Mistrunner 4 - Chapter 25 - Fighting the Good Fight in all the Wrong Ways (Patreon)

On every world, and in every instance, war is ugly. So it has always been, and so it will always be. But when Mira fights a war, even battle-hardened veterans blanch at her commitment to atrocity. Such horrors are necessary if we want to win such a lopsided war.

Alistaris Kargat

I sat atop the Leviathan, staring at the horizon as the sun set behind the mountains. The fading light cast the expanse in a majestic cascade of blue and orange. The undeniable beauty stood in stark contrast to the day’s actions. I wasn’t ashamed. Nor did I feel guilty. However, I couldn’t escape the reality of what I had done.

I had killed plenty of people in the past. Millions of them, in fact. However, I’d never engaged in such blatant slaughter before. The aliens I’d killed weren’t innocent, but many of them weren’t combatants, either. As such, they’d been entirely capable of fighting back. Certainly, they’d tried. I’d been shot hundreds of times, and yet, their efforts were for naught. Few shots had gotten through Mist Shield, and the ones that did were robbed of much of their momentum. As a result, none had even gotten past the thin armor of my infiltration suit. So, I was entirely unharmed.

The same couldn’t be said for my enemies.

And more than anything, I felt tired. Not physically. I could keep going for days without rest. And mentally, I was still just as sharp as ever. Maybe more so. However, from an emotional standpoint, I couldn’t quite outrun the implications of my actions. So, hours later, Patrick found me still sitting atop the ship and staring out at the abyssal darkness that was only possible in the wildest of places.

His footsteps were loud as he closed in on me, though I didn’t look his way. Not even when he settled in beside me. Our shoulders touching, we beheld the black landscape together.

Then, a few minutes later, he asked, “Do you want to talk?”

“Not really.”

“I think you might need to,” he said, putting his arm around me and pulling me close.

“I know,” I responded, though I didn’t follow that statement up. To his credit, Patrick didn’t break the silence. He knew me well enough to know that I would talk when I got ready to talk, and not a second before that. Finally, a few minutes later, I said, “I don’t think killing should be that easy.”

“It’s not.”

“I don’t think you understand,” I said. “With a thought, I can tear the Mist from a person’s body. I can agitate it. I can move it. With Mist Authority, I can probably make someone spontaneously combust if I wanted to. I have limits right now, though. It still hurts, and if I try to do it against really powerful people, I’ll end up like I did in the Rift. But I’m moving past those limits a little more each day. Eventually, there won’t be anything holding me back.”

“Good.”

I glanced in his direction, horror etched on my face. “Nobody should have that much power.”

“No. They shouldn’t. But people do. We have no idea what these aliens are capable of. So, if we’re fighting that kind of threat, I want someone like you on our side.”

He didn’t really understand what I was going through. I was never afraid to kill. I’d gotten used to living in a world where such a thing was just a part of survival. And I wasn’t even that concerned with killing innocents – largely because I didn’t consider any alien worthy of such a moniker. Even Alistaris and his people were invaders, and if they stepped even a toe out of line, I would throw them in with all the other would-be oppressors.

Yet, when I thought about my recent actions, I couldn’t deny the anxiety twisting my insides into knots.

It all came to one, simple fact: I was terrified I’d let my power run away from me. I’d done it before, and often enough that it could easily be called a pattern. In Nova, I’d done it willingly, but on the moon – and with the Pacificians – I had simply underestimated my own abilities.

And millions had died.

With the further development of my powers, I was terrified that I’d make the same mistakes. And at the scale of my capabilities, I wouldn’t just be destroying a city or a few million alien androids. No – if I kept going, it was feasible that I could kill everything and everyone on the planet.

It was a terrifying level of power, and the responsibility of possessing that capability was daunting.

I leaned into Patrick, and for the longest time, neither of us said anything. “I’m afraid, Pick. I know what I need to do. I know what it’s going to take for us to win the coming war. The aliens are ruthless, and so we have to be ruthless, too. But I’m afraid…I’m afraid of what it’s going to do to me. To us. Even if we win…”

“We will,” he said after I trailed off. “Because the alternative is enslavement, right? That’s what we’ve seen. We can’t live in that kind of world, so we only have two options. We run, or we fight, and with everything we have. Half measures won’t work. We can’t afford to have lines we won’t cross. Because they don’t. You can’t win wars by following rules, especially when the two sides are so lopsided. So, if we stay, if we fight, we have to embrace what we’ll end up becoming.”

He sighed. “But for the record, I advocate running. I know you don’t, though. And I see the value in staying and fighting. But I know you. I can predict what this is going to do to you, and I don’t want to see it. I’ll stay, though. I’ll stay and fight and support you because it needs to be done, and you are the only person who can do it.”

I looked up. “You really think that? There are a lot of powerful people out there…”

“Not like you.”

I knew that, of course. Maybe I’d fooled myself into believing that there were others who could do the things I could do, but that just wasn’t the case. As far as I’d seen, I was probably the most powerful individual on the planet, and I wasn’t sure if the next person on that list was even close. If Earth was going to win the coming war, I needed to push my misgivings aside and do what had to be done.

“I hate this,” I said. “I wish we could just live our lives without having to worry about war and death and oppression.”

“We can. We can go right now. We’ll spend the next couple of months out in the middle of nowhere, and then we’ll leave as soon as the quarantine drops,” he said. He sighed. “But I know that’s not what’s going to happen. You can’t leave this behind. You feel like you’re responsible for the whole world.”

I didn’t dispute that. Ever since I’d made my choice to join Alistaris, I had resolved to accept my share of responsibility for Earth’s fate. Now, given the rapid increase in my power, I felt that weight even more keenly. Earth needed me. That was obvious and inescapable. However, I needed it, too. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I left it to be plundered and pillaged by a bunch of unscrupulous aliens.

“I wish I could just leave.”

“But you can’t. I don’t think I could, either,” he admitted, running his cybernetic hand through his hair. It had grown longer, almost as if he wanted to compensate for the half that was metal. He’d so far refused to cover his artificial parts with synthetic skin. I wasn’t sure if he looked at those parts as a badge of honor, or if he’d been telling the truth when he’d told me that he kept them uncovered so he could tinker with them. “The idea of looking back on a dead or enslaved world and knowing I could have done something to prevent that…I don’t know if I could handle the guilt.”

“Me neither.”

After that, the conversation died out, but we continued to sit there atop the Leviathan where we enjoyed the comfort the other provided. Hours passed, and eventually, we migrated back inside where we found our way to bed. Sleep didn’t come quickly, though, and by the time morning came, I greeted it with bleary eyes and an exhaustion that had little to do with my lack of sleep.

That’s when Alistaris contacted me. I sent the call to the ship’s communications apparatus so that Patrick could hear, and I asked, “What’s up, Al? You going to try to trick me again?”

“I didn’t trick you.”

“You definitely hid things from me,” I said. “How about you play it straight with me from now on? I’d hate for something like dishonesty to come between us.”

I wasn’t actually angry with him for keeping me in the dark. It was more annoyance than anything else. But still, I didn’t want him to think he could get away with withholding information that might save lives. If I’d known that those reptilian aliens had multiple warships nearby, then I would have set things up quite differently.

“I wasn’t certain that they would come,” he stated. “And even if I had been, I needed things to play out precisely like they did.”

“Why?”

“Shock. Awe. You were clearly caught by surprise, and yet, you still ripped their warships from the sky, and in only a few minutes,” he stated. “They will have seen it, and they will know precisely what it means.”

“And what’s that?”

“That you’ve begun to break free of the system,” he stated. “What you just did is the domain of mystics, and not untrained ones, either. That will frighten them. For some factions, it will make this planet and its resources much less attractive. Some will do the math, then decide to leave well enough alone and move on to the next planet.”

“You think that’ll work?” asked Patrick. “And just so you know, I don’t enjoy being used as bait.”

“Noted,” Alistaris said. “As to whether or not it will work, I don’t know. It is only the beginning of the strategy.”

“How about you tell us the rest?” I asked.

After that, he went on to explain his plan, which hinged on me killing a lot more aliens. However, instead of simply taking positions or exterminating the interlopers, the point was to make the planet seem a lot more dangerous than it was. To do that, I would adopt a variety of different identities via Mimic, then repeatedly display the same power I’d shown against the reptilian aliens.

“With any luck, they’ll think Earth has at least a handful of powerful Mystics,” he said. “That will give them pause. For some, it will deter their invasion altogether. As I’ve stated, this is not a war of ideologies. Not for the invaders. It is a simple business venture, and when the cost begins to outweigh the benefits, we will win.”

I wanted to dispute the viability of that claim, but I couldn’t. So, I asked, “What’s the next step, then? Where do you need me?”

“The next fort is smaller,” Alistaris answered. “No more than a hundred combatants. Maybe fifty support personnel. But their defenses are second to none.”

He went on to describe the outpost. Like every population center, it was surrounded by a wall, but it was also protected by a host of drones and combat bots whose number and relative power rivaled the Dingyt settlement I’d infiltrated what felt like a lifetime ago. Back then, I’d had some serious issues with the mission, but with my current progress, I knew it would be much simpler.

After he described the defenses and sent over a packet of information concerning the base, Alistaris said, “You had better get going. Over the next few weeks, you’re going to crisscross the globe. Each target is going to be thousands of miles away from the last so as to enhance the perception that it is the result of multiple mystic-level defenders.”

With that, we said our goodbyes and got underway. Patrick wasn’t convinced that we were on the right track – I could see it in his face – but he pointedly didn’t say as much. Instead, he only asked me if I was sure about it. When I told them I was, he dropped and dissention.

I would like to say that the following campaign was exciting, but the reality was that it was ugly, tedious, and ultimately boring. That first outpost fell without any real defense. The moment I got through their Mist shield and disabled their robotic defenders, they gave up. It did them no good, of course. I wasn’t there to take prisoners. I slaughtered them all – except one – without even moving a finger.

Was I proud of it?

No.

It was disgusting. But in a war for my planet’s survival, I couldn’t afford mercy. The one survivor was allowed to live so they could spread the word. Of course, that story had been carefully manipulated – mostly, by the fact that, with Mimic, I had taken on the visage of a short and muscular male – but the survivor didn’t need to know that.

After that first salvo, I proceeded with Alistaris’ plan, and Patrick and I proceeded to spend the next month going back and forth across the planet. In the process, we killed more types of aliens than I could count. From more of the reptilian sort to giant blobs that moved like slugs, I slaughtered them all.

It got easier, too. With every passing day that saw me slaughtering more aliens, I lost touch with the part of me that found it objectionable. Increasingly, I just saw enemies.

Not people.

Not lives lost.

Not families left without their loved ones.

Just faceless masses of dead enemies.

That helped with the guilt. I also found that it was even more helpful to focus on their Mist auras. Those were just globs of nanites instead of living, breathing people. And in that way, I dealt with the trauma of doing something nobody should ever be asked to do.

“I think that makes it worse,” I said on the thirtieth day after Alistaris’s campaign had begun. I was sitting in the ship’s living area, just staring ahead at nothing. That day, I’d swept through two separate alien installations, leaving only a couple of survivors behind. Those were meant to spread the word.

“What does?” asked Patrick, who was busy fiddling with one of his cybernetic legs. Lately, he’d been talking about adding rocket boosters so he could fly, but he’d yet to figure out a means of stabilization. He was convinced he could do it, though. And I hoped for his success, not least because I would’ve loved the ability to fly. That wasn’t on my mind at the moment, though.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I want to feel guilty, but I don’t. I’ve lost count of how many aliens I’ve killed, but I don’t really feel bad about it anymore. Now, it just feels like a tedious task that needs to be done. I’m just afraid of what that says about the sort of person I am. Of the kind of person I’m becoming.”

“It’s worth it.”

“Do you really think that?” I asked, looking up and searching for confirmation that I was doing the right thing. Maybe I was going about it in the wrong way, but I had to believe that the cause was just.

“I do,” he said without a hint of doubt. I appreciated that, though I wasn’t certain if I really believed him.

Before we could get into any further, I received a communications request from Alistaris. I let it come through, applying Secure Connection without a second thought.

“We have a problem,” he said.

“What kind?” I asked.

“The kind that could derail everything,” was his response. “We need to meet, and as soon as you can arrange it.”

We were still scheduled to hit another couple of bases in the next few days, so I knew that it had to be something serious if Alistaris wanted us to abandon those plans. So, I said, “Send us some coordinates, and we’ll be there as soon as possible.”

After that, I let Patrick know what was going on – or at least what I knew of it. Then, we headed up to the cockpit. Only a few moments later, Patrick joined me and fired up the engines. Once he’d gone through his pre-flight checklist, he had the Leviathan in the sky, and we were speeding toward the coordinates.

It only took us a few hours to reach Alistaris’s location, which was a vast savannah where he’d landed his own fleet of ships. Only a few of them were of a size with the Leviathan, but there were a dozen smaller vessels nearby.

“Think this is everything he’s got?” Patrick asked.

“I don’t know. But it doesn’t bode well for us that he’s out in the open like this,” I answered. “Something must really be wrong.”

“Well, nothing for it but to land and find out.”

With that, he took the Leviathan in and landed about a hundred yards away from the other ships.