Eon's Edge (A Time-warped space opera)

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He awoke in an escape pod with a dim awareness of an old adage about Captains going down with their ships. But someone on the crew evidently disagreed. The pods had launched away from the doomed ship, but all of them were swirling in the gravitational wake that followed the eruption. How long had he been out?

Another voice.

As Bryce strained against inertia, barely strapped into the pod's acceleration couch – he saw his portable wrist comp laying on the ground, having slipped away from him in the confusion. A holo-screen was up. The jostling and shaking must have accidentally activated a file.

His heart leaped as he recognized his youngest daughter's gap-toothed smile.

The recording from home. A welcome distraction from the beginning and end of his first battleship command.

And... who was that – oh, her little friend. Susie's playmate was a wide-eyed girl with jet black hair, slightly taller and trying to horn in on the camera angle. While Susie had a world of opportunities in her future, her friend was another matter. Poor little Allegra was one of the girls from the summer of 2092, when they first learned what lengths the Sovereign Worlds would go to. Children into weapons. Undoubtedly João had been referring to girls like her. But he wouldn't relive that shit parade now. Bryce deliberately slated time when he was at home to engage the poor child. It was so unfair; the media hype surrounding the situation. No reason to associate these innocent girls with the terrorists. None. Poor kid was almost pathetically desperate for a father-figure. Plus, he knew her mom. Used to be a great pilot. Past tense.

"Look what we made in class, daddy!" Susie exhorted, holding to the camera a vinyl sheet that shimmered with an iridescent imprint of a wriggling tadpole. "We raised baby frogs in biology class!"

"Adults call them 'tadpoles!" her friend whispered conspiratorially in Susie's ear.

The holographic decal shifted in the lighting from the imprint of said juvenile amphibian, tilting the decal revealed a progression of images showing in stop-motion legs sprouting towards maturity. Almost too adorable.

In the background, lazy palms swayed with a gentle ocean breeze beyond the patio door of his home on Oahu.

"Hiiiii Mr. Gazelle," Allegra said. "Miss Gazelle says you'll be home soon."

"When you're allll done," Susie added. "Then mom says the General of Secretaries is supposed to pin a metal on you."

"That is like the most important Secretary in the world!" Allie's exclamation cut short as the recording stopped, Susie seemed to have accidentally dropped her recording device.

A Medal? Not Bloody likely, maybe posthumously. The current political climate was going to hit him hard when he was called to the carpet about his wayward security-risk son. If he survived this madcap catapulting long enough for the court-martial. But at least Susie wouldn't get involved with the SW's, this war was going to end long before her majority.

It might already be over.

There was a lot to love about this modern world he had failed to protect, where a Canadian Iranian like him from Hawaii could so easily connect with a South-African Australian across thousands of miles of relative peace and prosperity. Not sure how long until his Italian-Maori wife found out about it. But a lot of good if you didn't mind the bureaucracy to make an ancient Chinese Imperial court official green with envy.

One of his own missiles passed the window of his pod, circling in futile pursuit of a target denied it by a cyclone of tortured space-time.

He couldn't help but marvel along with Caldwell, a breakthrough of this magnitude – whatever the end result was as much a success for the Sovereign Worlds as a failure for the United Nations to keep up. And... how fast were they moving? Was that Mars in the window? The power to warp space itself! The Gold Standard of those old sci-fi vids. His death would establish proof of concept.