He wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, however, so he just nodded down the street.

“Dallas crawls. Unless you have a significant field force . . .”

Bermont shook his head. “Tactical strike squad. We’re stretched thin, even with as many people as we have.”

Eric nodded. He was disappointed but unsurprised. “Then we need to provide cover while we evacuate as many people as possible. Dallas crawls, and that can’t be allowed to continue . . . one way or another.”

“Roger that, Skipper. We’re on it,” Bermont said, feet lifting off the ground as he triggered his suit-warp and flew up to the top of a nearby building. “You take the low road, Skipper, We’ll see to the high.”

“Damn showoff,” Eric said to himself, making a note to get one of the new systems just as soon as he could. They looked like one helluva lot of fun.

“Cherokee Zero One Niner, Weston.”

“Go for Cherokee, Weston.”

“I need a pickup at my location, heavy-lift EXO suit for repair and rearm. I am proceeding on foot to secure the evacuation route.”

“Roger, Weston. Good hunting.”

“Nothing good about these things. They wouldn’t even make decent trophies. I’ll make do, though. Weston out.”

The battle was running well, Gaia noted. They would certainly lose a great many people, and much of the infrastructure of nearly every nation on the Earth, but that was a small price to pay for the survival of the species and, yes, even the world itself.

In fact, to the entity’s mind, things were going too well.

She observed the battles at every point, sometimes nudging her humans one way or another to give them the best chance at victory, and everything looked as good as one might reasonably hope.

The problem was, she didn’t feel that the universe was being especially reasonable on this day . . . So the ancient entity looked around her domain, within the sphere of which she was all but omniscient, and she couldn’t help but wonder.

“What am I missing?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“MA’AM, WE’VE secured NEO space.”

Admiral Gracen nodded, handing the ensign back the report he’d given her. “Good work. Start expanding our FTL and light-speed scanning to cover the rest of Sol Space. I want to make sure that they’re all gone before we relax.”

“Yes ma’am, I understand.”

She again did the mental math, trying to work out if there were any significant numbers of the enemy ships outstanding, but again decided that there were not. They’d accounted for the most dangerous portion of the fleet that had driven them from Earth space and assaulted the planet, though she was certain that a few more of the enemy ships were hiding out in the outer system.