Weekly: Emotion. Daily: Blessed
Shattered Expanse
Raymund Shayne Allmond
Human (Bastion Compact)
Bastion Army Sergeant
Raymund Shayne Allmond was raised with an idea taught to nearly every child of the Bastion Compact – survival is not an accomplishment. It is a responsibility.
On Aegiron, there was little patience for people who boasted about enduring hardship. Everyone endured hardship. Storms came. Systems failed. Bulkheads cracked. Crops died. People were injured. People were frightened. The measure of a person was never whether these things happened to them, but what they did when they happened. Raymund learned the same lesson from the Covenant Church.
The Church taught that the ancient Seven Deadly Sins remained dangerous precisely because they were ordinary human emotions and desires allowed to become masters rather than servants. Greed hoarded what the community required. Wrath replaced judgment with anger. Sloth neglected the work upon which someone else’s life might depend.
Pride was particularly dangerous. Pride told a person that he was better than those around him. Worse, it told him that he could not be wrong. Raymund understood that lesson. At least, he thought he did.
By the time Sergeant Allmond deployed to the Bastion outer colony of Kestrel’s Stand, he was an experienced infantryman with twelve years of service. He was competent, disciplined, and well regarded by his soldiers. He wasn’t particularly charismatic, nor was he interested in becoming so. Bastion soldiers respected officers who knew their work, shared hardship, and brought people home.
Raymund did all three. The Thrax attack on Kestrel’s Stand surprised almost everyone.
Raids were nothing unusual along the outer territories. The Thrax struck isolated settlements, merchant traffic, mining operations, and poorly defended installations whenever opportunity presented itself. Bastion settlements were usually less attractive targets. There were easier people to rob than humans who constructed civilian settlements like fortresses and regarded emergency preparedness as a civic virtue.
This was different. The Thrax came in numbers.
Ships appeared beyond the orbital perimeter. Landing craft descended into the northern continent. Heavy infantry followed armored vehicles into the mountains. Within days, Bastion High Command realized they weren’t dealing with raiders.
The Thrax had committed an army. Nobody knew why.
Kestrel’s Stand possessed mineral resources, but nothing extraordinary. Its agricultural production barely supported its population. There were no major shipyards, Foldspace installations, or strategic weapons facilities. Yet the Thrax kept coming. Bastion did what Bastion had always done. It dug in.
Several weeks into the campaign, Raymund’s squad was ordered into the mountains west of the main Thrax position. Reconnaissance had identified a narrow canyon being used to supply approximately a company of Thrax occupying a fortified plateau overlooking the approaches to one of the colony’s major settlements.
Raymund’s orders were straightforward. Enter the canyon, destroy the supply route, and withdraw. The operation went almost perfectly.
Raymund’s squad slipped through the mountains under darkness and reached the canyon before dawn. They planted demolition charges along an unstable section of the canyon wall while two members of the squad moved ahead to watch the road.
Then a Thrax supply convoy arrived early. The careful sabotage mission became a firefight. Raymund watched his soldiers perform magnificently.
Corporal Mara Vey held the northern approach despite taking fragments through her thigh. Specialist Corin Hale crawled beneath fire to replace a demolition initiator that had failed. Their medic, Jessa Orrin, crossed nearly thirty meters of exposed ground to reach Vey. Private Tomas Venn, the youngest soldier in the squad, spotted a Thrax flanking maneuver seconds before it would have trapped them. Raymund redirected his fire team. Hale triggered the charges. Half the canyon came down.
Stone, dust, vehicles, and Thrax disappeared beneath thousands of tonnes of rock. The surviving enemy scattered into the mountains. The supply route was gone. More importantly, Raymund still had every member of his squad. Standing beneath the settling dust, listening to the distant secondary explosions of burning Thrax vehicles, Raymund felt something powerful.
Pride. Not in himself. In them.
He looked at exhausted soldiers checking one another’s wounds, ammunition, and equipment and thought there wasn’t another squad in the Bastion Army he would rather have beside him.
“You did well,” he told them. That was not the mistake.
Bastion command ordered Raymund to secure the demolished canyon and wait for relief. The destruction of the route had accomplished its purpose. The isolated Thrax company would now have to survive on whatever ammunition and supplies it already possessed while Bastion forces prepared to surround its position.
Then Raymund received reports that several surviving Thrax were retreating deeper into the canyon network. He studied the terrain. They were hurt. Disorganized. Running.
Raymund thought about the fight they had just won. He thought about how quickly his squad had reacted when the operation went wrong. He thought about Venn spotting the flank, Hale repairing the detonator, Orrin crossing through enemy fire. They were good. Very good.
And somewhere during those thoughts, Raymund’s pride in his soldiers became pride in his squad. Then pride in his command. Then pride in himself.
Private Venn looked at the tactical display. “Sergeant, we’re supposed to hold here.”
Raymund remembered looking at him. “We just gutted their supply line. They’re running.” Venn hesitated. Raymund saw the hesitation and mistook it for fear. “We’ve got them.” Three words.
Raymund would remember them for the rest of his life.
The Thrax were not running, they were leading him. Raymund’s squad had advanced less than two kilometers when the canyon narrowed between two steep ridges.
The first plasma burst came from above.
Then another.
The squad scattered for cover as weapons opened from concealed positions along both sides of the canyon. Their communications dissolved beneath electronic interference. A Thrax heavy weapon began firing from somewhere ahead. Raymund understood immediately. He had walked them into a prepared kill zone.
Everything the Covenant Church taught about Pride suddenly stopped being theology. Pride wasn’t boasting. Pride wasn’t admiring yourself in a mirror. Pride was looking at incomplete information and believing you understood it because you had been right before.
Raymund ordered his squad behind a rocky outcropping. Venn was covering the withdrawal when a plasma bolt struck him. He died almost instantly. Raymund saw him fall. For several seconds, something terrible happened inside Raymund – he wanted to attack. Not because it was tactically sound, not because it would save his soldiers, but because retreating would mean admitting what he had done.
If they could break the ambush, if they could kill the Thrax, if they could take the ridge — then perhaps he had not been wrong. That was Pride’s second temptation. The first had gotten Tomas Venn killed. The second could kill everyone else. Raymund keyed the squad channel.
“I was wrong.” Nobody answered. There wasn’t time.
“Fall back. Orrin, smoke. Hale, left side. Vey, covering fire. We are leaving.” And they left. They carried Tomas with them.
The squad returned to Bastion lines several hours later. Raymund made no attempt to disguise what had happened. His after-action report contained no language about aggressive reconnaissance, unexpected enemy concentration, faulty intelligence, or tactical necessity.
I violated orders and pursued retreating enemy forces. The enemy withdrawal was a deliberate deception. My decision resulted in the death of Private Tomas Venn and injuries to two additional personnel. Responsibility is mine.
Raymund submitted himself for disciplinary review. That evening, he sat outside the temporary field chapel beside the sealed bag containing Tomas Venn’s body. Chaplain Elias Morren found him there. For a long time neither man spoke.
Finally Raymund said, “I killed him.”
Morren looked toward the body. “You gave the order. He followed it.”
“I knew better.”
“Yes.”
Raymund had expected reassurance. Instead he received the truth. He stared at the chaplain.
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Repent.” Raymund waited. “Learn.” The chaplain nodded toward Venn. “Carry him.”
Another silence. “Do better.” That was all.
There was no promise that God would make the consequences disappear. No suggestion that everything happened for some unknowable reason. Tomas Venn was dead because Raymund had made a bad decision. Grace did not change that. Grace meant the worst thing Raymund had done did not have to become the only thing he would ever be.
Raymund’s mistake produced one unexpected piece of intelligence. During their withdrawal, his squad had recorded unusual Thrax activity farther inside the mountains. The ambush had not merely protected the retreating soldiers. It had protected something behind them.
Bastion reconnaissance redirected drones toward the area. Several were destroyed, but enough imagery returned to reveal heavy excavation machinery descending into an ancient geological formation beneath the mountains. The Thrax weren’t invading Kestrel’s Stand for its colonies. They were looking for something.
Whatever lay beneath those mountains was important enough for the Thrax to commit ships, armor, thousands of troops, and months of supplies to obtain it. The battle for Kestrel’s Stand had suddenly become something much larger. Raymund’s squad returned to combat.
Months later, Bastion forces finally broke the Thrax position. Raymund was there. So were Vey, Hale, Orrin, and the others. They fought through the same mountains where Tomas had died, this time as part of a coordinated offensive supported by armor, artillery, reconnaissance, and three other infantry companies.
Raymund followed the plan and when conditions changed, he reported them, when he didn’t know something, he said so. When one of his soldiers questioned an assumption, Raymund listened. His squad performed magnificently.
Afterward, another sergeant found Raymund sitting beside his soldiers as they waited for evacuation.
“Hell of a job, Allmond.”
Raymund nodded. “They did well.”
The other sergeant looked across the exhausted squad. “You should be proud.”
Raymund looked at Mara Vey helping Corin Hale repair a damaged weapon. Jessa Orrin was checking one of the younger soldiers for concussion. Someone had already started heating field rations for everyone. There was an empty place among them that Raymund still noticed. There always would be.
“I am,” he said. And he meant it.
Raymund Shayne Allmond remains proud of his squad. He is proud of frightened people who continue doing their jobs. Proud of soldiers who carry the wounded. Proud of subordinates willing to question him. Proud of comrades who trusted him again after he failed them. Proud of a Compact that sends soldiers to defend colonies most of humanity has never heard of.
He has even learned that there are things about himself of which he may quietly be proud.
But Raymund never again confuses pride with certainty.
When a young Bastion soldier once asked him how someone knows when confidence has become the sin of Pride, Raymund thought for a moment before answering.
“When you stop asking whether you’re wrong.” He paused. “That’s when Pride has already answered for you.”
Blood & Suns
Miroslav Medvadev
Codename: Boris
Affiliation: Monolith
Cell: Field Operations
Location: Rommelsberg, Reich State of America
Miroslav Medvadev hated parades. Not crowds. Crowds could be useful. Not uniforms. He had worn enough of those himself. Not even flags. A piece of cloth was incapable of offending him. He hated what the Reich did with all three. Today, several hundred thousand people had been packed into the monumental avenues of Rommelsberg, the city that had once been called Washington, D.C., for the annual Reich Patriot Parade.
Every one of them had been issued a flag. Miroslav had been issued one too. He waved it enthusiastically. That was important. The man standing twenty meters to his left had apparently not understood that. Miroslav watched an officer of the Staatspolizei push through the crowd toward him. The officer said something into the man’s ear. Whatever it was immediately corrected his deficiency in patriotism.
His arm began pumping harder. The little flag snapped back and forth. The officer watched for another few seconds. Then he moved on. Miroslav kept waving. There you are. That was Pride in the Reich. Measured in centimeters of arm movement.
The crowd suddenly erupted. Miroslav nearly flinched. Something had appeared on one of the enormous screens overlooking the avenue. He turned with everyone else and saw the face of a senior Reich official smiling down upon them. The reaction was extraordinary. People screamed. A woman beside Miroslav burst into tears. Two teenage girls began jumping up and down while waving their flags. An elderly man repeatedly shouted the official’s name with such intensity that veins appeared along his forehead.
Miroslav had once seen archival footage of musicians arriving at concerts before the Regimes finally finished sanitizing most of the old entertainment archives.
This reminded him of that. Except those people had wanted to be there. The screaming intensified. Miroslav screamed too. He raised his flag above his head.
“HEIL!” Hundreds of thousands answered him. “HEIL!”
His implant whispered into his auditory nerve.
—Boris. Contact lost.
Miroslav continued smiling. He did not answer immediately. There were too many cameras. Too many microphones. Too many systems watching for the wrong facial expression at precisely the wrong moment. He waited until the crowd began another chant.
“HEIL!”
Under its cover, he subvocalized. “Last position?”
The reply came from somewhere else in the crowd. —Sector Seven. Moving west when we lost him.
Three other Monolith agents were scattered among the parade. Miroslav could not see any of them, that was intentional. Their operation had begun four blocks away and was supposed to have ended there.
Konrad Vetter, a Reich intelligence courier with access to internal security transfers, had agreed to meet someone he believed represented a criminal syndicate interested in purchasing information. Monolith intended to take him alive. Vetter had noticed something. Nobody knew what. The grab went bad. Vetter ran.
And of all the places in Rommelsberg he could have chosen to disappear, he had plunged directly into the Reich Patriot Parade. Now four Monolith agents were looking for one frightened man among several hundred thousand chemically enthusiastic fascists. Miroslav almost admired the bastard.
The Schnuller made occasions like this possible. Most people thought of the household device as part of ordinary life. It dispensed approved medications. Provided news. Entertainment. Health instructions. Educational programming. Civic announcements. And, generation after generation, it quietly helped teach people how they were supposed to feel.
Monolith’s deprogramming specialists had explained the process to Miroslav years ago. Chemical reinforcement, subliminal suggestion, repetition, association, fear and reward. None of it completely controlled a human mind, it didn’t have to.
Give people the correct push every day of their lives and eventually most would walk in the direction you wanted without noticing they had been pushed. A parade simply concentrated the effect. Music thundered from speakers built into the monumental buildings. Banners three stories tall hung between stone columns. Armored vehicles crawled down the avenue. Children threw flowers before marching soldiers. Every screen showed smiling families. Strong workers. Beautiful Übers. Healthy children. Victorious soldiers. Happy colonists. The Reich!
Everywhere Miroslav looked, the message was the same. Look what we have built. Look what we have conquered. Look what you belong to. Be proud. And beneath that – We are watching to make certain that you are.
His implant highlighted a face. Miroslav’s heart accelerated. Male. Approximately forty. Brown coat. Glasses. Eighty-three percent biometric match. Vetter.
“Found him.”
—Confirm.
Miroslav turned with the crowd as another military formation passed. “South side. Moving against flow. About sixty meters.”
The response came immediately.
—We have him.
Then —Do not move yet.
Miroslav didn’t. That was harder than it sounded. Vetter was disappearing again. People surged between them. Flags obstructed his implant’s facial recognition. A giant banner descended from one of the buildings, covering half his field of view. And somewhere nearby an SS soldier was staring directly at Miroslav. So Miroslav smiled.
He waved his flag. The SS man continued watching him. Miroslav cheered as another armored vehicle rolled past. The soldier finally looked elsewhere. Only then did Miroslav allow himself to breathe normally. He hated parades.
He looked at the people surrounding him. That hatred softened. Monolith training had taught him something else.
Pity the prisoner before you hate the prisoner’s behavior.
That wasn’t always easy. A man nearby was enthusiastically explaining to his young son why the Reich was the greatest civilization humanity had ever produced. The boy listened with absolute attention. His father wasn’t pretending. That was the terrible part. He believed every word.
Perhaps his father had told him the same thing. Perhaps his grandfather had told his father. Perhaps the Schnuller had whispered it to all three generations while they slept. Miroslav wondered what the boy might believe if nobody whispered anything.
That was why Monolith deprogrammed its recruits. People sometimes became angry during the process. Sometimes terrified. Sometimes depressed. Occasionally violent. Imagine discovering that some of the strongest emotions you had ever experienced might not entirely belong to you. Imagine examining your patriotism, your prejudices, your ambitions, your fears—even your love—and asking: Was that me?
Miroslav remembered asking that question. He remembered the answer frightening him more than anything the Reich had ever done to him. Some of it wasn’t. But some was. That distinction had changed his life.
—Boris. Move.
Miroslav moved. Not quickly. Nobody moved quickly through this crowd. Vetter was thirty meters away now. Twenty-five. Another agent was approaching from the opposite direction. Miroslav caught the smallest glimpse of her. She never looked at him. Good. Twenty meters. Vetter looked over his shoulder. Their eyes met. For perhaps half a second neither man reacted. Then recognition appeared on Vetter’s face.
“Shit.”
Vetter ran. Miroslav ran after him. The crowd swallowed them both. People shouted angrily as Miroslav shoved through. A flag struck his face. Someone cursed him. Vetter knocked an old woman down. Miroslav vaulted a barrier. The parade continued. Bands played. Soldiers marched. Hundreds of thousands cheered.
Above all of them, an enormous holographic Reich eagle spread its wings across the avenue. Vetter reached an intersection. Stopped. One Monolith agent appeared ahead of him. Another emerged to his right. Miroslav approached from behind.
For the first time, Vetter understood that the crowd had not hidden him. It had trapped him. He slowly raised his hands. Miroslav caught him by the arm.
“Walk.” Vetter stared at him.
“Where?”
“You’re coming with us.”
“You’ll never get me out of here.” Miroslav looked around. Flags. Uniforms. Banners. Soldiers. Secret police. Cameras. Hundreds of thousands of witnesses. Then he smiled.
“Of course we will.” He shoved a spare flag into Vetter’s hand. “Wave.”
They joined the crowd. Four Monolith agents and their prisoner stood beneath the banners of the Reich and cheered as the next procession passed. Vetter waved his flag. Miroslav waved his.
“HEIL!” The crowd answered. “HEIL!”
Miroslav felt something then. Pride. Real pride. He was proud of the three people hidden around him. Proud that none had panicked when the operation collapsed. Proud that they had found their target. Proud that somewhere beneath this monstrous city there were people preparing for the day when nobody would be required to cheer. Most of all, he was proud that the feeling belonged to him.
No chemical had placed it there, no government had demanded it, no officer measured whether he displayed enough of it, and no device whispered while he slept that he ought to feel it. It was his.
Perhaps that was what it meant to be blessed in a world like this. Not divine favor, not destiny, and not superiority. Simply possessing something billions of people had been denied – ownership of your own mind.
Miroslav looked again at the father and his young son. The boy was still waving his flag. For a moment, Miroslav imagined another parade. No mandatory attendance. No Staatspolizei watching the crowd. No SS soldiers searching faces. No chemicals. No subliminal instructions.
People would come because they wanted to. Or stay home because they didn’t. Some would wave flags. Some wouldn’t. Some might boo the politicians. Miroslav almost laughed at that thought. Now that would be something worth seeing.
Vetter glanced sideways at him. “What are you smiling about?”
Miroslav raised his flag as the crowd erupted again. “The future.”
Then he shouted with everyone else. And meant none of it.