...The cool green hills had gone the way of the Dodo. Now what was left was scrapping over the rest of the solar system, killing each other for the mineral bearing rocks of the Belt, fighting over ice for the volatiles needed to sustain life.

Rhysling's Rue
Chapter 1
By Theide
 

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The cool green hills of earth. Oh how the irony of that phrase ran through her soul as she stood on the grey battle steel of her first command. There were no cool green hills any more. There was only the blasted ruin humanity had left of it’s cradle, the blighted wasteland humanity had once called home.

No, the cool green hills had gone the way of the Dodo. Now what was left was scrapping over the rest of the solar system, killing each other for the mineral bearing rocks of the Belt, fighting over ice for the volatiles needed to sustain life.

And perhaps the worst thing was that she was responsible for much of it. It had been her hand that had launched the last horrible assault on the Ozarks, had commanded the devastation that brought the last forces planetside to their knees. But there had been no choice. She told herself that again and again, and she wished fervently to believe it. Still, the lost souls of her husband and her child cried out to her from that blasted ruin.

Yet there was nothing to do but carry on, and that she did with every fiber of her being. There wasn’t really anything else to do, after all. She commanded 5,000 lives, was their mistress after god, their captain, and it was her responsibility to make sure they lived or at least gave their lives in some manner worthy of the sacred honor they had pledged themselves to as Fleet Marines. It wasn’t a job she wanted, it wasn’t even a job she had ever desired, but it was hers, and nothing could take that last little bit of solace from her.

It was all that was left. That and a small naval yard, orbiting the frigid rings of Uranus. And that was under attack by a ragtag batch of Belters. God only knew what they hoped to achieve, but those folks were hers, and be damned if she was going to let them go down on her watch! So it was maximum boost, hell bent for leather, every hand struggling under 3 gravities, and broken bones were the order of the day.

It was a weary crew that arrived after 5 months of hard gravity, broken in body, damn near broken in spirit. They were all vastly stronger in body, but their minds had taken a terrible beating, news of disaster after holocaust after genocide beating in upon minds already numbed by the horrific physical toll their environment had taken upon them.

There wasn’t really much to say when they finally arrived at Heaphestus Naval Yard to find a blasted, looted ruin, a few straggling survivors holding together the last of the environmental support systems deep in the bowels of the yard, protecting the few dependents who had been gathered there.

It was no hardship to take those few aboard, to shelter those last lost souls in the welcoming warmth of the last bit of civilization around. Some of the crew had to double up, but there were a bare 500 or so survivors and most of them were children. Lost bewildered children who spent their days wandering around with an odd determined look in their eyes and their nights fighting of dreams of horror. The thing that bothered her the most was that almost none of them ever cried.

She tried to befriend some of them, and knew that many of her crew had made the same effort, but these children were unlike any she had ever met. They all seemed to share a bond, that much she could tell, but none of them would open up to any of the adults, none of them would share with them just what horror haunted their cold flat gaze. That was the other thing they all shared, the cold, burn you to the soul and pin you to the deck gaze that she had seen in many veterans of close combat, the thing they called the thousand yard stare.

You could look into the eyes of these children and see what they had been through, but it gave no insight into who they were or how they felt. It was like they just looked through you , through the ship itself and into the depths of space, and nothing would ever interrupt that terrible regard. It was really a little creepy.
 

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