A/N: Super duper special thanks to TheSilenceisVast, Foacir, and Zackbfunky for reviewing. This one is dedicated to Foacir in particular for being a total BOSS and giving me the motivation to keep on writing.


-Joey Antonson

-TEC Naval Space Station Delta, Eastern Command HQ, 2.04. 1347—

Bodies, some clad in the grey and white uniform of the Advent troopers and others in the mismatched clothing of Resistance fighters, littered the floor of the Spaceport. The T-80 Cosmic transports were being prepared by a crew of technicians. Squads were rushing to pre-planned positions. There were a few Resistance members simply idling, waiting for new orders as the chaotic situation unfolded and became more disorganized with each following second. Joey was waiting on his leader, anxiously awaiting any change in plan.

Rachel casually held an SMG in one hand as she listened to the radio in the other. When the transmission finished, she nods her head. "Copy that. Strike-One out."

She turned to a squad leader. "We've got an Advent tank brigade moving through the central districts and heading to our positions. Get as many as men as you can spare and bring them out to the perimeter defenses." The squad leader acknowledges and runs off to carry out the order.

Joey rushed over. "Boss, what's the word?"

"No change in plan for the pilots, Joey," she says. "Try and lift off in the next five minutes if you can."

"You said there's Advent armor in the central districts? What happened to Gustav's men?"

"Almost all gone. Couldn't even reach Gus himself. One of his lieutenants was going to try and fend them off for as long as he could."

"So what now?" asked Joey, "You can't be seriously thinking of going against tanks, are you?"

"What else can I do?" she snapped. "I'll take a team to link up with some of Janila's people and set up an ambush zone. We'll bottleneck them in the streets. Now if you'll excuse me, I have troops to prepare and you have a plane to catch." She was marching to the door.

He hurried alongside. "Rachel, you've got hardly any anti-armor weapons. The most you'll do is stall them."

"And that's all we need. If we can hold the Spaceport long enough for you to knock out their Beam Defenses and for the TEC fleet to show up, our objective is complete."

Joey put himself in her path, stopping her mid-stride. "At least let me take a gunship to provide some air support. You'll get ripped to shreds otherwise."

"No, Joey. Stick to the plan."

"We've got enough pilots to hit the orbital structures. What you don't have is anyone skilled enough to give some close-fire support, except for me. I could cut down half their column on a single tank of fuel!"

"I said no!" she barked. "Jesus Christ, I'm not planning on committing suicide here. Have some faith in me."

"But—"

Rachel cut him off. "Just trust me. We'll handle our part here on the ground, no problem. Stick to the plan. You handle your part. Okay?"

Joey didn't say anything.

Rachel huffed for a second, before lightly hitting him on the shoulder. "Trust me, Jo. We'll be fine." She forced a small smile. "Now get your ass to your bird."

Joey acquiesced, moving to the side and heading to the transport which would take him and a demolition team up to the Advent orbital defenses. But he turned back for just a moment. Rachel was already back in action, shouting out orders and readying the armed Resistance fighters to take the fight to the streets.

It was a sight which burned itself into his memory.


Joseph Antonson opened his eyes from the restless sleep.

It took him a second to remember that he wasn't on Triton anymore. The matte grey coloring of his room was so very similar to the concrete ceiling of the dingy apartment that he had hidden in for months.

No, he was safe. No more dodging patrols. No more Advent checkpoints. No more late-night meetings with Resistance members.

At that last thought, Joey felt heavy. As if the dullness of loss had regained their points and dug once more into him, dragging him down the weight of the sacrifice. He exhaled a shaky breath and pointedly looked away from the ceiling.

He listened to the numbing hum of the station's generators. It was almost imperceptible, but when he was quiet for long enough and slowed his heartbeat and just sat on the bed without thinking, he could feel the gentle reverberations of the machines which relentlessly went about their task deep within the space station.

After he heard that hum, he couldn't fucking not hear it anymore. It was driving him nuts.

Joey fidgeted, giving in to the urge to adjust himself on the narrow, lumpy bed. On the table next to the bed, his holo was blinking with the urgency of messages unread. The light getting to his nerves, Joey reached over and hit a key. The blinking stopped. He laid back down on the bed.

It wasn't a healthy situation. Not physically or mentally. He knew that. He just couldn't bring himself to care enough.

By any logic, Joey knew that he should be used to this feeling by now. It was not the first time he had lost comrades before. Sole Survivor 2.0.

But it still hurt. It hurt so much more this time. The first time, when the Advent had invaded Triton and the rest of his fighter squadron had been blown out of the sky, Joey had been quickly swept up in the chaos that followed. Joining the roots of the Resistance movement and spending half the day trying to escape being caught had eaten up all his time. He had had no time to grieve then.

And all their efforts had pulled off in the end. Triton was liberated. The Advent occupiers decimated. Never mind the craters which now dotted the Capital City. Never mind the thousands of rebels who had died in the process. Never mind the fact that out of the high ranking Resistance leaders residing in the capital, there were only two left now. One, if he didn't count himself—which he really shouldn't, considering that he was a "Resistance leader" only when it came to flying.

Both Rachel and Denzel had told Joey, separately, that victory was all that mattered. At the time, Joey had always thought that they were trying to bolster their own confidence and narrow their resolve. In hindsight, he realized that they were willing to sacrifice anything, even their own lives, for the sake of an ideal.

The math was in their favor, this time. Not like Rachel and Denzel were around to enjoy it, or that there would ever be another time.

So former Warrant Officer Joey Antonson celebrated the liberation of Triton by lying in bed, listening to his own heartbeat. He promised himself a bottle of liquor later in the evening to spice up the festivities.

A knock on his door roused him from his heavy thoughts. A second later, it opened and Marc walked in, wearing the dark grey dress uniform of a PDF militiaman. A silvery cross shimmered on his chest.

"Hey."

Joey didn't look up.

Marc at least tried to look bashful, as if he wasn't deliberately interrupting Joey's self-induced aura of mourning. He cleared his throat before starting to talk.

"You missed the ceremony, you know."

Joey rested an arm over his eyes. "Yup."

"There were a lot of high-ranking brass there. Fleet Admiral Tyrol presented the awards."

"Cool."

Marc made a disgruntled snort and then hesitated, as if he was going to say something rude and had thought better of it. "Why didn't you come?"

Joey gave a long sigh and then sat up. "What does it matter to you?"

"What?" came the surprised reply.

"You never liked me, Marc. In fact, if we wanted to be completely honest, we hated each other for every second that we had to work together. Now you have what you always wanted, don't you? Your goddamn medal, a fancy promotion, Fleet Admiral Tyrol's fingers all over you. You don't even have to share the credit anymore. So why the hell are you here?"

Marc shot a vicious glare back at the bedraggled warrant officer. "I wasn't here for you. This was for Denzel, Rachel, the rest of the guys. I thought they might have wanted me to at least try to get your ass out the mud." He spat on the ground. "Guess you're too pathetic to see that. Maybe if you weren't so worthless, they all would still be here." He turned to leave, letting that last barb sink in. But he paused and thoughtlessly tossed something onto Joey's stomach. "Congratulations, you piece of shit." And then he left.

Joey seethed, his fury and grief mixing together to form something that he couldn't vocalize. Instead it settled within him, making him feel sick as his regret clawed at him from within.

He looked down at the medal in his hands. The Cross of the Lion. The third highest military accolade awarded by the Trader Emergency Coalition. He looked on the back.

A short statement in ancient, unfamiliar script stared back at him but Joey knew, as all military personnel knew, what it said. For Resilience and Honor.

What a joke.

He almost hurled it against the wall but something held him back. It was as if Rachel was there, reprimanding him for attempting such a childish action. He lowered his arm and then unceremoniously dropped the medal on the table next to the bed.

Joey's earlier plans of drinking alone came back to him. Alcohol would do him some good right now.


"What is this?"

"A lager. What you ordered."

"It tastes like horse piss."

The bartender glared at Joey and went back to polishing. Joey gulped the beer down anyways.

The lounge was deserted at this late hour. The lack of company suited the young pilot just fine.

He felt an emptiness within him. Like the spark that had once kept him driven and determined was just…gone. Snuffed out. A listless ship without a rudder.

On Triton, the rebellion against the Advent had been built up with miniscule steps. A change of half a percentage in the statistics, slowly ticking over into their favor. It had been a life of putting in all your effort without any guarantee of success. But in those months, he had felt like he was accomplishing something.

Joey didn't delude himself into thinking that he was the key piece of the Resistance. Sure, his flying skills had been the ace up their figurative sleeve, but he was just one out of many in the global effort. And somehow, he had still felt like he was doing something meaningful. He didn't need medals, or a uniform, or even a rank. He hadn't been Warrant Officer Antonson, Cross of the Lion recipient. He had just been Joey. Resistance members who didn't know him well just called him the "pilot dude".

He had a rank now. He had a flashy dress uniform. He had the thanks of some nameless admirals for his "instrumental" role in the liberation of Triton.

And he felt like shit.

The warrant officer was about to order another drink when he felt someone sit down on the stool next to him at the bar.

It was a woman. Maybe late-thirties Prematurely graying hair. She was wearing something that potentially could have passed for a utility uniform—Joey's vision was getting a little blurry at that point. The woman held her own drink (cranberry juice?), casually sipping from it.

It took approximately 2.4 seconds before the noise of the sipping got to Joey's nerves. He pointedly cleared his throat, hoping to get the message across to other person to find somewhere else to sit. The woman didn't move. The sipping continued.

Sip.

Ugh, Joey mentally groaned. "Listen, do you need something?" he said, turning his head.

"A Class-3 freighter full of crystals, the schematics for Cyclotaurite Missile Payloads, and a bottle of Vasari brandy," the woman promptly said while taking another sip of her cranberry juice.

"Huh, well that's awfully specific," said Joey.

"Hey, you're the one that asked."

Joey scratched his head. "So what do you need all those things for?"

Sip. "Well, I was taking a look at some statistics yesterday, and they said that the cost of building a small home on one of the garden worlds in the Belsian Strip was about the equivalent to the value of a large freighter's haul from a crystal asteroid." She cracked a grin. "Always wanted to have a place in the Belsian Strip. You ever been there?

The pilot numbly shook his head. "No…uh, never really left home, I guess."

"Never left your home system? But you're a pilot, aren't you?" asked the woman, gesturing to the shoulder patch on Joey's utility uniform.

"Yeah. But I was in the Planetary Defense Force." Joey unconsciously added an emphasis to the past tense was.

"That's a shame. Best part of the military is all the traveling you get to do, free of charge."

Joey snorted. "Free ticket straight to the middle of some alien's plasma minefield. I'll pass."

"Ah, but see, I've visited over five hundred star systems. I have no end of good stories to tell," the woman said, smirking.

"Were those good stories worth all the plasma mines?"

"Not really," she said. "And the plasma mines were the least of my problems."

They both chuckled. The woman stuck out a hand. "The name's Ramos."

"Joey." They shook.

Withdrawing her hand, Ramos took another sip of her cranberry juice. "So Joey, what's the hero of the Triton resistance doing at this late hour?"

The young pilot coughed. "You know who I am?"

"Have you seen this place?" said Ramos, "This is a space station housing Eastern Fleet Command. The only people who have the free time to get a drink from the bar are so-called heroes drowning their sorrows and worn-out officers on leave."

"I was not drowning my sorrows."

She raised an eyebrow.

"…I was wallowing. There's a difference."

Ramos gave him a serious look in the eye. "Whatever the word you use, the end result is the same."

"Oh yeah? And what might that be?" said Joey.

"It's that whoever you're drinking in memory of, you're pissing on their grave by trying to lose yourself in a bottle."

Joey's mood darkened as he processed Ramos' words. His earlier anger with Marc, having been stifled by the inebriation, surged back tenfold.

"Who," he growled, "the hell do you think you are?"

Ramos calmly took another sip. "Someone who's seen over five hundred different star systems." She paused. "Every ticket has a price."

"You can't imagine what I feel right now. You don't know what went down and you didn't know the people that died." Joey almost spat. He was confused by the rapid change in his own emotions. Is this who he had become? Someone who flew off the handle with the slightest provocation? But his fury drowned out any reason.

"Actually I do know what 'went down'," said Ramos. She reached up to her shoulder and pointed to a patch sown there. Winged boots. Joey recognized the symbol immediately: the Reconnaissance Forces of the Department of Naval Intelligence. "Level three clearance. I know everyone you worked with, the play by play details of your insurrection, and how it all went down. I have a pretty good idea of how you feel right now."

Joey could not express the hate that he felt towards this woman. But he just turned back to his drink. "Leave me alone."

"Joey, what do you plan to do? Keep withdrawing and lashing out forever? Rather, until you get court martialed for dereliction of duty?"

"Maybe. Whatever. I don't care."

"Maybe you don't," said Ramos, ."your dead comrades certainly do."

"What?" said Joey, startled.

She turned and looked at him.

"How many people have died in this war so far?" asked Ramos.

The warrant officer looked at her quizzically. "Uh, I don't know. More than I can count."

"Six," she said, "since we've started this conversation."

He had nothing to say to that. It was as if the hollowness in the room was palpable. Joey awkwardly grasped his drink, fishing for something to come back with.

Ramos continued: "You think you're the only one who's lost someone dear to them? It happens every day. Lives are crushed. Hopes disappear. Thousands and thousands of thousands of people die. Every single day.

"That doesn't make your grief any less meaningful. The perspective doesn't lessen the loss. Death, no matter how often it happens, is still a terrifying concept." She took another sip from her almost-empty glass of juice. "But as a species, we would have died out a long time ago if everyone wrapped themselves up in their grief to the point where they were nothing more than a drain on resources. We survive. We go on. And at the end of the day, or the month, or the year, you can look back and see those moments where you had the opportunity to live."

She leaned over and patted him on the shoulder. "You're living right now because someone else took the bullet that would have hit you. Indirectly or directly. So are you going waste this time you have to make a difference and invalidate that sacrifice? Or are you going to man up and grasp the chance when you still have it?"

Ramos waited for a pregnant second before downing the last of her drink. As she stood up to leave, she paused before heading out the door. "Admiral Caradin was given authorization to form a new strike fleet. He was impressed by your performance during the liberation of Triton and it just so happens that he's low on fighter pilot recruits for the new unit. There's a try-out spot for you if you want it. Tomorrow, 0900. Hanger Bay 8B." And then she turned and left.

Joey couldn't remember how long he sat at the bar, his drink long gone and left unfilled. Hours passed with the flickering of his heavy thoughts. Eventually he got up and returned to his room for the night.

And the next day, he showed up to Hanger Bay 8B. There was a brand new Starfighter sitting there, waiting for him to try it out and show the evaluators what he could do.

It was like coming home.


Codex Entry: DNI Section One: After Action Report (4019FX) (U)—"Liberation of Triton"

Date of Operation: 1.23.1347

Dep. of Naval Intelligence, Sec ONE

Authority: EO 13526

Records & Information Div.

.

.

.

SECTION III – Analysis of Statistical Data

(a) ….Losses to local military components currently immeasurable, due to fluid status of Triton Resistance members. Total casualty loss in capital city estimated of up to 33% of pre-occupation…

.

.

(d) …Over reliance on limited Resistance aerial components resulted in poor coordination between incoming TEC units and Resistance personnel. Achievement of satisfactory conditions for deployment of Third Squadron, 22 SPECNAVOP, only completed through heavy casualties for Resistance units. The hostile Advent occupational force was able to deploy est. six S-G vessels which devastated local friendly forces through bombardment until Third Squadron was able to arrive….Additional obstacles was the result of under-equipped and largely untrained local aerial forces which severely hampered ability to eliminate Advent naval...

.

.

.

(f) …..One particular exception being local Unit COSMIC THREE which was able to achieve Phase I operational objectives despite above-expected casualties in assisting Resistance aerial forces (see Personnel File: WO J. ANTONSON)….

.

.

.

SECTION VI – Personnel Profiles

.

.

II. Resistance Operations

THAURIN, Denzel

Occupation: Civilian, Independent cybersecurity contractor

Largely responsible for logistical and organizational successes of Triton resistance operations, his computational expertise enabled an unprecedented level of strategical mobility. De facto leader of local and global resistance operations.

Status: Killed by orbital bombardment during operation in Capital City

GARBER, Rachel

Occupation: Military, 1st Triton Guards Regiment

Junior officer in Triton PDF, quickly became involved with Triton resistance operations after Advent invasion. Head planner and later tactical commander of resistance ground forces during operation.

Status: Killed in action during operation near Triton Spaceport in Capital City.

BOROUGHS, Marcus

Occupation: Military, 4th Capital Militia Police

Long-time enlisted soldier in Triton PDF with negligible civilian occupational experience prior to invasion, became connected to resistance operations particularly in Waterside district of Capital City. Limited influence in tactical planning.

Status: Active

Recommendation: Return to service in Triton PDF

BOSELL, Adrian

Occupation: Civilian, laborer

Leadership position with pre-invasion workers unions eventually led to active cooperation with Triton Resistance. Later responsible for tactical command in Western Industrial district of Capital City.

Status: Killed by orbital bombardment during operation

DERVIS, Janila

Occupation: Civilian, evidence of criminal activity pre-invasion

Former boss of local gang in Capital City North Side district. Later involved in assisting Triton militia personnel in escaping immediate post-invasion purge. Strategical planner in resistance and later co-head of tactical operations.

Status: Killed during operation near Triton Spaceport

...

ANTONSON, Joseph

Occupation: Military, Triton Naval PDF

SF-62 Fighter pilot in Triton PDF. Largely relegated to garrison duty prior to Advent invasion, with no notable achievements. Sole survivor of squadron during initial invasion, later heavily involved with Denzel Thaurin and Rachel Garber in primary organizational efforts of resistance. Mostly uninvolved with higher level planning in resistance operations, but fulfilled reconnaissance and intelligence gathering within urban limits. Tactical commander of aerial component of secondary operational phase. Successfully destroyed two Advent Beam Defense orbital platforms despite heavy presence of Advent forces. Largely responsible for successful coordination of TEC naval components and surviving Triton resistance ground forces.

Status: Active

Recommendation: Evaluation for transfer and placement into either STRIKE FLEET 10098C, 6th Fleet Group OR Dep. NavIntel Section TWO—Spec. Activities Div.

Update: Active service in 45th Strike Fleet, 6th Fleet Group, Special Operations Command HQ

(personnel files continued next page)


A/N: Finally got around to letting you know what happened to the Resistance on Triton! (Yes, I stole a line from the Imitation Game).

One problem that I've encountered: I started writing this story just to plop down whatever idea I had floating around at the time, whether or not they would actually create a connected, coherent story. The result is I end up with, like, four separate story lines that become really difficult to actually work together. There are a couple half-written stories for previous POVs (the Vasari one is begging to be uploaded), but idk. Kinda wondering if I should continue this story and try to work it together or just drop it entirely.

Did you like this chapter? That's great. REVIEW.

Did you hate it? Fantastic. REVIEW.

Was it totally "meh" for you? Great! Let me know. REVIEW.

Seriously, they make my day.