Although I never walked the sentient jungles of Pelapatarn, I did once fly over them on a cargo dirigible, as we were ferrying medical supplies from one port to another. It was three weeks before we suffered the final attack, and I was overseeing the restock of the medical frigate. For six hours, I had nothing to do but dangle my legs through the railings of the gondola’s observation platform, inhale the flowery scent of the canopy, listen to the squawk and gibber of flitting bird-lizards, and wonder at the ponderous creaks of the trees as they engaged in their dreamy, decades-long discourse.

By the time the Conglomeration attack came, I was back on board the Nightingale, and we were in a higher orbit, well outside the scope of the battle. From up there, the planet resembled a jewel set against the velvet cushion of space, its single continent a vivid emerald sliver in an ocean of glittering cerulean.

After the strike, all that was gone. Clouds of smoke and ash obscured the surface, transforming the globe from a shimmering precious stone to a rheumy, cataract-choked eyeball, and we watched from our vantage in horror, more shocked by the desecration than by the slowly dawning fact we had lost the war.

In the hours following the strike, rescue shuttles pulled a depressingly low number of survivors from the radioactive hell-scape. All our senior commanders were dead, as were thousands of soldiers from both sides. The only ones who made it out alive were those who had been fortunate to be in deep bunkers near the coast, on the fringes of the holocaust.

One by one, they were carried aboard, bodies blackened and eyes unseeing, skin charred and blistered, clothes and hair burned away, their bodies riddled with near-lethal doses of radiation. In most cases, it was impossible to tell on which side they had fought—and it hardly seemed to matter in the face of such overwhelming horror. All we could do was try to patch up the ones who could be saved, and make comfortable those who couldn’t.

Towards the end of the second day following the bombardment, I volunteered to go down with one of the shuttles. Our flight crews had far exceeded their limits in terms of flying time and radiation exposure. If others like me hadn’t stepped forward, the rescue operation would have had to be abandoned.