Reconstruction

Tau, MIT, Revere Company Command Post
24 hours later

Townsend and Dorman, with their escort, jumped out of the helicopter and ran in the required crouch to get out of the pressure footprint of its rotor as it took off again, bound for the fuel station. They had taken the latter part of their flight rather more slowly, after learning of the battle.

After Hildenstoy and the Berets had reported Chao’s death, the Revere Company’s reserves had moved in, backed by the bulk of the militia. They hadn’t had any fatalities among themselves, although there were a few injuries. But twelve civilians and one of the Failure lieutenants had died when that lieutenant had fired her gun at a fuel tank. Three more of Chao’s supporters had died in close-quarters firefights. The tranq darts wouldn’t dent armor or break riot shields, so heavier ordinance had had to be used. The last two on the body count were Failures who had died due to reactions to the tranqs, including one of Chao’s guards. Thirty-five of Failures had been taken prisoner without a fight. The other forty-three left alive, including Maness, had surrendered only when confronted by the infantry and their air support. There were a few more that were keeping quiet, hoping to be taken for civilians. They hadn’t been brought in yet, and probably wouldn’t need to be. Without weapons, without a leader, and without any support from the community, Chao’s movement was gone.

Unsurprisingly, there was no honor guard waiting for the Caltech envoy, just Cadet Corporal van Allen and his militia assistants guarding the entrance to the reclaimed MIT Police Station.

Twelve days later, the proas reached campus, sailing up the New Charles to the base of the dam with their keels barely above the mud. By then, all of the remaining traps and hostage devices had been safely taken down and disabled. The dead had been burned and buried, the surviving Failures had been placed in protective custody, and the population had largely moved back into their homes. Townsend and the surviving MIT medics had started to discharge patients wounded in the battle. Zijun and Gera had been cremated and their ashes scattered in the closest approximation that the Techers had yet had of state funerals. Hazmat teams had retrieved the remains of the missiles and disassembled the hostage bombs, and they had placed the warheads at the center of a large package of other reminders of the war and placed it all on a raft. As the reconstruction continued, there came the time when the raft was hauled by the proas out into the ocean for three days. They stopped directly above the trench of a subduction zone. Then the raft was sunk. It would fall four and a half kilometers down, hitting the bottom far below any depth where it could be retrieved. Soon all the weapons would be covered by landslides and eventually drawn down into the crust. This was the official end of the Failure War.

Only the last three exiles in California remained. The oligarchs’ council met again. They grieved over what had happened, tried to find another way things could have gone. In the end, though, they put this aside as well as they could. Julian articulated it for them all. “We did the best we saw at the time. We’ll have to trust that that will be enough for the Examiners. And we will have to keep living every day as well as we can, even though the effects of this war will not leave us.”