The next time Kayla woke, she looked around to see that she was in a different room with several beds nearby. Ray was sitting up, reading something on her tablet. Next to her, Thandi was slurping down some kind of horrible green liquid substance. Kayla stayed quiet and watched them while her heart swelled several sizes.

  “Good morning, dear leader,” Ray said. She tapped out a message on her tablet, then smiled. “How’s the hangover?”

  “Still hurts,” Kayla croaked.

  She fought back a grin as Thandi downed her drink, then pushed herself very slowly out of bed and stumbled over to her, dragging an IV tree with all the grace and finesse of a drunken elephant. She collapsed on top of Kayla and scrambled around for something like a hug, which Kayla weakly returned.

  “I can’t believe we made it,” Thandi said tiredly. Then she looked up with a little more energy. “Also, you pulled me out of heaven, so that’s going on your tab.”

  “I did?”

  “Sort of. I kept picturing you wailing and moping without me and I felt guilty.”

  “Okay then,” Kayla said. She waited while Thandi pushed herself back to her bed. “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “I can’t help but notice that I actually just died and came back to life, for the purposes of saving humanity, so I mean… technically speaking…”

  Thandi pointed an accusing finger in her direction. “I’m watching you, madam. Don’t think that I’m not. Keep satan behind thee.”

  Ray chuckled. “There were a dozen ODTs who did the same thing, and I guarantee you it will be decades before they stop chirping about it. Bunch of egomaniacs.”

  Kayla wanted to laugh, but she knew it would hurt. “I keep thinking this has to be a dream. Like, how can we be brought back from death? Then I move my head the wrong way and I totally get it.”

  “The PJ who found us came in earlier,” Ray said. “She said another few minutes and we’d be gone. She might have been trying to impress me though.”

  Kayla groaned softly. “Thandi, please tell me you’ll allow a cursing dispensation?”

  Thandi stared at the wall for a long moment, then waved a hand. “For now.”

  “Jesus Christ goddamn shit this hurts.” Kayla sighed, then looked again at the beds. “Is that Lyna?”

  “Sleeping still,” Thandi said. “She was up earlier, but pretty depressed. Not happy about life in general, unfortunately.”

  Kayla didn’t know how to respond to that. A little more scanning revealed that she had her own green drink waiting within arm’s reach. “How’s the flavor?” she asked.

  “Vile,” Thandi replied cheerfully. “That’s how medicine works.”

  Kayla nodded grimly and started to reach for the glass. Luckily for her, Urtiga chose that moment to enter the room, followed by Doctor Gilah and the rest of the Ranger squad. Bibi and Tian greeted them with tears and smiles, while Jessica seemed to be on the verge of breaking down.

  “Fresh out of a makeshift Barrochian prison camp,” Urtiga crowed. “And boy, do those guys not have their shit together. We drove everyone out in a couple of supply trucks.”

  “Way to go gang,” Kayla said. “Glad to see our girlboss is putting on a brave face.”

  Jessica gave her a tight smile, but said nothing.

  “She’ll get over it,” Tian said happily. “One day, when she learns she did her job just fine and not everything is about her.”

  Kayla bit her lip. “Hello, Doctor Gilah. I think I owe you an apology.”

  Gilah waved her hand. “Water under the bridge. Completely understandable given the circumstances. By the way, I was able to send a message for your… ah… final request. It’s all taken care of.”

  Kayla blinked in confusion. “What request?”

  “You know,” Gilah insisted. “We managed to place a tracking device on your Marine friend, so we’ll be able to watch his every movement, like you asked.”

  “Oh, shit,” Urtiga crowed loud enough to make Kayla shudder. “She’s at it again.”

  “What an obsessive girl you are, Kayla,” Ray scolded her. “Men are supposed to chase you.”

  Kayla ducked beneath her covers while the general mockery continued. When she emerged, bright red and more than a little angry, she caught Gilah’s wicked smile, and a wink.

  When they felt better, a doctor brought a holoprojector for the whole squad to watch. She played the documentary series that had gone out on all Valkyrie channels while they were under. General Smyrna, now retired from operational status, narrated the story of the galaxy as far back as she knew it.

  The Rangers watched impatiently and learned that they had been lied to. The Jotnar had not been aliens, but human. The species had advanced far earlier than anyone had admitted, until a final war drove them to the brink of extinction. Their machine intelligences took control and formed a council, headed by the entity responsible for ending the conflict; the Interregnum. His role, or ‘its’, as Kayla kept insisting, was to return humanity to an ignorant tribal state until measures could be taken to resolve their violent nature. The Artificially Intelligent Elders were working on that question, though evidently without success.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “Resolve this,” Kayla said, with her middle finger extended, and was reassured to hear angry agreement from the others.

  While the council attempted to craft the perfect human culture, Smyrna’s disembodied voice explained, they empowered certain humans to assist them. Otrera was one of those figures, but she had rebelled, leading an army of enhanced women against the forces of the Elders. Another war ensued and the humans were defeated. Otrera and her followers stayed in hiding, working behind the scenes to dismantle the deadly arsenal littering the stars, as Valkyrie had always claimed. Then, without explaining why, their founder left them, never to be heard from again.

  The presentation finished, leaving its watchers substantially unimpressed.

  “That’s such bullshit,” Lyna complained. “Why are humans always the bad guys? It’s so depressing.”

  “And there’s a ton she left out,” Kayla said. “Urtiga told me there used to be men and women. What the hell is that about?” She reached for her phone. “I’m texting her, cause I’m pretty sure we’re getting about fifty percent honesty right here.”

  “I heard those stories too,” Ray said cautiously. “But that’s all they were. thousands of years is a lot of time for rumors to create themselves.”

  Kayla gave her a sidelong look. “So, you’re satisfied with this?”

  “Hell no.”

  Bibi was more thoughtful. “One of those Elders has to be on our side, or how else does this organization get so well resourced?”

  “Salvage maybe?” Ray asked.

  Kayla nodded enthusiastically. “Maybe that’s the whole point. They keep us out there dismantling shit so they can rebuild an army to fight back with.”

  “No, that doesn’t make sense,” Bibi said. “They should have passed that point centuries ago.”

  “Whatever it means,” Kayla insisted, “we are going to war. That’s the only way forward.”

  “War?” Tian asked. Her face was lined with worry. “Do you really think so?”

  “Of course,” Kayla said. “You can’t feed us this story and tell us to just go back to our day jobs. With a bunch of computers trying to rule humanity?” She leaned back in her chair with her hands behind her head. “We knew the whole time, obviously. Thandi and Christie were figuring it out.”

  “We haven’t remotely figured anything out,” Thandi said patiently.

  Kayla shrugged. “Well, so what? It’s clear as day now. And I know our friends out there are all coming to the same conclusion. Death to the machines.”

  Ray sighed heavily. “Yeah, probably. Hard to see it any other way. But, Barnes, you can shove that sunny disposition somewhere dark and quit running your mouth. You have seen some nasty combat, but you haven’t seen war. They are not the same thing.”

  Kayla wilted in her glare and nodded meekly.

  Once they were able to walk and work out, the squad were free to rejoin their unit. With the Helvetic League’s newfound focus on Caldera, and the military presence in Rackeye, the Ranger battalions were on standby for whatever might happen next. A few briefings from Akane left them all free to train, study their potential new enemy, and work on contingency plans.

  While they were not free to roam the planet’s underground bases, Christie managed to use her higher clearance to get Kayla and Thandi a pass to the Omega site, where Doctor Gilah met them for a short tour.

  After they had secured the base, the Raiders had brought in engineers to prepare a collapse of the top-level passages around the mineshaft and staircase. When they retreated, they destroyed any advanced technology left and set a fire to burn out the place. The Barrochian soldiers who investigated the mountain doorway found a smoking hole in the ground. Only the ventilation remained a concern, and Collective scientists were already at work trying to convince the spiders to dig new shafts, in case they had need.

  Gilah suggested they visit the control room again, but Kayla refused without explanation. It wasn’t the room she had died in that bothered her. She didn’t want to see the corridors and offices nearby, for which she had fought like a savage. As soon as she pictured them she felt the punch of overpressure, heard the deafening storm of gunfire and smelled the acrid stink of cordite. The sensations still threatened to overwhelm her, so that she preferred to blank out any thought of the place.

  Instead, they went to see the machine.

  “Our current thinking is that it’s trying to read human culture,” Gilah explained as she led them through the giant cavern.

  Kayla gawped at the mind-bending structure she had once passed over with a cursory glance. It was certainly impressive. And a little frightening.

  Gilah continued. “Once it processes whatever it is trying to understand—”

  “Us,” Christie said. “How to ‘fix’ humanity, I believe.”

  “Scary, isn’t?” Gilah said with a smile. “But it’s taking whatever conclusions it comes to and feeding some kind of influence back into the galaxy’s media. News articles, social feed posts and comments—all from legitimate looking idents.”

  “So, you’re going to blow it up?” Kayla demanded.

  Gilah gave her a pained expression. “No. Once we’ve managed to deactivate the various security systems, and once we’ve understood a lot more about how else it can defend itself, a phased reduction in processing power…”

  “Or you could just blow it up.”

  “I shall pass the suggestion up to my superiors. I’m sure they’ll have some comments.”

  “How would you feel about the Helvetic League descending into a civil war led by hundreds of warlords jockeying for power?” Christie asked with only a hint of sarcasm.

  Thandi’s eyes widened. “Wait… Really? It can do that?”

  “Nobody knows yet,” Gilah said. “We have to be careful, and keep our assumptions as limited as possible. Especially in light of… recent revelations.”

  “Indeed,” Christie added. “The chiefs are still very much in line with the ‘no interference’ policy, whatever that’s worth.”

  “Can’t you talk to it?” Thandi asked. “Try to redefine its objectives?”

  Gilah shook her head. “It doesn’t talk. It doesn’t reason or think in any way that we understand. It just runs its program. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t even understand what that is supposed to be, yet. My research thesis suggests it is still in the ‘test and observe’ phase of its operation, though, of course, I have a lot of data to analyze before I can flesh that out.”

  Kayla stared back at the machine, and the army of spiders crawling all over it. “On my home world they dared to build this cursed thing,” she said.

  Thandi’s brows furrowed. “Uh… technically they got here—”

  “On my damned home world, Thandi.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “And the League wants to get its dirty hands on it,” Kayla continued. “Whatever illusion we pulled off up top might have worked for now, but they know something is up. They won’t stop until the planet is in their control. There will be a war; for Caldera, if not the galaxy.”

  Christie sighed, but didn’t say anything.

  After a long moment Kayla turned away from the view. “Come on then. Let’s get a drink. There’s a joke somewhere that starts ‘Three Rangers and a spy walk into an underground bar’, and I want to know the punchline.”

  Gilah gave a guilty smirk as she led them away, but while they walked her expression changed to one of disquiet. The doctor, Kayla guessed, had joined up to seek knowledge first and foremost. Now she was probably contemplating the implications that her Ranger training and nanite enhancement carried on a besieged planet. She had sworn to serve humanity from an objective standpoint, but she might have to kill members of one tribe on behalf of another.

  But that wasn’t Kayla’s problem. The enemy was closing in once again, and her mind was racing with ideas for how Valkyrie might be convinced to fight them off. Rayker had been taken out of the picture, but her master was still out there and very likely finding new ways to control the League from behind the scenes. Philosophical problems about humanity didn’t keep Kayla awake at night. A fight was coming, and she would be damned sure that Caldera would win it.