Chapter 11: What the Mothership Didn't Say
Rie was asleep by the time Gamma slipped out, curled small in the enormous bed like she was trying not to take up too much of something that clearly wasn't hers.
He left the way he'd left her once before — quiet, deliberate, a note of guilt sitting somewhere in his chest that he still hadn't found a proper name for. This time, at least, he left an actual note instead of a light-strip in the dirt: a folded scrap of paper on the nightstand, three words in careful, blocky script. Back by dawn.
It wasn't much. It was more than he'd given her the first time, and given how that first time had gone, he figured it counted as progress.
The signal led him north, away from the Crimson Red's torchlit sprawl and into wilder country — forest thinning into broken hills scarred by something that had clearly hit the ground hard enough to reshape the landscape around it. His HUD's tracker pulsed steadily brighter the closer he got, until finally the trees gave way entirely to a long, black scar cut through the hillside, and at the end of it, half-buried in torn earth and broken stone, sat the wreck.
It wasn't a crate this time.
The section of hull rose out of the ground at an angle, twisted and scorched, easily three times the size of the escape pod he'd ridden down in — a whole cargo module, torn free of the Perseus during the initial breakup and left to fall the rest of the way on its own. Whatever gravity had done to it on the way down, it hadn't been gentle. One whole side had peeled back like foil, spilling scorched crates and shattered containment cases across a wide radius of blackened grass.
Gamma stood at the edge of it for a long moment, just looking.
This is a lot more than I thought I'd find.
He moved through the wreckage carefully, cataloguing as he went — the old habit of a man who'd spent two decades treating injuries as puzzles first and emergencies second. Weapons crates, most cracked open, their contents scattered and half-buried. A medical supply case, miraculously intact, its seal still holding despite everything. Fuel cells. Two more sets of armor, damaged beyond salvage. And near the deepest part of the wreck, still half-attached to a support strut that had somehow survived the crash, a long-range antenna array — bent, scorched, but recognizably whole.
His pulse — steady as it usually was — picked up a fraction.
If that thing still has a working relay, I might actually get a real signal out.
He worked through the night to free it, careful in a way that had nothing to do with fragility and everything to do with the fact that this was the only intact long-range array he'd found since the crash, and he wasn't about to break it out of impatience. By the time he had it mounted on a cleared rise of ground, hooked into his PDA's makeshift power cell, the sky had already begun to lighten at its edges.
He powered it up and waited.
Static, at first. Then, slowly, a signal — thin, distant, but real.
[CHANNEL OPEN — LONG RANGE — SIGNAL WEAK]
GAMMA: This is Lieutenant Gamma, Perseus survivor, requesting status update. Do you copy?
A long pause. Long enough that he started running diagnostics on the array again, certain the connection had failed.
MOTHERSHIP: ...Copy, Perseus. Signal received. Standby for authentication.
GAMMA: Authenticating. Designation Gamma, service code Seven-Four-Two-Echo.
MOTHERSHIP: Confirmed. Status report requested.
Gamma exhaled, slow and even, and gave it to them plainly — the crash, Gia, the mutiny, Frank, Hiro, the scattered cargo, the local political entanglement he'd built to buy himself room to operate. He kept it clinical. He always kept it clinical. It was easier that way, and he suspected, on some level, that it was easier for whoever was on the other end of this channel too.
MOTHERSHIP: Acknowledged. Cross-referencing prior directive 774-Echo.
GAMMA: Understood. Requesting clarification — full cargo recovery remains priority?
MOTHERSHIP: Negative.
Gamma went still.
GAMMA: Say again?
MOTHERSHIP: Negative on full cargo recovery. Reassessment complete. Scattered unit count exceeds single-operator recovery capacity by an unacceptable margin. Continued attempt represents inefficient allocation of a single asset's operational time.
GAMMA: There's an entire cargo hull's worth of weapons and equipment sitting exposed on a planet already fighting a war. That's not a rounding error, that's a live containment failure.
MOTHERSHIP: Acknowledged. Revised directive: prioritize elimination of hostile personnel — designated traitor combatants, including but not limited to subject Hiro — over further cargo recovery. Full containment sweep to be conducted by proper recovery team upon confirmed system stabilization.
GAMMA: Confirmed system stabilization meaning what, exactly.
MOTHERSHIP: Meaning: hold position. Complete primary objective. Await further instruction.
There it was again — the same bloodless calculus that had cost him Gia's rescue timeline in the first place, dressed up in slightly different words. Cargo first. Then survivors. Then, apparently, whenever it's convenient, an actual answer.
GAMMA: And extraction? Is that still on the table, or did that get "reassessed" too?
A longer pause this time.
MOTHERSHIP: Extraction remains approved. Timeline unconfirmed, pending Fleet Command review of regional priorities following the Aquarius ceasefire.
GAMMA: That's not an answer.
MOTHERSHIP: It is the answer currently available.
Gamma stood in the gray pre-dawn light, jaw set, saying nothing for a long moment. He'd have accepted almost any answer that gave him something solid to hold onto. What he got instead was the same institutional shrug he'd been getting since the first night on this planet — support, in theory, arriving eventually, in theory, once priorities he had no visibility into finished sorting themselves out.
GAMMA: Understood. Objective confirmed: eliminate Hiro and any remaining hostile combatants. Hold for further contact.
MOTHERSHIP: Confirmed. Maintain comms discipline. This channel may not remain stable — the array you're using was not designed for sustained long-range use.
GAMMA: Copy that too.
[CHANNEL — SIGNAL DEGRADING]
[CHANNEL CLOSED]
He sat with it for a while after the line went dead, watching the sky finish its slow bleed from gray into pale gold over the wreck's twisted silhouette.
No cavalry. No timeline. Just a job, narrowed down to its bones — find Hiro, end it, wait. He'd fought under worse terms before. He told himself that firmly enough times that it almost stopped feeling like a consolation prize.
What it did mean, plainly, was this: he wasn't doing this with backup from home. Whatever force he brought to bear against Hiro and whatever remained of the angels' faction, it was going to be built here, out of whatever this world could actually offer him. A demon empire's soldiers. Whatever the Council was willing to spare a "Lower Devil" they still weren't fully convinced of. Maybe, eventually, people like the ones Roz had already started hinting toward — specialists, misfits, whoever was left over once the more useful soldiers had already been assigned somewhere better.
Not ideal. Workable.
He salvaged what he reasonably could from the wreck — the medical case, most of the fuel cells, one of the less-damaged rifles, though he left the bulk of the scattered crates where they lay, exactly as ordered. It went against every instinct he had to walk away from exposed military hardware, but orders were orders, and there was a certain grim efficiency in not spending the next month babysitting cargo nobody back home actually cared enough about to properly reclaim.
By the time he made it back to the Crimson Red, the city was fully awake around him, and the guest suite's door was, predictably, already open before he reached it.
Rie stood in the doorway, arms crossed, the picture of someone who had clearly not slept well and had decided to make sure he knew it.
"You left a note this time," she said, before he'd even fully stepped through the door. "I want that on record. Progress."
"Noted your approval."
"I still didn't sleep." She fell into step beside him as he moved to set the salvaged equipment down, her earlier irritation softening slightly at the sight of the medical case, the fuel cells, the general evidence that whatever he'd gone to do, he'd come back from it in one piece. "What did you find?"
Gamma considered how much of it to actually tell her — the mothership's answer, the thin comfort of "hold position," the quiet, private frustration he wasn't in any hurry to hand someone else to carry. He settled, in the end, on the version that was true without being the whole of it.
"Confirmation," he said. "No backup's coming. Not soon, anyway." He set the rifle down with more care than it probably needed. "Means whatever happens next, we're building it here."
Rie was quiet for a moment, turning that over. Then, with none of the reluctance he might have expected from her a few days ago: "Good. Then let's start building it."
He glanced at her — something in the flat line of her mouth, the set of her shoulders, reading less like naive optimism and more like a girl who'd already decided, somewhere over the last few days, that she wasn't interested in being talked out of whatever came next.
"Yeah," Gamma said, after a moment. "Guess we will."