“Like it or not, you are our only hope. I just thank my lucky stars you aren’t as homely as Obi-Wan Kenobi.” If they hadn’t both been so exhausted, that would have triggered another round of sex. As it was, they snuggled into each other’s embrace and fell fast asleep, not without some giggling.

Ted awoke feeling as though he had run a marathon on his hands. He didn’t have a single muscle in his body that didn’t ache with overuse and his stumps were throbbing even worse than his head. One thing made up for all that though, and that was the woman he held in his arms. He gazed wonderingly at her face as she drooled on his chest, her snore something fit to wake the dead.

She didn’t care about his legs! He was lost in his gratitude for that fact as he stared at her and she gradually awoke. To his amazement, she opened her eyes and looked straight into his face before snuggling up even more closely into his embrace. “You know, in Micro-g, I think sex is actually better without legs, at least on the guy.”

He looked into her bloodshot eyes, astonished. “Er, what?”

“Well, it was really good, and I think we actually managed a few positions that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. That spinning thing was just incredible!” She stretched, bringing her erect nipples almost up to his eye level and causing his body to react independently of his intellect.

“If you don’t stop that, I’m gonna get all hot and bothered again!”

“Well you can get as bothered as you want to, but I get first use of the head!” She disengaged herself from their embrace and launched out of the bunk on a trajectory that gave her a lead on a backspring toward the aforementioned head. By the time she was done, he had discovered the frustration of not being able to do the bathroom dance.

She burst out in laughter as he streaked past her through the opened door, running on his hands at record speed. The sounds coming from the facilities only made her laugh harder. She was still indulging herself in fits of laughter when he appeared through the door, a somewhat sheepish expression on his face.

“OK, sneaking up on me with fighters was damned distressing, but at least I knew what was happening! Springing a goddamned surprise bidet attack was just a little beyond the pale! I damn near knocked myself out on the opposite wall of the cubicle when that fucking thing attacked me!” She let him fume for a moment before she interjected.

“Um, it’s set up for a lady’s needs. I didn’t exactly figure on having a gentleman friend use it.” At that point she completely lost it again and collapsed onto the bunk in a major giggle fit. “Gods I wish I’d been watching!”

She was still giggling madly as he boosted himself into the micrograv field of the bunk and wrapped himself around her. “Hey, you can laugh all you want, but the way that one jet was aimed and this little tube of lube I found tell me I sorta missed something last night and if you don’t mind, I think I’m gonna make up for that oversight.” She giggled right up until her shrieks of laughter turned into moans of pleasure.

“Alright, captain, I think you and I need to have a serious discussion about our relationship.” She looked into his sleepy eyes.

The best thing he could come up with was “Er, relationship?”

“Yeah, relationship, dumbass.” She kissed him until they were both breathless and rubbed herself along his length. “Like how the hell are we going to handle this?”

“Handle what?”

“Well, the fact that we’ve had sex, and the fact that I think I just might be falling in love with you.”

“Um, you what?” He jerked up, holding her in his arms and looking back into her eyes. “I mean, did I just hear what I thought I heard? Not the sex part, I mean it’s not like I can deny that, but the love thing!?”

“Hey, you think it freaks you out, you oughta spend a day or two in my shoes. Here I am, the greatest butcher the human race has ever known, and I’m telling a man I have feelings for him. That’s just pretty damn strange.” She gazed back into his hazel orbs. “Strange or not, it is true. I’m not sure if you feel the same way, but for right now, I’d like to pretend you do.”

His mind raced as parts of him throbbed with arousal and yet other parts delivered twinges of pain almost too intense for him to deal with. “Er, you know I’m pretty much damaged goods? I mean, I’m literally like half a man!”

”So? I’m less than half a woman! I slaughtered my own family because I thought my ideals were worth more than a few billion lives. You just got your legs chopped off in an accident, I made the choice to kill a whole hell of a lot of other people and slaughter my family in the bargain! You wanna talk damaged goods buddy, I think I’ve pretty much got you on that score!”

He tightened his arms around her. “Um, look, I had no idea you had it that bad. I mean I knew you were some kinda badass, but that’s way beyond anything I ever thought about. I can’t even begin to imagine how much guilt you feel.” She twisted away from him, tears prickling at her eyelids.

“Look, I‘m the last person in the universe to judge you for anything like that! I don’t care if you were the Angel of Death!” She collapsed into his arms, sobbing. “Oh my god, you were! Do you know that the inhabitants of the rest of the solar system call you that?”

She sobbed into his shoulder as he held her close. “I’m both things, and neither, and something even more terrible than any name they can ever give me. I’ve personally killed more human beings than anyone ever in the history of mankind.” She wept piteously as he rocked her in his arms. “I’m a monster! I don’t even know what to call myself, I’m so horrible!”

He held her in his arms and cradled her in his embrace, shocked by her revelations but totally aware of the sort of person he had spent the previous night in bed with. In his mind, there was no real way to square the one persona with the other, even though he knew they were the same woman. “Look, I’m pretty sure you just did what the circumstances dictated. In fact, in your position, I probably would have done the same thing, that is, if I’d had the balls to do it. I just wouldn’t have a family on earth to feel guilty about.”

He squeezed her even more tightly, nuzzling into her shoulder and shedding his tears on her. “I don’t blame you for a damn thing you did, those bastards were going to turn the rest of us into outright slaves! You saved all of humanity! And yes,” He held her closer as her sobs turned into something that would have shaken the entire solar system with the power of her grief. “You destroyed what needed destroying. By your actions, you have saved the very soul of humanity!”

She pushed him away from her, looking him in the eyes, her steely gray gaze holding his hazel regard. She wiped her tears away and stared into the depths of his soul. “So you are trying to tell me that I needed to kill close on 7 billion people just to have a moral victory?”

It took him a moment to think it through, to recall the things he had said, but in the end, the truth was inescapable. “Um, yeah, pretty much.”

“So what the fuck do we do now?” He looked deeply into her eyes again and stroked the part of her hair that seemed determined to obscure his vision of her face.

“Well, you know, I think you made a pretty good start just yesterday. You got a little bit of a recovery effort going, even though you had to scare the shit out of me to do it. My ship is just the first piece of the puzzle. You’ve got damn near 250 yard dogs on your hands. With that kind of manpower and the resources available, we could have a fleet of about 20 smaller ships available within two years. That’s counting in the time it would take to train crew to run them and time to build armaments for them. It just depends on how you want to run the mix, military versus civilian ships. I’d say for right now, the best bet would be to focus on miners.”

“Wow, you’ve really given this some thought, haven’t you?” She started rubbing some very sensitive parts of his anatomy.

He captured her errant hand and tried his best to be very serious. “Yes, Madame President, I certainly have given it some thought.” She jerked her hand out of his grasp.

“What the fuck did you just call me?”

“Madame President, I called you what you are right now, nothing less, nothing more. If you don’t like the title, perhaps you shouldn’t have done the things necessary to earn it. I mean, if you wanted to, you could call yourself a queen, although I rather think the Belters would object. At this moment, you hold in your hand the most powerful military force available to all of humanity. You also hold the only decent prospect of building any kind of military force, in the name of Hephaestus station. It might be wrecked at the moment, but it is the best base for an industrial and military center left in the entire system.”

“Like it or not, you are our only hope. I just thank my lucky stars you aren’t as homely as Obi-Wan Kenobi.” If they hadn’t both been so exhausted, that would have triggered another round of sex. As it was, they snuggled into each other’s embrace and fell fast asleep, not without some giggling.

Almost directly across the solar system, in the orbit of Neptune, the exact opposite was happening. “Ok, we’ve got a shipyard and vessels to provide materials to build more fighter craft and more dreadnoughts.” Admiral O’Shaughnessy held court on the bridge of his flagship. “The question is, should we focus on building a force which can defeat anything else out there, or should we focus on building an effective civilian economy?”

His flag officers looked at each other, reluctant to voice their opinions. Grant was the first to speak up, hesitant though he sounded. “Sir, I think the fact that some of the prewar navy has survived and some of it has admittedly gone rogue suggests we should focus our efforts on a military buildup. I think if we went civilian at his point we would be inviting defeat in detail, sir!”

The admiral agreed, although he couldn’t help but wish that he had something better than sycophants commanding the other ships of his squadron. “What about food and other basics?”

“Well, we have about a five month reserve of protein sources in our freezers, sir. Beyond that its pretty much beans and rice, sir. If we limit it to only senior command staff, you could pretty much have a steak dinner every night for 2 years, sir” the steward who answered had an almost cringing quality about him, as though he was afraid of being struck at any moment. “After that, we just might have some lobsters big enough to eat, sir.”

“That’s the best you can give me?” O’Shaughnessy’s face was almost purple with rage. “Fucking seabugs?!”

“No sir, I might be able to provide you with cloned beef tissue, but it will consume almost 20 crewmen worth of nutrients. Not an ideal use of crew or supplies, sir.”

“As long as I don’t have to eat a fuckin bug, you’ve got a job. Now let’s get on with how the hell we’re going to crush that bitch!” If any of his subordinates had felt differently, they would likely have spoken, but none of them did. The men who ruled the complements of 12 Terran ships of the line were simply glad they were alive.

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. As of 2 hours from now, we will depart for the Uranian System. We will proceed to locate and destroy the Hermes. At that point, the only thing left capable of challenging us will be small craft and none of them can even begin to think about standing up to the level of force we can apply. Gentlemen, we have the entire solar system in our hands!”

A tiny ship hid in the shadow of one of the smaller moons, watching as the ponderous bulk of O’Shaughnessy’s fleet boosted out of orbit. An almost miniscule amount of its occupant’s attention was dedicated to monitoring her sensors because the rest of her rather impressive intellect was occupied with deciding whether she should risk revealing herself by trying to warn the Hermes. As so many things had in this war, it came down to a moral decision and Nimashet Bismadi felt herself woefully inadequate to the task of making one of those. Nonetheless, she took a bit of solace in the fact that her carnivorous tendencies had been distinctly curbed toward the vegetarian end of things by sheer necessity and though she enjoyed a good steak, she wasn’t craven enough to think that her personal enjoyment was worth more than the survival of her entire species.

Little personal moral satisfactions aside though, she had to admit to herself that the cretinous little cowards who had helped spark off the war and then hidden themselves safely away from the maelstrom weren’t exactly the people she wanted to see determining the future of humanity.

With that thought, she realized she had made her decision all over again, the same judgment call she had made before the conflict even began. The voice of her sensei came drifting through the halls of memory.

“Remember, you are small and weak. The time for you to strike is when others have weakened each other with fighting. Your brain is your best weapon, you must use it!. Hide if you have to, wait until the time is right for you to strike. This way, your victory will be assured.”

“Well, I don’t know about assured,” she thought wryly to herself “but it just may be that I can give the good guys a fighting chance!” Her fingers played over the keypads in front of her, setting up a complex burn sequence that would take advantage of every gravitational slingshot she could find. When she finally settled back into her chair to await the first burn, she noted with satisfaction that her trajectory would put her in the Uranian system almost a full month ahead of the fleet. She didn’t believe in prayer, but at that moment she found herself uttering one.

“Please, let it be enough time, and just let it be enough!”