The amber liquid showed a murky, twisted reflection of an unshaven, broken man. Aaron twirled the glass around with his one good arm, more to kill time than anything else. Drinking now meant getting drunk quicker. Getting drunk quicker meant having to return home sooner. Returning home sooner meant sitting in his tiny assigned cube apartment, with nothing but his thoughts to keep him company. And right now, his thoughts were the last thing he wanted to confront.

  The bar was a squalid, tiny thing, deep in the city’s former rough neighborhood. It was the kind of place decent folk wouldn’t have found themselves dead crossing, and where cops patrolled in groups of four or over, or more often not at all. Ironically, its very repulsiveness was what had spared this shithole the destruction wrought upon most of Earth’s former cities. It was of such little import, so forgotten, that military and police didn’t even try to hold it during the city’s doomed defense. And even now, an Eckzahn patrol was a rare sight.

  Which for Aaron was perfect. He had to suffer neither the fearful, contemptuous glares of his fellow humans, nor the cruel humor and petty bullying of his “comrades” from the EDA, nor the condescension of his Eckzahn overlords.

  Aaron sipped at the chipped whiskey glass. It tasted like paint thinner and something small and fluffy was inside the liquid. He probably shouldn’t have been drinking this stuff.

  Fuck it. If he died, who would have mourned him? His parents were dead. Most of his former friends were dead. What few remained had stopped returning his calls after he joined the EDA. The only one who would have shed a single tear, the only one who would have ensured he received anything resembling a proper funeral, was Madde.

  God… Madde. Her. A few months after the war, when everything began to settle, he and his surviving friends went out to one of the few remaining bars. His friends had drunkenly dared him to offer one of the alien occupation soldiers a rose from the table’s vase. They must have seen how he stared at her longly out the window. They most likely expected her to kick the shit out of him and have a good laugh about it.

  Instead, the towering wolfess stared down at the smaller human. She looked at the unknown plant, with its blood-red petals and sharp thorns, then looked at the strange human, with his nervous grin and deep green eyes… and she blushed. He remembered the electric caress of her fingerpads as she accepted the strange gift. He remembered her looking the dainty little flower over, slowly, carefully, like it might explode in her large, delicate hands at any moment.

  Then she looked down at him with those sky-blue eyes, that blush only deepening.

  “Is… nice.” Her alien tongue struggled with forming the words. They were the two most beautiful words Aaron had ever heard.

  From that day onward, he had something to live for. Something to wake up for. The next day, he caught her at the end of her patrol. He thought she might be hungry, so he cooked something. He didn’t have many rations left, and he wasn’t much of a cook, so he made grilled cheese with some leftover grated chorizo in the middle. Not the greatest meal, even by his standards, yet like the rose, she accepted the gift.

  He watched those pearly white, sharp fangs crunch through the bread and cheese, her eyes widening at the unknown taste.

  “Mmmmm…” She said, licking her lips. “Is all Earth ration this good?”

  Two weeks passed like this. He would meet her during or after her patrol, he would offer her some paltry gift, they’d exchange words, then part ways. Then… he mustered up the courage to talk longer with her. Then she asked if he ever thought about joining the auxiliary Earth Defense Army…

  “Is very good in EDA!” she’d excitedly told him in her sweet, melodic voice struggling with English, even with her translator. “You get better apartment, meet people like you, more rations, and respect… and I would teach you how to shoot blaster!”

  That last part was what had sold it. More time with Madde.

  Madde, Madde, Madde…

  She had lied about one thing, after all. The EDA was not at all made up of people like him. He’d expected it to be made up of what was left of Earth’s military and police forces, like Eckzahn propaganda stated. But the EDA were not former soldiers, and they absolutely were not former cops.

  They were loud, rude, muscle-bound brutes. Aaron wasn’t exactly a true crime fanatic, but he knew a gang tattoo when he spotted one. Aaron remembered the Eckzahn Union proudly proclaiming that they “overthrew the old Earth ruler’s tyranny and freed all the wrongfully convicted prisoners.”

  It wasn’t difficult to connect the dots: the aliens had emptied the prisons and penitentiaries and offered the convicts a deal: “Put on a uniform, get a gun, crack some disobedient heads, and be free.”

  Career criminals, murderers, drug dealers, rapists. Those were to be his comrades.

  And with their animal instinct, the former criminals detected him and all the other outsiders in an instant. The civilian volunteers simply smelled weak. The Eckzahn trainers had foreseen this, and placed the ex-cons in separate cadet platoons from the civilian volunteers. But still, they found ways to bully and belittle them. They were rougher than necessary in hand to hand training. Equipment was found stolen and then “mysteriously” worn by one of the ex-cons, grinning at his victim. They sprayed obscene graffiti over the ex-civvies’ barracks, which they were then blamed for and had to clean up.

  It was like being back in high school. And he hated it.

  Yet, Aaron pushed through. Every time he thought about quitting, he saw Madde. He thought of how ecstatic she was when she heard he’d applied. He thought how disappointed she would be. He did it for her.

  Her, her, her, her….

  He pushed through the six weeks of training. His formerly flabby, weak body turned to lean muscle. His soft hands became hard and callused, and he thought, larger. It wasn’t just his body that changed, but his mind. He felt more confident. He was more eager to tackle issues head on and not hesitate.

  Seeing Madde beaming with pride, throwing her hands in the air as she saw him in his EDA armor for the first time, made it all worth it.

  That had been the price of his humanity: a wolf girl’s smile.

  He grunted and swallowed down the rest of his whiskey. He slammed the glass down on the till. The rough bartender poured another measure from the labelless dirty bottle, spilling a little on the stained wood.

  The training made him think he was ready for anything. Madde certainly seemed to think so. That was until his first assignment. His unit was to escort a shipment of rare ore to the city. All went well. Their vehicles rolled uncontested across the deserts and ruined highways. When they got to the city, they all breathed a sigh of relief. Surely, the rebels wouldn’t try anything in a city with actual Eckzahn soldiers garrisoning, right?

  Then the lead vehicle exploded.

  It was an old Earth APC, the kind SWAT teams used, repurposed for the EDA. A missile impacted it from above and reduced it to a charred, wheelless wreck. The rear door blew out, and Aaron was greeted with the sight of charred bodies wearing tatters of EDA uniform.

  Ten people had been in that van. Ten people that he trained with, ate with, laughed with. Gone in an instant. They hadn’t even had time to see what killed them.

  The other vehicles got hit with small arms fire that sounded like cannon shots. Aaron saw tracers tear into engine blocks and the cars. Anti-materiel rifles.

  “AMBUUUUUUSH!” the sergeant yelled. They all got out of their vehicles as the rebels pummeled them with RPG and .50 cal fire. They fired from upper windows, then repositioned. A few of the cars managed to escape the slaughter, only for a heavily armored technical to block their way. The truck bed had an m60 machine gun, which the bearded rebel manning it used to great effect. The blocked EDA cars, completely unarmored former police cars, were torn apart like tissue paper. Aaron saw blood erupting within the cars, covering the windows in a thick coating of viscera.

  “Earth fights on! EARTH FIGHTS ON!” the battle cry rang out from dozens of voices, like the growl of a wolf pack cornering a moose.

  Aaron’s squad managed to dismount their truck and take cover. Rebels began pouring out of buildings and cars. They wore a hodgepodge of civilian clothing, tactical gear and improvised armor. Most had modern pre-invasion weaponry, but some used whatever they could get their hands on. A squad of machinegunners used WWII era BARs to lay down suppressive fire for their fellows taking cover. Aaron even spotted something that looked like a WWI-era bolt action rifle, bayonet and all.

  But what they lacked in gear they more than made up for in skill. They spread out, moved under covering fire, popped smoke grenades, used upper floors and rooftops to envelop the superiorly armed EDA in a deadly enfilade.

  Aaron’s sergeant yelled an order. He wasn’t sure what. He was so singularly focused on the slaughter, chaos and fire, that his mind shut out anything else. Aaron turned around to ask the sergeant to repeat the order, only to find that his NCO could no longer talk, as his entire jaw, alongside half his head, was missing.

  Aaron ducked for cover right as the sniper took a shot at him too.

  “You see someone barking orders, they’re important. Shoot them first.” had been one of the things taught to them during live fire exercises. Seems like their enemies had understood that better.

  With this came a horrible, sudden realization: these weren’t the desperate, lawless rebels that Eckzahn propaganda said they were. These were soldiers, through and through. The aliens said that the remnants of the US Armed Forces had been allowed to reintegrate into civilian life, but that always sounded false. And now, the terrible, undeniable answer was before him.

  Suddenly, Aaron no longer felt confident. Everything he learned during the intense six weeks of training seemed forgotten. And the horrible reality set in: they were barely trained militiamen sent to fight seasoned soldiers instead of the Eckzahn .

  The EDA was not meant to protect Earth from insurgent forces. They weren’t even meant to be true auxiliaries to the Eckzahn’s military presence. They were cannon fodder, pure and simple.

  Fear was then replaced by rage. Aaron aimed his blaster rifle for the smokescreen the rebels were advancing under and fired. The red hot plasma bolts expelled forward with a resounding “CLAP!”, like someone was loudly clapping right in his ear, concrete and masonry melting where he hit. He didn’t really know if he hit any of the hostiles. He wasn’t even really aiming. All he knew was that firing back felt good. The surviving EDA troopers followed his example and began forming a firing line. A few rebels fell before the superior firepower, plasma tearing through armor plates like putty and fusing flesh with clothing.

  Aaron followed a corporal, a beardless youth that didn’t seem any more ready for command than he was. The impromptu squad ran through a partially destroyed department store and flanked the rebels. They all opened fire, and horribly, Aaron remembered feeling glee as he saw one of them scream and fall down below his own barrage.

  Despite a great number of them falling, the rebels did not panic. The two BAR men turned around and laid down suppressive fire, a barrage of 30-06 tearing through drywall, wooden counters and brick like it wasn’t even there. As he dived for cover, Aaron saw one of his comrades fall from a shot to the chest. The armor the Eckzahn supplied the EDA with was meant to stop standard rifle rounds with no issue. Either they’d lied, or the rebels were packing black tips. Or both.

  Then, out of the corner of his eye, Aaron saw a lone rebel charging the hunkered down EDA. She was barely over five feet, the old rifle she was wielding was a fair bit longer than her. He turned to fire at her, but she moved with the speed of a cheetah. The man closest noticed the gleaming bayonet far too late. He was a mountain of a man, a former gang leader, he boasted. With a savage thrust, the bayonet tore through his unprotected treetrunk neck. The little woman’s flowing blonde hair was stained crimson as she slashed the bayonet to the right, almost decapitating the giant. She grinned and spat upon the wheezing, choking body. She turned around, blood dripping off the massive sword bayonet, grinning right at Aaron. He had never seen such a terrifying, malevolent creature. He was only able to act when the gore-coated bayonet began approaching him. He emptied the rest of his magazine into her, the burning red plasma creating golf ball size holes right through her chest you could see through.

  Hands shaking, teeth chattering, he was barely able to load a fresh magazine.

  The corporal ordered them to fall back. The bodies of EDA troopers littered the streets. Aaron realized with a strange sense of detachment that they were the only ones left. He pushed the button of his radio speaker.

  “This is the 47th EDA! We’re pinned down on Washington Street! The rebels are tearing us to shreds! We need backup! Now, damn it!” He was surprised at how calm, yet demanding his voice was. The other NCOs had certainly called for backup before they were cut down, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  “Negative, 47th. We cannot spare the manpower all nearby patrols pinned down, gunships are already occupied. Protect the cargo at all costs. Over.” The accented, uncaring voice of an Eckzahn came through. Aaron cursed.

  “?rahn!?” Another Eckzahn voice came through the radiowaves. Far from uncaring. It was concerned. Scared.

  It was his Madde.

  Aaron could have screamed out in joy.

  “Yes. EDA Private 23-87-90. Requesting backup!”

  “We are coming! Just hold on!”

  Aaron felt tears prick his eyes as he took cover behind a concrete barricade and returned fire. She was coming… she was coming for him. Everything would be alright…

  In less than a minute, an Eckzahn vehicle pulled up behind him. He saw Madde jump out, her ponytail flowing in the wind. He grinned at her, and she grinned back. His cheek exploded with pain as concrete chips tore into his cheek.

  Madde hid behind the nearby brick corner, pulled out her controller and threw her drone in the air, while her sergeant scanned their flank. Piloting her drone around the corner she saw too many targets to count, lit up by the drones sensors. Seeing the Eckzahn drone and Hraun AFV, fire shifted from Aaron to the new targets.

  Seeing his opportunity and with a roar of anger, he turned and fired back, hunkering down behind the barricade as much as he could. It hadn’t been enough.

  His first impression was that he’d slipped and fell. There was no pain. He tried to get up, but his body refused his commands. Something warm and wet slid down his bicep and forearm. Raising his palm, it was crimson.

  His ears were ringing, but he heard something through it.

  “AErahn! AErahn!”

  That was when the pain finally registered. It was a greater pain than he’d felt in his entire life. It was like a knife of ice had stabbed him in the shoulder and twisted. He felt broken bones grind, he felt severed arteries pumping blood with each heartbeat, he felt torn flesh cry out in agony.

  And he screamed. He screamed louder than he had in his entire life. He felt himself being lifted and carried away. Carried to safety. But he was gonna die.

  It got hazy after that. He was pretty sure he’d called for his mother. The mother that was torn to pieces by an Eckzahn missile. The mother that would never, ever be there for him again.

  But he did remember something: a presence. A warm, loving hand holding his own, a shaky, heavily accented angelic voice begging him to not leave her. There was never a day she wasn’t with him.

  Except now. Now, he was healthy enough to be discharged. At least, so they said. He didn’t feel healthy. He could barely walk. But, beds had to be freed up for injured Eckzahn soldiers… just like doctors had to be freed up for “valuable” injured troops while he was bleeding out.

  And she had gone off with her unit to hunt down the rebel cell that had ambushed them. He felt bad for those poor bastards. He’d seen Madde on the range and in hand to hand training. The angel could absolutely be a devil when push came to shove. But some part of him also hoped the rebels could get away.

  They had a right to be angry. They had a right to fight back. They were scared and furious at their world being torn apart overnight. But that world would never come back. All the Earth’s militaries had been decimated. The governments accepted alien rule. There was no fighting that. And even if they could somehow make the occupation of Earth untenable, what then? How would they protect Earth from ships that could travel faster than light? It was hopeless.

  “That looks nasty, Mr. Ludwig. Drinking to quench the pain?”

  Aaron snapped around in his seat. Seated next to him was an anthropomorphic deer. He’d seen a few of their kind milling about, brought in by the Eckzahn as workers. He was already nursing a beer. When the hell had he come in? How had he not noticed him?

  “Do I know you?” Aaron asked, tightening his grip on his glass should he need to defend himself.

  “I don’t believe you do. But I know a few people who know you. Well, knew.” The deer turned around. His russet fur glinted oddly in the bar’s dirty light. “Strange kind of thanks the Eckzahn have. You throw away any hope of humanity rising again, you sign up to murder your fellow humans, you get shot for them, and they don’t even give you proper treatment. Hell, you’re not even given any extra pay.” The deer shook his head slowly from side to side, almost like a reptile, then took a slow sip of his beer.

  “How the fuck do you know this?” Aaron asked flatly, reaching for the sidearm he had beneath his jacket. The deer shrugged.

  “It’s not exactly a secret. EDA “troopers” are treated worse than dirt. I’m a nurse in one of their medical tents. I’ve seen EDA guys with massive gut shots get shafted for Eckzahn soldiers with little more than paper cuts.”

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  “Yeah? And what’s it to you?”

  “As I said, Mr. Ludwig; I know some people who knew you. Do the names Marius and Laura ring any bells?”

  Aaron tensed. They were his best friends in high school and college. His only friends, arguably. Having failed to reconnect after the invasion, he assumed they’d died, like so many other of his friends and family.

  “They might,” he said casually. “Again; what’s it to you?”

  “They are interested in meeting again.”

  “Then why don’t they just drop by?”

  “It’s… not that easy. Your… new profession makes them… hesitant to do so.” Another slow, deliberate sip. He placed the beer stein down gently, almost daintily, completely at odds with the slovenly establishment he was in.

  “What? They gone rebel?” Aaron scoffed incredulously. The deer glanced at him, but didn’t answer.

  Aaron realized something else: The deer’s English was excellent. There was a slight accent, but not much. Far better than Madde or any other Eckzahn could manage, even with their translators. And the deer had no such device.

  “I could arrest you right now, you know?” Aaron sneered. “Suspicion of terrorist activity. They take that sort of thing very seriously.”

  The deer turned around completely. He didn’t glare or make any move, but Aaron was suddenly struck by fear. He only now realized that the man-animal, like most of his kind, towered over him. As if that weren’t enough of an advantage, the deer retained the function of both arms.

  The bell near the door rang. Two wolves in Eckzahn uniforms walked in, rifles slung over their shoulders.

  “If you wish to arrest me, Mr. Ludwig, now’s your chance. You have the weight of numbers as well as firepower on your side. There is no question of who would come out on top in any confrontation.” Now the deer glared at him. It wasn’t a threatening glare, but a judging one. Those brown-gold eyes stared deep into his soul.

  “The real question is, could you live with yourself? Is there any shred of human spirit left inside you? Because if there is, you will not call out.”

  Aaron opened his mouth. He reached for his gun. He was about to call out to his canine comrades to take down the terrorist. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. The deer smiled.

  “I am glad to see that your friends were correct.” The deer said. “It was nice meeting you, Mr. Ludwig.” The herbivore said this loud enough for the soldiers to hear. He dropped enough Eckzahn-backed currency on the till to cover both their tabs. “I will be looking forward to meeting you again soon.” He extended a furry hand to Aaron.

  Glancing at it for a long moment, Aaron shook it. As he expected, he felt a slip of paper being pushed into his sleeve. The deer fluttered his long coat and walked out.

  Rushing back to his cube unit, Aaron closed the door and covered the one window. Breathing heavily, he sat heavily on the bed.

  Questions ran through his head. The deer man had been a rebel recruiter. That much was clear. But why? What did a damned deer care about human independence? And why him? He was EDA, the enemy. He was far more likely to try to arrest the deer than listen to what he had to say.

  With shaking fingers, Aaron struggled to undo the slip of paper, wincing from the pain still tormenting him. As he opened it up however, there was nothing. The paper was blank. Frowning, he turned it around. Nothing. Was this just some bad joke?

  In a few seconds, however, black shapes slowly began forming on the paper.

  “DORY’S DINER. 8 O’CLOCK.”

  Dory’s Diner did not exist. It had ceased to exist long before the Eckzahn invasion had made so many little things disappear. It was the diner of his childhood. He, Marius and Laura drove out there every weekend to enjoy Dory’s jalapeno burger and double chocolate milkshake. It was a short ten mile pilgrimage that ended with them watching the sun set over the canyon as they munched on their burgers.

  But then, Miss Dory died. And her son had little interest in continuing the family business. He sold the lot for peanuts then moved to Las Vegas. Dory’s Diner joined the long line of roadside diners taken over by McDonalds.

  One of the many perks of collaboration was being allowed his personal vehicle. One of the first moves the Eckzahn did when starting occupation was confiscate personal vehicles. They did that more thoroughly than confiscating personal firearms. There was only so much damage a man with a gun could do, but someone with a car could drive off. Get some friends. Pack some supplies in the trunk. And maybe set something up that would be a huge pain in the neck for the occupiers later on.

  His EDA badge allowed him to go through checkpoints without any issue. Then he drove out on the streets. It was the first time he braved the highway on his own after the Invasion.

  Abandoned cars littered the road. A few were blown to pieces, but most of them were intact, doors still open, sand and dust eroding the paint. He looked inside a few of them. A scattered card game on the back seat. A smashed pink iPad next to a torn baby seat. He drove through the graveyard of his world, through the remnants of humanity that the Eckzahn Union did not believe worthy of cleaning up.

  He reached the former site of Dory’s Diner with no issue. After all, for once, there was no traffic to worry about. Just dead cars and the occasional skeleton picked clean by scavenger birds. The McDonalds, he noted with a small degree of satisfaction, had received a direct hit from a mortar. Only one half of the yellow M remained in front of the rubble-strewn entrance.

  He pulled up into the crumbled parking lot and looked around.

  “I am glad to see your friends were not wrong about you after all, Mr. Ludwig.” Aaron whipped around to see the deer once again. He’d just looked in that direction, and there was no one there. How the hell did he keep doing that?

  The deer’s outfit was changed completely. Gone was the longcoat, and instead he was wearing the improvised plate carrier he’d seen the rebels wearing. An assault rifle was slung on his shoulder, yet he kept his hands well away from it. Something on his chest glinted in the moonlight. It was a small cross necklace.

  Aaron frowned. Why would an alien worship an Earth religion?

  “I came all the way out here,” Aaron said. “What do you want? And where are Marius and Laura?”

  “You shall meet them later. For now, you shall have to be satisfied with my presence alone.” the deer said. “Quite frankly, Mr. Ludwig, it would be unwise to meet any human members of my organization for now. Their opinion about you is most… poor.”

  “Right,” Aaron scoffed. “So, you want me to leave my comfortable life, become a fugitive, and join a bunch of starving rebels living in shitty tents that want to rip my head off?”

  “The Eckzahn wish you dead as well, Mr. Ludwig. Or at the very least, they wish the complete eradication of your culture and very essence, and for you to exist only to serve them. As you felt on your own skin, they care little for your life.”

  Aaron didn’t reply.

  “You are correct, however. I am here on a recruitment drive. We have no interest for you to join us, as you so eloquently put it, in our ‘shitty tents’. You are within the enemy’s organization. A grunt and trusted little, but within their organization all the same. And you took a bullet for them. While they will never appreciate that, the fact you didn’t quit the EDA said something to them.” The mysterious deer smirked. “And… you have the ear… and eyes of one of them.”

  Aaron flinched.

  “If you want me to do anything to Madde, you and your rebel buddies can go-”

  “Oh, who said anything about hurting the lovely Sergeant?” The deer smiled. “Quite the contrary, it very much lies within our best interests that Miss Madde remains healthy.”

  Aaron said nothing.

  “So, what do you want to do?” he asked.

  “Well, for now, we want you to-”

  “No, I meant overall. What is your endgame? How do you plan to liberate Earth?” Aaron cried.

  “That is a long way off, Mr. Ludwig. Years, perhaps decades off. We are taking things one step at a-”

  “One step at a time off a goddamned cliff! How are you going to lead a campaign against the Eckzahn? Their technology went through the Earth’s best military tech like they were friggin Fischer Price toys! What do you have? Old scavenged guns and uparmored Ford trucks. And let’s say, by some miracle, you get the Eckzahn to retreat. What then? How will you defend from the inevitable future invasion? We have no way to stop their space fleet, and your merry band of hooligans won’t be in any shape to stop another planetary invasion. You’d just make sure what little is left of humanity gets eradicated!” Aaron screamed out the last sentence. He hadn’t realized how much he’d bottled this up.

  The inevitability, the sheer hopelessness of his planet’s fate. The harsh truth was, humanity would never be masters of the Earth again. Their best course of action was to be useful enough to the Eckzahn Union that one day, they be given a kernel of independence once again.

  The deer was silent for a long moment, then he produced a pipe, which he filled with tobacco and lit.

  “You are correct, Mr. Ludwig. Our ‘merry little band of hooligans’ cannot face the Eckzahn alone. We couldn’t even hope to overwhelm their garrison, which I might add, is little more than a token force while their main armies go off to conquer other worlds. But… as you may have gathered, Earth was not the first world to fall to the Eckzahn Union’s tyranny.” The deer’s eyes blazed in the moonlight. Anger and the yearning for vengeance seemed to light up his irises as the old curved pipe blazed hot embers upon his cross.

  “My world too has long been beneath the Eckzahn yoke. And if you believe things get better with time, allow me to quash that hope: it does not. They will forever view you as inferior. For you are not a canine. You are, at best, their servant.

  The Free Earth Movement is ultimately about Earth, and about humanity. But we are only one link of the chain that will one day wield the mace that shatters the Eckzahn’s deathgrip upon our worlds.”

  “So… you’re planning to contact these other Resistance movements and coordinate uprisings while the Eckzahn are busy with war somewhere else?” Aaron asked, more as a statement than a question.

  The deer grinned behind his smoking pipe.

  “You’re a fast one, Mr. Ludwig. Yes. It will be a long and arduous process. One that we expect will take at least five years, much more likely over a decade.”

  “That’s… quite a longshot.” Aaron muttered.

  “Look at me.” The deer demanded. “Look at me, Mr. Ludwig.” Aaron looked up. The deer’s eyes blazed once again.

  “I’ve seen you looking questioningly at this.” he raised the small cross. “You see me, an alien, fighting for the humans, speaking your tongue and worshipping your God. I adopted your culture because mine is long gone. I came here on Earth as a mere laborer, like millions of my fellows to other worlds, spread out to ensure we couldn’t organize. That’s all we are to the damned wolves. I landed here, expecting to see a cowed, obedient population.

  But what I saw instead, was grit and fighting spirit. I saw rebels take down Eckzahn supply AVs with little more than some wire between two buildings . I saw priests standing hand in hand with their parishioners before the bulldozers that would have destroyed their churches. I saw people hiding old books and hard drives of Old World knowledge and culture, preserving them for future generations.

  I saw hope, Mr. Ludwig. I saw someone who fought on. And how could you do any different? The story of your kind is one of hardship, endurance and thriving in sheer adversity. Your ancestors lived in caves, surrounded by creatures that were larger, stronger and faster than them.

  Did they cower around the fire, hoping that if they stayed quiet the monsters wouldn’t come for them? No. They built weapons of wood, stone and bone, and went after the monsters. The weak, slow humans conquered Earth from mammoths and sabertoothed tigers.

  So I say, Mr. Ludwig, that your kind can once again rise from the ashes. And I wish to be among such men of iron when the time comes.”

  The deer’s eyes blazed brighter than the embers within his pipe as he gave his speech.

  Aaron was silent. He saw his parents, begging him to avenge them. He saw himself leading his world to victory over the invaders. He saw Madde, eyes filled with tears of grief and betrayal…

  He grit his teeth.

  “One condition,” the human said. “No harm comes to Madde. If you have to…” he swallowed his words. “If you have to… capture her, you will treat her fairly and humanely.”

  The deer laughed out loud. For such a restrained man, he had a resounding, chortling laugh.

  “My, that lovely little mutt really wrapped you around her little finger, didn’t she?”

  “DON’T YOU FUCKING CALL HER THAT!” Aaron roared, ripping his gun from his holster and aiming it right at the deer’s chest. His only reaction was to raise an eyebrow.

  “Calm down, Mr. Ludwig. If it means anything, I apologize. She doesn’t seem like a bad person… at least as far as the Eckzahn’s jackbooted soldiers go.”

  Aaron began to lower the gun himself, somewhat ashamed of his outburst.

  “But you will have to come to terms with a simple fact: your lover-”

  “She’s not my lover!” Aaron shouted, blushing deeply.

  “As you wish. Your… furred friend is the enemy. She is here for one purpose: to finish off the last of Earth’s resistance to Eckzahn rule and assist in incorporating it within her Empire. She doesn’t strike me as a bad person. She seems to greatly care about you, and she is surprisingly kind to other humans from the little I’ve seen. But that does not change the fact that she is the enemy. And we can do our best to capture her, treat her well and ensure her wellbeing, but sooner or later, you will have to look her in the eye and tell her that you betrayed her.”

  Aaron lowered his gun completely. He blinked away tears, biting his lip. Madde… his lovely Madde… his sole comfort… the first person in years to make him feel like he mattered…

  “Fine,” he said. “I will… I will join you.” he holstered his weapon.

  The deer grinned. “I am very happy to hear you say that, Mr. Ludwig. You have made the right choice. For you, your people, and your children, should the Lord above ever bless you with any.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Aaron asked flatly.

  The deer produced a tiny computer chip. “In a few days, your medical leave will come to an end. At which point, you will be escorted into the Eckzahn’s HQ for debriefing. I believe the lovely Miss Madde will also accompany you. This chip fits any standard Eckzahn military computer. Simply slot it in any computer when no one is looking, and we will have complete access to their communications in this region using their cipher rotation. I suggest hiding it behind your teeth. Eckzahn electronics do not have the vulnerability to humidity that human ones do. Leave the chip there for at least ten minutes, then take it out again. It is vital that you do so, else they will catch on.”

  Aaron looked down at the tiny chip. He’d seen a few of these before used by occupation forces by slotting them in their devices. They seemed to work similarly to USB sticks.

  “Alright… I’ll do it.” He said. He tried to dash the image of Madde out of his head.

  “In that case, this is where we part ways. We will contact you again when we need you.” Aaron shook hands with the towering deer again. No paper slips came out this time.

  “What’s your name?” Aaron asked. The deer puffed on his pipe contemplatively.

  “My old name means nothing. But… your fellow humans have been kind enough to grant me another; Spartacus. I understand he was a great human warrior who fought for the freedom of his people.”

  Aaron didn’t have the heart to tell him how Spartacus’s rebellion ended.

  Nodding, he turned around and walked back to his car.

  “And Aaron?” Spartacus said.

  Aaron turned around, vaguely realizing this was the first time the deer man had called him by his Christian name.

  “Earth Fights On.”