“You’re really going through with this, aren’t you?”

Tessa sighed, scratched weakly at the back of her head, looked up, met Phoebe’s eyes through the hazy, grainy image shaking across the vidscreen. Words came slow, almost painful, dragged out into the open and abandoned, stillborn.

“I. . . I don’t know, Phoebe.” She looked away again, eyes half absent as they roved across the bed, the shelving in the quarters she shared with Dimitrov. “I’m going through the motions, but I still have my doubts. The Stormfury is an amazing plane. She might just give us the edge we need to win the war.” She shook her head, met Phoebe’s gaze again. “But then again, she’s also the only way I have of going back and making the changes that might save billions of lives.”

“There’s no guarantee that if you go back, your changes will make any real difference.” Phoebe said shakily, the patchwork entanglement signal lancing into her words, eating at the transmission. “Billions of people may still die, and things might turn out worse for you.” She swallowed, eyes flicking, uncertain. “The further you go back, the more time you will have lost, the more you’ll end up giving up.”

“The bigger the impact I’m likely to make on the timeline.” Tessa breathed, then closed her eyes, shook her head, gestured dismissively. “But I know. I know what you mean.” Tessa pressed her fingers into her eyes, squeezed the bridge of her nose. “It’s the doubts that are killing me.”

“And there’s Ben.” Phoebe said quietly, almost meekly. Tessa hesitated, let her hand fall away from her face.

“Yeah.”

“I mean,” Phoebe hesitated. “You love him, don’t you?”

Tessa swallowed, looked up, watching Phoebe with tired eyes before she managed a quiet breath, nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“Isn’t that reason enough to stay here, in your own time? To not take the risk?”

“It should be.” Came Tessa’s quiet response. “God, Phoebe, I don’t know. Every day the Coralate gets closer, but this close, we should be able to recoup enough ships to beat them, drive them back.” She glanced away, sighed. “If Delaware and his people can just get the new Seindrive fleetyards up and running. . . I know that we can do this. I feel it, Phoebe.”

“I wish I had your optimism, Major.”

“It’s not optimism.” Tessa shook her head, let her chin come to rest in her hand. “It’s desperation.” She gave the ghost of a smile, reached out, traced the edge of the screen. “Hey, you said earlier that you had something for me.”

“Yeah.” Phoebe nodded, glanced across at edges of desk Tessa couldn’t see. “Uh, I’ve got the package on silicon here, just a second.” Phoebe grabbed something, slotted it into the terminal, touched functions on her screen that were mirrored only in the form of translucent frames popping up across Tessa’s screen and fading away again, letters thin, blinking in teal. Incoming data package.

“I’m sending some files through that you might find useful if you go.” Phoebe said absently, glanced back for a moment to meet Tessa’s eyes. “Troop movements, detailed reports of battles, some equipment schematics, all the classified and declassified files I could hack out of the command mainframe without catching a court martial.”

Tessa nodded, gave the other woman a genuine, weakening smile. “I appreciate it, Phoebe.”

“Whatever you decide to do, Tess,” Phoebe paused, breathed. “You have my full support.”

Lips parted, but before Tessa could respond, the sound of a door whispering open cut her off. Ben glanced back at her as he entered, offered a tired smile. Tessa’s response was immediate.

“Any word?”

Ben shook his head. “Still no sign of the blue skins.” He tossed off his flight jacket, turned and came up behind Tessa, hands finding her shoulders, working casually at knots as he leaned in, grinned at Phoebe. “Hey Jenkins. What are you two girls up to?”

“No good.” Tessa gave him a wry smile, eyes half-lidded as she sank into the warmth of his hands. “The usual.”

“Sounds fun.” He dropped back out of sight of the camera, busied himself with the static clamp on his uniform, shucked the entire thing into the autowasher as it came free. “Let me know if you need a hand.”

“You’ll be the first to know.” Tessa turned back to Phoebe. “So, back to what we were talking about.” She winked. “Cute boys on the Von...”

Phoebe colored instantly, mouth working at the edges of sounds, mind lost in an attempt to form words, then blasted into silence as the sound of Hilleboe’s voice came garbled and broken with static through the hazy screen. “All hands, all hands, this is the Captain. Report to duty stations and stand by for further instructions. This is a priority one alert. All non-standard communication channels are now subject to lock down.”

“What’s going on, Phoebe?”

“Not sure, but we’ve got to cut the link for now.” Phoebe looked breathless, keyed a quick sequence. “Catch you later, LC!”

“Be careful out there, Phoebe!” Static lanced into the signal, and then there was nothing, darkness, Phoebe’s soft, worried smile hanging in the dead silicon.

“My god.” Ben’s voice dropped into the silence, caught Tessa’s attention. He glanced back at her, silently passed her a silicon ‘puter scrolling through the latest newsfeed of military data, his expression hanging worried, drawn and waxen.

“Proxima.” She swallowed, eyes scanning quickly across the data, triggering retinal videofeeds of fighters blasted into fiery hail, warships carved by violent light as they spun, dropped away, tried to avoid the sea of silver dropping in on them at high speed. Images of stations burnt to slag, planetary surfaces bombarded, orbital snapshots of cities that were little more than patches of hot glass and fire. Her mouth drifted open, shock hot in her face, eyes wide.

“My god,” She managed. It took a force of will to glance up at Ben, to meet his eyes again, see the shock clinging there. “They’ve. . . They’ve wiped out Alpha Centauri, Proxima, Toliman, the yards, everything.” She glanced back at the ‘puter. “Everything.”

Alpha Centauri. The second most heavily defended system in the Commonwealth.

Home to humanity’s last fleetyard station, Augustus Octavian Orbital Complex.

The gateway to Earth.