"The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time."

-Thomas Wolfe, (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) American novelist.

Chapter Nine

Colonel Medora sat on the small dirt brown hillock, staring down at the sprawling base below her. Ten-Mile-West had been built according to the operational plan of the Dragon of the West himself, to support what was supposed to be the final offensive against Ba Sing Se, that would have, should have, effectively ended the war. Should have, as the Fire Nation's greatest Army commander, the Crown Prince who'd been in the Fire Nation Army since he was twelve years old, suddenly and inexplicably lost his nerve on what should have been his greatest triumph.

Because he lost his son, she thought coldly. And Iroh, the so-called Dragon of the West, was too much of a moral coward to press on. His son died in service of our nation's destiny and one would think the great General Iroh wouldn't want his soldier son's sacrifice to be in vain. Fortunately, Princess Azula, while still only technically a Lieutenant, proved to be of sterner stuff than her Uncle and finished the job General Iroh proved he couldn't handle.

And then it all came apart anyway. Iroh himself, not just coward but traitor, had no problem attacking the forces of the country he swore to defend with his life to hand the city not ten miles to the east of here back to the mongrels who couldn't accept the new order. Then Zuko, as much of a moral coward as Iroh was, defeated his own sister while the Avatar reduced Ozai to a broken shell of a man sitting in a cell in Crater City.

Granted I can understand wanting the Firelord and the Crown Princess to pay for the dishonor they had heaped upon him, she thought, but he should have seen his way clear to finishing the work his ancestors started, whatever their faults. The fact that he couldn't…

Whatever. Zuko was now Firelord andhad formally dissolved the Lightning Swords and had ordered the termination of Medora's command. In fact, he was hunting down any Lightning Swords who ran rather than accept dissolution of their units. By the time it was all said and done, she was one of the only senior officers left who was still committed to Sozin's vision.

She supposed by the letter of Fire Nation law she wasn't even that. As far as Zuko's War Ministry was concerned, she was a traitor, mass murderer, and deserter. She had been convicted of all those crimes at tribunal while absent. She had been stripped of her rank and all accompanying privileges and sentenced to death.

Now she was here. Lightning Sword spies in the city reported that Iroh had been recalled to active duty and was due to be gathering a force here to help Ba Sing Se. Her orders were to destroy the base and capture Iroh, Pakku, Hakoda, and any other senior members of the White Lotus laying over at the base before Iroh could concentrate his forces. Which the weapons she had at her disposal should make easy.

Oh, how she'd longed to turn those weapons loose on Crater City. Problem was that Zuko and Katara defeated in an Agni Kai, which meant Zuko technically had the valid claim on the throne. Along with a certain Water Tribe bitch fucking Admiral Chan's son. Putting Azula on the throne would be sure to lead to resistance somewhere even from people who would otherwise support finishing the task Sozin had set them too. But it had to be done, even if only to forestall the (distant, admittedly) possibility that some mongrel half-Water Tribe bastard would one day claim the throne.

The new weapons should help with that. Unlike some of her more credulous associates, she didn't actually believe the spirits had granted them to her people out of thin air. No, these were technological weapons, which meant mere mortals built them, even if they were far beyond her nation or anyone else on her world's ability to build. Which meant they had to have come from somewhere else. Presumably whomever had given them to her people had motivations of her own, though she was not one to look too closely at a gift. One thing that was certain was that no force without the weapons she'd been given could engage a force that did and live.

Aang sat, rooted to his chair in the Earth Kingdom War Ministry as Mai finished her explanation of everything that had happened in the Middle Ring. He and Sokka had been waiting, in the darkened courtyard, for them to return, only for Mai to emerge from the darkness, with two people, neither of whom the ones she left with. The newcomers had rescued Ty Lee and Mychiko, and were working to help with the disaster, which had apparently been caused by another ship of some sort exploding in orbit. Ty Lee and the newcomer's leader had personally intervened to prevent a fight. But they sent Mai to escort the two girls, apparently old friends of Zuko, back to the palace where they would be safe and to keep him informed of what was going on.

"Are you sure we can trust them?" Sokka cut in from next to him. "They did attack you."

"Sokka, we were three youths with covered faces and black clothing harassing two of their volunteers," Mai said pointedly. "I would have fired on me. Ty and Mychiko are with them, and I think we'll see them again."

"And what's to keep them from flying off with them onboard back to wherever they came from?"

"I saw what they were capable of with my own eyes, Sokka," Mai said repressively. "If they meant us harm, I do not believe we would be standing here now."

Aang nodded blankly, leaning back in his chair. I hope you're right, Mai. I hope you're right.

Katara sat on the padded bunk in the small airship that Captain Archer referred to as a shuttle. It was clearly a storage trunk, but with a leather padding on the lid so a passenger could sit on it when no one needed to get the tools inside. Zuko sat next to her right shoulder, and the two of them stared at the two women sitting on the other side of the shuttle. The two young Kyoshi Warrior officers had seemed to have a constant low-grade smile on their faces. Katara could hardly blame them. What she was seeing around her she'd never imagined in her dizziest daydreams. Yet and still…

"Are you sure we can trust them?" Katara asked the gray-eyed young woman across from her.

"Mychi and I are not about to forsake our oaths to Zuko and swear undying devotion and eternal allegiance to Archer and whatever his government is if that's what you're asking," Ty said dryly. "But he saved both our lives, and I feel like he, at least, is sincere in his desire to get to the bottom of whatever's been going on around here."

"Even so," Zuko said softly, "I'd like to get a feel for the man and his officers myself before I get Aang in the same room with him."

Ty and Mychi looked at each other and Ty nodded, conceding the point. "Fair enough."

"Now that you're all in agreement," Archer said from the front of the craft. "We're coming up on Enterprise."

The four of them looked at each other and shot out of their seats and headed towards the window out the front.

She didn't know what she was expecting, something akin to a Fire Nation airship perhaps? What she saw was a saucer-shaped hull and a cylindrical hull, joined at the base of the saucer, with two long thinner cylinders, glowing red at the tips and blue down the sides. By all rights she should think it was ugly but there was something…clean about it.

"She's so…beautiful," Ty said softly.

"Haven't you already seen her from the outside?" Zuko asked, his voice with a huskiness she rarely heard from him.

"We were literally dying," Mychi said distractedly, still staring at the ship floating there in the black.

Archer tapped one of the glowing multicolored squares on the screen in front of him. "Archer to Enterprise," he said, "requesting permission to land."

"Acknowledged, Captain," a female voice said, as smoothly and clearly as if whoever was saying it was saying it through a speaking tube on a ship. "You are clear to dock."

"Copy."

"She's the first ship of her class," Archer said, "capable of traveling at nearly four hundred times the speed of light. Which, considering just how far away those dots of light out the windows are, is necessary if we're going to get to them in our lifetimes. Her sister, Columbia, is due to return shortly. She's commanded by my friend, Erika Hernandez. Hopefully she'll bring back reinforcements with her."

Katara gave a fleeting, tentative smile, unsure whether to be hopeful or concerned. Or both. On the one hand, Ba Sing Se needed all the help it could get, wherever they could get it. On the other hand, they knew next to nothing about these people and she was unsure letting them gain a foothold, however temporary, on her world was a good idea. Well, we're in it now anyway, she thought, all we can do is all we can do. Katara watched as the huge metal double doors opened without making the clanking or whirring hydraulic sound she would have expected Of course, she thought, feeling somewhat foolish as the Enterprise's shuttle slid into the brightly lit bay, setting itself down with a thud that reverberated through the small cabin, we're in space. There's no air for sound to travel through outside.

After a moment an oddly stilted female voice intoned, "Bay pressure stable."

The door opened with the same whine of hydraulics, and Archer got up from the pilot's seat and stepped out onto the deck. Katara followed, and she heard Zuko and the others follow her.

"Welcome aboard," Archer said. The door on the upper level hissed open, and a woman wearing the same uniform Archer did stepped into the room. She had slightly darker skin then Archer did, with stiff brown hair and…ears that came to pointed tips?
"This is my first officer, Commander T'Pol," Archer said, "her species is Vulcan, from a planet that translates into my language as also being called Vulcan. Commander T'Pol, this is Firelord Zuko, sovereign of one of the nations on the planet below," Zuko shook himself free, and remembering his manners, bowed respectfully, "and his friend and one of his nobles, Lord Katara."

Katara's face flushed, not for the first time wishing Zuko had just forgone saddling her with a Fire Nation title. "Just Katara," she said sheepishly even as she bowed. "Please."

T'Pol bowed half-bowed back. "I assume they're here to view our evidence?" T'Pol asked her captain.

Archer nodded. "Yes. I'm just about to take them there. Any news on Columbia."

"Nothing so far," T'Pol said, "and all our attempts to contact Admiral Gardner are being met with the response that Gardner's in consultation with the President and the Prime Minister, to continue our current operational profile and await further orders."

Archer rolled his eyes. "No news is good news, I suppose," Archer muttered. The man gestured with his head towards the door. "Follow me, please."

Katara looked at Zuko, who stared back at her, the apprehension on his face mirroring her own. The way he'd asked them to follow him, didn't exactly fill either of them with confidence.

Zuko stared at the lifeless body of the boy lying in the perfect stillness of death. He looked merely eleven, then the thirteen Archer claimed he was. The sun Earth orbited (and wasn't that an odd translation from the modules Archer claimed was installed into every compartment on the ship to allow the people in them to be perfectly intelligible to each other regardless of language) was not as bright as his own sun. As such it's planet was closer to it, and thus, it's solar year was shorter than his. Meaning that, in Archer's years, Aang and Toph were edging on fifteen, Katara was seventeen, Captain Lee was eighteen, and he and First Lieutenant Kurorsawa were twenty.

None of which, of course, mattered a whit to the dead boy lying in the freezer tray, and certainly didn't matter to the pirates who had murdered him. murdered him at the behest of some still unknown third party, to gain weapons to be used to kill him and his friends. Zuko ran a hand through his hair. He had been a naval officer once upon a time, and like any decent naval officer, of whatever country, he hated and despised pirates. It was part of why he'd helped Katara attack the Southern Raiders. What they had done to the South was exactly the thing a good Navy was supposed to stop,not carry out. If Katara had carried through with the attack on Yon Rha, he would have lost no sleep over it. If he wasn't a pirate, he was the next best thing to a pirate and whether being scared enough to shit his pants or butchered by Katara's icicles, he got what he deserved. And he hoped someone gave whoever killed this boy in the prime of his life what they deserved.

"Are you okay?"

Zuko shook himself and stared levelly into Archer's brown eyes. The fortysomething Captain of the Enterprise looked at him with concern on his face.

"I don't understand," Zuko said softly. "I mean, I've lived with people wanting me dead before. My own sister tried to kill me more than once just in the past year. But someone from another world I've never heard of wants me, my friends, dead. For what? What do they get out of it?"

"It's fucked up, I know," Archer said sympathetically. "And neither one of us can answer that question right now. But I do know one thing. Neither of us can stop whoever's behind all this on our own. We need to work together, or more people are going to end up dead. A lot more."

"I know. I know. And more than that, I think Aang knows it too. But it's only just now, being here, surrounded by all this that I'm starting to fully see the implications of where we're going. There's a part of Aang, a part of all of us, that would want us to be able to go back into our comfortable obscurity after this is over. But we won't be able too. If what happened to Ba Sing Se really was just a freak coincidence, and I am not at all convinced of that, the butchering of these civilians and the attempt on my life have to be part of a plot that's been in the works for months, probably years. Everyone in this room is one race, I can see that just by looking at you. But our worlds have been separated for I don't even know how many thousands of years, and now suddenly we've been thrown back into the mix together, and who knows how that will end? The only thing I can tell you is that we won't be able to go back to quietly developing on our own without any interaction with the wider galaxy."

Archer nodded. "Believe me, there's a lot of potential for things to go wrong, and something will inevitably go wrong somewhere." He gestured at the dead body in the tray. "It already has, in fact. But there's also a lot of potential for things to go right, and I'm willing to bet, when all is said and done, this meeting between our worlds will do more good than harm."

Zuko opened his mouth to respond when the panel next to Archer's head suddenly gave a loud beep. Zuko recognized it immediately, and so did his friends. While it certainly looked odd, the concept of speaking tubes for communication between different parts of a ship was an old one.

"Bridge to Captain Archer," the voice of their host's vulcan first officer filtered and distorted, said.

He jabbed the white button on the panel. "This is Archer. Go ahead."

"Captain," she reported. "I'm reading a cluster of human warp signatures at the edge of the system. Seven vessels, and one of them is Columbia."

Zuko's nostrils flared in shock.

He watched as an unmistakable relieved smile appeared on the older man's face. "Is Captain Hernandez hailing us?"

"She started as soon her ships appeared," T'Pol reported.

"We'll be on the bridge shortly," Archer ordered.

A few minutes later, Zuko found himself gaping like an idiot at the sights of the Enterprise bridge. The compartment was circular, he noted, with both freestanding consoles and consoles and panels built into the wall. A massive window or screen dominated the front wall.

"Welcome to the bridge," Captain Archer said. "I promise I'll give you a proper tour later. Is Captain Hernandez on?"

"Yes, sir," a tawny skinned young woman with dark hair and eyes from a console on the left side of the room.

"Onscreen," Archer ordered.

The large screen dominating the front wall came alive with the image of a woman in her late thirties wearing the same uniform as the rest of the ship's crew, with dark brown hair and eyes and light brown skin.

"Erika," Archer said, "I see you were productive."

The woman on the screen, smirked. "I could say the same for you."

"These are several of the local leaders," Archer gestured to him. "We'll introduce them properly when you arrive."

The woman nodded. "Very well. As for myself I have six freighters carrying every designated emergency Search and Rescue team in North America and all their equipment. Along with the entire Third Corps. The government's working on pulling together a Starfleet and allied contingent of ships, which will be sent forward as soon as they have all the units in place."

Archer breathed an audible sigh of relief even as Zuko looked at Katara, their feelings of hope and mild concern mirrored in each other's eyes. Ba Sing Se needed all the help she could get at the moment, and certainly Archer's government would have to be concerned about protecting their relief workers and protecting the city. It was why he had ordered his Uncle back to active duty and had him putting together a Fire Nation relief force. They were still however foreign troops from another world entirely. A world whose government and peoples they knew next to nothing about, despite their apparent good intentions. Giving them a foothold on their homeworld, however necessary or temporary, couldn't help but make him a little uneasy.

I guess I know how Kuei feels at the moment, he thought sheepishly.

"Erika," Archer continued, using what was presumably his female fellow officer's given name, "the situation is a little more complex than we thought. We've confirmed that the weapons that were stolen from Makati City were taken here and handed over to a local faction. In fact," he said, pointing at him and Katara, "they were used in an attempt to assassinate these two."

The woman leaned back in her command chair, eyes widened in shock. "Why? No offense to you two," she said, addressing him and Katara, "but why would orion pirates seek to influence the political and military trajectory on a world that has developed on its own for at least the last few thousand years and none of the regional powers even knew existed by killing a couple of people who look to be barely out of their teens."

Zuko's face flushed, both at the reminder of his youth, and the reminder that despite the Fire Nation's attempt to conquer his world, that the new Empire his line had tried to create wouldn't even have counted as a contender among the states that sailed the stars. In fact, though Archer hadn't really gone into all that much detail about his ship's weapons, he had a sinking suspicion that his ship, alone, could annihilate the militaries of all Four Nations, could flense his entire world of all life, in an afternoon.

The implications weren't lost on Ty either, as she leaned in to his right ear and muttered, "Thank Kyoshi they're on our side."

"Colonel, sir?"

Colonel Medora turned around and looked at the man who, after all the desertions, arrests, and people who refused to renounce their loyalties to Zuko and Katara's corrupt regime, had ended up in the slot of her executive officer. Colonel (Second Rank) Ijan was a tall, broadly-shouldered darkly handsome man with thick black hair that glinted in the light of the moon that deigned to finally peak out from behind the clouds. Once, a lifetime ago, two junior lieutenants named Medora and Ijan had been lovers, and she was glad that he was by her side this night.

"All our units have been prepositioned, sir," he said formally. "They await your orders to commence the attack."

"Good," she said, looking down at the base, that for the most part slumbered below them. No military base, particularly one so close to an enemy capital, could ever truly shut down entirely, but General Iroh had only arrived in the last couple hours, and he would not want to truly begin the process of assembling a new task force until the morning, when the officers he would need would ideally be fresh and alert. Assuming they survived the night.

"Very good. Execute."

The insistent beeping from Malcolm and T'Pol's consoles caused Archer to tear his eyes away from Erika's image on his viewscreen. "Report."

"I'm reading a large amount of small arms fire on the surface," the British man in his late thirties reported. His eyes widened, "From standard United Earth particle weapons."

Archer shot out of his command chair, crossing the bridge in quick angry strides, barely cognizant of the four pairs of feet at his heels. "Where?"
"It appears to be a major base sixteen kilometers south-southwest from the outer edges of Ba Sing Se."

A chorus of gasps from behind him drew the Starfleet officer's attention to his guests. He looked at them, eyes widened in shock. The only male of the group, Zuko looked up at him, traces of genuine terror on the younger man's face.

"That's where I sent my Uncle to put together a force to help defend the city," he said. "Katara's father is there as part of the Water Tribe delegation."

Archer's nostrils flared in anger. From what Ty had told him, Zuko was as close to his Uncle Iroh as Archer himself had been to his father before his death. Zuko's father, Iroh's younger brother, by all accounts, had the moral compass of a chainsaw and wasn't worth the oxygen he was sucking down. Whereas his son was, at his core, a decent young man who had spent his entire life trying to do what he thought was the right thing, and now a totally unknown aliens were trying to reward him and his friends by killing them all and using his world to do it, damn them all!

Not on my watch, Archer thought.

"Hoshi," Archer growled. "Are you picking up an enemy communications net down there, coordinating the attack?"

Hoshi, listening to her earbud and tapping out commands into her console, nodded even as she stared intently. "Confirmed, they appear to be using the standard MACO/Starfleet communication frequencies."

"Punch through their safeguards," Archer ordered. "They're going to hear me whether they want to or not."

"Aye, sir," Hoshi responded, tapping commands into her console. "Ready."

"This is Captain Jonathan Archer of the Starfleet vessel Enterprise," Archer growled, "to the forces attacking the Fire Nation base sixteen kilometers southwest of Ba Sing Se. The weapons and equipment you are using to carry out your attack have been stolen from my government, which does not sanction or support your actions in any way. By order of Starfleet, you are ordered to disengage and stand down completely. You will pull back from the base perimeter, cease all offensive actions and surrender your command. I say again, you are ordered to surrender your command. This is your only warning, you will comply with these orders or we will be forced to initiate deadly force. Archer out."

"Scramble the MACOs on the surface," Archer ordered, "get them to their shuttles and get them out there. Tell the shuttle pilots they are weapons free as soon as they get into range."

"Aye, sir," Hoshi said, leaning over her console.

"It will take at least twenty-five of your minutes to move from patrolling the district we control on the surface to close air support against the forces attacking the base," Shran suddenly cut in from behind them. Zuko and Katara wheeled around and faced the Andorian thaan as he sat at the bridge engineering console, eyes shocked at his…decidedly non-human appearance.

"This is my operations officer and liaison with the Andorian Imperial Guard," Archer said quickly. "Commander Shran."

Zuko and Katara recovered themselves quickly and bowed. "Honored to meet you, Commander," Zuko ordered. "That being said, what else can we do?"

"I can bring my ship up immediately," Erika said from the viewscreen. "A warp jump will have me within striking distance in thirty seconds, and my entire crew, as well as the MACO detachment is onboard."

"You'll be lucky if you don't tear the ship apart," Archer said, quickly, "and even if you don't, if your calculations are even slightly off, you'll crash right into the atmosphere."

"Not that it matters," Zuko said, amber eyes glinting, "even if you could, you shouldn't abandon the convoy units. You're the only protection they have, Captain, and if whoever's trying to destroy my world has ships hiding out there, they'll be helpless."

"That's your Uncle down there, Zuko," Lee said, anxiously. "And Katara's father. You can't just leave them."

"We won't," Zuko said, rounding on his officer, wide-eyed and anxious himself. "But he won't like it if we allow this to stampede us into doing something rash. We can't sacrifice our best a chance to win the war to win one battle."

"Maybe we don't have to," Katara said softly, a curious hint of something on the young woman's voice. "Can we bring this ship into the atmosphere? Right over their positions?"

Archer cocked his head. "Yes. We've done it before, in fact. Why?"

The dusky skinned young woman with striking blue eyes smiled evilly. "I have an idea."

Aang watched Sokka pacing the Ministry council room. A year and a half traveling with the older boy meant he knew exactly why. A worry over his sister and their friends…and the fact that they were on a starship that came here from another world and he wasn't. He wanted to be up there, bombarding her crew with questions about every aspect of her operations.

Which, I want to do too, he thought anxiously.

His thoughts were interrupted by an almighty rumbling blast that filled the area, causing the room to shake and dust to fall from the rafters.

Sokka stood rooted to the floor, his incessant pacing interrupted. "Shit," he bit out. "It's starting again."

"I didn't see a blast of light though," Aang said, fighting the urge to grab his staff and run for the nearest basement. Instead he forced himself to walk over to the window and look out over the star-studded sky, as the clouds had long-since parted. "Maybe it was just thunder. I mean there was a storm on the horizon earlier."

Then he heard it, a rumbling that filled the room. Not the sudden, irresistible blast that had sent him and Sokka to the floor yesterday evening, just a loud rumble.

Sokka walked to the window looking out into the night, looking for whatever was coming that could cause that. Then a bright light appeared overhead. His eyes widened, as he saw…something. It was hundreds of feet long with a saucer-shaped front, a cylindrical back, with struts connecting it to two longer thinner cylinders out the back of the secondary cylinder. The front tips of the two cylinders were a pulsating red, while the rest of her was bathed in bright white and blue light.

For a long moment, Aang's mouth worked soundlessly as he struggled to articulate something. "It's too big to be that fast," he finally murmured.

"It's too fast to be that big," Sokka said, as though in a daze.

"You don't suppose that was the ship, was it?"

All Aang could do was nod.

Archer leaned back in his chair, impressed by Katara's reasoning. It was a risk, what Katara had proposed, but a calculated one. If they were these "Lightning Swords" that tried to kill Zuko and her and did end up killing one of Major Lee's people, the odds were good that whomever had handed them the weapons hadn't given them all a complete briefing on their ships when they handed over the instructional and training materials designed to make use of their weapons. Indeed, there wasn't any indication that they had sent along any actual trainers, instead expecting them to work out the tactics required to use those weapons effectively themselves. Seeing something like Enterprise coming at them full bore might be enough to make them blink, at least enough to save the base and disorient them for when his forces in Ba Sing Se attacked them from the rear. It may even frighten them into surrendering.

"We're coming up on their position," the junior flight controller said, Lieutenant Mayweather on the surface about to lead the shuttles getting ready to follow them on.

"Standby phase cannons and spatial charges," Archer ordered.

Iroh sent a blast of fire down the corridor, listening to the screams of the men and women trying through. Two or three lifetimes ago, a much younger Lieutenant Iroh would have been eager for a straight-up fight, whatever the odds, after six months of sitting around on his ass. The old White Lotus grandmaster would by no means back down from a necessary fight, he hadn't during the events of the past year that had culminated in his beloved nephew's return to the throne that was his by right, after all. However, he no longer courted such fights as he had at Zuko's age, or even as the aggressive young Colonel in his thirties would have. Another scream down one of the adjoining corridors indicated that Pakku had probably nailed one of the Lightning Sword traitors with a water whip.

Then the firing of those damn weapons that the bastards had tried to use to kill Zuko and Katara, and had killed he didn't know how many loyal Fire Nation officers and soldiers in the last thirty minutes, ceased.

"General Iroh," an amplified voice echoed through the corridors of the half-wrecked base commander's office. A voice he recognized as Colonel Medora. She who had replaced Colonel Chang as the commander of the Boiling Rock. She who had so brutalized Azula's former best friend, and who had so savagely executed so many Kyoshi Warriors in the Rock with no other justification than his niece wanted to punish Ty Lee.

"I'm going to make this easy," the outcast traitor who no longer had any right to the rank she claimed said, "you will order the remains of this base's garrison to surrender and you and the rest of the White Lotus will come out quietly without any further resistance. Failure to comply will result in me pulling my people back and blowing the hydrogen tank farm. Everyone still alive in this base will die. I'm sure the famed Dragon of the West, who's concern for the lives of his men and women caused him to defy his orders and break off the siege of Ba Sing Se wouldn't want that to happen, would he?"

He looked back into the room. Hakoda, a fresh bruise purpling the right side of his face was on the other side of the doorjamb, ready to attack anyone who finally managed to get past an Iroh whom they both know couldn't keep this up indefinitely. Piandao was holding position next to Pakku ready to work there.

"Do you think she'll do it? Hakoda asked.

"She tried to have your daughter killed," Iroh said dryly. "She'll almost certainly have no problem killing us all if she can't take us."

Hakoda opened his mouth to say something, but the words never came as abruptly a rumbling filled the room.

Medora's eyes widened as the glowing…thing, rushed towards her positions at impossible speeds. She'd heard the loud, angry voice, furiously denouncing her attack on Ten-Mile-West and ordering her in no uncertain terms to abort her attack and surrender her command. But she dismissed it as an enemy attempt to stampede her into doing something stupid. Someone on Zuko's side had gotten his hands on one of the communication devices, figured out how to send a general signal, and was now trying to bluff her out. She'd ordered her forces to ignore the message and continue with the attack.

But now, there was a ship. She was barreling down on her with impossible speeds, this Enterprise, and anyone who could build the weapons systems that she'd been armed with, could cross the trackless void between stars, surely had enough weapons to make short work of her command.

More than that, her soldiers knew it too. Men and women who had cut through the two infantry regiments already stationed here as though they were butter were scattering like scared birds in all directions. Many of them were throwing down weapons and packs entirely, the more to increase their speed as they took flight to flee what had come down on them, as though it was the Avatar Himself come down to deliver furious vengeance. The demolition teams in the tank field had already left, without taking the charges with them, or for that matter setting them.

My command is finished as a cohesive fighting force, she realized numbly, and if I don't leave, right now, so am I.

"We have to go!" Ijan suddenly yelled in her right ear, shock and fear obvious on his face even as he made to tug at her. "Now, sir!"

Medora growled and followed her first officer into the night. It would take time, days, maybe even weeks to manage to reconstitute any part of her forces into something that might be effective against anything. But she would sooner or later, and she knew she'd have to deal with the totally unexpected peer force that had made it's presence known.

Even through her self-righteous anger, a low voice whispered that the war she'd fought since she was twelve years old was well and truly lost now.

General Iroh picked his way through the hallway, Hakoda and Piandao on either side of his shoulder, hands on their weapons, as they worked their way forward to the front doors, or at least one of the half-dozen gaping holes in the structure. They walked over destroyed stone rubble, bits of wooden furniture…and bodies. Even then he saw other people moving around in the structures, digging wounded friends out of the rubble. Calling for help. Calls that for too many of those desperate, scared men and women who were still, at their core, Fire Nation soldiers, would not be answered.

Then they saw it, a hole in the wall, bathed in white light, big enough to allow three adult humans to walk through easily. The three of them moved cautiously, out into the night air.

Hovering above them was an enormous ship, with a saucer shaped front section, connected to a cylindrical back section, with two long thin cylinders on either side. And on the ground below them…

"Zuko," he said, his voice huskily as he ran across the field, throwing his arms around his nephew.

"Uncle," he said softly as Katara rushed up to hug her father behind them.

"How," Iroh said, for once utterly confused by what he saw.

"I believe he can answer that question," Zuko said, stepping out of his hug and beckoning behind him.

His eyes widened as he saw Ty Lee and another Kyoshi Warrior officer flanking a fair-skinned man in his forties, with sandy brown hair and light brown eyes, his muscular frame in a totally unfamiliar blue-and-gold uniform.

"General Iroh, sir," the man said crisply. "I'm Captain Jonathan Archer of the Starfleet vessel Enterprise," he said, gesturing with his head at the mass of metal that floated above them. "We're here to help."