Allison watched her certain victory vanish as two new super hive ships, the Harbinger and ten hives appeared in the system. The disruption field was already active. The impact on the allied ships was sudden and total. Even the remaining League ships were disabled. The only ships still active were the few remaining System’s Alliance ships that had the shield frequency modulators installed. Allison hit her console with her fists. Her eyes focused on the Harbinger. It was already shifting its trajectory as if it was going to try and escape the battle. She maneuvered the Phoenix to intercept the Harbinger.


    “Destroy that ship at all costs. It seems to be the only one able to wake up the hibernating Sal’nash. Then we need to deploy the Cataclysm bomb. We’ve lost.”


    The Grand Eminence began pounding on the Harbinger with the secondary batteries. Allison was single-minded in her pursuit of the ship. Since the Phoenix was one of the few remaining ships that seemed like it posed a risk, it became a primary target. Without evasive maneuvers her shields were buckling under the withering plasma blasts. Wesva spoke.


    “We have lost all shields.”


    Blast after blast rocked the Phoenix. Soon afterwards all of her guns went silent. Allison screamed in frustration.


    “Keep firing!”


    Futara responded to Allison’s frustration with a calm tone.


    “He can’t, we’ve lost power to weapons systems.”


    Allison snarled.


    “Ramming speed!”


    She slammed the throttle forward. They took more direct hits. The helm stopped responding entirely and all she could do was watch the Harbinger flicker pink three times then vanish into FTL. She hit her console again. Wesva spoke.


    “We have maneuvering thrusters only. There are multiple hull breaches. Areas were already isolated when I turned off life support to them. The main reactor is offline, and fold drive is showing no power. Without engineering teams, we will be unable to continue this battle. We still have secondary antimatter power, secondary FTL and communications are functional. We are caught in the star’s gravity, with proper use of the maneuvering thrusters we can avoid the radiation and heat, then perform a slingshot maneuver.”


    Allison shifted the viewscreen to an aft view. She watched helplessly as her defenseless armada was ravaged by the recently arrived Sal’nash reinforcements. She stood up.


    “Wesva eta to the star?”


    “Ma’am, we have thirty minutes until we reach the corona. Course corrections must start within five minutes, or our interaction with the star will be fatal.”


    Allison looked at the Grand Eminence.


    “Take the helm. If those two super hives are still active by the time you are in optimal launch position for the Cataclysm bomb, you are to warn all remaining ships to retreat, initiate the supernova and use the secondary FTL drive to get out of the system. Warn our governments of our failure to complete our objectives and tell the System’s Alliance to shut down our wormhole network.”


    Allison started to leave, and the Grand Eminence grabbed her arm.


    “You are talking about the death of a star system and who knows how many more. We will destroy our armada. You will die here. I’ve already seen this happen once. I do not want to be the one to press this button.”


    Allison nodded.


    “I know, but if we can’t take out those super hives, we will lose our armada anyway. At least this way we take the Sal’nash with us. It was my original back up plan all along. Please, I’m depending on you to finish this if I can’t.”


    He stood up straight and hit his chest in a salute.


    “Glory to your house, Battelord. It has been my honor serving with you.”


    Allison hugged him. He seemed confused at first but accepted it.


    “Thanks.”


    She rushed off toward the hangar where Bit was docked the AI woke from sleep mode when Allison opened the cockpit.


    “Allison, is the battle over?”


    Allison pulled her harness on.


    “Not if I can help it. Bit arm the warhead.”


    Bit started powering up systems and Allison saw the memorial torpedo show up on her listed armaments.


    “Allison, I have serious moral objections to deploying a weapon of that nature in a system with a class H planet.”


    Allison skipped all manner of launch protocols as she started the starfighter’s main reactors.


    “The other option is I initiate a supernova of the star. This way the planet has a chance. The other way, one habitable planet would be the least of the damage I do.”


    Allison punched her throttle forward and blasted out of the small hangar.


    “We need shields to keep the signal from taking us out, this is going to be dicey.”


    Allison hit her armada wide frequency.


    “Any active fighters and ships. This is Shadow One; I am making an attack run on the super hive in sector 5-6-1. Cover me if you can.”


    She spoke to Bit.


    “Grab any drone wings you can Bit, collapse them around us and hopefully that will give us enough of an ablative defense to get through the worst of the Sal’nash fighters.”


    Allison smiled as she heard a few fighters report in.


    “This is Dagger 1, we got you.”


    Allison glanced over her shoulder and could see that Commander Holiday and Legend had formed up on her wings. Bit was pulling whatever she could to create a rotating field of drones to defend the small wing of fighters. Allison brought up targeting for the memorial torpedo. Then she stopped. She couldn’t wait for the nanites to reach the queen. She had to make it happen faster.


    “Dagger Squadron cover me but break off at a thousand kilometers to target. I’m going to make sure the package gets delivered where it needs to go.”


    Allison spoke to Bit.


    “Bit, when we reach the super hive I’m going to fly inside the hangar. I need you to fire everything those drones have at the aft wall and then ram them into it and whatever is behind it.”


    “Allison, you are going to get us killed.”


    Allison shrugged as she weaved the squadron through withering plasma fire from the Sal’nash fighters.


    “I’d rather die trying to do something Bit.”


    Allison spoke to her wingmen.


    “Accelerating for my attack run, break off now. If you get the retreat order from the Grand Eminence, go to FTL, warn the System’s Alliance we have failed and tell them to shut down the stargate at Andromeda One. If they do not listen, destroy it. We cannot allow the Sal’nash to gain access to the Milky Way.”


    Legend responded.


    “Understood, Shadow One. I will make sure it happens.”


    Dagger one and two broke off as Allison hit her ion drive’s superboost. Bit spoke.


    “I love you and the chaos you have brought to my existence, Allison. Sending the drones in.”


    Allison covered the drone’s approach to the hanger with a full volley of all her missiles. Sal’nash reserve fighters that were trying to launch to engage her exploded into balls of blue plasma as the organs that stored it burst when the fighters exploded. It chained along the rows of drones that were hanging from the walls engulfing the hangar in a huge blue fireball.


    Allison rammed the shield power distribution control up which in turn shifted all shield power into her forward shield array. The plasma fire wrapped around the shield and created a blue corona. The plasma was blasted away as the drones, each carrying antimatter to power their reactors exploded on impact with the vulnerable walls of the hive. The super hive’s mid-section was suffering from catastrophic atmosphere loss. Allison flew through the gaping hole the drones had created. The end of which led to the building sized Queen who had yellow blood flowing from shrapnel wounds.


    The Queen’s large golden eyes met Allison’s as the pair faced off. Swarms of warrior drones dropped from the ceiling threatening to overwhelm Bit’s antigrav panels with their shear mass. Allison narrowed her eyes and launched her nanite bioweapon. The memorial torpedo struck the Queens abdomen. The jury-rigged dispersal device exploded. The compressed air caused the Queen’s chitin to burst. Yellow ichor sprayed everywhere, including onto Bit. Inside Allison could see thousands of wiggling translucent eggs leading down into the bowels of the super hive.


    The Queen took a last vindictive swipe at Bit but Allison was already retreating out of the hull breach. The Queen screeched as her body started to be devoured from within. The warrior drones on her fighter started convulsing and they too succumbed to the ravenous nanoscopic machine plague.


    Allison reached the hangar that was still engulfed in an unquenchable plasma fire that did not need air to burn. She spun Bit around and hit her ion drive superboost again and escaped the doomed super hive. The League ships that hadn’t been disabled or destroyed by damage were starting to show life again. She hit the armada wide comm channel button on her AR HUD.


    “Super hive in sector 5-6-1 has been neutralized. All active ships focus fire on the remaining super hive’s weapons. Send all available ground forces to the super hive. All fighters break off engagements and escort our troop transports. The objective target is the Queen. If she is alive, we cannot win this battle.”


    Bit spoke.


    “I’m detecting forty three incoming FTL signatures. Unrecognized ship configurations.”


    Suddenly one after another smuggler and pirate ships popped into existence. They were all small freighters, transports and other ramshackle craft. They immediately started engaging the Sal’nash fighters. Allison smiled. Yoggi had come through for her. She addressed the armada.


    “New ships are friendlies. Do not engage.”


    Allison received an incoming comm request. She grinned when she saw Yoggi, he was wearing a flamboyant white uniform with red feathers of some description sticking out of his tall white hat.


    “Sorry we’re late my dear. What are our pressing concerns?”


    Allison looked at the super hive.


    “The biggest Sal’nash ship has a Queen on it, she is disabling a large portion of the fleet. I really need her dead. It is a hard target and there is an army on that thing. I will pay a million League credits to anyone who can put a bullet in her head. Otherwise just kill what Sal’nash you can.”


    Yoggi rubbed his tentacles together.


    “Not my style, darling, but this should foster some competition. If only I’d known, we could have run a betting pool! Blood sports are so delicious and so are the credits they bring in from viewers. I’ll let the scoundrels know.”


    He ended the comm link and a dozen pirate ships broke off and started launching boarding pods at the super hive. The pirates were having more success than her ground troops. Most of the limited number of troop transports that were launched did not reach the super hive and of those that did, precious few were able to land. Allison was sad about the loss of those brave men and women, but she knew that it was better then the entire armada being wiped out. If even one soldier could reach the Queen and end her, they could still win the battle, and the war.


    Allison looked at the timer on her AR HUD. She had thirty six minutes until the Grand Eminence would enact her failsafe. Even if she wanted to, she wouldn’t be able to raise the Phoenix on comms at this point, it would be too close to the star. She flew inside the remnants of one of the League Battleships and cloaked. The missile magazine had been hit and left a gaping hole in its hull. She rubbed her face, closed her eyes, took a deep breath and brought up the battle map that the still active Agamemnon was projecting on their comm net.


    At this point she wasn’t sure that taking the Queen out would be enough. The armada was out of position in tatters and with the Phoenix out of comm range that meant they had no coordination of fire beyond what ship captains could manage between their crews.


    She could call a retreat now, but she’d be abandoning three quarters of the System’s Alliance fleet that were disabled by the Queen’s signal. That would be seventy-two thousand humans and change. The Sal’nash weren’t even firing at their disabled ships. They were probably saving them to feed their young. Much more exposure to the signal and they’d be brain dead but could be kept on life support of some kind to make the food live. Allison sighed. Her tactical assessment based on all her education said without reinforcements they were losing this fight seventy five percent of the time. That was if the Queen was killed.


    The human crews who had been exposed to the Sal’nash signal for an extended period of time would have their ability to perform their duties seriously compromised. They weren’t dead yet. She could improve the odds by landing on the Agamemnon and coordinating from C&C. Of course, she could also be hampering her own ability to change the course of the battle with her own actions. She closed her eyes and sighed. Bit spoke to her.


    “Allison, are you alright? All my systems are operational, and we still have half our missiles and one anti-matter torpedo. We can make a difference. One fighter, one pilot can make a difference.”


    Allison opened her eyes and nodded. She did a search for the Agamemnon on the comm net and opened a channel directly to the Admiral.


    “Admiral, I need you to transfer command to your first officer and go to C&C. The Phoenix is in a comm dead zone for the next thirty-three minutes. I am transferring control of the System’s Alliance fleet to you from the Fleet Admiral until such time as she can resume her duties. I am also transferring control of the League fleet to you as of now until such time as First Trimarch Nutina can resume her duties. Admiral the tactical situation does not look good once we pull that super hive’s teeth, we need to start destroying those hive ships or we have lost. If you have not received confirmation that the Queen of the super hive is dead within thirty three minutes you are to prepare all ships that are able to retreat for an FTL jump to our Beta site. Any ships still in this system after forty minutes from my mark will be destroyed. Do you understand?”


    The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    Admiral Chiang saluted her.


    “Understood, ma’am.”


    Allison accessed the armada comm net and updated the command structure with a swipe of her fingers, pulling Nutina and the fleet admiral out. Admiral Chiang popped in under her. Allison sighed and accessed the boarding party comm net. This brought up several video-feeds she was dismayed to see that there were only twelve of her people still showing life signs, and only three of those were not just showing a chitin floor on the feed. She was glad she’d had League ground tech issued to as many as her System Alliance teams as possible, at least she knew.


    The only active squad on the super hive was Silverfang. If anyone had a chance to reach the objective, it was them, but it did not look good they were encountering extremely heavy resistance, worse yet the wolf-born couldn’t even use their war forms because it would just make them big easy targets for the Sal’nash drones. No one was immune to the toxin. Even the vampire Georgia Lance was just as vulnerable to it as mortals. Allison could tell from her time studying the super hives and her time on them that the team was within a quarter of a kilometer of the Queen. It was incredible progress considering the Queen was two kilometers from the hangar which the Wraith had managed to land in.


    “Widow, will you be able to complete the mission objective?”


    Widow fired off a few more explosive bolts before pulling back into cover and letting her team take over.


    “No, not without a lot of reinforcements that are immune to the signal. The dampeners were insufficient once we approached the objective. There’s just too many of them Allison.”


    Allison sighed.


    “Understood, I have engaged some contractors, have you seen them?”


    Widow nodded.


    “Yes, they’re the reason we haven’t been overrun yet. They’re distracting the drones and forcing them to defend multiple entry points to the objective. We were able to lay some fusion mines on our trip here. I believe it pushed the reinforcements that would flank us to the decks above and below us. Our position is untenable, and we cut off our own retreat by laying those mines. Sorry Allison, we tried. If anything changes, I’ll let you know. I don’t think your contractors are going to last long either.”


    Allison took a deep breath. She sighed.


    “Understood. I’ll see what I can do.”


    Allison brought up the armament and cargo manifest of her starfighter. She had forty high explosive guided missiles. Ten dumb firebombs. Finally, one high yield antimatter torpedo. For cargo she had a month’s supply of food and water, a month’s supply of blood, ten doses of her serum and her crash survival kit. The kit had another week of food and water, a distress beacon, a flare gun, a fully loaded old style projectile pistol, a fusion torch, four neon smoke grenades, a roll of duct tape, one tube that contained four quick weld strips and one emergency antimatter storage cannister. She tapped her finger on the last entry of her crash survival kit and she smiled.


    “Bit prime the AM torp pretty please. I have an idea.”


    She pushed her seats down and pulled the duct tape, quick weld strips, flare gun, smoke grenades and the emergency antimatter storage container. She made sure the last item still had charge, it did. She got her seats upright again and hit the grenade against the solidified liquid metal of her cockpit it cracked spilling neon powder everywhere. She pulled the detonator cap out and tossed the useless smoke canister aside. She did the same with the other three. She set the detonator caps aside.


    “Allison, you know we don’t have enough antimatter in reserves to even activate the wormhole comm. I do not see how it could cause any significant damage.”


    Allison held the ends of the last quick weld strip down with her thumb and tore off a piece of the black duct tape with her teeth and then tapped the strip down. She spit a few times to get rid of the taste of the tape’s adhesive from her mouth.


    “That really depends on the objective doesn’t it.”


    She held the detonator caps against the containment vessel and wrapped duct tape around them several times.


    “How are you going to detonate it? The yield will be low, but it will still be enough to blow you to pieces.”


    Allison dusted her hands off and inspected her handiwork and answered Bit in a sing song voice mimicking the song about human bones she learned in kindergarten.


    “The weld strips are connected to the antimatter container, the magnesium detonators are connected to the welding strips, the flare gun is connected to Allison’s hand.”


    Allison giggled to herself. In truth she was just trying to destress slightly since the shit had already hit the proverbial fan in a big way, there was no point in being serious Battlelord Allison when no one but Bit could see or hear her.


    “I shoot it with the flare gun from a safe distance, the flare ignites the magnesium in the detonators and the magnesium burns hot enough to ignite the quick weld strips and boom.”


    Allison put the device under her seat and put her hands on her holo-controls. She opened a comm to Widow again.


    “I am going to cause a distraction. I do not know how long you will have. Once I am on the super hive my comms will fail; I’m still using SA kit.”


    Widow pulled back into cover and was reloading as she spoke to Allison.


    “Well, I hope its quick, we’re running low on ammo.”


    “Shadow One out.”


    Allison had eaten up time building her jury-rigged antimatter bomb she swept the countdown she had on her AR HUD away. One way or the other she figured no matter how immortal she was, she wasn’t coming out of this alive. There was no point in worrying about it anymore. She flew at suicidal speed through the raging dogfight and battle. This was no time for caution. She targeted the lower aft hull on the massive super hive. Her antimatter torpedo wouldn’t do significant damage but it would punch a hole big enough for her and Bit. She would have loved to fly right into the Queen’s room and shoot her in the face with her particle beams but she lacked the billions of credits worth of drones that she’d sacrificed in her last super hive attack.


    She launched the antimatter torpedo at minimum safe distance. Then hit her graviton retro thrustor which resulted in a sudden full reverse of her fighter. If there were no inertial dampers on her fighter she would have just killed herself. This left her in perfect firing position to take out three of the ten Sal’nash fighters chasing her. The rest were engulfed in the blast wave of her antimatter torpedo’s detonation. She switched to forward thrust and swept into the hole she’d just created in the super hive’s hull.


    “Bit once I’m on the deck you raise shields. If I don’t survive, and the armada falls you make sure we cut off the stargate network at Andromeda 1.”


    Allison willed her helmet on, grabbed her IED and opened the canopy. She climbed on the fighter and rammed the storage device against the antimatter extraction port. The ports lights flash green showing that containment was empty. She lept down to the deck, pulled the canister into her arm like it was a football and started out in a full on power armor assisted run. She pushed her blood vitality into her muscles to run faster. If she were at a track and field event she would have broken the world record for five hundred meter sprint by about thirty seconds.


    This section of the super hive consisted of its biological functions. She was in the equivalent of the tail end of its digestive track. Thankfully she didn’t have to swim through the feces as there were service ramps all over the place. The worker drones ignored her as she dashed past them. Though a few got knocked into the black ichor that was the hive and its collective Sal’nash’s sewer water. She ran up the ramp and into the chamber she was looking for. Her target was the end of the Queen’s kilometers long egg sack. Worker drones rushed to collect the rapidly piling up eggs. They were carrying them off to the maturation chambers. Allison was hoping Sal’nash queens were like most mothers. You go after their young, they’re going to want to mess you up.


    She held the antimatter based IED like a football and threw it. She added more umph with her vampiric super strength and armor’s enhanced strength. As the long lob landed squarely at the mouth of the egg sack, she lifted the flare gun and fired it. The blinding blue flare flew in a long arc and landed on the top of the containment unit. As Allison had correctly deduced, the flare ignited the magnesium which flared a blinding white. She decided it was best to dive for cover at that point. The floor of the egg chamber shuddered as it detonated. Sal’nash egg remnants started raining down all over the chamber. Allison then started shooting eggs and worker drones with her Qual’sa pistols. She kept doing that until the first warrior drones started to rush in. Well not warrior drones, these were the bigger, far more dangerous elite warrior drones. Allison nodded and mused to herself.


    “Yeah, that got her attention.”


    She started running before they could get a clean shot with their spines. She shouted as she ran down the ramp towards bit.


    “Bit! Bit! Cover me!”


    Allison dove as she reached her starfighter. Even through her armor she could feel the heat from the plasma gatlings. Bit spoke over loudspeaker.


    “You are clear; Be quick! More are on motion detectors, a lot more. Possibly every Sal’nash in the hive.”


    Allison scrambled on top of Bit and knelt down. She added her Qual’sa pistols to Bit’s plasma gatling guns as they fended off another wave of Sal’nash. She barely slipped into the cockpit before another barrage of spines pelted the fighter’s armor. She backed Bit out of the hull breach and flipped around before hitting her aft thrust. Bit shifted the liquid metal and the spines that had pierced it floated away leaving only pristine resealed armor. Widow spoke to her through comms.


    “Target is eliminated. Don’t know what you did but they sure took off in a hurry.”


    Allison hit her armada wide comm.


    “Last Queen is down! Last Queen is down!”


    One by one the disabled System’s Alliance ships started coming alive, but they were sluggish and weapon’s fire from them was sparse. Admiral Chiang opened a channel with her a few minutes later.


    “Ma’am, exposure to the signal has incapacitated a lot of the ship crews. Comms have been restored to the Phoenix and the Grand Eminence wants to speak to you. Ma’am, we do not have enough firepower to win this battle. I suggest we use the failsafe you mentioned and retreat. By the time the ships are combat ready, we’ll have lost most of them. The medical staff consensus is twenty minutes for them to recover enough. Thirty six hives are still fully active with minor damage with most of armada being sitting ducks, we’re outnumbered and outgunned.”


    Allison frowned.


    “Your recommendation is noted. Maintain command of the armada. I’ll assess.”


    Allison sighed and cloaked. She swept into another cored ship. She took a deep breath. They had tried their best. It had not been enough. Even the Ark Royal would have made little difference had it been here. She accepted the incoming signal from the Grand Eminence and noticed on her tracking display the Phoenix was still in the immediate gravity well of the system’s star.


    “Grand Eminence why is my ship still in the gravity well of that star. You cannot go to FTL and without the slingshot you cannot reach escape velocity.”


    His one good wing shifted upwards as he stood up straight.


    “Battlelord, we have discussed our options. We have armed the Cataclysm bomb and we are prepared to deploy it on your order.”


    Allison’s heart fell. She had come to feel a great deal of affection for Wesva, R’sslv, the Grand Eminence, Nutina and especially Futara. She could feel herself choking up. She’d kept it together so far, but she was starting to fray at the edges. The difference between this and the last time she asked them to sacrifice themselves was that she was going to be dead so she would not have had to live with the guilt. She managed to blurt out.


    “Stand by.”


    She paused their call. She hugged herself and fought back tears. She shuddered as she fought against the sobs. Bit’s simulated human face appeared on the holo-display. Something the AI rarely did. This was perhaps the second time she’d done it since Allison and her had been assigned to each other.


    “This is the part where I tell you to grow up and do your duty.”


    Allison looked at the simulated human face Bit had made for herself with hurt in her eyes.


    “They will die.”


    Bit’s simulated face had a great deal of empathy in her eyes.


    “And how many more are dying right now because of your hesitation. Allison, do you have another way out of this?”


    Allison shook her head. She had used every card she had in her hand. There was nothing left. She was about to resume her connection to the Grand Eminence when Bit interrupted her.


    “Wormhole vortex forming in system.”


    Allison flipped her thrustors on and pulled out of her hidey hole as a column of graceful white Commonwealth ships of the line exited the wormhole. Then another wormhole formed and even more of them appeared. The Ark Royal finally appeared. The newly arrived reinforcements wasted no time in engaging the hives which found themselves flanked by thirty three new warships. Red-orange beams sliced along the hive ships. The more advanced antimatter torpedoes of the Commonwealth ripped holes in hive ship after hive ship. With no shields the hives were defenseless against the onslaught. Allison resumed the connection to the Phoenix.


    “Stand down Grand Eminence, I’ll make sure we send an engineering team as soon as we can.”


    Captain Seng was trying to get a signal through to Allison on the tactical net. Allison accepted the incoming comm request. The captain appeared on her holo-display.


    “Sorry for not explaining better, I received a communication from command that your request for military aid from the Commonwealth had been accepted. I wanted to get them here ASAP. It took time to gather their forces, and I didn’t think we could chance a wormhole out during the battle. Or in the system. I tried to get a message through, but you were otherwise engaged.”


    Allison nodded.


    “I’m just glad you got here when you did, we were about to retreat. A lot of the ship crews are still incapacitated. So, anything you and the Commonwealth fleet can do to protect them until they can defend themselves would be appreciated.”


    Captain Seng nodded.


    “Understood ma’am. Ark Royal out.”


    Allison decided to do what she did best. She joined the battle. She was getting angry again and she was going to take it out on the Sal’nash. She became the avatar of death as she descended on the Sal’nash’s fighter drones and hive ships. She was all out of mercy. Her personal count dwarfed the next closest starfighter pilot.


    Once the disabled crews recovered the battle shifted from a slug fest to a slaughter. Allison pushed her armada onwards. If there was even one Sal’nash life sign left on a hive ship, she ordered the armada to obliterate the entire hive. She took no chances. Who knew if, like some insects, the lowest low drones could become a Queen if there were none. She was long passed any sense of moderation today. It turned out that the people under her command agreed with her assessment of how this battle should end. The mop up took an hour.


    *****


    Unlike the adult soldiers who Allison had commanded in the extermination of the Sal’nash, she had to go to school when classes resumed two days after the battle. The first was a National Day of Mourning for those who were lost in the battle. The second day off was due to both governments declaring it a national holiday. Allison hadn’t gotten to take those days off; She had been busy helping with search and rescue. She left for Eden Prime, leaving the combined salvage and body recovery operations in the hands of the Fleet Admiral who had recovered nicely from her head injury. The reserved and cranky old woman had even patted Allison on the shoulder as the teenager had transferred overall command to her and said, Your performance was adequate. This was probably the highest praise the woman had given out in her entire life. At least if Allison took what scuttlebutt said to be fact.


    Allison was supposed to have given speeches at ‘Victory Day’ events. She had avoided those along with a demand to appear in front of the LSR Council by the Synthlin High Counciler. It was pretty easy to convince Futara to report that the Battlelord was injured during the battle and was recovering so she was unable to attend. Thankfully the System’s Alliance hadn’t demanded she speak to the Board. That excuse wouldn’t have flown because they knew the chances of her being hurt for more than twenty-four hours were extremely low. She’d have to deal with the mess eventually but for now she was going to take the win as messy as it was and move on with her teenage life. The minute she got home to Eden Prime she’d submitted her request for a leave of absence so she could focus on school, and prepare for her internship with the LSR councils, to her commanding officer, aka her Aunt Maria, who approved it, then made it effective immediately. She made the same request to the Grand Eminence who had also granted instant approval from his hospital bed.


    Allison felt free as she stepped outside her temporary home in Bit’s hangar. She took a deep breath and let the sun warm her skin. She smiled. She had nothing to worry about, if she ignored the fact that she had two essays due, and final exams coming up in less than a month. Her leave of absence meant that she could not be compelled to testify in front of either government body. Sure, she was only delaying the inevitable but that was a future her problem. She smiled and hopped into her pickup and lowered the windows. She enjoyed the feeling of the wind blowing her hair around.


    The only thing keeping her from being truly filled with joy was the fact that so many people had died in a battle she led. For some reason this was less personal than it had been in the past. No one who directly reported to her was killed in action. She did not have to issue any death notices. In fact, of those that died she only knew six personally and they were just saying hello in passing. She did feel partially responsible for the losses but this time she was able to rationalize that she had done everything in her power to minimize the loss of life. She had no idea what the court of public opinion was saying about her, she had avoided all social media and news related sites. In fact, she’d just sent a message to her mother and father telling them she was home. They had tried to call but she’d just ignored them.


    She parked her pickup in her parent’s driveway and walked inside. Her family was sitting at the breakfast table. She didn’t have to wait long to be swarmed by one Qual’sa, one nargle, one eight year old, and her mother. She hugged each of them tightly. Her mother cupped her cheeks and looked her face over.


    “Are you alright?”


    Allison smiled and nodded.


    “Looking forward to going back to school and being a normal teenage girl again. I took a leave of absence from the military no more patrols, no more duty times, no more briefing government officials…”


    Apiyo smiled.


    “You look much better than you have in a long time my precious little angel.”


    Her father had waited until the rush was over to engulf his daughter in a tight hug. She patted his back and spoke quietly in his ear.


    “It’s over dad. I got them for Babu.”


    He kissed her forehead.


    “You did good Allison, you did really good. I’m so proud of you. Your babu would have been so proud of you hon.”


    Allison smiled. Apiyo made a sound to get their attention.


    “We have all the time in the world for you to inflate her ego for now let her get breakfast.”


    He smiled and wrapped his arm around Allison’s shoulders.


    “Come on let’s get you fed before your mom kicks me out again.”


    Allison smiled and sat down. She looked around the table as the normal ruckus of mealtime at the Wanjala house kicked in. The last doubts about her actions over the last year evaporated. This is what she had been fighting for.