The Block were not his enemy any more than the terror groups had been, however. They were just opponents in someone’s obscene game of chess. It was stupid for a knight to hate a pawn just because it flew a different flag.

Finally, however, Eric had found a real enemy.

The Drasin were everything others had tried to tell him he’d been fighting all along.

Ruthless, implacable, unshakeable evil and nothing less. An enemy that literally had to be fought to the last man because if they survived, humanity wouldn’t.

Deep down inside him, Eric felt a stab of guilt because he felt almost vindicated by it. He’d done things as a Marine and, later, as a pilot for the Double A squadron that had left him dead inside at times. Now he found that maybe, just maybe, everything he’d done in his life had actually meant something after all.

This was a fight the likes of which only existed in fiction, a war that was black and white and had no vagueness in where the line was drawn. If you were human, you stood cleanly on one side, and if you were Drasin you stood on the other.

Of course, deep down, Eric doubted it was really that clean. He remembered the unknown ships allied with the Drasin, the ships they’d narrowly evaded back in the Dyson Construct. Ships that very much resembled the Priminae, just constructed with different materials.

Eric suspected deep down that not all humans were on his side of the line, but for the moment he was content to put that thought far from his mind. Here, on Earth, the lines were clean and pure and he was going to enjoy that lack of ambiguity for once.

He grabbed a supply of DPU shells from the supply train, eyes looking over the men and women he now had fighting for and with him. They had work to do before they rested, but he was going to do everything he could to make sure they lived to enjoy that rest when the time came.

Eric looked up at the sky, now darkening enough to show a few stars that were no longer washed out by the lights of the city that never slept. With no power to most of New York in the aftermath of the attack, the stars twinkled happily above him, and Eric found one he knew and just stared for a long time.

He hoped that his crew were well, wherever they were out beyond that star.

Eric’s thoughts were violently redirected from his crew when flaming trails appeared in the dark sky, descending fast toward the Earth. He dropped the last of the DPU shells into his gravity weapon and opened a squad-wide channel.

“Look alive, boys and girls. We’ve got more guests coming to the ball,” he said, sloughing off the fatigue. “Let’s give them a warm welcome, shall we?”

CHAPTER TEN