[continued from previous message]

shell, burning her skin, twisting her intestines, shattering her
bones.

"Now," she whispers, and someone hears her, and pushes the button.

()

Coop collapses in on herself: her body becomes infinite, her mind
becomes infinite, time becomes infinite. Right now, at this moment, on
the twenty-eighth of May, she is going down with her ship, but at the
same time, it is also the second of January, and she is being briefed
on her mission.

The briefing isn't how she remembered it: bits and pieces of it are
moving around. Probably that's because her brain has been crushed by
her skull. She is incapable of thought and sensation, and yet, she
thinks and she feels.

"You've turned the gravity generator into a weapon?"

"More like a portal," says a man without a face as the first
dreadnaught appears on the starboard side of the Hope's collapsing
wreckage.

Coop doesn't have eyes to see it, but she recognizes the emblem of
Earth-44. On the port side, there are two dreadnaughts from Earth-26.
Then, one from Earth-9.

"How many?" she asks.

"The treaty of the United Earths has ninety signatories," comes a
voice from Weavers Dawn. "Some are only providing troops, resources.
Most aren't any more advanced than we are, but some have already
conquered star systems in their own universes."

"How many?" she asks again.

"Sixty dreadnaughts," says her dead husband.

"And three hundred single-man fighters," says the son they never had.

"The Pulse have thirty-six active carriers," the spymaster Regina
White is telling her. "Maybe half of those should be tied down by our
allies from Kyklokos by the time you get to Weavers Dawn. If you can
draw enough of the remainder to your location, then the United Fleet
can overwhelm them. Not only are we cutting their empire in two, but
we're wiping out a big chunk of their space navy."

Only one of the enemy carriers will escape, and less than a third
of the enemy fighters. Coop knows that a week after her death, two
planets that had previously refused Earth's pleas for help will join
its uneasy alliance with Kyklokos. The queen-sons of the Eighth Hive,
left behind in the Pulse's initial invasion of Earth, will secretly
leave Beijing, and then the Earth, so that their leader Rurik can
instigate a rebellion; that rebellion will spread. The fleet of the
United Earths will hold Weavers Dawn until they are betrayed by
accident, by someone named Claire Belden, whom Catherine Cooper met
once in passing but doesn't recognize.

Coop doesn't have a body, but she feels the explosions miles in the distance, as the carriers burst into shrapnel, and the fighters panic
and run -- those that aren't crushed by gravity bombs or ignited by
laser cannons. The victory of the Earths is not without a cost: they
lose twenty of their own fighters, and Earth-6 loses its dreadnaught.

And among the dead, of course, there is the crew of the Forlorn
Hope of which not a trace remains, save that fading bolt of light.

COPYRIGHT 2023 AMABEL HOLLAND

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