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On Earth, Star had lived the semblance of a normal life. The idyllic scenes came back at night, dancing like phosphenes in the canopy of the tent – in the stifling-then-frigid desert air. Skateboarding with Marco and Jackie. The simplicity of a normal life – neither cherished nor recognized in the moment, but thereafter. When it was over. When Marco and Jackie were killed in 9/11.
Watching those towers come down in real time. Months of waking up afterwards, realizing each time that they were gone. A rhythmic torture. There wasn’t even anything to bury.
Psyche fractured, the root of fanaticism grew up in its place. Of devotion to revenge. And so Star had come here, at nightfall, to the outskirts of Tora Bora, the massive underground complex of al-Qa’ida, with every nook and cranny filled with WMDs.
Day broke. Star trekked up along the barren, sandy ridge. Looking down at the valley with binoculars.
It was milling with terrorists, all of them garbed in turbans and wielding AK-47s. Even the assault rifle she was clutching would be insufficient for this. Or was some sort of magic in order -- to fill the valley with phosphine?
After of moment’s contemplation under the brilliant desert sun, Star got out the satellite phone over AEHF, directly to the Pentagon.
“Department of Defense, how may I help you?”
“Hi!” started into the phone cheerily, “I’d like to order a nuclear strike for 34.117°N, 70.217°E”
“Uh…” the guy on the other end came back “that sounds like a White House thing. Hold on, let me transfer you over.” Crappy holding music started to play… and kept playing. Star watched the sun dip towards the horizon on hold, taking refuge in an outcropping of rock, sipping water from a canteen as she contemplated the deaths of her best friends. Fiddling with boots in the sand – more like moondust than anything back home. A gecko crawled along a rock.
At nightfall, the tone finally changed.
“White House speaking”
“Can I please speak to the President?” More ringing. Silence.
“H-hello?”
“Misunderestimated! 2 + 2 = 6!” It was George W. Bush, or simply W, the famous mis-elected President whose tarnished legacy would only be redeemed because Donald Trump would be worse years later.
“Ugh! Get someone else on the phone!” Star spoke exasperatedly. There was some scuffling, then a baritone
“We need to seriously consider the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.” It was Colin Powell.
“There never were any WMDs! It was just a pretext!” Star bemoaned into the desert twilight, shaking her head in consternation. “Can you please put someone else on?”
A pause in the line. Crackle. And then a gravelly voice: “Star, I have just authorized a nuclear strike against the entire Middle East.” It was Dick Cheney, war bastard extraordinaire.
Tears of relief trickled down Star’s face. The end. “Thank you Mr. Vice President.”
Click. The line went dead. All around the world, the American nuclear triad was paroxysmally scrambling to usher in the apocalypse-on-demand. The phone had no signal as AEHF went down.
Star sat for about 5 minutes, clutching legs, uncertain of what to do next.
What exactly next?
The nuke was coming here, so why not go out in a blaze of glory?
Star stood up and – with some effort – pulled back the charging handle on the M4 carbine. Flipping the NVGs down brought the world into an eerie green half-light. She scrambled up over the ridge, found the first terrorist sentinels, and opened harassing fire. They never saw what hit them. Running now, across the ridge top. Drop. Shoot again. A machine gun nest went down. Then a whiz of rounds went back over her head, forcing her to the sand.
The magazine was empty anyway. Ejecting it, trying to shakily get the other in while prone on the sand. Until she looked up, at the violet twilight.
Up there, at an impossible height, there was a Falling Star. Then another – then another still. Coming right for them. Incoming warheads, with the ingredients inside for ephemeral stars-on-earth. So the lesser Star pulled the strap of the M4 off her shoulders, casting it away, rolling flat on the sand. Time to watch the fireworks.
The terrorist voices were near, but those angels of death up there were faster and approaching with impossible urgency. So instead of trepidation, Star filled those last seconds with memories: of Mewni, Marco, Jackie – of all her time on Earth. And that was the ultimate defeat of terrorism: to find joy despite it, joy in its defeat. Here, on foreign sands, disheveled hair splayed out, Star felt the purest joy in those rushed memories, the racing, thunderous supernova of a life's triumphs and laughter and even moments of tranquility.
I’m coming home.
The warheads careened down faster and faster and faster, whip-like flying past her view into the valley, leaving an incandescent trail that lingered for the briefest instant, comets into the valley below.
Time froze. The firing units in the warheads woke up. Not knowing where they were – not what – but only what they had to do. They fired, initiating the perfect detonation waves, and the cores crept inwards until the reactive excursion kicked off, turning the warm embers of 239Pu into blazing, hot coals of stellar incandescence, shining like a sunrise in the radiation canister, pushing the fusion fuel inward, squeezing it like a miniature supernova.
And 1000 Sunrises came from the bottom of the valley, lighting up the sky with an impossible, radiant glare. And – for the briefest ephemerality – there was a Star on earth.