Bright sunlight bathed the podium on which the three athropoids stood. A nice breeze tickled Mir's cheeks and played with Rin's hair beside her. Calming leaves rustled above the rest of the crew, 410 in total, who were arranged to watch them depart. The captain and a political delegate stood with them.
"Comrade Mir", the CC delegate said, approaching her with a medal. She took hold of one of Mir's hands, and placed the honour in the palm. Then, she looked up to meet Mir's eyes.
This CC delegate was hundreds of years old. She had lived on Earth. Like the soldiers, she was an arthropoid, but of the old type, back when they were designed with biomimicry and had thick armour made of chitinium. Mir, and Rin and Lariophel had shed most of the insect features, and only really shared size and intention with the older model.
In the symposium, they lived in purely human bodies. If they were to survive the war, they would have their cyberbrains replaced into Porth's mind arrays, and they would return to being in practice be no different than any other being, though in reality people did still treat others differently based upon past phyiscal body plan.
Olivia, on the other hand, retained her distinctly abhuman body. It was that of a bee, a mass production model that had been built in Britain during the end stages of the Red Solar War 250 years ago. She had lived the nation of England, before the Human Empire had reduced that name to royalty, control and a standardised habitat design.
Mir felt the badge be applied to the shoulder of her physcial form. It was a waste of mass, really, but the sentiment was nice. It came with a digitised letter signed by all the crew, and the Party leadership out in the Oort Cloud. She murmured, "Thank you."
Olivia shook her head. "No, comrade. We thank you, for your bravery and sacrifice. You're going to fight in one of the most daring operations that I've seen since the Earth War. We all wish we could be with you, and I promise, if this was back on Earth I would, but the rocket equation limits our ability to shift the mass of physical bodies. So, the mission lies on your shoulders. And after getting to know you all these years during the transfer, I do not think anyone could be more up to the task."
Mir smiled. She felt proud. She wasn't capeable of feeling fear, and if she could, she would have been paralyzed. But she'd discarded that emotion when she volunteered for this
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