Calinda despised that photo.

War propaganda, the service insisted on calling it. Something to put the boys in the recruitment line. Or the girls. Glorifying violence by glamouring it up with thigh-high stockings and knee-high leather boots was surprisingly good at getting women to enlist.

But Calinda remembered the street that photo was staged in. She remembered the explosion that turned a building into a tidal-wave of shrapnel. The photographer had nearly fainted when he discovered he caught the picture just before she noticed a city block being blown to pieces.

The photo was taken in Stalingrad, during the last battle of Earth's unification, nearly ten years ago.

It felt like another century. A century where they were alone in the universe.

"Where the frack did you find that?" Calinda asked Corporal Hanz Getchüllf, pointing at the photo of her standing on a tank.

"The LT dug it up from an old supply box. Thought it was time to remind the troops why we call you the Slaughterhouse Bunny," Hanz explained, his hands open and held out in front of him.

"No one gives a shit while we're inside these," Calinda insisted, as she swung the bottom of fist and rapped it against the chest-plate of her Rüstung Mark IX battle suit. "I've earned my place."

"We earn names in the Sturmtruppen. Having you own call-sign is a mark of honour," Hanz said. Calinda couldn't miss the bitter note in his voice.

Hanz hadn't earned a call-sign yet. On the radio, he was still Sturm 4-71.

Calinda didn't bother to offer Hanz any sympathy, instead stepping over to her suit and booting-up its systems.

She stepped inside as it initialized, and it's interface systems took her sight, and threw it through the on-board cameras.

It took her a moment for her head to adapt to eyes that could see in infrared and ultraviolet, that could dump a thousand times more information into her brain. Everything was richer, more vivid, and more beautiful when she wore the Mark IX.

"Sergeant Calinda Draugun, online." She said aloud, an action her suit automatically translated into a broadcast message to the platoon.

"Acknowledged," the reply appeared as blue text at the periphery of her vision. The text came with the ID tag Abyss, the callsign of her lieutenant, and the only other person in the Ninth Sturmtruppen Company to have earned a name.

"Time to drop, ten minutes. For the Fatherland," Abyss sent.

"For the Fatherland," she replied without thinking, sending the old reply out.

She took a deep breath and flexed the suit's fingers, forcing her senses to acclimate to being jacked into the machine's computer network. Her eyes were now glass irises, her skin was a nanotube composite, her heartbeat the timing clock at the heart of the onboard computer.

She might have earned the callsign 'Bunny' from that photo, but her current face, polished and coated to reflect most radio frequencies, was how she earned the other half of her legend.

Slaughterhouse.

Idly, she switched the feeds on Mark IX's display to show her the view from the ship's cameras.

She saw dozens of ships like hers, small transport vessels, gathered in a nearby group. Large capital ships dotted the peripheries. All of them were illuminated in the warm, yellow glow of the nearby star.

As she watched, one of the transport ships erupted into tiny star, followed by a staccato of brief but nebulous flames as a ship was ripped into pieces.

"So much for our surprise attack," Abyss sent, the message accompanied by an eye-rolling emoji. Calinda snickered, but didn't respond.

Calinda could feel the push of the ship's rapid acceleration as her suit leaned to compensate. She felt a smile creep across her lips, and her senses twitched excitedly over the digital safety locks on the suit's weapons.

"All hands, we drop in five minutes!" The dropship's captain sent.

Calinda smiled, and she swore the sensor lights on her suit lit-up.

The ship's camera feeds narrowed on their destination, displaying a garden-moon nearly a tenth the size of the world it orbited. As they approached, devouring the distance in minutes, flashes of light spattered the screen as explosions rippled across the sky.

"Give'em hell!" Calinda cheered, as they drew closer.

"We're starting our approach! Two minutes until we hit their atmosphere," the ship's captain messaged, just as the ship passed by the massive hull of one of Earth's capital ships.

The black hull was brightly illumined by the rapid staccato of flashing lights, as missiles crashed into the spray of metal flack, and ferromagnetic sprays of plasma carved through the hulls of nearby vessels. Anti-matter explosions erupted in the distance, so bright the camera went black for a few moments.

By the time Calinda could see anything out of the ship's cameras again, the ship began to rumble as an orange glow surrounded the ship.

"We're going-in hot. Captain's in a hurry to get us on the ground," Calinda remarked to her lieutenant.

"It's for your sake," she saw the Lieutenant respond. "Cap's afraid of what might happen if you don't get to shoot something."

Calinda laughed. There was no humour in it.

"She should be."

Calinda was jubilant as the ship burned a tiny hole through the atmosphere, plunging towards the ground. "I am fire, I am fury, I am all I ever wanted to be!" she screamed, grateful that her voice wouldn't carry beyond the confines of her suit.

She felt the floor push at her suit as the ship's thrusters kicked in hard to slow their descent. She felt the rapid rumble as its turrets began firing at something she couldn't see.

"Get me down there, Cap, to take the heat off. I'll make my way to the muster site," Calinda sent, grateful that text didn't carry the giddy eagerness she felt.

There was a short pause, before the captain responded. "Affirmative," the message read. "Prep for descent."

"Slaughterhouse Bunny, prepped," Calinda responded instantly.

The bay door behind her slid open with a fierce clang of sliding metal, and the ejector system launched Calinda into the air.

She screamed in delight as her targeting systems kicked online, and started highlighting small dots on the ground. She turned the coil-gun online and started launching finger-sized pieces of tungsten at ten thousand kilometres a second.

The air around her turned into fire, as her shots ignited the air as each bullet kicked the ground apart like a massive hammer. Her suit streaked through the fire, screening her descent as she smashed the ground.

Anti-personnel turrets fired without her input, striking for the dozens of nearby targets that now scattered like roaches hiding over an overturned rock. Her missiles streaked out and smashed into trucks and small buildings, creating a bloom of orange that blotted out the horizon.

"Rejoice!" Calinda cried out, using the suit's speakers to amplify her voice into the thin air, and broadcasting it through a wide spectrum of radio frequencies. "For bad things are about to happen!"

Up ahead was a statue, colossus-like in its proportions, straddling a small canyon. Some of the soldiers were gathering around it as a rallying point, using its towering presence to strengthen their resolve. Giggling as she raised her arm, she aimed the coil-gun at the massive statue's knee, and squeezed the trigger.

The narrow knee-joint blew apart in a cloud of shrapnel. There was a wonderfully quiet moment, when the world seemed to stop as the statue began to tilt. It hung in the air, and Calinda watched breathlessly as it slowly swung to the right, and toppled to the ground.

"Whatever you did, it took the heat off us," the message from the captain appeared on her screen. "It's heading your way instead."

The second message was from her lieutenant. "Who was that statue dedicated to?"

"Don't know, don't care," Calinda sent. "Feel like I'm going to be busy soon."

Her sensors started hissing at her, and she turned to see a trio of fighters in a wide turn, swinging their noses in her direction. She overrode the targeting computer, aimed the coil-gun up into the air, and fired three times in rapid succession.

Her sight was blinded by the erupting mass of burning air, and she used the screen to hide herself as she turned on the suit's thrusters and launched herself behind cover.
As she leapt aside, missiles slammed into the spot she had just vacated, kicking up a shower of rock that spattered against the Mark IX.

Calinda set her suit's radar for a quick sweep of the nearby airspace, but she only picked up a trio of small, human sized targets descending slowly towards the ground with a combination of parachutes and small ion rockets.

"Slaughterhouse, you have three enemy soldiers in your sights. Why aren't you firing?" The captain asked by text message on her screen.

Calinda scowled, and turned her attention back to their company's landing zone. "You don't shoot at escape pods or parachutes. We're soldiers, not butchers."

"Disregard the captain and rendezvous with us at the muster site. The engineering core lands in thirty minutes," the lieutenant interjected.

Calinda snickered, amused. Despite the rank difference, the Sturmtruppen didn't fall into the command structure of non-combat officers. Their captain, in this situation, was an overpaid taxi driver.

Calinda engaged the Mark IX's booster rockets, and rode the few kilometres in relative peace. Her sensors swept the area, but asides from small groups of retreating foot soldiers, there was nothing to see for dozens of kilometres in any direction.

As she approached, to see dozens of other suits spread out in a wide area, she could see the approaching construction platform for the engineering platform.

The ship was so large it swallowed up part of the horizon, a mammoth structure of steel that swept the ground clear with its descent rockets. Nearly as large as one of the kilometre long capital ships, but far wider, with no windows to mar the nearly solid square as it landed.

"That's huge," Calinda muttered, not realizing that her suit was still translating her voice into text, and sending it to her lieutenant.

"Well, when you're building a mass accelerator, you need a lot of equipment," Abyss sent back.

"A mass accelerator? Is that to pin the planet down until it capitulates?" Calinda asked.

"Pretty sure it is," the lieutenant replied. "We just chuck boulders at their planet and keep them pinned to the surface of their world until they want to negotiate."

"And the part of their fleet that's still out of the system?" Calinda asked.

"Will stay away while we have a gun to their head," Abyss sent.

Calinda smiled, and watched as the massive ship finished touching down, before a message flashed on her screen.

"Ninth company, muster for extraction. We have orders to return to the fleet immediately," the captain sent, just as the drop-ship passed overhead.

Calinda launched her suit into the air, and let the autopilot engage the docking protocols with the suit. As she docked, a private message appeared on her screen from the captain.

"That's not a mass accelerator they're building, Bunny. That's a fusion rocket."

And as the suit powered down automatically, Calinda was trapped with nothing but her own thoughts until the drop-ship returned to the carrier.

******

Immediately as they docked, Calinda went to the first terminal she could find, and scrolled through hundreds of thousands of logged orders.

"Calinda?" her lieutenant asked. "What are you looking for?"

"Our taxi driver told me something, just before the suits powered down. She said that the engineering crew was dropping off a fusion rocket, not a mass accelerator," Calinda explained, as she started reading some of the armada's deployment assignments.

"That can't be right," Abyss said. "Even a booster of that size wouldn't do much to that moon."

"That's what I thought," Calinda agreed.

"You know the captain has it in for you. The fleet's high command think like politicians now. They can't stand the Sturmtruppen. They don't like to see real soldiers," her lieutenant insisted.

"Just let me get this thought-worm out of my head. It won't take too long," Calinda promised.

"If you find anything to confirm your suspicions, talk to me first. I don't want you walking up to Fleet Marshall Voidfox's office alone demanding answers," Abyss insisted, before he left.

Calinda returned her attention to the thousands of logged orders on the screen, applying filters to narrow them down.

Eventually, looking back into fleet deployment records, she found the ship they had cleared a landing site for. It had no name, no expectation for a return trip, and it's only cargo was a matter-antimatter material converter.

Anti-matter. The Captain had told the truth.

Cursing, Calinda scrolled through the fleet's deployment records, noticing that the ship they guarded was the only one-way trip on the registry. Hundreds of unnamed vessels, with similarly obtuse cargo manifests, were registered to their fleet.

They weren't building a mass accelerator to hold the populace of this world hostage. They were going to push the entire moon.

Calinda grabbed her sidearm, and marched for the nearest elevator.

She shoved her way through nearly a dozen mechanics, knocking one over, until she stepped into a lift and jammed the door shut.

"We're soldiers, not butchers..." Calinda muttered to herself, waiting for the lift to rise the dozens of floors to the carrier's bridge. She tapped her foot anxiously, and her fingers fidgeted over the safety of her sidearm.

The doors hissed open, and Calinda blinked to try and adjust her eyes to the hazy green light.

The CIC was a long, gently sloped stairwell filled with computer monitors, and arching metal columns like spider legs that seemed to be reaching up to the banners on the far end of the hall, as if trying to reach the flag of the One Earth.

"State your business, sergeant," a voice growled from down the hall.

The voice belonged to a smartly dressed, well decorated soldier standing beneath the banner. Calinda recognized Field Marshall Bertha Gunnerung, who earned the callsign Voidfox before Calinda had ever been born.

"Ma'am!" Calinda barked, snapping to attention. "I..."

"Running a fleet doesn't leave a lot of idle time, sergeant," the Voidfox warned.

"Sergeant Calinda Dragun, Fourth Platoon, Ninth Company," Calinda said, saluting with her hand outstretched. "I recently came upon some troubling information about our objectives on the Garstach Moon I was just deployed to."

"I see," the Voidfox said, nodding slowly. "You know we plan to thrust the moon into their world."

"Ma'am, this can't be us. We're soldiers, we kill our enemies. All that enemy propaganda back home, that we exterminate people for purity and lebensraum, that isn't us!" Calinda exclaimed, the tenor of her voice rising as she drew her pistol.

"The Garstach live in an atmosphere of boron and arsenic. The world's useless to us, and their terraforming projects will compete with ours," the Voidfox replied, seemingly untroubled by the weapon pointed at her. "This war is inevitable. It's just best to start and finish it on our terms."

"Genocide. We really did it," Calinda said, her voice choking on her range and her eyes stinging with tears. She squinted her eyes, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

"We really did it," the Voidfox agreed. "Nearly a billion people, by the end of it. But if you're going to walk the stars, you need to build the bridges out of something."

As the Voidfox spoke, security grabbed her with hand too strong and too unyielding to be human, pried her fingers with the ease of breaking a spaghetti noodle, and took the gun from her shattered hand.

Her captors were straight-angled metal faces with a single red light, dressed in an imitation of civilian formalwear. All the emotion of a toaster, and the menace of a starving bear.

"We slaughtered millions so we would be worthy of reaching beyond the world. We will slaughter trillions so we are worthy of the stars that are our birthright," the Voidfox said, with a sad smile.

"For the Fatherland," she added, and Calinda cried.

"Take her to the nearest airlock. Return her sidearm, and salute. This isn't her fault," the Voidfox said, as she turned away. "Our war has just broken another soldier."

Calinda screamed as the security droids hauled her away, and down a short hall. They reached the outer door, where one of the droids opened the hatch while the other stepped through.

Calinda's heart hurt too much to notice that the droid carrying her was standing beside her still, inside the airlock. It set her to her feet, and saluted, right hand projected forward.

Unbidden, an old piece of resistance propaganda sprung into her thoughts, words over a century old, told by a broken soldier in a distant battlefield.

"My friend, you would not tell with such high zest, to children ardent for some desperate glory the old lie: How sweet and fitting it is, to die for the Fatherland," Calinda recited.

She turned away, to gaze at the crest of the world she had helped condemn to death, with the moon even now unnaturally close to the white clouds and blue skies of this alien shore.

She whispered an apology, just before the air was ripped from her lungs and her skin touched the void.

(Author's notes: The Poem Calinda recites near the end is a part of 'Dulce et Decorum Est', by Wilfred Owen. The story uses all eight prompt pictures)