the smoking craters near Hangzhou, Lyon and Durango, and the amount of dust kicked up by the railgun impactors meant humanity would be treated to spectacular sunsets for a couple months.