The team tumbled to the end of the hall, landing on the tower. Vigil and Ricardo's battered remains fall nearby. They approached the stairs, running up the tower beside them towards a higher entrance, when suddenly their helmets came online with an incoming broadcast. Orbital communications had been restored.
"Abort Mission, Gate Team 1." Came the image of their usual HR Rep. "We've just received transmission from Earth. The war is over."
The remaining survivors of the enemy team, including their Gauss sniper, peacefully surrendered when the message came through. Transports were dispatched, repairs would get underway. They were each quietly fired, without reference, and returned to the Earth.
Under the terms of the Armistice, the Latin Union annexed the rest of the Americas to form the New American Union, which turned it's fleets and armies to continue to nationalize it's corporations. The world was shocked and outraged, but, despite armed soldiers now spread throughout the solar system to ensure revenue for the state, life improved under the New American Union. The UBI went up for the first time in generations. Within two years, the other nations of the world had, in the face of overwhelming public support, opted to join the New American Union, which rebranded itself the Earth Union.
Many of the early acts of the Earth Union were to limit the freedoms of corporations in order to prevent future capital flight. This included the suspension of the Gate program. Earth would retain her three colonies, as each of them would take decades, perhaps centuries to fully exploit. Akras briefly pondered fleeing through the gate to a distant, unknown world, but shareholders voted against it, in part because Akras' market position, and in part because many of the shareholders could not safely reach the gate.
Industrial mining on Mars and around Rigel fed growing cities and autofactories on New Australia. Multiple new solar systems' worth of resources to tap and exploit created a new economic renaissance on earth, and the Earth Union saw to it that the public shared in all of it. The cost of shipping made goods vastly cheaper on New Australia, and a great many humans chose to emigrate, despite the danger. Drone wars against the spiderbeetles all but wiped them out, save for zoos and biolabs.
Christmas remains a beloved vacation destination. The growing human population on the gate network make it an ever more popular vacation and immigration destination - though most homes have daylight simulation. On earth, and in all of it's colonies, Christmas Moths remain the dominant pet craze. As qualities of life continue to grow, Christmas Moths become a common sight, fluttering through the neon lights of revitalized cyberpunk cities, laying across laps by simulated fires, and soaring high over the New Australian sky.
As humanity's great engine of industry passes through Akras' exclusive monopoly tradeport, Akras' value continues to skyrocket, with the tax and tribute paid to the earth by other corporations now almost all passing to Akras. Today, Akras' stock closes at the equivalent of 98k per share, the stock having split a few dozen times since the last Gate mission.
Most of the original gate team retired to relative wealth, and those that didn't found rising standards of life easily caught them. Each of you is free to describe your epilogue, or, if applicable, your money's epilogue, who it went to, and what became of your memory.
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Topic: Castle:Reboot [Combined Missions] (Read 47026 times)