Communication cut out at three in the morning.
Not with an explosion. Not with any dramatic interference. Only the signal growing thinner — like thread being pulled from both ends at once, until at a certain point it could no longer support its own weight and simply broke, without sound, without warning.
Hammond stared at the communication screen displaying one line of text: SIGNAL LOST — TELLUS ORBITAL SECTOR.
He did not try to reach Adler again.
He knew what it meant. The rebel fleet was now close enough to block the orbital lanes entirely. That meant bombardment would begin within hours, not days. That meant everything he had been quietly preparing for three weeks — all the positions shifted without announcement, all the reserves hidden at points not on any official map, all the plans laid out on a quieter table than this while reading intelligence reports whose every page said the same thing: no hope — would now have to work on their own.
No help was coming from outside.
There never would be.
Hammond closed the communication screen. Swivelled his chair. Summoned all division commanders to the map room.
They arrived in two minutes — faces that had long been with him, exhausted with a kind of exhaustion that had long since passed beyond the need for sleep and gone to somewhere deeper than that, but not yet broken. Not yet.
"Communication with Magnus II has been cut," he said, without preamble, without a tone that invited them to feel anything about that information. "Bombardment begins before dawn. All units to defensive positions within one hour. Nothing moves without explicit authorization from the command post." His finger moved across the map. "Legio Imperialis — first line, these sectors, these, and these. Cataphracta waits at the points established last week. Legio Adamantis stays in reserve until I order them directly."
The old colonel with the scar on his jaw raised his hand. "And if the bombardment is heavier than estimated?"
"Then we adjust."
"And if—"
"Then we adjust." Hammond looked at him — not harshly, only in a way that left no room for the next question. "We don't know what's coming. What we know is what we've prepared. Focus on that."
The room was quiet.
"To your positions."
They moved. Only one did not leave immediately — a person standing slightly behind the others, with fully-scarred armor and the number 45 on the left pauldron. Not older than twenty-eight. Hair short, eyes calm in a way different from practiced calm — the calm of someone who had seen too many things they couldn't forget and had made peace with the fact that they never would.
"Forty-five," said Hammond without looking up from the map. "Sector six. Don't move from there unless I order it personally."
"Understood." A brief pause. "Have you slept?"
"Irrelevant."
"That means no."
Hammond finally looked up. He met Forty-five's eyes with an expression that didn't change. "Sector six. One hour."
Forty-five nodded. Turned. But at the threshold paused — just briefly — and said without turning back, "Don't die before me. That would be rude."
Hammond didn't answer.
The door closed.
— — —
The sky turned white at twelve minutes past four.
Not sunrise.
Too sudden, too total — as though the entire atmosphere of Tellus had been flipped in an instant, as though someone had lit a new star directly overhead, too close, too bright to look at directly. Hammond watched it through the narrow window of the underground command post for one second — one second was enough to understand what was happening.
The word left his mouth before he decided to say it. Not loudly. Not with rage that erupted. Only in the way of someone just confirming something known for a long time but never needing to be said until now.
"Traditores."
No one heard it but the walls of the command post and the sky outside turning white. There was no need for anyone to hear. The word was not for anyone — only a judgment too long held back, finally coming out in one last quiet second before all the noise of the world erupted at once.
Then the sound arrived.
Not from one direction. Not from above or below or the side. From all directions at once — as though the air itself decided to stop being air and become something denser, crueller, more indifferent to the difference between the dead and the living. The ground of Tellus did not tremble.
The ground of Tellus cracked.
The concrete floor of the command post lifted two inches then fell back in less than half a second — enough to throw everyone standing off-balance, enough to send the map rack on the wall crashing to the floor, enough to kill one communication terminal instantly with a small spark no one had time to deal with. The ceiling rained dust and small concrete fragments — not collapsing, but peeling, like the skin of something very large being slowly stripped away.
Outside — Hammond didn't need to see it, sensor reports were sufficient — the buildings on the surface didn't collapse the way buildings hit by ordinary explosions collapse. They collapsed the way something collapses when pressed from above by a hand too large, too heavy, too indifferent to architecture or history or how many people were inside when it pressed. An orbital projectile doesn't only strike — it transfers its energy into the ground, spreading in all directions in a shockwave that no wall or steel or depth still within range can contain.
The second tremor came eight seconds after the first.
Harder.
A young lieutenant in the corner of the room lost his footing entirely and fell to his knees — he was back on his feet within two seconds, but those two seconds were enough for Hammond to see that his hands were shaking when he gripped the table edge to rise. Hammond didn't comment on it. He returned to the map, most of which had already become irrelevant as sectors kept disappearing from the sensor network every time a new tremor arrived.
Antennae. Relays. Everything that needed to stand upright to function.
Third tremor. Fourth. Fifth. They came without pattern — sometimes in a burst within four seconds, sometimes with a gap of nearly thirty seconds that felt like a small and painful gift because you'd already started breathing normally when the next one came.
The command post lights flickered. Went dark. Came back in emergency red that made everything look as if it were bleeding.
Hammond stood before the map and counted.
Projectiles per minute. Radius of destruction. Estimate of what percentage of surface communication infrastructure would still be functional when the bombardment stopped. His hands moved across the map — erasing sectors that had become irrelevant, redrawing lines with a blunt red pencil, moving unit markers to positions that could still be held.
Outside, on the surface that had become something that was no longer a city but not yet fully rubble — amid all of it, amid tremors and dust and fires too large to be called ordinary fires — there were people who were not part of his calculations. Civilians who hadn't been evacuated. Who had chosen to stay. Who had no choice to leave. Who were in the wrong place at the most wrong time to be anywhere on the surface of Tellus.
Hammond knew this.
He didn't allow himself to think about it.
Forty-seven minutes. Tremor after tremor. A map that kept shrinking.
Then it stopped.
The silence that followed was not clean silence. It was full silence — full of dust still falling from a ceiling that had lost several of its layers, full of the sound of still-settling rubble in the distance moving in a way that was slow and unstoppable, full of screaming coming from too many directions to localise. Silence that felt like the lungs of Tellus drawing a long breath — not to rest, but to hold what was coming next.
Hammond looked at the map. Closed his eyes for one second.
Opened them again.
"Legio Imperialis — activate the first line."
— — —
They came like water that cared nothing for what lay beneath it.
Not in a beautiful or dramatic way — in a way that was many, in a way that made the concept of counting enemies irrelevant because the number kept changing and was always larger than the last report. The first wave of rebel infantry came out of the dust haze still hanging over the city like new weather born from destruction, moving through the rubble of buildings that had only just finished falling, with a certainty that Hammond recognised not as courage but as arithmetic: they knew what the numbers were.
Legio Imperialis held the first line.
The line bent. Didn't break.
Hammond received reports every forty seconds. He adjusted. He received more reports. He adjusted again. The holographic map on the wall updated itself with a relentlessness that stopped feeling like information and started feeling like a record of things that could no longer be changed.
"TRADITORES!"
The word came up from underground — not through speakers, not through the communication system. It came through concrete and steel, carried by the same medium that carried the tremors and the explosions, entered the command post the way things enter places they have no official channel to enter. One word, from hundreds of mouths, repeated until it no longer sounded like a word. Until it sounded like something that had decided to be more than a word.
Hammond listened to it.
He didn't say anything.
— — —
Cataphracta deployed at eleven-forty.
Unit Seven went dark on comms at thirteen forty-two. Unit Twelve at fourteen sixteen. Unit Nineteen at fourteen forty-one — its last transmission was two words: position compromised. Then nothing.
Hammond received these reports in the same way he received all the others. As data. As facts. As things that were real and couldn't be changed and therefore didn't need grieving now.
He adjusted the positions.
He kept adjusting.
— — —
Legio Adamantis deployed at sixteen twenty.
One word. From Hammond himself, to the commanding officer he had met only twice but whose file he had read enough times to know that one word from him was enough.
"Now."
The holographic map changed. Not immediately. Not all at once. But within twelve minutes of Legio Adamantis moving into position, the red markers in the sectors where they operated began to thin at a rate different from all the sectors where they were not.
And from one sector, carried by the communication system with a fidelity that stripped everything except sound itself:
"Perditi."
Flat. No intonation that could serve as a reference. Not toward any specific person — not a cry directed at anyone, not a warning, not a threat wanting a response. Only a statement. Like a fact recited by someone who feels no need to convince anyone of its truth.
The red markers in that sector thinned faster.
— — —
The line began to fall at nineteen oh-three.
Hammond kept receiving reports. He kept adjusting. But at a certain point, adjusting and holding were no longer the same thing, and Hammond had known that point was coming long before he had seen its coordinates on any map.
He reached into his right pocket.
The watch was still there. He opened it.
The photograph inside: five people, taken in the courtyard of the Imperial Palace on a day that still had a name. Mother. Father. Grandfather. Adler. Hammond.
Four of those five names were gone. And the terrace of the Imperial Palace behind them — which this morning had been one of the first points struck by the bombardment, which now perhaps no longer had a third column from the left to remember the crack in — was gone too.
Hammond looked at the photograph. Not long. Not in a way that could be described as sentimental. Only looking — with calm, in the way of someone who has made peace with all the things they cannot change, who has stopped wanting a different version of all the decisions already made.
For the whole of today he had known only one name for the person. Forty-five. A code. A unit number on a scarred-armor pauldron, a name used in reports, in orders, in coordinates transmitted until transmission cut out fourteen minutes ago at sub-sector seven-Gamma.
But in this too-dim room, in the chair with the cracked leg, with the watch still showing a photograph of five people now reduced to one — Hammond no longer needed to use anyone's code.
"Seems," he said quietly, to the empty air before him — in a voice that no longer sounded like the voice that had been giving orders all day, only the voice of someone too exhausted to maintain distance even from himself, "we'll be meeting again, Quinry."
Not Forty-five. Quinry. The name that for the whole of today he had never said once — kept behind the code because that was the only way he could keep giving orders without letting moments like this slip inside his calculations. The name that now came out not as a report or a command, but as an acknowledgment: that behind the number 45 on that pauldron, there was someone who for eight years had stood closest to him of all the people he had ever trusted.
There was no answer.
Of course there wasn't.
Hammond closed the watch screen. Pocketed it. Stood.
— — —
The command post trembled again as he took the communicator from the table. The channel to Magnus II was still blocked. Had been since three that morning.
But he tried anyway.
"Brother."
He waited. Outside, the sound of gunfire drew closer.
"Tellus has fallen."
Then — from the far end of a channel full of interference, thin, barely there — he heard something. A voice too thin to confirm. But enough that Hammond pressed the communicator harder against his ear.
"Brother… can you hear me? Brot—"
"ADLER!"
The word came out louder than he'd planned. Not from panic — because this communication window was small and narrowing and he didn't know how many more seconds before everything was lost.
Then from the far end, clearer — Yes… Hammond…
That voice.
Hammond clenched his jaw for one second. Just one second.
"Tellus has fallen! I repeat — Tellus has fallen! The Imperial Palace — they've surrounded it! They're everywhere, brother!"
An explosion. Closer than the last. The ceiling of the command post rained dust again and one of the communication terminals finally died completely.
Hammond didn't move from his position.
"Brother…" His voice dropped from a report's tone to something lower than that — to a voice not present in any military communication protocol, that he had never practiced, that came by itself from a place he didn't usually allow to speak. "Whether or not this is my last request… please… live. Live longer than me."
Outside, the sound of gunfire changed character — no longer sporadic, but sustained, with a rhythm showing that what was happening outside was no longer a distant battle.
"Please… Live, however you can…"
From the far end of the channel: Hammond.
Just his name. But the way Adler said it — in a tone showing he already understood, had already processed everything just said even as interference cut half the words — that way made something in Hammond's chest tighten in a way he couldn't name and wouldn't name.
"No hope, brother." Flat. Not without feeling — only already too far past the point where intonation could add anything to a truth already this large. "Too many of them. Tanks, artillery, and orbital artillery from their ships. Tellus has fallen. Truly fallen."
Another explosion. Closer. The sound of concrete cracking somewhere above the ceiling.
Then something he hadn't planned to say — that came not from the part of himself trained to speak in situations like this, but from the part older than that, that existed before training, that could not be educated away:
"What a shame, brother."
A small pause.
"I never got to see you take the throne."
Don't joke, Hammond!
The corner of Hammond's mouth moved — not fully a smile, but the shadow of something that had once been a smile in very different moments from this. Adler's voice like that — angry, panicked, refusing — more real than any signal he had heard tonight.
"Keep living, brother." His voice dropped again. To the deepest place he had ever allowed to be heard. "However you can."
An explosion outside. Loud. The walls of the command post trembled in a way different from the usual vibration — in a way showing the source of that explosion was no longer in the distance.
"I… I love you."
Those words came in a way he had never said before — not because he had never felt them, but because there had never been a moment when saying them felt more important than not saying them. Until now.
"I am proud to be your brother."
From the far end of the channel — Hammond—
"Goodbye, brother."
He pressed the transmit button one last time.
Sending one final sentence into the small gap that might still be open, that might already have closed, that might never have existed and all of this was only Hammond speaking into emptiness.
Live.
However you can.
The next explosion hit directly.
Not from a distance. Not vibration coming through ground and walls. Directly — in a way that made the difference between outside and inside vanish at once, in a way that left no gap between sound and impact, in a way that turned one small room with a dim lamp and a folding map table and a chair with a cracked leg into something entirely different in less than one second.
The communicator signal at Adler's end —
flickered.
Then nothing.