Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Up until a month ago, one could look at Earth and be fooled into thinking that the blue marble was a healthy world - not one with rising sea levels, environmental degradation, and overpopulation. Like a rotting stump, it could look sturdy, but would break apart if someone gave it a hard-enough kick. Now though, looking down at her homeworld from the bridge of the UNN Onyx, Captain Del Toro reflected that looks could no longer deceive the outside observer as to just how fucked up Earth actually was. It had been fucked up before, it was fucked up now, and would likely remain fucked for generations. Fucked to the point where it was bleeding, and begging for the fucking to stop. If Earth was the womb of humanity, then its children were sending projectiles to fertilize the bitch.

In spite of everything, she smirked at the lewdness of her joke. Had she said it out loud, to the frigate's bridge crew, some might have called it gallows humour. Others might have said it was in poor taste. This being a UN Navy ship, chances were that the obedient drones wouldn't say anything. Making jokes was her captain's prerogative. Standing here, on the bridge, her feet kept on the floor by mag-boots, was her prerogative. Walking over to the wall of glass that separated the bridge from the vacuum of space, and beyond it, Earth? That sure as hell was her prerogative. She figured resting her head against the glass was in the captain's list of can-dos as well, but she resisted the urge, as difficult as it was.

65 million years ago, an asteroid had struck the third planet of Sol and killed off the majority of its species – at least the big ones. It had been the planet's fifth mass extinction, and while the sixth had begun centuries ago, Del Toro found herself reminded of the asteroid impact - learning about long extinct creatures in school, before moving onto extinctions of the more recent variety, with the teacher hammering home how much humanity sucked (right now, she couldn't fault Mister Blackstone on that assessment). Back then, when the dinosaurs kicked the bucket, had there been a dust cloud covering the northern hemisphere? Had wild fires run rampant across entire continents? Had supersonic winds flattened entire cities? Probably not, since the dinosaurs hadn't built cities to her knowledge, but still...

She clenched her fist. Key difference was that the dinosaurs hadn't engineered their own demise. That as far as she, and anyone else across the breadth of humanity was aware, there weren't reptiles flying in spaceships who sent asteroids onto their homeworld in an act of genocide that eclipsed every genocide across humanity's bloody history combined. Another difference was that if the entire population of Earth was wiped out, that wouldn't doom the human race. They'd spread too far for that. Marco Inaros might have doomed everyone in the Sol system to death by starvation, but those beyond the ring gate would survive. Hell, some of them might even welcome it. People had left Earth in droves. With Earth gone, mummy dearest could no longer look over their shoulder.

"Nice view."

But Commander Suzuki could. She looked around, seeing her XO standing beside her, a grim smile on his lips.

"Minus the whole dust cloud, wildfire, billions of deaths thing."

She returned Suzuki's smile with one of her own. "Anything else you want to add?"

"Mass species extinction? Power failure? That none of us will live to see Earth restored to glory in our lifetime?"

Glory. The word sounded foreign to her ears. When had Earth been glorious? Well before space colonization by her reckoning. Perhaps, generations from now, when history had been written in favour of the victors, some might claim that the Free Navy had done humanity's homeworld a favour. Get rid of its excess population, give nature a chance to crawl back from the ashes, and let humanity do its merry dance across the stars, no longer fucking its parent planet. Simple, right?

"Anyway, here's today's report," Suzuki said.

Del Toro grunted and took the data pad from him. Things were never simple. The simple thing to do at this point was to get the UN Navy to move out in force, hunt down the Free Navy like the pirates they were, and pound every Belter outpost to dust while they were at it. But again, things weren't simple. Things had never been simple. As she signed off on the report and handed the pad back to her XO, she reflected that things would never be simple again. At least not for her generation. People who could walk on the surface of Earth and see a blue sky, doing so in the knowledge that the Sol system was the frontier, and aliens most certainly did not exist.

"Simple," she murmured to herself.

"Pardon?"

She looked at Suzuki. "Just talking to myself."

"Oh." He smirked, but she could tell that it was forced. "You know that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness, right?"

"No. What's the second?"

"I-"

"Bombarding Earth with asteroids because the Belters are pissed that people can live on worlds outside Sol? Killing billions of one's own species? Destroying the Sol system's breadbasket? Issuing a moratorium on gate travel, when now, more people on Earth are going to want to go through the gates?" She looked at Suzuki. "Is that the second step?"

He shrugged, failing to hide his unease. "Figure there's a few more steps than that."

"Yeah. Quite a bit. One day you're getting into orbit with chemical rockets, then you're using Epstein drives. One day you're committing genocide through gas chambers, the next you're dropping the hammer of God on the filthy Earther heathens. Y'know, baby steps."

Suzuki didn't say anything. No-one did. But glancing around the bridge, seeing the crew looking at her, or suddenly turning away, Del Toro felt some pride in knowing that she was simply saying what everyone else was thinking. People like Chrisjen Avasarala might urge caution, to distinguish between the Free Navy, the OPA, and the wider Belter community, but that was the type of rhetoric that had been employed for generations. The UN Navy had been created to defend Earth. And no-one won a war just through defence.

Only, that was what the Navy was doing, the Onyx included. Pulled back to defend Earth from any more asteroids. To stop Marco Inaros from being the next Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, or Ashton Torunga (though he'd exceeded the death count of those maniacs combined already). It was, Del Toro reflected, being put between a rock and a hard place. Only the hard place was a lot less hard due to the asteroid bombardment, and the rock wasn't just one rock, it was dozens of asteroids and dwarf planets, spread over millions of miles.

"You think we're gonna stay here?"

She looked at Suzuki.

"I mean, at Earth," her XO added. "Like, do we stay on picket duty, or do we go out there and get us some Belters?"

Del Toro smirked. "Chewing at the bone already Suzuki?"

He gestured to the bridge crew, then to the planet below. "I think that's what most people want."

"Yeah, well, the secretary-general wants something else, namely dialogue and defence." Del Toro blinked. "Though I guess that's wanting two things."

"Yeah, and while she gets to be on Luna in some fancy suite wanting that shit, the rest of us want the first thing. And last I checked, the United Nations was still a democracy."

Del Toro frowned. It wasn't that she disagreed with Suzuki (though calling the UN a "democracy" was a bit of a stretch, when citizen representation didn't go beyond Earth's nation-states), but there was a time and a place for such sentiment. An XO criticizing the secretary-general in front of junior officers and shipmen, questioning standing orders? If there was a time and place for that, now wasn't the time.

Then when is the time? When do we get to striking back?

"But that's just me," Suzuki said, as if realizing on his own that he'd crossed the line. "I'm sure the secretary-general knows what she's doing. And the Martians."

Del Toro chuckled. History might be kind to Chrisjen Avasarala. She didn't expect nearly as much mercy for Nathan Smith. The Free Navy might have been an offshoot of the Outer Planets Alliance, but it was Martian tech that had brought Earth to its knees. It was Mars which had broken away from Earth's control generations ago, it was Mars that was dying as people headed for greener pastures beyond the ring gate, and it was Mars, intentionally or otherwise, which had dragged Earth down into the same kind of shit. The only consolation Del Toro could find was that generations from now, Earth might be on the way to recovery. Mars however, was a shithole. It had been a shithole for billions of years, and with the terraforming project as good as dead, it would remain a shithole. Earth would endure. Mars wouldn't.

Some might call that schadenfreude. She called it "what the fuck do you care?"

"Anyway," Suzuki murmured. "Places to go, people to see, drive to inspect..."

Del Toro grunted. "Get to it then commander."

"Yes ma'am."

If he saluted, she didn't see, as her gaze remained fixed on Earth. She did hear the sound of his boots though. And when she murmured, "ten billion," heard them stop as well.

"Ma'am?"

"Ten billion," Del Toro repeated. "That's the projected death count, and that's if we're very, very lucky." Ten billion. I'd say that's a decimation, but mathematically, that would only come to two billion."

Suzuki said nothing.

"Ten billion," Del Toro repeated, and when she spoke, it wasn't just to her XO. "Remember that number. No matter if we stay here, or if we go out beyond Earth space, or if the Onyx is finally sent to the shipbreaking yards, remember that. Remember that number. Because someone has to."

No-one said nothing. But she could see the look in their eyes. The look she'd seen a dozen times, even before the discovery of the protomolecule and the averted war with Mars. It was the look of vengeance. It was the look of fury. It was the look of frustration as well. Of being stuck here, in the calm after the storm. Hovering above Earth like silent angels, as Eden withered below them.

Caught between a rock and a hard place.