He thought about heading home. It was getting late. Too late. But the memory captured him once again. He was carried back to that night. It was the night before his mom left, never to be heard from again. Roll had only recently turned four years old. He woke to the sound of his mother yelling. She did that sometimes. Then she would usually calm down for a while. He heard what she said; he heard her clearly.
She said: “One is ENOUGH. TWO is too much.”
She had raised her voice even louder and repeated it. He was only four, but he knew what she meant. Twins. One would have been hard enough. How could she handle two of them? Two was too much. The next day she left, never to return. His dad was always so ... passive. She walked all over him. Two was just too much. It would have been okay without Roll, if there had only been Rock. Roll had messed it up for the whole family.
He took another pull. It burned going down. And it melted a little part of him. The part that cared. What would it be like if he just didn’t care anymore, about anything at all? Two is too much.
***
September 18th. 09:00 hours. Shockwave headquarters. Main conference room. Information and planning meeting. Topic: Darkside, enemy base, the Moon. I’m sitting here trying to stay focused. Important meeting. There is no unity at all. Roll has arrived. It’s ten after nine. He’s late. That’s not like him. Even lately that’s not like him. Mr. T took a long and piercing look at him. Yikes, hyper-scanned. But Roll doesn’t look apologetic or worried. He just shrugged his shoulders and sat down. Now I’m really worried about him.
Back to the meeting. Dissension. Argumentation; back and forth, back and forth. We need to keep the nuclear option open. Someone said it would be worth taking the time to build a real space force based on bug technology before we take the next step. Take the time? What time? This should be done, that should be done. On and on.
Mr. T is mostly sitting and listening. He speaks up once in a while, in an attempt to keep the meeting somewhat calm and orderly. Time ... is ... going ... so ... slowly. This is getting ridiculous. It has been going on for over an hour. Mr. T is standing up.
“Colleagues, this is not getting us anywhere. General Whitehall and my team, will you please stay? For the rest, we will be in touch. Let’s call this meeting adjourned, 10:05.”
Mr. T is standing there. Other than Shockwave and the general, the rest are all looking at him, beaming out an air of self-importance. Their expressions shout it out, who are you to shoo us off? It’s awkward. Mr. T is still standing there. It’s quiet. Battle of the wills.
Wait, he’s gesturing. He’s pointing at me, Para, the twins. Now an open hand invitation to the general, our general. And he is walking out of the conference room, heading toward the lunchroom. We all follow. The rest can let themselves out. It looks like we will be having a little subcommittee meeting in the lunch room. Mr. T is having a thought, looking at us one at a time.
He said to the group, “Would you excuse us, just for a minute?”
Mr. T looked at me and motioned to follow him. We went to his office. What did Mr. T want to talk to me about? Had I done something wrong? My mind was racing. He was frustrated from the meeting, that much was obvious. I think we all were.
There’s no time for upgrading our ship and weapons technology. And we can’t just nuke the place, even though that had been strongly suggested and seemed to be the prevailing mood. Let’s have Shockwave nuke them! I wouldn’t be a part of something like that, not with all those people on base. Unless... No, there has to be a better way. But I understand the tension. A portal gate would soon open that would let a darkness even worse than the bugs get to us.
We have no idea where Empire headquarters is located. The queens have a way to hide that, or it could be, they don’t know. We have to push through the bugs and get to the Empire. Otherwise they’ll sneak up behind us and get us, eventually.
Mr. T is looking at me. “Dear-heart, what would you do?”
Dear-heart. Serious stuff then. I knew Grandad had a plan. But he wanted to hear what I thought. And actually, I had been thinking a lot about all of this.
I even had a reply at hand. “If we wreck the portal anchor on the Moon, we have something like 50 years. Who knows? Let’s use that number. Then the Empire is coming. Can we advance enough in 50 years to meet them head-on? That might be possible. But they would expect us to have advanced significantly by that time.
“It would be one world, the Earth, against ... a lot of worlds. We don’t have any idea how many worlds are in the Darkstar Empire. But if we let them open the portal, we should be able to slip through. Shockwave should be able to slip through. We could then nuke the Empire side of the portal gate bridge to buy us time. And we would know where the Empire is lurking.
“If we fail and they move enough ships over the bridge, we lose those 50 years. That’s something to really think about. I want to have kids and grandkids. But I want to have them on Earth. Or, at least I want it to be my choice where I have them.
“In this
