A long time ago.
The entire SATO fleet mutinied when they heard what they'd done.
Even now, riding in a Raven transport through a smoke-choked Lunar sky, Sailor Mercury didn't blame them. She couldn't. Knowing only what they knew, she would have done the exact same thing.
She cast a glance behind her. The soldiers accompanying her were atypically silent. They were handpicked, a group of freelancers nominally independent from the regular Lunar command structure, but whose loyalty was beyond question. They stood in a line, grabbing overhead straps with one hand and hefting carbines in the other. Gates, the section commander, nodded. She and her team knew the stakes.
But even in crisis they had always been chatty, Mercury remembered, bantering to the point of unprofessionalism. We're a family, and we'll kick your arse. She thought she might have appreciated the quiet, just this one time, but instead it unnerved her. It made her feel like what they were doing was wrong.
There was never any joy in killing friends.
Mercury walked to the side door, grabbing a handrail as the transport bucked underneath her. An Earther's Jackal was taking potshots at their flight group, and a 50mm cannon round had struck hard against their Raven's shields. Mercury dismissed the warning from her scouter with a thought, the blinking alert vanishing from her vision. No real danger.
Outside the window, Serenity Valley burned.
The city's masonry had been shattered, broken domes and spires and Greek columns of alabaster lunar stone. Wide thoroughfares that had seen parade processions were pock marked by craters and lacerated by concertina wire. She saw a company of Lunar Guard firing small arms, scurrying at street level between barricades of fast-hardening ballistic foam. Elsewhere were civilians, clothes sheeted with dust, each gambling that going outside would bring them closer to safety than waiting for a ceiling to collapse on top of them. An arpeggio of slaved warheads surged from the shoulder launcher of an Atlas-class Titan, yellow flames reaching skyward like a giant's fingers to swat aside a strafing Jackal like a handball. The stricken warplane veered left, trailing smoke in a spiral, and plunged into a multistory building.
The AATIS guns, defensive cannons the size of hilltops hurling shells the size of boulders, sat idle in their dome shields, their hydraulics frozen. Airships filled the sky. Battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, blue-flamed elevation thrusters tilting them sideways into lazy pylon turns, turreted naval guns booming as they crushed whole city blocks to moon dust. By rights, the fleet would have leveled the entire city, but the Earthers needed to capture the Glaive Beams working and intact.
But for that, they needed boots on the ground.
Mercury saw a fleet carrier dive toward the Lunar Palace. Its well deck swung open, spilling APCs and mecha to the Lunar surface like seeds from a sack of grain. She could see the ship's name and hull designation from this angle. Printed in stark letters on its side: SWC-141, UNSA Retribution.
Lieutenant Reyes, Mercury thought, with a pain in her chest. Doubtless he knew that he was sending his men to the abyss. Sailor Venus and the Palace Guard would eviscerate them.
"Drop point coming up!" the transport pilot shouted. "One klick out from the AATIS control tower!" Mercury stepped away from the side door, turned to face her team. This seemed the right time for words of confidence, words of fortitude. She locked eyes with them, opened her mouth to speak.
Then the transport lurched, wrenched onto its side. Mercury hit the floor shoulder-first, started sliding. Red lights flashed. The mechanical fingers of a Titan pierced the hull, peeled away the side door like the lid of a sardine tin. Mayday, mayday, mayday. Looking out, a Stryder-class's twenty-five foot metal skeleton disrobing from a shawl of phase energies, its limbs clamped to the transport's side, leveling a car-sized shotgun at the transport's gaping belly.
"Jump!" the transport pilot shouted, punching switches and wrestling the stick. The rear ramp lowered, slowly, too slowly. "Jump, now!"
Mercury half ran, half tumbled out the back of the Raven, mentally triggering her optical cloak as she fell. She saw the flares of her team's jump kits, tiny thrusters flipping their bodies upright as their cloaks vanished them into shimmering air. The Stryder's shotgun perforated the Raven behind them like a pitchfork through an aluminum can.
The ground rushed towards her. Mercury twisted, her hydrokinesis conjuring steam jets to steer herself in mid-air. Lunar regolith rushed towards her, gray moon dust expanded to fill her vision. Gray, she saw, gray, gray–