"I thought you said the empress wasn't likely to try and attack."

"I said that it would be stupid for her to try and attack," Varis said, looking up and around.

I followed her gaze as well. There were a lot of signs of death and destruction all around us.

Okay, mostly it was destruction all around us, but I knew there had to be a lot of death that went along with that. Twisted buildings rose through the gloom all around us. Support struts and structures and all that stuff reached out like skeletal fingers grasping for the living.

All of it had been torn down, and there was a layer of black dust blowing in the super-heated air. Like, we're talking it was super-heated even with the shield rising like a tower right in front of us creating a localized firestorm inside that shielding.

"The empress has been making a lot of stupid decisions lately," Varis said. "I would hardly be surprised if she made another one now."

I stared at her. I blinked, and then I grinned.

"Yeah, I guess you're right. Why wouldn't she make one more stupid decision?"

We walked over to a group of livisk who were standing in front of a large archway that had been literally twisted around. I let out a low whistle as I stared up at the thing.

"Nice to remember the kind of forces we're dealing with from time to time," I said.

"What are you talking about?" Varis asked.

"It's so easy to push a button on a console in your ship, and you unleash the kind of destruction that only nature could deal out in the past. It's a nice reminder once in a while to put your boots on the ground and see the end result of pushing those buttons up close and personal."

"Ah," Varis said, putting her hands to her sides and cocking her head as she looked at the destruction all around us. "I guess I never thought of it like that."

"I find it's always a good idea to remember the people on the ground," I said, low enough that I didn't think she heard me. But she hit me with a considering look, and there was a considering thought that came through the link as well. "Even if you know you're still going to have to fuck up the people on the ground. Maybe especially if you're still going to have to do it despite knowing what you're about to unleash."

I looked up at the bubbling and roiling angry mass in front of me. I could see the mushroom cloud still rising in the dusk settling over the city, though there was still no black rain. There also wasn't lightning or anything like that going up through the cloud. Clearly it hadn't been seeded with anything nasty.

At least nothing more nasty than the usual radioactive shit you expected in a bomb like that. It had to be a lower yield if it only took out the one building, even with the shielding in place.

A millennia of nuclear weaponry on earth had resulted in seeding bombs with some pretty nasty designer stuff over the years. The kind of stuff that made the wrath of God stuff mentioned in the Bible seem quaint in comparison.

Varis led me over to a group of livisk gathered in a small circle in a spot where there was less debris than everywhere else. Meanwhile ships were swooping in and dropping off troops and what I assumed to be rescue personnel, though most of them were standing around doing a whole lot of nothing

That had an itch developing between my shoulder blades. I wanted to do something. I didn't want to stand around listening to a bunch of livisk talking about what they were going to do.

Varis stepped up to a holodisplay floating in the middle of all the gathered livisk. I didn't recognize any of them, but I figured it would be a good idea to pay attention and get a feel for who each and every one of them was.

"What is the situation?" Varis asked once she stood side by side with a gentleman who had a long flowing mane of purple hair. We're talking it looked like the kind of stuff that would be on a model, or maybe someone who was in a neo-hair metal revival band.

"Not good," he grunted. "The fortress was taken out with a precision strike, as you can see."

"A precision strike with a tactical nuke," I muttered, looking up at the thing.

He hit me with an irritated look.

"Do you have something to add, human?"

"It just seems a little excessive to use something radioactive on your own city. Especially if you're only taking out a single building," I said. "If it were me? I would've used more conventional explosives, but maybe the shielding you have is enough to deal with conventional explosives. Or maybe this is some livisk dick-measuring thing I'm not privy to because I didn't grow up in your culture and I'm looking at it from the outside."

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"Dick-measuring contest," he grunted.

"Yeah, where you whip out your dick and see which one is bigger? Y'all are doing it all over the city with these massive towers after all."

Granted, I didn't know if a dick-measuring contest was something the livisk actually engaged in, but they were descended from the same ancient hominid species as us. There were a lot of things that were the same between the two of us. I was willing to bet this was one area where the infinite combinations were bigger than the infinite diversity.

The man stared at me for another moment, and then the corner of his mouth quirked up just a bit. Just enough that I barely noticed because I was looking for it.

"Dick-measuring contest," he grunted, shaking his head. "I've never heard that one before. I rather like it."

"It's all fun and games until you're the one with your cock on the chopping block and you don't have as many inches as the other guy," I said, grinning at him.

He blinked, like he was unsure of what that meant.

"General Ch'alm," Varis said, amusement coming through the link. "This is Captain William Stewart of the Terran Navy."

"Combined Confederate Fleet," I corrected without thinking.

I hated that I corrected without thinking. That was something that was important if you were in human space. It felt like a distinction without a difference out here in livisk space.

Sort of like how they all seemed like blue sparklies to me, even if there was a distinction between working for a noble house as opposed to working directly for the empress and all the convoluted bullshit that went along with that.

"You can call me Bill," I said, smiling and reaching a hand out to General Ch'alm.

I figured he was a lower-rank general than Varis. Like she was the generalissimo in charge of everything and he was merely a paper pusher. Like a lower star ranking back on Earth.

He looked down at my offered hand and then to Varis. She merely arched an eyebrow, but didn't say anything.

"You'll excuse me if I don't shake your hand, Terran," he said.

I shrugged. "Fine by me."

I tried to play it off, but I was irritated. I glanced over to Varis. I was glad she didn't say anything and force this guy to do something he didn't want to do, but I was also annoyed that he didn't seem interested in shaking my hand. Though, come to think of it, that wasn't a thing I saw a lot of livisk doing.

Varis turned her attention to the holoblock floating in front of them. I could see a spherical emitter in the middle of the thing making the whole thing possible, though it flickered every once in a while. As though there was some kind of interference happening as a result of the destruction just next to us.

I wondered if there were still residual pulses of EMP in there. Like I said, there were all kinds of nasty little surprises you could put into the radioactive cocktail that we'd discovered over the last thousand years of perfecting nuclear weapons that could do fun little things like that.

Not all of them were harmful to life. At least not directly harmful. A well placed EMP could fuck up all kinds of things that were keeping people alive, after all.

It was a wonder, come to think of it, that nothing had been knocked out in Varis's building as far as I could tell. Maybe the shields naturally hardened everything against an electromagnetic pulse.

"I want us to start moving our troops out in a circle around the building," she said. "We need to get suppressors moving in over the actual firestorm and try to get that under control, and I want to make sure we have all but our reserve fighter wings out and ready to push back any attack the empress might send our way."

"Do you think the empress is actually going to send something our way?" General Ch'alm asked, staring with an eagerness and anticipation that would have been unsettling on anyone other than a livisk.

For a livisk? It was just Tuesday.

"I'm not sure what she's going to do," Varis said after a moment of consideration. She stared at some of the buildings around the one that took the direct hit. The ones facing the destroyed building were blinking a yellow color, but none of them had gone into the red. Again, it was a miracle of livisk shielding technology that those buildings were mostly intact.

"Are you going to evacuate those buildings?" I asked.

"What are you talking about?" Varis asked.

"Those buildings. They have people in them, right?"

"Well, yes," she said. "And there are probably still people alive in the conflagration in front of us, but we have to deal with one thing at a time."

I blinked, and then I turned to look at the inferno raging in front of us. It seemed like nothing could survive in there. The level of destruction was the sort of thing that could only be described as biblical in proportion. Real wrath of God type stuff. Dogs and cats living together. That sort of thing.

"There are people alive in there?" I asked.

"The building took a hit that destroyed it, but there will be individual shield generators in certain areas that were probably able to keep some alive."

"How long will those shield generators last?" I asked, speaking quietly.

Varis looked at me. No doubt she could hear the concern in my voice. I sensed a flash of irritation at the concern in my voice. Like she knew I was thinking about doing something stupid.

Of course she knew I was thinking of doing something stupid. She could feel the gist of my thoughts even if we couldn't exactly read each other's minds directly.

"What is it, Bill?" he asked.

I looked around at all of the livisk in turn and then back to her.

"Who's in charge of running the rescue operation?"

Nobody responded. So I decided to try again.

"Who's in charge of rescue operations? Evacuating those buildings? Making sure that we find survivors before they become casualties?" I asked.

She took a deep breath and let it out. Nobody volunteered that information.

"The best thing we can do for the people in those buildings is to make sure we have a military response ready to go. Ready to push back the empress. They know they're on their own as far as survival until we can get the military situation under control."

"Bullshit they're in there on their own."

She blinked. That irritation flared through the link once more, and there was something else: annoyance.

"What was that, Bill?" she asked, her voice a low purr.

I'd heard that low purr from her before. Usually it meant things were about to go really well for yours truly, but in this case? I couldn't shake the feeling it was a dangerous low purr that said things were about to go very poorly for yours truly.

"Look, if there are people in there then we need to get in there and rescue them, and if we don't have anybody who's willing to do it among your staff then..."

I looked down at the little triangle on my shoulder that looked like something straight out of Stark Industries. It was glowing brightly now. Like it was working overtime thanks to the radiation.

I looked back at Varis and grinned as a spike of worry shot through the link.

"How good are these radiation scrubbers you have, anyway?"

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