Thirty Nine Light Years: False Flag

As Desster quickly rejuvenated from his forty plus years of stasis in a biochemically maintained perch on the utmost precipice of death memories were beginning to reform. Old synapses and pathways were surging back to life, all streaming back in through the cybernetically recoded fungal implants which were also carefully adding metered amounts of nutrients.

Desster was a soldier, an old one. He was one of a handful (several thousand amongst the tens of millions) who had been through this near death before. He was one of six who had been a lifelong campaigner with the Tyrrian military. In all, he had seen four campaigns, all now historical footnotes. Most of the hordes of soldiers undergoing resurrection in this Forest-Mind were young. Children, almost, with no sense of history, or respect for it. Many had been cloned- vat grown and mass produced especially to swell the ranks about to descend upon this glittering blue green target, this "Earth".