I'd seen nukes going off on a planet surface before. Only I'd been high in orbit when I was watching, which meant I was at something of a safe remove.

It didn't feel anything like this. Back then I could imagine what was going on down on the ground. I'd seen videos from cities that'd been blown up on colony worlds. Seen the destruction coming in waves when a nuke hit a city that had a bunch of cameras already running from incidental streaming sources that were destroyed, but the footage lived on in the cloud.

Though as time went on it became preferable to drop a chunk of rock from space, or a rod from God. You got the destruction without the radiation that made a place uninhabitable until the cleaners came through or time and half lives did their thing.

I'd even seen nukes going off in ship-to-ship combat. I'd felt a deck move under my feet as the whole thing shuddered and threatened to buckle under me. There'd been times when I thought the shielding wasn't going to be enough. When I thought armor wasn't going to protect me when the shields went down.

All those experiences, both first and thirdhand, were nothing compared to what I felt as the floor moved under me. One moment it was under my feet and I stood there as easy as could be. The next the floor had dropped by a good five feet.

And there was still the light streaming in. It didn't look like it came from one of the buildings directly around Varis's tower, but it was close enough that it could cause some serious damage either way.

Thankfully there was shielding that kept it from being a blinding light.

Varis flew through the air. I felt where she was through the link, and I grabbed her and held her against me. I wondered if this would be the last thing I felt before the lights went out and I was nothing but atoms free-floating through the universe waiting for entropy to take everything.

I wondered if everything would be crated all over again in a never ending cycle. If there was some divine being that would do it all over again. If some computer somewhere would finally get sufficient data for a meaningful answer. Would all of this happen again?

All those philosophical thoughts went through my head in an instant as I flew through the air.

I was literally rolling through the air. The same antigrav that allowed us to slow fall when we were sparring was kicking in here to try and save us. I wondered if it was stressing the system to deal with forces this intense, or if it was a military level unit that was ready for something way more intense even than a nuke going off nearby.

Not that something being military-grade was necessarily a good thing. Most of that stuff was put together by contractors who'd put in the lowest bid using the cheapest parts to get something that would hopefully last forever, but not always depending on what company was doing the bidding and how much they were siphoning off for their executive team.

We spun around in the antigrav and I realized we had another problem. We were spinning right towards one of those windows that surrounded us on all sides.

I wondered if we were moving with enough force that we'd go right through the windows and fall to our deaths. Sure there was the shielding on the other side of the window, but the shielding wasn't right up against the building. There was enough wiggle room out there for us to fly out, slam against the shield, then bounce between building and shielding on our way down to our inevitable deaths.

I could only hope we didn't go for a long fall and a quick ending.

I saw the windows coming for us and I instinctively held tight to Varis. I'd like to say I tried to do something heroic. Like bend my body so I was the one who'd hit the mirror first. Maybe absorb some of the energy when we hit.

Only the reality was the forces that'd taken over were far too intense for me to be able to do a damn thing about it. Even if I wanted to. No. We were completely at the mercy of physics. We had a little bit of an assist from the antigrav, sure, but I wasn't sure that would be enough of an assist.

"Hold on!" I shouted, hearing the roaring all around us and wondering if that blast had been powerful enough that it was taking out the building even as we spun ass over teakettle in the antigrav field.

Finally I slammed into the window, though I didn't hit nearly as hard as I thought I would. It hurt, and the wind was knocked out of me, but then we were falling to the ground and I was on top of Varis.

I still didn't think. I just did. I held myself over her. I knew there was nothing my body could do to protect her from the forces at work here, but I was going to do my damndest to try. Even if I knew there wasn't a chance my body would survive against the forces working against us right now.

The rumbling and roaring seemed to continue for an eternity, but it couldn't have been all that long. Finally it stopped. I looked up and around.

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I expected to see the windows destroyed. Instead I just saw… Well, I saw windows all around us. Some were cracked. All were intact. And the mushroom cloud rose beyond.

"Son of a bitch," I said, picking myself up and trying to dust myself off. I looked down at Varis and held a hand out to her. "Are you okay?"

"I've been better, but I think I'm going to be okay," she said, standing up and waving a hand.

I looked around the room. Our sparring partners were also thrown against the windows at various spots around the room. There were a couple of cracked windows here and there, but they'd held. Though some of them sparkled with obvious shielding that'd held them together.

Okay. There were individual shielding units on the windows to keep people from flying through them. That was good to know. Arvie hadn't been bullshitting when he told me how safe this building was.

Our sparring partners were looking out the windows. I could see the city laid out all around us like always, and it looked like an angry hornet's nest has been kicked up. Only those hornets were air cars and fighter craft and other nasty things, and a lot of them seemed like they were coming right for Varis's building.

Like someone had been ready for this, and they were going to take advantage of the distraction to do something.

Varis waved a hand, and a readout of the buildings in the immediate vicinity of her tower popped up. She bit her lip and chewed as she stared at it. Then she waved her hand and pulled the tower in close.

There were a couple of yellow spots. It looked like one of the bubble areas sticking out nearest to where the explosion was had taken some damage. But the view also showed shielding in place protecting the people in the building.

"Did your building seriously just take a hit from a nuke and live to tell the tale?" I asked.

"I told you. The shielding on my building is state of the art. It would take somebody hitting us with several nukes directly to even begin to get through. Though that would cause damage to some of the surrounding structures that don't have quite the level of shielding I've installed on my buildings."

"Son of a bitch," I breathed.

I felt ridiculous ever having even a bit of PTSD worrying about those imperial fighters that came at us. If this tower really had been able to survive a nuke being dropped so close to it? Those imperial fighters were like so many mosquitoes. Maybe they were an annoyance, but there was never any danger they'd be able to do anything to harm us.

"Release all fighter wings," Varis said, clearly on a comm line to someone. "I want to have our anti-nuclear units sent out immediately. If there's a radiation signature, or an antimatter signature that doesn't belong to us, I want us to see it immediately. I also want a strike team going out to that area to take care of it."

She waved a hand, and suddenly there were livisk all around us. Standing in a holographic projection that was coming from somewhere. Livisk I didn't recognize.

I figured I might know some of them from the control room where we were planning the Grand Gathering, but no. These were all unfamiliar faces.

I liked to think I had a pretty good feel for a familiar face. It was one of those things you had to be good at if you were going to be a commander, though I'd always been terrible with names. It took a lot of memorization to get that down, and quick glances to name tags, but fake it until you make it.

"What are your orders, General?" a rather tall livisk sporting a bitching orange mohawk asked.

"I want you to deploy our troops all throughout our territory and beyond," she said. "Be prepared for the empress to send an attack our way now that she's given us a distraction."

"That's one sequel trilogy of a distraction," I muttered.

"As you say, General," the livisk said, saluting her.

He did it in the livisk fashion. He put his fist over his chest for a moment, held it there, then released it.

She turned to a woman. "We're going to need to get out there and have a look at things. It looks like they targeted Building 75. Trying to take down one of our outer fortresses, no doubt. It might be a precursor to invasion."

"As you say, General," the woman with long reddish hair, like the kind of red you could only find in a bottle back on Earth, said. She also gave the livisk salute over her chest.

"What are you going to do?" I asked, stepping up beside her and putting a hand on the small of her back.

I almost expected her to jump at that touch. I felt the tension roiling through the link. The way she was unsure of what to do. The worry there.

But I wasn't sure if it was worry for the people who'd been caught in that explosion, or if it was worry for a potential invasion that might be coming our way at any moment.

She took in a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh.

"I am a general. I'm supposed to lead. So I'm going to go to Building 75 and prepare a possible counterattack in case the empress has decided she wants our attention."

"I'm coming with you," I said.

"Bill," she said, a warning tone coming to her voice, even as worry lanced through the link.

I could see exactly what was going on there. She was worried about having me step outside her tower. Worried it would allow the empress to finally get her claws into me.

But I wasn't going to have it. I hoped the firm resolve I sent through the link was proof enough of that. I kept my hand on the small of her back, and I let the link do all the talking for me.

"You're not going to tell me I can't come help you," I said. "Because you need help right now, and that's exactly what I'm going to do. We have the link. You can be two places at once because of me. I hav a little bit of command experience, after all. Plus I'm at least three for four when it comes to leading a combat expedition against the livisk lately."

She stared at me for a long moment. Irritation spiked through the link, and then finally she shook her head. The worry was still there, but there was also resignation.

Maybe it was resignation. That wasn't something I'd felt coming through the link yet.

"Fine," she said. "But if you get yourself killed the I'm going to have a high priest at one of the temples pull your soul back from the afterlife so I can kill you myself."

I blinked at that. I was pretty sure that was meant to be a joke, but I also didn't know enough about livisk mysticism to know if that was even a thing they did. Not to mention there'd been enough surprises around livisk mysticism being more real than it had any business being that I couldn't discount that she was being totally serious.

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