"Come on ! We have to keep pushing !" Kavia yelled out, before coughing up some of the ambient...ice dust ? She'd lived in these tunnels all her life and she had no clue what the fuck they were breathing.

  To be fair...she'd never fought on her homeworld. Not openly, at any rate.

  When the Genetic Ascendancy had taken over, most people had shrugged at their statements as lofty propaganda.

  It hadn't been. But they'd discovered that too late. Too slowly.

  But she'd prepared. As a captain of the Europan Liberation Front, she'd prepared for the day the Ascendancy would fall. And finally, justice had come.

  She just had to make sure justice was able to do its job.

  "We have to secure the landing pads !" She said as one of her men ducked back into cover, swearing. She fired a few shots into the darkness ahead, and saw several shapes dart in the gloom.

  The 'genetically enhanced' warriors weren't intelligent. They were human, or sure looked like it, but the Ascendancy liked their servants to be just that, servants. Meat for the 'master race' to use as they pleased. But they had programmed knowledge and an instinctive cunning that was terrible to behold.

  She felt the ground shake, and swallowed. Fuck. No no no, not again.

  "We're out of time ! Push ! PUUUUUSH !" She screamed, and her men followed her, yelling war cries.

  She knew what those shockwaves meant. The Ascendancy was firing more missiles. Missiles with viral warheads, meant to 'purify' the rest of the solar system, eliminating the 'genetically inferior' and 'uplifting' the survivors, headed for Earth and Mars.

  The fleet in orbit may have the greatest admiral to have ever lived to head it, but even she couldn't work miracles. She'd heard stories that one of the missiles had made it through Mars' Orbital Defense Grid. That on the red planet, mushroom clouds blossomed in the skies as the fortresses burned an entire continent to atoms to contain the plagues.

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  And that was on a world still made of deserts so old they had literally rusted. Where people still lived under domes, as the planet's dead core prevented an atmosphere.

  Stars only knew what would happen if one hit Earth.

  The death of billions. If they were lucky. And the Ascendancy had threatened to attack every moon, every orbital, every station...from Ceres to Luna, from the outermost reaches of the system to Mercury. Everyone in humanity's home system was at risk. She didn't even know many people that was. Ninety nine out of every hundred human alive, probably.

  She lead the charge into the tunnel...and to her astonishment, the creatures went to meet her. As they gunned them down, she realized...they weren't counter charging. They were fleeing.

  They were slaughtered. Genetically engineered flesh meant nothing when faced with gauss pistols, and the creatures spasmed on the ground, their 'perfected' bodies failing them as she thundered out of the tunnels and onto the landing pad, her men behind her.

  She had a flare of hope as she saw the light. Shuttles ? They were fleeing the marine strike teams, coming down from orbit surely ! She could greet their saviors face to face as they came down-

  She stopped as she stepped outside. She noticed, in the back of her mind, that the shaking had become constant, not the intermittent of interplanetary missile launches from hidden mass drivers, and the immediate response of tactical orbital strikes to prevent them from firing again. And that the shaking had become a distant, but omnipresent roar in the air.

  It was irrelevant.

  Because the light wasn't a shuttle, exchanging shots with air defense systems.

  The sky was on fire.

  She stared in utter incomprehension, her brain uncapable of understanding what was happening.

  She was still staring when the warhead hit the neoconcrete pad behind her at half of the speed of light, instantly converting fifty kilograms of tungsten to a plasma wave carrying the power of a one hundred and thirty five megaton thermonuclear bomb.

  The admiral had done the same calculations she had. And made a choice.

  Billions could die, and every world in Sol could perish alongside them. From humanity's motherworld to the asteroids lost in the void.

  Or one planet could perish. A single world, lost in the moons of Jupiter.

  The rebel captain was instantly converted to energy as the roar of her world's death throes swept where she had once been.

  And above, far above...a woman whose long dead brother and sister had called 'Alex' watched a world die.

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