Crison looked up and around, and then he looked down. We couldn't see where Arvie was hanging out down below, taking stock of the support structure and how long we had.

"Shit," Crison muttered. "Well, I guess we're going to have to do this a lot faster than I anticipated."

He started talking, but I couldn't hear his voice. Presumably he was talking to other people who knew what they were doing and could facilitate the rescue.

"Okay," he said, looking at me and grinning. "Looks like we're going to have some fun doing this. That rescue craft is going to swoop over to the side and we're going to open up a small hole in the shielding for people to run through. They're going to have to make a little bit of a jump to get onto the ramp, but it's all we have time for if we want to get everybody out of there."

"Aren't you worried some of them aren't going to be able to make it?" I asked. "It looks like it's just kids down there. They might not be able to make that jump."

"We're going to have people in there helping them out," Crison said, shaking his head. "You just need to stay up here and keep an eye on the situation."

I could tell a polite brush-off when I was getting one, but that was just fine. I didn't think I was going to be any use in this current situation.

That was one of the hallmarks of a good commander. At least I thought that was one of the hallmarks of a good commander. You have to know when you can help things by sticking your nose in the middle of a situation, and you have to know when you can help things by staying out and letting other competent people who know how to do their jobs do that fucking job.

"Right, let's go," Crison said. That communication presumably going out to everybody.

I walked back over to Selii.

"Did you catch all that?"

"I did," she said, looking down. That was the only show of nervousness she showed, though. Otherwise, she seemed to be fairly confident. Though I wondered if she was just as nervous as I felt in that moment.

"It's one heck of a way to do things, isn't it?" she said.

"Something like that," I said. "I don't think there's going to be much for us to do up here."

She reached out and smacked my faceplate. I blinked, staring at her and wondering what she was on.

"What was that for?" I asked.

"Come on, human," she said. "You're involved in your military, right?"

"I am."

"Then you know the moment you start saying things like that is the moment everything goes to shit. Don't jinx us."

I blinked, and then I grinned because honestly, she had a pretty good point. I was running the risk of jinxing everything by saying stupid shit like that.

"So, sorry," I said, sketching a small bow.

There was a rumbling all around us. I looked up and around, worried that was the support structure finally giving out. We still had troops positioned all around the shielding. Some of them on the side being held in place by their suit connecting to the shielding with whatever it was the livisk had developed to do that.

That was an interesting development. We didn't have anything like that back in human space. I would've given a pretty penny to…

But then the moment that thought occurred to me, I realized I wouldn't have given a pretty penny to bring that technology back to Terran space. They'd written me off and called me a traitor, after all, and that was after they set me up to fail.

I was surprised to realize that my inner thought that Admiral Harris could go fuck himself was starting to extend to the entirety of the CCF and maybe even the Terran Navy for railroading me. Because it was more convenient to kick me into the CCF early than it was to have an admiral take the fall for what happened on the Ticonderoga.

I pushed those thoughts away. Not the time to go reflecting on the bad things that had happened in my past. There were plenty of bad things that were happening in my present to deal with, after all.

"We're going to keep everybody out here until Arvie gives me the warning," I said.

"Going into dangerous situations is what we signed up for," Selii said, still smiling.

"I know," I said. "But I want to make sure you know why we're sticking around in a dangerous situation."

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"We're sticking around because we need to make sure everything is safe on the off-chance the empress decides to mix things up with us."

I frowned as I looked at her, but I was distracted by that rumbling again. I looked over and I realized it was one of the rescue craft moving to the side of the shielding down below. It was close enough that the wash from the antigrav engines was moving over us, creating a distortion in localized spacetime.

We didn't exactly go flying up. My boots were stuck firmly to the shielding, but it was still an odd sensation.

"You don't seem to have any trouble complaining about the empress," I said, trying to distract myself from that unsettling zero-g feeling in the middle of a big old gravity well.

"I'm starting a timer countdown to when I think the structural support for this is going to finally give way," Arvie said. "Would you like me to put that countdown in the heads-up display of everybody who is working on this rescue mission?"

I thought about that for a moment. On the one hand, it could be a spur to action. On the other hand, it could just scare people to the point they froze.

Ultimately, I figured I had to rely on the people here knowing how to do their jobs, and that they wouldn't get scared by something silly like a countdown.

"Yeah, go ahead and make it so, Arvie."

"On it," he said.

A countdown appeared in the bottom right of my heads-up display, counting down from four minutes. It felt like an eternity had gone by. Not just one minute. I guess that's how things got when you were in the middle of a potential life or death situation.

"A lot of people aren't a fan of the empress," Selii said. "Why do you ask?"

"It's just that Varis seemed to be really weird about things like taking the empress's name in vain," I said. "She acts like it's some horrible sin."

"Well, she's a lot closer to the empress than most of us are," she said.

If she wasn't in livisk power armor, then I got the feeling she would've let out a fatalistic shrug as she said that. As it was, her body language and attitude seemed to convey that fatalism.

"That's interesting," I said, frowning. "So, the higher up you go…"

"The less likely somebody is to say something nasty about the empress, because they're a whole heck of a lot closer to her and more likely to run into trouble if they catch her attention."

"So, there isn't, like, secret police or something watching you and making sure you aren't saying bad things about the empress?"

"Oh, there totally are," Selii said. "And there are listening devices constantly trying to hear what you're saying about somebody. All kinds of stuff like that."

"You don't seem terribly worried about it," I said.

Again, she did one of those looks that almost seemed like a fatalistic shrug.

"There are a lot of people who aren't happy with the empress and how she's running things right now. If they decided to go after everybody who had bad things to say about her, then they'd be rounding up a good chunk of the population. The empress wouldn't have the capacity to do that even if she got all the nobility loyal to her to help her out. Which they wouldn't since more than a few of them might be on the arrest list."

"I know some assholes back on Earth who tried to do exactly that, because they figured it was easier to round people up than it was to actually change what they were doing and make the people happy."

"Maybe so," she said. "But even the empress doesn't have that kind of power. Not right now. She probably won't for her entire reign with the way she's running things."

I thought about that. It was an interesting brick in the wall. One more thing to note as I came up with my little plan that might or might not go somewhere.

Varis had talked about how the empress had trouble projecting power. That she had to get the consensus of the nobility if she wanted to launch an attack or a war or anything like that.

She had a lot of power here locally in Imperial Seat, though. Something to keep in mind. There was something to be said about vast local power if you were currently residing in that locality. The crater I was trying to rescue people out of at the moment was proof enough of that.

Though apparently even that vast power wasn't enough to stop people from talking shit about her. Especially people who worked for a general who was publicly on the empress's shit list so they felt a little freer about saying that sort of thing.

I was editorializing and trying to connect the dots a little bit with that last bit of conjecture, but I figured it was probably pretty close to the truth.

I turned my attention back to the rescue operation. Crison was down on the loading ramp for the rescue ship, and he'd poked a hole in the shielding. One of his people had jumped inside the bomb shelter and was trying to herd people over to that exit.

There wasn't a lot of space between the loading ramp and the shielding, but it was enough space that somebody could potentially slip through. And there was one sequel trilogy of a fall waiting for them.

I wondered if the fall would kill them first, or if they'd hit something structural that'd survived the firestorm all around us, or maybe the fires and the heat and radiation would be enough to kill them.

Either way, it wouldn't be comfortable for the moment that they were on that ramp before they were pulled into the rescue ship.

But people were moving along. The person on the inside was tossing small livisk bodies at Crison, and he was catching them effortlessly. Probably because the power armor gave him a bit of an advantage.

"This is going pretty well," I said.

"Shit," Selii said from beside me. "You had to go and do it again."

I blinked, and then I moved to cover my mouth. Only my mouth was covered in armor, which wasn't something I was used to.

But there was something about what she said, something about her tone.

"What is it?" I asked, looking up instinctively.

I saw ships moving through the fires and the smoke and the hell all around us. At first I thought they were more of the rescue ships Harath was sending in to assist us, or maybe they were more of the fighter craft I'd ordered in here to cover the rescue ships.

There were flashes of light going off in the hellscape all around us too. In colors like blue and purple. The telltale sign of plasma cannons going off and hitting shielding.

Like someone was fighting in here.

A missile streaked through the air above us, and I ducked instinctively. For all that ducking wasn't going to do a damn bit of good if that missile decided to home in on me and punch my ticket.

All I could do was hope the livisk power armor I wore would be enough to stop it.

"We have incoming!" Selii said.

"William, there appears to be a problem down here," Arvie said.

"We've got problems up here, Arvie," I said as one of those fighter craft bearing the Imperial seal along its side dove straight for us. But then, with dawning horror, I realized it wasn't diving straight for us.

No, it was diving straight for the rescue ship.

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