I was on the rim of the disaster. 

The last accessible airlock to ground zero was behind me, but the prospective now showed me as a manhole despite I walked through it as in a corridor. 

Space has no privileged direction, when I went out of the airlock I lost contact with every environmental control of the Sot'Quan: no more air, no more gravity, no more atmosphere. Closed in my EVO suit I let my magnetic boots getting a grip on the wasted bulkheads. This way I was perpendicular to the actual direction of the people inside the ship and the hole in the flank of the ship was a large crater in front of me, with scary bizarre steel structures forged by the explosion and the heat, sharp as dragon teeth.

It wasn't just a ground zero to me, it was already a cemetery. Every lump of metal melted and reshaped at zero G during the explosion was a tombstone, a memento for the dead.

88.000 rafkins died in the explosion, an entire section. Jeremhia's section. Jeremhia died along with all of them.

I saw a lot of wars. I saw a lot of dead, casualties they call them, like there's something casual about their death, like it's a sort of gloomy lottery. You can be angry for dead people, you can be disgusted for what happened to them, you can feel grief, but after some time you understand that all those feelings are just kindness, nothing more, nothing actually deep. After a while all the dead are just numbers, numbers you stop speaking about because every time you talk about them talks become unpleasant. Numbers that disappear when the war is over and you have to get over it.

Unless one of the dead is someone you knew.

Loranna Artell wrote few lines about that, she said "the only people that really die in a war is the people you know. There is no shame in that, it's just what happen in your heart"

So, there, on the rim of the crater, sat down on something that had to be a power generator in the past, I was crying just for Jeremhia, my friend, all other bodies fading behind him in a blur of lost souls.

I was alone. Knowing the hate of Cassandra for EVO suits and spacewalks I left her with the Rafkins of the Sot'Quan. There was no need for her to come and visit the devastated area. But I needed to see it, I needed to come on the last battlefield of Jeremhia that wasn't a soldier, but died like one of them. I needed to be sure to pay my respects in every possible way to a man that really deserved that.

While bringing me on site, Rafkins told me something about the attack. Scary part was that all the mess was done by a single blow. Some kind of torpedo or missile, launched by a ship just after appearing near the Sot'Quan. The story I heard was about something like a sneak attack. After the impact of the missile the ship disappeared, obviously noone was able to trace its route.

I repeated the story to myself many times while looking at the crater, like the spirit of Jeremhia could raise from the ruins and tell me something more. There was a sort of storm in my mind, mixing all the thoughts about what was happening, my grief and my fear. For the first time since the heereen appeared in our space, I was scared. Because when so many people die, a crisis always go a step forward to catastrophe.

The communicator in my helmet gave a tweet. "Is it all right, diplomat Callus?" A Rafkin's voice.

I needed some time to answer, my mouth was so dry I had problems speaking. "Yeah, no problems here, i'm coming back. Sorry to make you wait so long"

"You can stay there as long as you think necessary" said Balthor, joining the communication "we are grateful you went there"