Eric chuckled, shaking his head. Ronald Blake would never see him as anything else, he supposed. It was fair, though. He knew that he’d forever see Stephen as the snot-nosed little security breach who couldn’t keep his nose out of the Double A hangars.

“I’ll survive,” he answered.

“Not what I asked. You lost a lot in the last twenty-four. That’s going to play games with your mind, son,” the retired Air Force colonel said seriously.

Eric just nodded. You have no idea.

He couldn’t tell his old friend and sometime mentor about Gaia. Just what Central on the Priminae homeworld really was remained one of the only truly classified subjects that existed from his visits beyond the Black. The idea that one of those entities existed on Earth . . . that would change everything in ways he couldn’t guess. No, for the moment Gaia was staying his little secret.

Not that he supposed he had much real control over it. Eric suspected that if the entity chose to go public, then there was damn little he could hope to do about it. He or anyone else.

“I’m saying that you need to talk to someone, Eric,” Blake said softly, awkwardly.

Eric snorted. Neither of them had ever been any good at the touchy-feely bullshit, and it always showed.

“I’ll deal with it when we’re done, Ron,” he said aloud. “Between now and then, there is only war.”

Ronald Blake watched his younger friend walk on ahead of him and shook his armored head, his voice soft as he spoke. “Kid, that’s a path to perdition you’re walking.”

Eric heard him, of course. He could have been halfway across the city and heard him fine in the armor, but he didn’t turn back or respond. He knew the road he was on, better than his old friend did. It wasn’t a road to perdition. It was a road to hell and every man, woman, and child on Earth was walking that road with him.

The Drasin had to be stopped.

There really wasn’t any other option. It was that or death in the cold of space. They weren’t a human enemy. They weren’t something that could be ignored or endured. All his life Eric had heard his superiors, his commanding officers, the political hacks who made policy, all telling him the same thing. The enemy he was fighting was the worst of the worst.

In the Middle East it had been “terror groups,” men and women so poor and uneducated that they were two meals from starvation and honestly believed that the Americas were inhabited by devils. They were never the real enemy. They were just the easiest to find and kill.

Then it was the Block, the Eastern menace.

Again, Eric had fought. He’d done his duty. At times, to his shame, he’d even loved it.