John stepped away from the party and lit up a smoke.  They would be signing up tomorrow morning and a tension had been seeping into his mind, gradually increasing the closer that moment drew.


    “You shouldn’t disappear off on your own.  Two Guns is trying to get Armand to duel,”  Ryn said from behind him.


    “Is that what it’s like to deal with me?  Just popping up where you aren’t expected?” he chuckled.


    “Oh you’re much worse than me Dad.  I have to be able to see where I want to go, I don’t have some system enhanced memory thing letting me go anywhere I’ve been before.”


    “I suppose that’s fair.”  John turned and carefully ignored the subconscious flinch he noticed in his daughter as Ryn met his ruby eyes.  He pulled his sight in, making it as close to the human normal as he could manage.  Ghostly outlines became semi-solid as his vision was scaled down and structures and people appeared almost like they used to.  “Maybe you should get eyes like these.  I can see through anything.”


    “No thanks Dad.  They’re creepy.”


    “Creepy?  Charming!” John laughed and pulled Ryn into a hug.  He stepped back and put a hand on each of her shoulders as he stared down at her face.  “I’ll miss you kid,” he said softly.


    “I know.  I’ll miss you too Dad.  Let’s not get maudlin, Kev is probably twitching at your emotions!”


    “Mars will be easier for him, at least.  There’s only a few hundred people living there.”  John stepped back and turned to the view from the balcony.  They were in a park section of the bunker.  A vast cavern whose walls and ceiling were covered in screens and projectors to create an idyllic horizon around the expanse of parkland and forests Bob had cultivated deep underground.


    “I’m looking forward to Mars.  Have you seen the training facilities Bob has built?”


    “No love.  What are they like?”  John had seen the plans, he just wanted to listen to his daughter''s voice.


    “There’s huge caves made into all sorts of environments.  Parklands like this-” she waved a hand at the artificial landscape below them, “-urban complexes, even alien-style structures.  Weird mechanical and biological looking things!  All populated by bots and bioconstructs from Pete.  I had a look at his attempt at a Void spawning structure; it was awesome.  Twisty corridors and brood rooms crawling with messed up looking monsters!”


    John smiled to himself and let her ramble, asking only enough questions to keep her narrative flowing enthusiastically, as he soaked up the memories.  She would be so different when they came back.  The adult she would grow into would be shaped by strife and conflict, a weapon honed for the coming war, and he wouldn’t be part of that process from here on out.


    Ryn had already drifted away from Vic and John, to an extent.  Only in the normal way that happens with all teenagers, thus far.  She was going to spend years training and learning to make the most of her powers while they were separated and that natural distancing would create a vast gulf between his Ryn, standing next to him discussing the intricacies of using her power in confined spaces, and the woman who he would meet for the first time whenever the system decided to send him back home.


    He was confident she would grow into a good person.  Her friends and their families would be moving to Mars as well, along with a number of people with vital manufacturing abilities.  Bob, with the blessing of the Monarchs, had laid out complex plans that would take years, probably decades to realise.  Turning the interior of Mars and the Moon into massive industrial zones churning out all the materials of war that humanity was going to need was not a small project.


    Ryn gradually wound down and looked up at her dad, her enthusiasm fading slightly.


    “Were you even listening?” she asked.


    “I was, sweetheart.  I’m sure you’ll do fine while we’re away.  You’re a good kid.”  John controlled his voice carefully, preventing the emotions choking up his chest from showing through.


    “Of course we’ll be fine!  Heck, when you get back we’ll be ready to choke out the Void as soon as they appear in the solar system and they’ll still be fifteen years away!  We’ll be ready Dad.”  Her voice was full of the confidence of youth but perhaps, John thought, it was at least partially justified.


    "C’mon kid, let’s go rejoin the party,” she smiled and he put an arm over her shoulders as they headed back inside.


    The party was a contradiction.  Raucous and happy on the one hand and slightly sombre, coloured by regret, on the other.  The Carnival were all present, including the twins, and the friends and extended family of everyone were having a good time.  Clouds of gloom hung over some people, they were the ones that Kev was carefully keeping his distance from as the misery of imminent separation was impossible to ignore.


    John and Ryn walked over to where Vic was arguing good naturedly with Sam about something that would have been inconsequential in any other setting.  Sam was defending her comment and denying that the film she had referenced was made up while Vic needled her about the obviously fictitious movie reference.


    “Mum, I’m going to check on Kev, keep an eye on Dad?  He’s getting all grumbly!” Ryn hugged Vic and moved off to thread her way across the room to rescue her friend from Bad’s father, who was discussing knife fighting techniques in gruesome detail that the lanky teenager wasn’t appreciating.


    A few hours later the guests began filtering out, in ones and twos at first before some critical mass was reached and those who remained moved out almost en masse.  John scanned across the room and all the detritus of the gathering vanished.


    John, Vic, Evie and Ryn said their farewells to the rest of the team and moved into their apartment for the night.  It was a spacious series of rooms built around a central communal area, pleasantly decorated and well furnished with comfortable seats and fancy looking flute-legged tables.


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    “I’m going to turn in for the night!  I’ll see you tomorrow before we go, little sister!” Evie called as she waved over her shoulder and headed into her room.  She bumped into the doorframe and grumbled as she corrected herself.


    “How much did she have to drink?” asked Vic.


    “More than she should have!” John chuckled, looking forward to the hangover Evie would have in the morning.


    “I’m going to turn in as well.  Night Mum. Night Dad.  Sweet dreams!” Ryn hugged her parents and made her way to the door to her room where she paused for a moment.  She turned round and smiled broadly at her parents.  “I’m really proud of you both!” she blurted out before rushing through the door and slamming it closed behind her.  Grumpy complaints echoed out through the door to Evie’s room as a result of the noise.


    “Shouldn’t we be the ones being proud of her?” John asked as he moved over to a cabinet and pulled out a bottle of amber liquid.  “Night cap?”


    “Just a small one, please.  I’m not sure whether to be happy or insulted that Ryn is as ok as she is about us going away,” said Vic in a bemused voice.


    “She’s always been living in our shadow.  It will do her good to shine on her own merits,” John said as he poured two tumblers half full of liquid gold.  He lifted his glass, breathed deeply at the aroma and took a small sip before blipping over to Vic and handing her a glass.


    “That isn’t a small one, love,” Vic complained with a smile as she took the glass and drank.  They moved over to a sofa arranged so that it faced the window with the parkland outside lit by faux-moonlight.  It was beautiful in a slightly artificial way.  The green expanse looked too perfect and the knowledge they were half a mile underground only reinforced the uncanny valley feeling John got as his eyes switched to allow him to see through the enveloping rock and earth.


    They sat next to each other, a line of connection running along where their thighs touched, holding hands as they drank their scotch in silence.


    “I’ll miss this,” Vic said sombrely after a few minutes.


    “Pretty sure Bob is packing plenty of booze on Doris,” John replied.


    “Not that, idiot.  I swear if your liver wasn’t made of monster flesh you’d have died five years ago.  Tomorrow will be the last day we get to live in this world.”


    “We’ll be coming back,” John’s voice was confident as he tried to reassure his wife.


    “Most of us will, if the Monarchs are anything to go by,” Vic said darkly.  “That wasn’t what I meant though.  The world won’t be as it is now when we get back.  It will have changed as much as it has since the end of the Waves, maybe more.”


    “Bob and the Sigs will be here to keep an eye on things.”


    “I know that.  Dammit John you really are bad at listening aren’t you?” Vic turned her green eyes to lock with his red ones and let out a small laugh.  “I’m sorry.”  She brought a hand up to his scarred cheek and held it against his skin, the warmth of her flowing into him reminding him why he needed to get stronger.


    “I’m not great at it,” he said slowly, blipping his glass to the table in the corner and reaching up to put his other hand on her wrist, holding her hand to his face.  “I do try though.”


    “I know love.  You are very trying.” She grinned as he twitched and fought down a laugh.  “C’mon.  Let’s go to bed.  It’s our last night on Earth.  Whatever will we do with the time?”


    ***


    John carefully extricated himself from the tangle of Vic’s arms and legs a few hours later.  He was restless and couldn’t sleep.  He blipped himself silently back out into the living area and sought out his half finished glass from before.  He grabbed it and moved to the windows to look down on a terrarium hiding underground.  If they ever lost the surface this place, and places like it, would be the only green spaces his grandchildren might ever see.


    He blipped himself out into the “sky” and stood hovering in the air, casting his gaze through his surroundings.  The trees below were complex structures, long tubes running from deep in the soil to the branches above to transport water and nutrients to the photosynthetic greenery at their tops.  Humans and animals were moving through the space, even at this time of night, and he watched them flow around each other, the animals shying away while the humans passed each other with cordial politeness.  A young couple had made a den out behind some bushes and… He pivoted his gaze away, leaving them what privacy he could.


    “You will not enjoy being off-world, little mammal.”


    "And why is that, old fiend?” John asked without turning.  “Fifteen years you’ve hidden away without even a Christmas card.  I was starting to think you’d forgotten about me.”


    “Your world is moving into a new phase.  My intervention is no longer required and administrative tasks take up a lot of my focus,” said Fashtaal with a reptilian shrug.


    John glanced across at the golden lizard-man and blipped in a pair of smokes, passing one across to the avatar of the system on Earth.


    “Paperwork eh?  Well that fucking sucks for you.  Why won’t I like it off-world?” he asked again as he lit his own cigarette with a thumbs up, the small jet of fire springing from a special organ Pete had designed to replace the mechanical implant he had used in the past.


    “It will not be as you expect, naturally, but you’ll also learn some things you will not like.  And if I know you as well as I think I do you’ll probably end up doing something foolish.  Just remember that you’re only out ‘there’ because you want ‘here’ to continue to exist.”


    “How well do you think you know me?” asked John, turning his ruby gaze on the lizard.  Despite the effects of the eye’s Magic had “given” him, Fashtaal looked exactly like he had when John had his boring blue biological eyes; an outline of golden lights forming the creature''s body.


    “Well enough John.  Sometimes we have to do things for the system, things we would prefer not to do.  Bending to the inevitable is a wise choice in those circumstances.”  Fashtaal blew out a cloud of smoke that slowly spread around him.  Despite being hundreds of feet above the ground the air was still in this pocket of green beneath the stone.


    “I’ve done unsavoury things before,” muttered John, thinking of the outlaws he had put down in the past.  The renegades who broke the Accords, boosting their levels too high, too fast and going mad with the sense of power.  The ones who became a danger to the wider population and had had to be put down for their crimes.  The revenge he had taken on the Scunners was the least of his sins over the last decade.


    “Killing a few mad dogs is not the same.  Do you remember your second wave?”


    “Of course,” John snapped.  “Big ugly bastards.  If Hargreaves hadn’t been such a self absorbed dickhead we’d have cheesed the sons of bitches to death without losses.”


    “They once embarked on the same mission you are about to undertake.  Perhaps you will not be required to serve in such a capacity.  Then again, perhaps what the system requires of you will be even worse than slaughtering newly ascended primitives,” Fashtaal said sadly.  John took a moment to parse the possibilities through his mind.  Could he slaughter innocents trapped inside rainbow barriers?  Terrified people, newly empowered by the system and considerably lower level than himself and his team would be chaff in the wind to the Carnival.


    “Do we get any say on what missions we receive?” he asked.


    “I think you know the answer to that already.  The system is not a big fan of giving you options,” Fashtaal chuckled to himself, a sibilant rumble that raised the hairs on the back of John’s neck.  “Remember, my friend, it is better to bend than to break.”