The next morning, I watched as the Merlin hovered above Ellie, picking up an oversized pallet holding ten hovertank railguns. Adelaide would be taking the Red Eagles their payment. I didn’t really feel like it was necessary for Camille and myself to go out there again. We just didn’t have time.

As Camille watched the Merlin take off, she echoed my thoughts, “That was probably the last bit of relaxation we’re going to get for a while, huh?”

I nodded grimly, and we turned and headed to the command center. Adelaide had the holoprojector and round table ready for us; she’d put the Merlin on autopilot for the flight over to the Red Eagles, since it’d be moving at a snail’s pace with its cargo. A satellite map of Colorado was on the screen.

“How’re we doing Adelaide?” I asked as I sat down at the table, Camille taking the seat next to me.

“There is good news, and there is bad news. The good news is that the scanning upgrades are entirely compatible with our existing network. Additionally, Camille has confirmed that the Paladin firmware that we recovered is essentially complete. Camille and myself just have to make a few more tweaks in order to integrate the new scanning upgrades, then we will push it to every Paladin in the system, after testing, of course. In addition, the firmware for the Assault Paladin is nearly complete. I estimate that it will be done in two days, with Camille’s help.”

“That’s all pretty excellent. And the bad news?”

“The ‘black box’ we received from the Red Eagles will take significant time to decode. More importantly, the satellite network will take nearly a week to be fully updated,” she said, “And that is with me actively aiding the effort.”

Camille leaned forward, her brow furrowed, “Why? It’s just uploading software. It shouldn’t take nearly that long.”

“Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. In order for the new scanning technique to work properly, every satellite must be aligned in a particular way. I’m not entirely sure how it works, as I am simply following the instructions within the file, but dozens of small corrections to their orbits must be made using the onboard RCS systems. I have to guide those corrections manually, as they would from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.”

I whistled, “That sounds like a major pain in the ass. How many satellites is it?”

“One thousand, four hundred, and forty satellites compose the net. It will be, as you have said, a major pain in the ass.”

I gave Adelaide a look of mixed shock and horror, “Language!” I glared at Camille next, “You’re a terrible influence on her! She never used to swear.”

“Oh shut up, you cuss like a sailor,” she grumbled.

“All I’m saying is the second you show up Adelaide’s innocence is gone. Coincidence? I think not.”

Adelaide made a noise that sounded like her clearing her throat, “Can we please get back on topic here?”

“Fine. But we’re going to have a swear jar for you soon.”

If Adelaide could give me a withering glance, I’m sure she would’ve, “As I was saying,” she continued, “Although I have no need to sleep, I can only do one correction at a time. I will also need to take breaks, for my own sanity.”

I frowned and tapped my finger on my arm rest, “Alright, can we just upload the scanner upgrades to the Merlin and have it patrol autonomously?”

“Yes. Though I would recommend keeping it patrolling in a perimeter around Sterling only.”

“So we have some warning if they start moving. Smart,” Camille agreed.

“Indeed. To summarize: Both models of the Paladins are nearly complete, and the new scanning technology is easily implementable. However, we have another week of blindness before the satellites can detect the hidden Assimilators.”

Camille looked pensively at the map, “That might not be as big of an issue as it seems, Addy. Typically, Assimilators take a good deal of time between their initial movement and an assault. We saw this several times during the Assimilator War. They always took, at minimum, two weeks of ‘prep time’. Considering I noticed the movement roughly two weeks ago, that leaves us a nearly perfect amount of time left, in a worst-case scenario.

“That actually transitions well into what I’ve been doing. Besides working on the Paladin mental interfaces, I’ve been studying up on the Assimilators. I’m not entirely sure how relevant this will be right now, but I think it’s worth talking about at least. This goes back to the theory that you made, Sam. I mostly agree with the ‘hierarchy’ you’ve proposed. One key difference, though. Even while this ‘over-matriarch’ was directing the entire swarm during the war, the normal matriarchs under it still maintained some degree of local control. Though the overall targets of the attacks were the same, the Assimilators were able to implement various different movements within one attack. Flanking procedures, staggered assaults, different strategies at different locations, etc. Never mind the feasibility of controlling so many distinct maneuvers at once, it would be inherently inefficient to do so.”

Camille brought up an image of the Hive Lord I fought. I caught myself rubbing my side unconsciously. She continued speaking, “That brings me to this guy. This is an entirely new classification of Assimilator which never appeared in the war. It’s significantly larger, faster, better armored, and most importantly, smarter, than any Hive Lord I’ve seen before.

“I think it popped up to fill a niche. My theory is that the entire Assimilator population got a sort of downgrade in exchange for being able to spread out. With the over-matriarch too far away to control them, the normal matriarchs took their place on a local level. This new breed of Hive Lords, which I’ll call Primes, are filling the role of the previous matriarchs. To think of it in another way: during the war, the over-matriarch was the Commander in Chief, and the normal matriarchs were the generals that executed its strategy. Now that the swarm fractured and we’re in the occupation phase, the normal matriarchs are the Warlords of their own little territory, with the Primes leading in the field. What this means practically is that the Primes are very important, and dangerous, targets. There’s a strong chance they’ll be fighting in the field, so eliminating them will severely impact the Assimilators’ tactical abilities. Or at least, that’s my best guess.”

I noticed something in her explanation, “You said ‘occupation phase’. I take it that means you’ve got some theories on that too? Oh, and nice job with what you just said by the way. Might be super helpful down the line.”

“Yeah. I don’t want to get into it too much because it’s big picture and not all that relevant to the immediate problem. Basically, they’ve won the war, and they’re keeping the indigenous population managed for some reason. I’ve got some ideas on why, but that’s for another day.”

“Well, that wasn’t ominous at all,” I sighed, “But you’re probably right. Tomorrow’s problems for tomorrow’s me, y’know?”

Camille rolled her eyes at me, “Yup, that’s just like you. I don’t have anything else, so it’s your turn Mr. White Shield.”

“First off, shut the hell up and don’t call me that, it’s embarrassing. Second, I’m digging this round table ideas thing,” I said, ignoring Camille’s satisfied smirk, “Now, to get to my stuff. On the ol’ engineering side of things, we’re doing pretty good. I diverted all the fabricators off the Paladin manufacturing and onto building defenses for the town. We should be able to have a couple railgun turrets ready, but it’s going to be tricky transporting them. The Merlin can only do so much, after all. Other than that, F-04 and F-05 spit out all the rifles and rocket launchers already, so we’ll get those to Sterling ASAP. I’ve put a killswitch in them just in case we need it later, per Camille’s suggestion. Lemme see… yeah, so my darling F-03 has thrown together an Assault Paladin prototype. Diagnostics say all the hardware is good to go, because I’m that goddamn awesome. It’ll be ready for prime time as soon as you two figure out the firmware. I’ve got a bunch of large combat drones in the pipeline for you to use during the fight, Camille, and the field-reloading station is already done. Have I mentioned that I absolutely adore my fabricators?”

“Yes. Several times,” Adelaide replied.

“Well, I don’t say it enough,” I let my face set into a serious frown, “Now, on the combat front is where things get… bad. For me at least. Frankly, I’m not ready to fight another Prime. Or ten-thousand Assimilators. I haven’t had training with the Assault Paladin or the new firmware, and I barely have any experience with my new weapon. And I’ve only got a week to work on it.”

Adelaide caught on quickly, “No. Sam, that’s a terrible idea. You can’t.”

“Not sure I have a choice, Adelaide.”

Camille looked at me then up at the security camera, “I’m not really sure what’s going here, care to fill me in?”

“Sam is considering using the time dilation effect in the simulator again. It was used once during the Paladin training. There is a significant risk of damage to his sanity if he does it again.”

Camille’s eyes widened and she turned to me, “That’s fucking crazy Sam. Time dilation is nearly pure alien tech. We don’t really understand how it works, it’s barely compatible with a human brain. I’ve seen people that’ve been fried by those things. It’s not pretty.”

I held up my hands, “Whoa. I’m not an idiot. Hear me out, alright?”

After a few moments, Camille jerked her head in a nod.

“Okay. I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought it was too much of a risk. Basically, I’ve only spent around seven-hundred hours in dilated time, so about three days in reality, and thirty days in the simulator. You know the record for it, right Camille?”

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“Two thousand, four hundred hours. Still, that’s the absolute maximum –“

“I know,” I cut her off, “I’m not saying I should go that far. Basically, I’m pretty sure that thirty days is the allowed amount for liability and safety reasons. The vast majority of symptoms don’t occur until seventy or eighty days. I’m saying I take another thirty days, for a total of sixty overall. That leaves me a good amount of wiggle room, and gives me enough time to become at least competent with all the new shit before I’ve got to go Assimilator hunting.”

“That’s ignoring the issue of the marker in your brain that was placed there during your training. You can’t have time dilated for you while that is there,” Adelaide pointed out.

I snorted, “I looked into it, and it can be undone in the medical pods. I just have to have heightened privileges, which I do.”

Camille bit her lip, mulling it over. I’m not really sure what I’d do if she said no. I loved her, and I respected her opinions as much or even more than my own. The holographic map flickered lightly in the middle of the room, casting a light blue glow on the walls. After a long hesitation, she slowly shook her head, and my heart sank.

I growled at the Assault Paladin in front of me. The stupid fucking thing was not being very cooperative. There was a bug in the primary armament targeting system that just wouldn’t fucking go away. Diagnostics were bullshit. It didn’t seem to be hardware related, but according to Adelaide it wasn’t in the software. So maybe I’d screwed up my wiring somewhere. Either way, I’d been at it for a couple hours and was starting to seriously consider just smashing my holopad against the damn thing.

I sighed and put it on the metal workbench instead, then sat down heavily on my stool. I was in the armory, trying to do a few last-minute touch ups. It was pretty lonely in here, with the rows of empty Paladins above me and the Merlin gone from its usual place, but that suited my current mood just fine. Me and Camille hadn’t talked so much since the morning meeting. We’d exchanged a few stiff pleasantries, but there was that frostiness of a sort-of-not-really fight in the air. Looking at it objectively, her reasons for not being okay with letting me do the simulator time dilation thing were fairly logical. It wasn’t thought out enough, there was no way of knowing if it would fry my brain, the military probably had a pretty good reason beyond the bullshit I made up for limiting the duration to thirty days, etc.

But the problem, which I tried to explain, was that I couldn’t think of another way to learn the new systems in the week we had. The standard Paladin upgrades alone would probably take a week or so to get used to. I wouldn’t have any time to learn how to use my prototype weapons, and there definitely wouldn’t be time to figure out the Assault Paladin. There was a risk, sure, but it was way riskier to pop on off to Denver wearing nothing but my bloomers, and she’d been okay with that.

Things got slightly heated after that. There might have been a few angry words exchanged, some slight raising of the voice. Not too bad in the grand scheme of things, but about as bad as our fights got. It might sound obvious, but I really, really didn’t like the whole fighting thing.

“I just don’t know what to do Mr. Paladin,” I lamented to the inanimate suit of armor, “I feel like I need to do this training, but Camille’s so against it.”

I mimicked a low-pitched, strong voice, “Well, Sam, why not just ignore her and do it anyway? Lives are at stake!”

“Mr. Paladin, I’d like to. But usually when I ignore Camille’s advice things get really fucked up. I get fixated on stuff and she’s there to stop me from making mistakes. And going into this without looking at all the dangers is definitely a mistake, just like Denver was.”

“Sam, Sam, Sam, you poor silly naïve cinnamon roll,” Mr. Paladin (me) responded, “Sometimes there are things you need to do, despite what the correct thing seems to be.”

I thought about what I’d just said through the armor, “First off, you – I - really shouldn’t call me a cinnamon roll. That’s just weird. Secondly, you’re – I’m – right about part of that. But there’s a part where yo- oh fuck this.” I shook myself out of my one-man dumbass routine. But I kept speaking aloud, “Alright. I’m right, or at least half right, but I didn’t consider it enough. Camille’s half right as well; I need to come up with a way to make absolutely sure I get through the dilation with my sanity. Not going to do anyone much good of I’m a gibbering vegetable as they get murdered by aliens.”

I grabbed my holopad off the workbench and walked up to the Paladin, then rapped my fist on the thick unpainted armor, “Thanks buddy, couldn’t have done it without you.”

I sat right there on the concrete floor of the armory, and started going through the documentation and medical reports for the simulators’ time dilation. There was, quite frankly, some pretty freaky shit in there. Apparently, I was very, very wrong about some things. While it was true that most people didn’t show symptoms until 60 days’ worth of time, that was with a small sample size, and was pretty damn inconsistent. Some subjects started going loopy at around forty days, some even earlier, and there was no recorded recovery from the loss of sanity. That was a bit disconcerting.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom though. There were pretty clear warning signs when someone was about to go off the deep end. If Adelaide kept an eye out, and we rigged the simulator pod to watch out for specific abnormalities in my brain wave patterns (which we had a ton of data for thanks to my mental link to the facility), it would lower the risk significantly. The medical pods could also be helpful. Some in-depth brain scans would show how susceptible I was to breaking; studies into the time dilation procedure showed that some brains were better at handling the mental load than others. It wouldn’t be accurate, not by a long shot, but it would provide me an estimate to go off of. There were a couple other precautions I could take, like getting a lot of sleep beforehand and making sure to not break the dilation up into too many or too few chunks. Starting up the dilation was stressful to the brain, but extended time in it was also not so good. There was a fun little balancing act I’d have to do.

I looked up from my holopad a few minutes later and rubbed my forehead, “Holy shit. I did not think this through.”

“Nope, you didn’t.”

I jumped up and whirled around, nearly falling on my ass. Camille was standing about five feet behind me, both hands on her hips, an amused smirk plastered on her face.

“When, uh, when did you get here?” I stuttered, attempting to lean casually onto the workbench. It was lower than I thought it was, so I just stumbled a little more.

She laughed at me, her grey eyes twinkling, “Just about the time where you and Mr. Paladin were having your heart to heart. It’s insane how much you can tune out when you get focused.”

Fuck crapping assholes. I searched for something to say and she watched me struggle for a while. I found something eventually.

“I’m sorry. I should’ve listened to you. I had no idea what I was getting into.”

She walked over and gave me a hug. I put my face in her hair. It smelled like oranges and mint, and it hung loose down her back.

She pulled back slightly and looked up at me, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry too. I thought about it a little more. I still really don’t like it, but it’s better than you dying in Sterling because you weren’t used to the new tech. Now let’s figure out how to keep your brain from being scrambled.”

The next thirty-six hours were a blur of frenzied activity. I finished my last-minute tweaks to the Assault Paladin’s hardware, but most of my time was spent preparing myself for the simulator. I spent a good amount of time in the med-bay, removing the marker in my noggin and trying to figure out how my brain held up against the other ones that had gone through dilation. Turns out I was in the mid-lower range. I’d probably be able to handle twenty-five to thirty-five more days of dilated time, or around thirty hours of real time. We were going to be safe about it though. Adelaide or Camille, depending on who was available, would be monitoring me closely for the last ten hours of real time.

What I did was nothing compared to what Camille and Adelaide had to go through, though. They managed to finish the firmware updates for the normal Paladin and the Assault Paladin. Camille pulled an all-nighter to do it, working in the Command Center for nearly twenty-four hours straight. I brought her coffee a couple times, but I had to get a solid night’s sleep before my adventure, so I was forced to leave her to it. At least Adelaide kept her company.

I’d just wrapped up a final wellness check in the medical pod when Adelaide called me over the coms.

“The simulator is ready for you Sam. I finished the tweaks to monitor your brain activity more accurately.”

I stood up with a stretch. “Okay, I’ll be right up. I’ve just got to throw on my jumpsuit.”

When I walked into Simulator Room 01, I found Camille sitting on the floor, her back leaned against the wall. She was breathing lightly, asleep. I crouched down next to her and pushed a few stray hairs off of her eyelids. Her eyelashes were shorter than mine, something she always used to complain about. Seeing her like this, with the dark circles under her eyes, reminded me of all those years we spent working through the night like possessed madmen, trying to save the world.

She woke up with a start, and relaxed when her eyes met mine. There was a small smile on her face, but it was soon replaced by a nervous and determined grimace. I’d seen that look before: it was the time-for-a-serious discussion face. Camille looked at the camera, “Addy, can you give us a few minutes?”

“Of course, Camille.”

She gestured for me to sit down, and I plopped onto the floor in front of her with my legs crossed. She didn’t say anything for a while. I let her take her time. Finally, she started speaking.

“Alright. There’s something I need to tell you before you go in there, and you need to wait for me to finish before you respond. Okay?” I nodded, and she continued, “I realized something when you were in Denver, and the communications got jammed. When I saw all those Assimilators gathering in the building, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I realized that if you died, it would be my fault.”

She saw me lean forward and open my mouth, and she held up a hand, “Let me finish.”

When I sat back she kept going, “I’d gotten caught up in it. This Paladin thing. The selflessness and nobility and all that bullshit. Being so safe in here made me forget how insanely dangerous it is out there. I got lulled into a false sense of security. I should never have told you about the Assimilator movements. I didn’t know enough. I was jumping to conclusions. I knew that the minute you thought that Sterling was in danger, you’d do whatever it would take to save them. I let you go into the most dangerous place in Colorado half-cocked and vulnerable on a goddamn suspicion. Hell, I fucking encouraged it. And yeah, maybe that’s going to save Sterling. But frankly…”

Camille trailed off, then she took a shaky breath and looked away. When she made eye contact with me again, her grey eyes were as sharp as a chip of rock.

“I thought you died in Denver. I thought I’d lost you. And I thought it was my fault. When you came back alive, it made me remember what was actually important. I love you. You’re what matters to me. So you’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that in the future, if I have to pick between your safety and the lives of however many strangers, I’ll choose you every time. I frankly don’t give a fuck about being a Paladin. I’m going to train and put on that suit of armor because it’ll help me protect you. Not for some goddamn ideal, not to save a group of strangers, no matter how innocent or helpless they are.”

Another pause, another moment for her to gather her thoughts. “I’m not going to be able to change your mind about a lot of things from here on out. You’re on this path now, this self-sacrificing way of living. I hate it because it puts you in so much danger, but it makes me love you even more because that’s just the type of person you are. I’m not going to try to turn you away from it, which is why I haven’t told you not to go into Sterling, and why I helped you with this time-dilation crap. But know that I’m here for you, not anyone else.”

There was a long silence as I tried to absorb all of that. I let my eyes wander over the simulator. The black exo-suit looked so desolate when it was hanging empty like that. I waited for her to speak again.

“There’s one last thing. What happened the day before yesterday is going to happen again. Something is going to come up in the future where I know that I’m right and you know that you’re right and there are lives on the line. We figured it out okay this time because we did it together, and we have to keep doing it like that. I’m not going to give in to your opinion if something is really bothering me, you shouldn’t give in to mine. Finding the middle ground is going to be really important, because both our heads will make a better plan than just one of them. What I’m trying to get at is that with the world we live in, and the person you’ve become, I can guarantee that hard choices are going to come up. We have to be prepared for when they do.”