Thirty minutes after Temple Ship explosion
Immediately upon hitting the deck back at base, the soldiers poured from the craft. The entire base personnel poured out to greet them, cheering and clapping their hands. As the titanic MECs and the Archangel-armored troopers made their way towards the debriefing room, the crowd shrank back, afraid to touch the bodies of these men and women made demigods by the force of their effort. The operatives, legends, rising stars in the cosmos of human heroism, it seemed, just wanted to take a break. The doors of the briefing room hissed open. The Commander and Bradford were the only ones inside. Normally, a returning squad would be greeted by a cavalcade of scientists, engineers, and analysts after returning.
"Kislewski, tell me what happened." Bradford's voice had softened from its usual edge as he queried the squad commander.
"It's simple, Sir. He grabbed the Gollop device, then blasted us out of the cockpit and sealed the doors. We had no choice but to evacuate."
"No one's blaming you, Kislewski." Again, Bradford's words were soft, almost like he was addressing a distressed child.
"And he took it up, and you saw it from there. Sir, permission to add Michaels to the wall?"
"Don't worry Kiz, we will. He'll be remembered like no one else has ever been on the planet." Bradford continued, "Commander, do you have any further questions for the men?"
"I don't Bradford." Weariness had crept in beneath his voice. "Make sure they're taken care of."
Early in the morning, the base was quiet. Bradford, who had declined the celebrations in order to chaperone the rowdy party, walked into the central hologlobe room. The board was clear and green. The wealth of the information available from satellites and the hyperwave relay were displayed, but no analysts sat at the banks of computers. Taking it all in, Bradford noticed a sliver of light peaking from beneath the door of the Command Office. As he climbed the stairs, he ran through his mind the speech and subsequent dressing down of the soldiers who had dared crawl into the office in their drunken celebrations.
He grasped the handle and threw the door open. There were no drunken soldiers or technicians, just the Commander, sitting in the chair that had jokingly been remodeled by the engineering staff to resemble the bridge chair from Star Trek.
Bradford queried, "Something keeping you up sir?"
The Commander replied, "The telemetry from the troops. The broadcast from the Uber Ethereal. It's worrying. The idea that this was just a test, that there may be even more forces out there that we've never seen before, that there could be something beyond the Ethereal just waiting to come and conquer us. This project has been the most consuming one of my life, and I'm afraid that it will take more than just this ragtag team to stop them if they come back for real. We may have Firestorms and the best technology ever developed by mankind, but we cannot simply reveal our existence. It would destabilize the world political system and cause even more infighting over who would be allowed to keep our technology as their own. Even if we do go public, I'm not convinced that we wouldn't become the world police, called in to fight internecine wars and keep the peace because we can.
We have to stay on guard. That's the worrying thing. With the destruction of the Temple Ship, I'm concerned that the Council nations will just start to pull their funding as the threat decreases and any remaining pockets of aliens disappear. We have to keep the hyperwave relay active. We have to track any further incoming threats. Without these things, we're sitting ducks if they do come back.
And we have to make sure our people are taken care of. Our MECS...what's to become of them? We can't reveal that we basically turned people into giant robots so that we could get the edge on aliens! There would be riots and they would be ostracized, or worse, killed. Our genetically modified soldiers can probably go back to their original billets, but who would want to? A life in the normal army, when you previously defended all of humanity? No, all these things are keeping me up, Bradford, and there's no easy way to make sure that we can do what we need to do now that the threat is over."
