Blue Resurrection, page 38
Protocol "Fire Rain." Watch.
Thornen leaned forward, his face illuminated by the red reflections of the screens. The video feeds began automatically. There was no pause button. There were no admin rights to stop the broadcast.
Footage from Station "Sentinel" appeared on the central monitor. The quality was poor, the camera shaking, but horror didn't need high resolution. The vacuum sucked bodies out through the torn hull. Officers begging for evacuation as their air ran out. And then—that voice, crystal clear, heard from the black box recording:
"There are no survivors. I repeat, no survivors."
Vane's voice. His intonation was calm, almost bored, while on the screen soldiers slammed against the hermetic doors.
Down in the hangar, the change began.
Thornen looked through the glass. He was no longer watching the shuttle. He was watching the people.
The signal arrived, sudden as an electric shock, and everywhere at once. Terabytes of information, flooding into hundreds of devices simultaneously. And then—the sound.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep-beep-beep.
Hundreds of chirps, like thousands of electronic hearts beating in the same rhythm. A notification. Then another. And another. A cascade of pings that washed over the hangar like a wave of metallic bells. Thornen felt the hairs on his arms stand up. That sound—that innocuous, familiar sound of an incoming message—was more terrifying than any air raid siren. It was the sound of a shattered illusion.
Mechanics, dressed in oil-stained coveralls, had stopped mid-movement. One technician dropped a hydraulic wrench. The tool fell silently to the floor, but the technician didn't even look down. His eyes were glued to the holographic panel on his wrist. His mouth was half-open.
Next to him, a group of pilots, just off duty, stood frozen. Their helmets hung from their limp hands. They weren't talking. They were reading. Their jaws tightened more with each passing moment.
And the light...
The light spilled from hundreds of screens like a ghostly dawn in the dark hangar. The faces of the personnel were lit from below—bluish, cold reflections that turned their features into masks of horror and rage. The technician with pale fingers. The pilot with clenched teeth. The young comms officer, whose eyes widened so much Thornen could see the whites even from the tower. Each was illuminated, each was reading the truth.
The digital contagion jumped from device to device. Movement in the base ceased. Cargo hung suspended from cranes. Carts stood still in the middle of aisles. Even the unloading drones locked into immobility on their ceiling tracks.
This is the end of the myth. The end of the god.
Thornen felt the tension in his shoulders melt away, replaced by a cold, sharp clarity. He had expected chaos, shouts, people running. But the reality was more devastating.
This was the moment of collective shock and betrayal. Thousands of people simultaneously realizing they had been fuel for one sociopath's ambitions.
The loyalty, woven over years with words of honor and duty, was unraveling before their eyes. Vane was not their savior, but their executioner.
The shuttle door opened slowly, majestically. Steam hissed, revealing the silhouette of the admiral, surrounded by his elite guard. Vane stepped onto the ramp, expecting the usual formation, salutes, impeccable discipline. Instead, he was met by a wall of backs and bowed heads, all staring intently at screens.
Thornen saw the admiral's body stiffen. He clearly noticed, even from that distance, the slight step forward, then the halt. Vane expected attention, fear, majestic silence upon his descent from the heavens. But no one was looking at him.
One of the senior mechanics—a burly man with scars on his arms, whom Thornen vaguely knew as Sergeant Luhano—slowly looked up from his tablet. He turned toward the shuttle. The distance was too great to see the features of his face, but his entire posture screamed. His shoulders squared. He wasn't standing "at ease," but in a posture of defiance.
His hand gripped the tablet—Thornen could see his fingers whitening from the strain—but instead of crushing it, the sergeant raised it high, the screen pointing toward the shuttle, toward them.
Others rose as well. The pilots threw their helmets aside. The sound of composite materials hitting concrete must have echoed like a gunshot down below. They didn't reach for their weapons. Not yet. But the atmosphere in the hangar grew ominously heavy, charged with the electricity of a brewing mutiny.
Thornen saw Vane's guards shift their weapons—small, spasmodic movements betraying a sense of change. The instinct for self-preservation sharpened.
You won't get away with it. This time, no hidden protocols. No edited history.
On the monitors in the tower, next to the ominous footage from "Sentinel," financial transactions scrolled. The bribes. The arms sales to the Separatists. Vane's name was everywhere—a digital trail no deletion could erase. Everything the admiral had hidden behind double-encrypted walls was now pouring like a torrent through the terminals of every grunt on the base.
One screen showed a list of names. Soldiers sacrificed for "strategic necessity." Another—a schematic of Operation "Sacred Ground," outlining the use of the civilian population of the Nova Therma colony as a living shield.
Thornen approached the control console. His fingers, now steady, moved across the touch panel. He isolated the audio channel from the runway and hangar. He wanted to hear, not the filtered silence of the tower, but the sound of the collapse.
He pressed "Activate."
The interior of the tower filled with the noise from outside. But it wasn't the noise of machines. It was a strange, muffled roar, like an approaching earthquake. Voices. Hundreds of voices rising at once. The initial whisper of disbelief turned into a stifled murmur.
"...he killed them! He killed them all..."
"...how many more died because of him..."
"...liar, damn liar..."
Someone shouted louder:
"Murderer!"
The word echoed, followed by a stronger cry:
"Liar!"
Then a third:
"Traitor!"
Thornen watched as the figure of the admiral froze on the ramp. Even from there, the hesitation was visible—a slight recoil, barely noticeable, but enough. For the first time, Vane was not in control. His guards clustered around him, trying to block the gazes, but it was too late. The wave was already rising.
Time to pay the bill, Admiral.
The officer leaned back in his chair, eyes fixed on the small figure on the runway, who now seemed so insignificant against the rising tide of uniforms he himself had unleashed. The people were no longer a faceless mass of loyal soldiers. They were individuals, shaken from the stupor of subordination, and they stared at the man who had betrayed them.
A mechanic, younger than the rest, shouted something unintelligible and stepped forward.
"Not yet," two colleagues stopped him, "it's not time yet."
But the intent was clear. The hangar seethed with impatience.
Let the storm begin, Thornen whispered, his words dissolving into the growing din from the speakers.
On the screen before him, the footage from "Sentinel" continued. An endless loop of horror, broadcast from thousands of displays. Vane had no power to stop this. Not enough guards, not enough lies would help him now.
Thornen returned his gaze to the runway. To the solitary figure on the ramp.
Vane stood alone. The wind from the shuttle's engines whipped his dark cape, but it no longer looked majestic. It had become a rag, mercilessly battered by the airflow. His guards had stepped back—just a few centimeters, but the distance was there, visible and irreparable. And they knew. And they had read.
The admiral was alone against thousands of eyes judging him. Eyes illuminated by the bluish glow of truth, which no longer saw a hero.
The truth had now spread. And it was hungry.
CHAPTER 37
The dust tasted bitter as crushed bone. It clung to the roof of Eliza's mouth, gritty and insistent, indigestible. Victory Square—the once architectural jewel of Europa Prime—now gaped like an open wound. The facades of the administration buildings had peeled away like skin, revealing an unsightly weave of rebar and optic cables. There was no wind. Smoke from the burning structures rose in vertical columns, black pillars propping up a leaden sky.
Eliza dared not move. Maya's hand in hers was damp, small, sticky. The child wasn't crying. Shock had dried her tears, leaving wide-open eyes scanning the gray landscape. Eliza squeezed her fingers. A heartbeat. Rhythmic, fast, feral. She's alive. The only thing that mattered.
The crowd around them was suffocating. Hundreds of survivors, pulled from basements and subway stations, stood frozen among the debris. No one spoke. The silence was more crushing than the falling plaster.
All eyes were riveted on the center of the square, where they stood—The Blues.
The squad bore no resemblance to the heroes from propaganda holos. Their armor was cracked, smeared with soot and organic slime. Some leaned on each other. Others were bent double, hands on knees, chests heaving for a breath. Dried blood caked around their mouths. Not their own.
Eliza swallowed hard. Monsters. The word surfaced in her mind, but not with horror—with a strange, twisted gratitude. These creatures had torn the invaders apart with bare hands and short blades after their ammunition ran dry. Now they stood motionless among the corpses, resting after a bloody hunt. The people looked at them with a reverence primal humans held for fire—a force that could warm, but also incinerate.
A low rumble split the still air. Eliza looked up and saw the clouds part.
A Titan-class assault shuttle pierced the veil of smoke. Its hull gleamed in matte gray, bearing the Federation's emblem—a golden eagle clutching a planet in its talons. The vertical landing engines roared, blasting jets of superheated plasma at the square.
"Mommy!" Maya flinched and buried her face in Eliza's coat.
"Don't look," Eliza whispered, pulling her close. "Don't look up."
The shockwave hit the square. Dust rose in a suffocating whirlwind. Debris and paper danced a frantic jig. The shuttle descended, crushing the remains of an abandoned civilian transport with an ugly metallic screech. The hiss of its hydraulics echoed like a giant's sigh.
The silence that followed was different. The rear ramp of the shuttle slammed down onto the concrete.
Eliza squinted through the dusty haze. She expected medics, stretchers, water, blankets. She expected the bustle of rescue teams rushing toward the wounded.
Instead, soldiers emerged from the ship's belly.
The troops that disembarked were immaculate. Their white composite armor was unscratched. The visors of their helmets glowed with a cold blue light. Their uniforms looked so sterile against the bloody mud of the square that they seemed like a layered visual error upon reality. They didn't avoid the puddles—they marched through them with machinelike indifference.
Twelve of them. Armed. Their plasma carbines raised, ready for hip-firing.
Eliza took a step forward, her instincts screaming that help had arrived. Her foot froze mid-air, however.
The Federation soldiers didn't glance at the civilians. They didn't scan the perimeter for hidden threats. Their muzzles rotated in sync, aiming at the center of the square. At Nara. At the Blues.
Her stomach knotted. Cold slithered through her veins, displacing the adrenaline. This isn't a rescue op.
The new soldiers fanned out, blocking the exhausted squad's path of retreat. They were here to clean up.
"Why?" whispered the woman next to her, clutching a bloody rag to her chest. "They saved us..."
Movement to the side caught her eye. Someone was forcing their way through the crowd with rough, desperate strength. Eliza turned, ready to defend herself, but saw a familiar face. Caelan.
He was filthy, his face a mask of soot and sweat, his pilot's jumpsuit hanging ragged off one shoulder. He wasn't running; he was shoving through bodies, swimming against the current. His eyes were fixed on her and Maya with near-manic intensity.
"Eliza!"
She couldn't answer. He crashed into her, his arms wrapping around her so tightly the air left her lungs. It wasn't a lover's embrace; it was an integrity check. His hands felt her back, her hair, Maya's shoulders. He was trembling.
Maya sobbed and clung to his leg. Caelan dropped to one knee, burying his face in the child's hair, his shoulders shaking in silent spasms. For a moment, the world shrank to this small triangle of bodies.
But the shadow over them grew denser.
Caelan lifted his head. His gaze skipped over Eliza's shoulder and locked onto something behind her. His face hardened. The warmth vanished, replaced by the icy mask Eliza knew from before a battle.
She turned slowly. At the top of the shuttle's ramp stood a figure.
"Admiral Vane," Caelan hissed through his teeth.
He wore no helmet. His gray hair, impeccably swept back, revealed a high, sharp forehead. His uniform—pure white with gold epaulets—was flawlessly clean. He stood there, high above the ruin, with the air of a god surveying a failed experiment.
Vane descended the ramp. Each of his steps was measured. He didn't look at the heap of civilian bodies to his left. He didn't look at the shattered facade of City Hall. His eyes, cold and gray as steel, were fixed only forward.
His boot stepped into a deep puddle of blood and mud. He stopped. Looked down. His face twisted in a brief expression of disgust—of a man who'd stepped in excrement. He raised his foot, examined the sole, then continued forward without a glance at the dead whose blood had soiled his shoe. He is not part of this world, Eliza thought. And he doesn't care for it.
His gaze settled on the woman commanding the squad.
My god, Anika looks spent, Caelan's words gave a name to the figure who had saved her earlier in the day.
Anika, Eliza repeated in a whisper. To remember.
The soldiers in white tightened their grip on their weapons, fingers resting on triggers.
Eliza felt Caelan slowly rise beside her, his muscles taut like steel cables. His hand instinctively went to the empty holster on his thigh.
"No..." Caelan hissed. The sound was so quiet Eliza barely heard it.
Vane stopped ten meters from the Blues. He surveyed them with clinical revulsion—like a contamination that needed sterilizing.
Anika, or rather, what remained of her beneath the layers of alien blood, lifted her head. She didn't reach for her weapon. She just looked at him. There was no plea in her eyes, only weariness and something more: indifference. She had killed an alien Guardian moments ago; one admiral in a white suit no longer impressed her. He was just another tedious obstacle.
The admiral fell silent. Slowly, he raised his right hand. His palm was open, facing the sky. An elegant gesture, almost like a conductor's.
Time in the square curdled.
Eliza saw the muzzles of the twelve carbines stabilize. The light in their visors shifted from blue to combat red.
Vane's hand hung in the air, holding the moment before execution. His fingers began to curl into a fist—the signal to fire.
No... what is he doing... why?
The world narrowed to that motion.
Eliza's breath caught in her throat.
* * *
The tactical helmet visors flickered. A synchronized pulse sliced through the space. The calm blue dissolved, replaced by the crimson of arterial blood. Combat mode. Time fractured.
Admiral Vane's hand hung in the air—a white glove, immaculate and sterile, contrasting with the ash covering Victory Square. His fingers slowly clenched. A gesture foretelling doom.
Caelan held her firmly. His fingers dug into her shoulder, his knuckles white beneath the grime. He was trying to shield her, to pull her aside where the chance of survival was greater. His paternal, his spousal instinct drove him, but this time they were wrong.
Eliza jerked free with a sharp, almost animal movement. Caelan's nails scratched her skin, but the pain was distant, muted by adrenaline. She didn't hear his shouts. Before her eyes, the world narrowed to the muzzles of the ten Mark-IV plasma carbines aimed at the crouched figures in the center of the square.
She took a step. Her boots slipped on the shattered concrete and glass. The distance was barely twenty meters, but each step pressed down on her like a millstone. Before her, the "monsters" breathed heavily. Blue skin covered in black, clotted blood. Their armor plates cracked by shrapnel. The same creatures who had saved her, who had fought with such ferocity, now faced the muzzles with weary acceptance.
Anika was there. The woman who had saved her and her daughter from the Architects not an hour before.
The soldiers of Vane's disciplinary platoon adjusted their aim. Their armor hummed quietly as servomotors tilted the barrels down.
The Admiral was shouting something, but the words reached her as nonsense, drowned out by the rush in her ears.
Eliza stepped forward and placed herself between the muzzles and Anika, spreading her arms in a desperate attempt to stop the plasma with just flesh and bone. Shredded wisps of vapor escaped her lips in the cold air. Her chest rose and fell with effort.
The square fell silent, shocked not by a shot, but by her very presence.
Vane did not lower his hand. His face, framed by the high collar of the Admiral's uniform, remained expressionless, but his eyes narrowed to slits. A civilian pawn on his chessboard. An impermissible error in the algorithm.
"No!"
The word tore from her throat. It was not a plea. It was a command.
Eliza raised her head. The fear that had been crushing her lungs a moment ago had transformed. Now it was fuel—raging, dangerous. She looked directly into the black visors of the disciplinary platoon. She saw her own reflection in them—disheveled, filthy, with fire in her eyes.
