The Celestial Code

Chapter One

Dessa's chest rose and fell heavily, her knuckles turning white from the iron-like grip she had on her gun. Adrenaline flooded her system, leftover from her final kill and making it impossible to loosen her hold or relax any of her tense muscles. They would ache later. They always ached later. In the back of Dessa's mind she tacked a note there to remind herself to take a bath later. Between the sweat dripping down the back of her neck and making her black suit cling to her body even more than it already did and the way her muscles had remained tense for hours on end, she would need it.

When the H-bomb went off, she had known the battle was over. The war still waged, but this fight was done. Nothing survived the H-bomb. They had so few of them and therefore, used them so sparingly, but she understood why the general had decided on such drastic measures. There were more bodies from their side than the Celests side covering the battlefield. No one would admit it later, but they wouldn't have survived if they hadn't dropped the bomb. Now, in the distance, Dessa could see the plumes of smoke rising and curling in the distance. A town burning to ash. Every mother, child and father turned to cinders and crisps. She'd seen the bombs used before and it always twisted her stomach.

Cheers and hollers still echoed in her mind when her fellow soldiers heard the explosion. Dessa could never bring herself to make a sound. She hated the Celests with every ounce of her being, but she didn't wish death on innocents whether they were human or alien. Little children didn't deserve to die for the mistakes and bloodthirst of their parents.

The sound of bones cracking under a boot jerked her from her transe. Dessa's grip on her gun at last eased and she holstered it. From the corner of her eyes she saw Elio standing next to her. Blood smeared across his face and coated his short cropped black hair, mixing with sweat from the blistering suns of Avere. Half of his suit had been torn off, leaving his shirt exposed along with a long, nasty cut down the inside of his elbow.

"That's how many used now?" he asked quietly.

Unlike the other human soldiers he didn't cheer either. Unlike her, though, he didn't cheer because he cared about how many bombs they had left.

Dessa wiped her sweaty palms on her mud and blood covered pant legs. "Five."

He let out a low whistle. "That leaves ten left."

Ten may seem like a lot, but in the grand scheme of a war that had been going on for five years, it didn't feel like it. In all those five years, they had only used five of them and only in the most dire of circumstances. And the one time the emperor had used an H-bomb to show first... it had done nothing to deter the Celests.

All around them the surviving soldiers whooped, clapping friends on the backs or hobbling their way toward the med chips that would be arriving soon. Very few remained fixed on the battlefield, clutching the hands of battlemates or whispering prayers to the gods for the dead. Dessa used to eye the soldiers who left their dead comrades behind with distaste and disdain, but after two years of fighting beside them, she understood now. They couldn't let themselves slow down or think too hard about how many friends they had just lost. If they did, they would go mad. If a soldier stopped to think or mourn every loss they had... they would never find the willpower to get back on the battlefield.

And that was why Dessa turned her back on the blue H-bomb clouds in the distance and the bloody battlefield. She stopped to dwell for too long, she would lose it and she couldn't do that. Not again. The soldiers needed her to have a strong face. They needed to respect her.

"Hear anything from the general?" she asked as Elio fell into step beside her.

He swiped a palm over his forehead, leaving a smear of blood against his dark brown skin. "The capital is still unbreached, but we did take Taza and Monkoy. But they also took Titan City."