Fourty-three seconds before he was shot dead, Jeremiah Travers lowered the MAX-9t launcher from his shoulder and let it thud into the dusty rock that he stood upon. The smoke from the warhead it had just fired arced upwards in a wispy white line, standing out against the black and starry sky.
The tri-strontium combat suit he wore was sparking and hissing as it leaked out its pressurized air into Hammersee’s atmosphere, through the burst of rifle fire that it had intercepted on the left side of his torso. A severe injury, and the tears he blinked back as he followed the missile’s trajectory emphasized that.
Some had long claimed that the moments before death were like both a snapshot into the present moment, and involved memories flashing before one’s eyes. Travers let both come to him as they may in these, his final moments.
Thirty-five seconds.
He had cut short his chemistry degree on Erie’s surface to join with the nascent resistance movement against Liberty’s occupation, swiftly to become a de-facto annexation. Travers had watched what he’d felt was the nominally “free” society he’d grown up in, subjected to arbitration and oppression by outsiders. The curfews, the full-body searches, being harassed by uniformed and armed Libertonian military police–it wasn’t long before he found himself in contact with people just as alarmed and outraged as he was, just a small cell in an only slightly larger local system-wide resistance movement.
As he watched the missile streak towards the smudge against the night sky, he winced through the pain of his wound and became dimly aware that the gunfire a hundred yards away had stopped; it was likely his compatriots were now dead. Still, the missile’s smoke arc started to wave and follow in time with the dips and dives of the Valkyrie that needed to be removed from the equation of this prison break.
Twenty-two seconds.
The sporadic raids against the Libertonian occupation in Pennsylvania, on the heels of the one major fleet-based battle fought there; it had disillusioned Travers. But he’d heard one particular speech amid the panoply of collaborators, squabbling rebels, and detached politicians flooding the Neural Net with their own takes on the political event: from the obscure Bundschuh, of all things. He had been lucky enough to manage to get off-world and be taken to their stronghold in Rheinland as Klugmann’s men pulled out and left Pennsylvania to its fate, promising to one day return.
Why had he joined them? He struggled through the pain, tried to filter out the ideology that Klugmann’s speeches had touched upon, the faces of the friends and acquaintances he’d made, tried to put into his own words what had brought him here, less than half a minute before his death.
Fifteen seconds.
All the jukes and dodges; the rainbow of countermeasure flare packages the Valkyrie dropped in an effort to shake its lethal tail–Against all odds, a miracle happened. Both blips in the distance collided and disappeared in a fantastic orange-and-green explosion. The fighter, scrambled as part of the reinforcement when the prison camp’s garrison became aware of Travers’ group’s infiltration and escape attempt, wouldn’t be raking its tachyon cannons across the defenseless near-hundred people fleeing for the Pelican-class transport that would ferry them to freedom; alongside the survivors of the taskforce.
Seven seconds.
And as Travers was vaguely bathed in that starlight and green-explosion backdrop, it hit him. He’d gotten here, was about to sacrifice himself, because he recognized that Erie–his home–was a symptom of something bigger than his own life, or of a cause he’d followed either then or presently. He wanted to synthesize “Freedom”--Whatever it may mean–Into its simplest, most elemental form, and he guessed he wouldn’t have had it any other way in the end than he had now.
The thudding of boots against rock snapped him out of his last reverie, and he turned to face the half-dozen guns pointing at him from thirty feet away. Jeremiah Travers spread his arms wide and spoke.
“You’re too late. What we’ve started can’t be stopped.”
