Apocalypse Redux

If it hadn’t been for her wristwatch, Ambassador Soumare wouldn’t have been able to tell you how long she sat in her office, trying to process what she’d just seen.

Had it been a person who’d brought the message, there was a good chance she’d have assumed they were playing a cruel, awful, prank … or had been sent by someone doing the same.

But no, this message had come in through the top-secret, emergency-only, single-use messaging channel meant for just such an emergency.

In other words, it was as guaranteed to be true as anything possibly could be without the Secretary-General having personally talked to her about it.

Earth had been attacked. No, Solas a whole had been attacked. The fact that the damage had been “contained,” and wasn’t that word choice terribly tone-deaf to the Belt, was hardly the silver lining the writer of the report seemed to have believed it to be.

That was … she was read in certain worst-case scenarios, but nearly all of those had been designed believing that humanity’s homeworld would be attacked on the tail end of an enemy campaign, that they’d already be on war footing by the time things well and truly reached their peak.

Something like what had actually happened, without even a declaration of war, was unthinkable, unacceptable, unconcionable.

And now it was her job to try and drag in the very first alien species humanity had ever encountered into this war. It hadn’t been phrased like that in her orders, but that was what it boiled down to.

Soumare glanced down at her wrist once again. Much as she was still far from “calm,” she was also half an hour from a meeting with the Provost.