Gaia walked the scorched earth of the battlefields, her feet bare but unaffected by the heat, shards, and poisons strewn about. She was immaterial, but not untouched. The death and savagery was such that it stood out, even in her long memory of death and savagery, and the entity knew it to be a moment in history that would be remembered by either everyone or no one.

Those moments were rare, in her experience.

So much history had come to pass that only she recalled, that only she knew the truth of. Great men had died unknown and unlamented, while weak-willed cowards stood tall and claimed glory. Nations had crumbled so completely that the only trace of their passing was that which she carried with her. History was filled with those moments, important things that would forever be forgotten by everyone save her.

This, though, this was something . . . momentous.

It only remained to be determined whether or not anyone would survive to remember it.

Gaia paused in her walk, silently surveying the bodies of the Drasin and the bodies of the human warriors who fell in the fight, then vanished from one place on the Earth to appear again in another.

This time it was a similar war zone, nearly identical ruins filled the landscape, and more bodies of both sides lay motionless on the ground. It was a different continent, however, and a different people as those of the Earth viewed such things. Gaia walked across this field and fell into step beside a machine that walked as a man, her eyes lighting on the sight of a familiar face she could see inside it.

“Oh Captain, my Captain,” she mused as she walked beside the lumbering war machine piloted by Eric Weston. “Are you ready for what is to come? I wonder . . . I know that I am not, but humans have surprised me in the past despite my near omniscience within the Earth realm.

“There is much to do, and so little time to do it. I do not believe I will be able to confuse our foes for much longer, my Captain.”

She walked alongside him for a time, through the ruins of a city that had once been the center of so much activity and promise, then sighed to herself with a sound like the wind through the trees and shifted her focus elsewhere.

The captain was on mission, and doing what must be done.

For the moment, that would have to suffice.

Eric felt a chill run down his spine and he shifted uneasily in the cockpit of the EXO-13, eyes automatically checking all the warning systems, telltales, and proximity instrumentation. Everything seemed in the green, so he pushed the feeling off and returned his focus to the job at hand.