Chapter 55

Deep Space

Divinium Mine

Sarah looked in horror as plasma vented through the ship and the drone launch hatches. Even the ones they had closed were opened by the flow of superheated gas, the obstructing debris cleared in fractions of a second.

The silence was deafening, before Sarah swallowed.

"Elteria, Status?"

"They...I..." The AI took a shaky breath. "The escaping plasma is compatible with a gravitational fusion reactor overload, not nuclear warheads. They most likely filled the interior of the asteroid with plasma, but they didn't blow everything in it to smithereens."

"Shit. Alright, contact Soliensky, we need to discuss possible Search and Rescue, as well as the pursuit of the enemy ships."

*****

It didn't even take fifteen seconds to get the admiral on the line. His face was white with shock, but at the same time Sarah could see the beginning of righteous fury in his eyes. As far as she could tell, he had joined the Dominion Navy to actually protect people, not out of ambition or greed. To a man like that, what had just happened...

Let's just say she made a mental note to check on the prisoner's treatments once everything had calmed down. She couldn't afford to have the one high ranking ally she had in the Dominion Navy be arrested for war crimes after all. Besides, as sweet as immediate revenge would be, he seemed like the kind of person that would regret it a thousandfold later.

She knew that from personal experience.

"Admiral." She greeted him.

"Captain. It appears our worst fears have come true. Our enemies appear to be insane enough to sacrifice their own people in the millions just to prevent capture."

"Indeed admiral. I was in contact with their command center actually. Their local governor -a semi civilian leader I presume- wished to surrender, but a death squad took over, killed everyone, and triggered the self destruct."

"Ah, I see...So maybe not as cold blooded as I thought. Not their regular officers at least."

Sarah shivered as she heard that tone. She knew it, as it was the same one she'd had when she had ordered her tactical officer to follow her CO's orders, and open fire on an inhabited planet they'd sworn to protect. To glass the world they were still getting desperate distress messages from, as people tried to escape the rampaging nanotech.

Scratch checking on if the Dominion treated their prisoners well, she'd have to check if they took prisoners at all.

"So it seems. If I may ask sir, what are your intentions? Should we deploy for Search and Rescue in the installation, or pursue the fleeing enemy vessels?"

Soliensky looked unsure of himself for a second, before checking the display.

"Do you truly think anyone could have survived that?"

Sarah shrugged.

"I might not be a terrorist scum like the TRF, but I know space miners sir. Especially with this environment, there had to have been some emergency shelters built to survive anything, even someone trying to crack the planetoid open. With their superior's permissions or not, the mining personnel at least would have tried to create a safe place for their families."

"I see. Very well. I will leave my lighter battle carriers to conduct Search and Rescue, as well as all of the marine shuttles of the fleet. The rest of the fleet, including you, will split up and run down the remaining enemy vessels."

Sarah nodded. There wouldn't need to be a lot of splitting up, only three light cruisers remained, one having been killed during the engagement, and the other two having been shot out of the proverbial sky when their comrades' resolve had broken and they had left them to face the Dominion's missiles alone.

"Of course, assign us a flotilla." She smiled wolfishly. "I can guarantee you the ship you'll send us after won't be going anywhere."

The admiral nodded and matched her smile.

"Very well captain. Good hunting."

*****

Sarah sighed as she sat back in her office's seat.

"Well, today sucked."

Elteria's hologram appeared on her desk, and shrugged.

"Could have been worse. Far worse, actually."

Sarah nodded. While they ran down the fleeing enemy vessels, the Dominion's marines had conducted a Search and Rescue operation in the Divinium mines.

The area was literally filled with magma, which in some places was outright radioactive, and everything could collapse at any moment, but if marines anywhere had any qualities in abundance they were stubbornness and an instinctive urge to protect the innocent.

So the marines had managed to find survivors. Sarah had been right, the miners had devised a way to protect their families from harm. And it turns out, they'd decided that if they could protect their families, they might as well protect as many people as they could.

She was sure the structural plans the TRF high ups had didn't include several massive reinforced blast doors dug into the rock and made to literally crush several corridors to seal the civilian residential sections, or the makeshift gravity bombs made to collapse entire utility tunnels and ship access tubes.

Regardless, it had worked. Sort of. The residential areas had been mostly protected, although in a few sectors the blast doors simply hadn't been enough and the plasma wave had gotten through. Fortunately one of the types of Divinium mined here was ridiculously resilient to heat and force, part of why the plasma has escaped through the hatches and not blown its way through the rock. Thus the tunnel collapses had just laughed off the reactor overloads, and all the parts cut off that way had survived more or less unharmed.

And miners being miners, they had made very sure the backup life support systems were on the right side of their emergency hatches. And had hidden some of their own power generators, plus stocked up on supplies.

So at least, everyone that had survived the initial detonation had made it until the Dominion had drilled through the obstructions and rescued them. A few idiots had tried to set up ambushes or IEDs, but before they could do anything serious they suddenly decided to commit suicide by stabbing themselves thirty times in the back with mining drills and fusion cutters. Funny that.

The survivors in need of medical assistance were currently being moved onto the battle carriers, who had converted entire hangar decks into field hospitals, while the others were left in place. After all the Dominion fleet didn't have the life support capacity to take them all aboard, and once their life support plants and portable reactors were under Dominion guard there wasn't a great deal they could do even if someone had the sudden bright idea to attack the people with the only ships remaining in the system.

The TRF's remaining cruisers had fled. Or rather, tried to. Two had been destroyed, refusing to surrender to the very end, and the one Sarah had been tasked with going after had panicked, and tried an emergency jump to hyperspace.

She hadn't even needed Elteria's scans to guess it had failed. The poor bastards had managed to jump to hyperspace...but their hyperdrives most likely exploded right afterwards. Everyone onboard was now nothing but exotic radiation in another dimension.

Overall, as the AI had said, it could have been far worse. But she would still wish it had been better.

"Alright. Do we have a headcount?"

"On what?"

"Everything."

"Okay. Well, the Dominion lost around a hundred thousand spacers, and recovered fifteen thousand in escape pods. Most of the losses were from the gunships, but some of the battle carriers took a beating as well. Soliensky's flagship, especially, the mass missile volley at the end was all targeted on it. It survived only because our scan data gave such an advantage to their point defence."

Sarah nodded. Even while they were focusing on the Khopesh-class light cruiser -the Quetzalcoatl according to some of the prisoners-, Elteria had continued feeding vital sensor data to the Dominion. It had probably saved the entire fleet's ass, on top of Soliensky's. Hell, the Dominion hadn't even lost a single large warship, although all of them were going to need a stint in a shipyard to be combat ready again. A few might even be outright scrapped, actually, given the level of damage.

"Alright. The TRF?"

"Figures are a bit vague. We only got a few hundred from the escape pods of their ships, and mainly because the fleeing ships had people ejecting and trying to surrender constantly." Sarah nodded. It wasn't exactly clear, but apparently the fleeing ships descended into mutiny as the crews tried to force their officers to surrender when they realized there was no chance to escape alive, and the officers as well as those loyal to them had locked themselves into the core areas of the ship, and held long enough for the Dominion to reduce them all to smithereens. "That's a less than 1% survival rate. As for the civilians....well, we don't have precise numbers, but around a million or so are dead, and three millions more have survived. We don't really have precise numbers on how many ships were still in the hangars, or how many people were onboard, same for the mine's internal security and defensive complements, but estimates are at around half a million, with zero survivors."

"That's a lot of bodies."

"Indeed. Those guys were paranoid as hell."

"Not enough, apparently."

Elteria chuckled.

"No, it seems not."

Both women stayed silent for a few seconds, before Sarah sighed, and sat up.

"Alright, well, it's time we start the funeral. Is the casket ready?"

Elteria grimly nodded.

"Yes. Nothing of Grace's body remained, but we put some of her personal items in it."

"Alright. Warn everyone, funeral in three hours."

"Aye aye ma'am."

*****

Sarah finished reading from the prayers for the dead, and looked up at her assembled crew.

Most were sobbing, a few were swearing, but a handful had the grim face of veterans who would do their grieving later, in private. Unsurprisingly that included all of her senior officers. Seria on the other hand was openly crying. She hadn't been on the crew for long, but Grace had been one of the people she knew the best, after Cindy. As for Turral...Sarah made a note to not let the chief engineer ashore until they had left this place, or she'd at least had a serious talk with her, and even then only send her under escort. She'd seen the chief engineer check her private weapons collection, and she was fairly sure she'd spotted at least a tactical nuke in there.

Turral was over protective of her engineers, and it wouldn't be the first time a very bloody 'accident' happened to people who had been related to those who had killed one of her men. Sarah didn't necessarily disagree with the sentiment, but it was clear to her all of the ones responsible were either dead or far away and out of reach. The people left on the planetoid were all civilians, and the poor bastards the Dominion Navy had picked up in their escape pods were all low ranking grunts. Well, mostly, there had been a few officers but they'd taken the easy way out rather than be captured. One simply by blowing up her escape pod, alongside everyone with her, although the others appeared to have more morals than that and simply swallowed a neurotoxin capsule, which apparently was standard issue for TRF personnel, and had destroyed their neural tissue past beyond any hope of reconstruction or digitalization, even if they'd gotten to them in time.

"Everyone, if I could have your attention please?" Said the captain, and everyone focused on her. "No matter how many times I do this, it never gets easier. Today, Grace left us. But she was not killed by the enemy. I do not deny that our foes were ultimately responsible for her death, but they did not kill her. Instead, she chose to sacrifice herself to protect us, her family. She fell doing her duty, and upholding the highest tradition of our old homeland." That last part was directed to the original members of her crew. Grace had been one of them after all, one of the Alterians that had followed her out of the Directorate and into exile. "To Grace! May her essence join the stars in eternity!"

"TO GRACE!" Everyone shouted in unison, raising their fists, and Sarah nodded to Elteria.

The AI nodded back, and the casket lifted under its own power, and floated into the airlock.

Sarah watched the casket under her tears, before snapping a salute, followed a second later by her entire crew.

The airlock cycled, and the casket flew into the void, towards the star Grace had died closest to, so that what was left of her and her essence may rejoin the cycle of creation.

Sarah waited for a few seconds, before lowering her hand, and turning back towards her crew.

"The wake will take place in an hour. Feel free to attend, but no one will blame you if you need some time alone."

Everyone nodded, and Sarah walked back towards her office. She needed a drink.