Chapter 45: Burial Ground
Orion sat in silence.
The simulation had ended hours ago, but the weight of it hadn't left his body. It settled deep in his chest, like smoke that wouldn't clear. He didn't blink as the holographic display continued its quiet rotation in front of him—death counts, fleet reports, grainy combat footage that blurred together in a haze of destruction.
The number still burned into the center of his vision: 195,462,009,311.
It was the confirmed death toll.
He watched the numbers scroll, his thoughts caught somewhere between disbelief and a hollow understanding. The Selunir War had lasted ninety years. A one-sided slaughter from the moment it started. What the simulation showed wasn't exaggerated. If anything, it had softened the worst of it. Some of the footage was real. Some of it reconstructed. All of it brutal.
The Confederacy's secrets suddenly didn't feel so strange anymore.
Everything he'd never understood about the Confederacy began to line up. Why certain technologies had shot forward at impossible speeds—ship propulsion, orbital defenses, energy transfer—while others like medical science, education systems, or social welfare had either plateaued. Why genetic diseases still existed. Why people lived longer, but not necessarily better.
Because the progress hadn't been organic. Humanity hadn't evolved—it had scavenged.
The war had forced adaptation, not development. The only reason humanity still existed was because it had stolen time—time bought with lives, desperation, and someone else's technology. The leaps they'd made weren't earned. They were side effects of disaster.
The realization dug into him as he watched another data stream play out: Cerus-IV, a colony with a population of eighteen billion, burned from orbit. Entire families. Gone in seconds. Civilian transports turned to vapor. Communications jammed before warnings could even be sent.
And then there was Earth.