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Chapter 49 - The Administrator[]
LCS David Ngo
Sampan IV Class cutter
Inner Asteroid Ring, Horneburg System
Lyran Commonwealth
November 18th, 3147
She was named for a hero in the Blake war-not that unusual. Sharing that hero's bloodline isn't either, not for a Rockjack from Kowloon. She never met the genetic parents-being grown from banked ova and surrogated kind of eliminates directly knowing your parents but, being raised by Nicole Minh meant she had a very good grasp of who the donor of the egg was and who they might have become.
Commander Linda Sithers-Minh 002 grew up with the values of the Kowloon Coast Guard, and the cognitive dissonance that only comes with an existence centered on protecting humanity from a contagion. While simultaneously trying to uphold the things that make humanity worth saving. Going to war was a relief from the Quarantine Line. Seeing the humanity she'd been raised to defend? well...some of it was definitely worth saving, and some needed to be burned.
Dear Mom...
It's our fifteenth day watching the Falcons on Horneburg. we found the burrows and stations they 'cleansed'. no survivors in the orbitals, at least, nobody stupid enough to have an active transponder running.
The surface of the planet's if anything worse. I wonder if this is the kind of thing the Blakists did, that sent the original Giao Pham over the edge? it seems like it.
The books you made me read as a girl strike home now. This is what Amaris was doing to Kowloon for two hundred years. The ethnic cleansing, the forced labor camps, all of it. I think I begin to understand the 'why' of the Elbar Toothpick, and the promise it contained.
What has happened to the Falcons, the gene-cousins of Hue, is an atrocity, a horror that breeds more horrors. They have become the Rim Worlds Republic, and they must be stopped. This contagion has a name; "Mongol", with sub-names like "ordun", stolen from humanity's darkest past.
I know you tried to raise me as a Christian, as your father tried to raise you...but these people can not wait for a messiah to save them. So I bend my prayers that we're not just doing this to record an atrocity, but to prepare to take the lives of some of god's wayward children, in order to save many more. It is vain of me, to take on such airs. It saddens me to think that in the anger I feel, I am adding to the lord's suffering on the cross.
But there it is. I pray that when the word comes down, I will have the strength to forgive them-but not until after I have stopped them.
Your loving daughter,
Linda.
"RTO, prep for send in four minutes, thirty seconds, our Recon report, and outgoing mail."
"Box is prepped, mum."
"Send." she leaned back at her station.
"incoming flash priority message, Mum."
"Read it out loud."
"[Stand by for action orders, War Plan Green version Silver, Sixty Three Standard Units.]"
She nodded. {soon} Linda thought.