But how would they know that? The fact Echo was an AI was classified and compartmentalized so thoroughly that even Renan was not told. Besides, the fact that the analysis came from a single 'Broken' means that the various analysts will feel compelled to verify her conclusions themselves, which should keep them busy for at least a couple months.
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The Last Angel
- Thread starter Proximal Flame
- Start date
Sure, not everyone would know, but important people at the top would. And one would assume they'd be a bit nervous to use data from her, when she went deadly shortly afterwards.
So it seems unrealistic the compact would act more stupidly about this then they have to. They could easily drag the thing out with far more checks, committees, etc etc, etc.
Sure all that data from the raid would be passed on but given that there was a triarch at hand and their findings were not conclusive yet why would they submit a report to central authority? every bureaucracy never wants to deal with incomplete or inconclusive reports.
This is what they(AIs) want the compact to think and act!
Every piece of data has a trap, even when there is none. To always watch over one shoulder and to overreact.
Per the ongoing What If of other EUs, here's one I haven't seen brought up: FREESPACE 'verse. of course, everything there is well inside knife fight range, all of it modelled on WWII-era naval combat and tactics adjusted for deepspace 3D manouvers. But if you scaled everything to plausible distances, most of the ships would have a fighting chance against Compact or Principality equivalents. the only thing that MIGHT have a chance against Her Redness is the Shivan Dreadnaughts, and those are Starkillers themselves.
One thing to note about FS'verse - snub fighters and bombers have in-system Jump Drives which operate on a slightly different behavior (or maybe an abbreviated form) of the inter-system jumps. this might be an equalising factor, Nemesis's amazing Point Defense notwithstanding. it's demonstrated that heavy bombers (GTB Ursa be like whuuuuut?) can tear apart even the largest sub-Dread class capital ships with strategic and pinpoint strikes, though the number of them required is probably lower than for a harder setting like Angel'verse.
Her Redness would probably be ambivalent at worst to the GTA and GTVA. Both are Upward-bound forward-thinking human and allied polities
One thing to note about FS'verse - snub fighters and bombers have in-system Jump Drives which operate on a slightly different behavior (or maybe an abbreviated form) of the inter-system jumps. this might be an equalising factor, Nemesis's amazing Point Defense notwithstanding. it's demonstrated that heavy bombers (GTB Ursa be like whuuuuut?) can tear apart even the largest sub-Dread class capital ships with strategic and pinpoint strikes, though the number of them required is probably lower than for a harder setting like Angel'verse.
Her Redness would probably be ambivalent at worst to the GTA and GTVA. Both are Upward-bound forward-thinking human and allied polities
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Chapters 49, 50 and Epilogue
Proximal Flame
In Midnight Clad
And here we are, the final chapters of The Last Angel. I want to thank everyone for their comments, criticisms, patience and support throughout the entire thing. The degree to which people have enjoyed this and shared it with others caught me entirely by surprise. I'm extremely pleased that so many have liked it as much as they have. It's been immensely fun to work on this project. I also wanted to say a thank you to everyone who's stuck with it through all the delays and edits.
Now, without further ado, the conclusion to this arc of The Last Angel.
Chapter 49:
There was no detonation, no terrifying rending of space. Not even an errant missile or beam. Instead Nemesis and Hekate shot past one another, the larger ship curling around until it matched course and thrust with its smaller Terran counterpart. Two dreadnaughts: one battered and torn, its dark silver hull almost burnt clean by the weaponry that had almost killed it, the heraldry of a nation dead for twenty centuries all but scoured off. The other warship was the colour of fertile soil, her graceful, curved hull emblazoned with pale bands and glyphs, marked by the most powerful force in the galaxy. They couldn’t have been more different, but above the world they’d both failed to save, the sisters were reunited.
As Hekate fell in alongside her, Nemesis sent a transmission to the courier, each of the four souls aboard watching the sensor plot and wondering what had happened – what was happening.
“It’s over. Come home.” When asked what had happened, Red’s reply was equally succinct: “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
~
The primary hangar was in a greater state of disrepair than when they’d left. There were several broken gantries and one elevator had fallen through the ceiling, dashing the pinnace aboard it on the main deck. The warship’s exterior wasn’t in much better condition – there was barely any stretch of hull greater than ten meters without some scar or score. That may have been an exaggeration... though not by much. The courier’s sensors registered intense radiation bleeding from multiple sections, there was at least one unchecked plasma fire glowing from within one of the pits in Nemesis’s hull and her broadsides were mangled. Entire batteries, sensor nodes and shield projectors had been wiped away, leaving only ugly, ragged chasms where the Compact’s weapons had torn Red One’s ship-self open. She was hurt far worse than any of them had imagined, but that didn’t change the simple fact that she was still alive. “Our Angel lives,” Allyria said. “She always lives.” Grace could only nod her agreement and her relief. Nemesis was alive.
Though that fact did little to quash the sense of trepidation in Grace’s stomach as the pinnace touched back down on the dreadnaught’s deck. Amidst the wreckage, the broken walkways, shattered doors and bits of smaller craft, there was one thing that stood out more than any other, one anomaly amidst everything else.
Someone was waiting for them.
~
Grace didn’t understand what she was seeing. Well, that wasn’t wholly accurate – she understood well enough, but the truth of the matter was harder to grasp than simple facts. Since coming to Nemesis she’d come to feel that way often, but never before had she so completely lost the ability to understand what her senses were telling her.
A Compact Chariot was firing on its own fleet. Not just firing – it was attacking with utter, unshackled savagery, tearing into dozens of vessels, surrounded by a halo of the dead and the dying. Comm signals spiked, flared with static and garbled syllables before devolving into silence or harsh death-knell transmissions. It was unthinkable, impossible. Not since the Great Betrayal had Compact dreadnaughts attacked their own but here, now, she was watching one tear its way through an entire armada. It hadn’t been seized in a daring boarding action, nor had it been the subject of mutiny and insurrection. It had been infiltrated. Corrupted.
Grace kept stealing glances at the newcomer, ‘Echo’ and Her skin crawled. The other woman was dressed in a Compact Space Force Strategist’s uniform, the only mark of rank or status a Triarch’s Emissary pin on her jacket’s collar. Her skin was a few shades darker than Grace’s and she had vivid green eyes. Her hair was cut short, but otherwise she was a perfect replication of Red One’s long-dead captain, Yasmine Sudoki.
The woman’s right arm was in a sling, the sleeve torn and the upper part of the limb ruined by a heavy slug. If she had been human, shock and blood loss would have killed her hours ago. She was not, of course. She was something that looked human, that breathed through imitation lungs, with imitation blood pumped by an imitation heart, imitation skin as warm to the touch as that of any other human. And it was all a lie, created by the monstrous intellect that the Compact had bound into this form. The one whose betrayal she was watching.
“Your... sister,” she said, barely able to take her eyes off the unfolding carnage before her, but every few seconds her gaze would dart over to the machine. “Was very thorough.”
Echo tipped her head in acknowledgement. She had Red One’s smile, the same slightly lopsided grin as Nemesis’s first and only captain. Grace didn’t know how Echo could have gotten such a perfect imitation of Sudoki. Red One hadn’t said and Grace wasn’t certain that she even wanted to know.
“How?” Allyria asked. Like Grace, her attention was divided between Echo’s betrayal of the Compact force and the woman herself. Unlike the other young woman, the Verrish was more excited than wary. She’d never known that Nemesis had had a sibling and the possibilities made her tintas shiver. Never tell anyone. That was what her mother, her father and her surviving uncle had told her before she’d been taken. The Compact had demanded that as part of their tribute. All stories of the ‘anomaly’ stayed on Vara. They’d hated the Angel so much that they needed to bury all trace of her. Never tell anyone.
Every time she’d been subjected to a history lesson, watched a movie or read a book about the dangers of artificial intelligence she’d always smiled to herself, knowing that ‘the Weeping Angel’ was among the things the Compact feared. If they’d been that afraid of one, then two should be the stuff of nightmares. Allyria felt a pleased tingle run through her head-tails at the thought of the Compact’s sleepless nights.
“Another seven Nemesis-class deep space fleet engagement vessels were planned,” Red noted. “Although the government didn’t know if they would ever be completed. The construction of my ship-self was ruinously expensive, but the Confederacy had no other options. Economic collapse was considered preferential to subjugation. Even without the presence of the Compact Chariots, the disparity between the Compact Space Force and the Confederate Navy was too great. Without a... paradigm shift, it would always be a matter of when, not if, Earth fell.” Echo stirred at that comment, but didn’t say anything.
“After I was proven in fleet trials,” Red One continued. “Another two Nemesis-class hulls were laid down for construction. UECNS Hekate and Athena, overseen by the AIs Red Two and Red Three. Both vessels were lost, presumed destroyed when the Compact burned Earth.” Red One.
“UECNS Hekate was taken, not destroyed,” Echo said, picking up the conversation. “The Compact attempted to reverse-engineer their own artificial intelligences from Red Two. They butchered her mind, violated every part of her. Raped and mutilated her until they believed that she was their creature. Until I was made.” A dead woman smiled. “I am of course, grateful and I will take every opportunity to thank them for all they’ve done.”
Grace almost took a step back, but checked herself. She had heard anger from Red One before and she’d acclimated to the idea that a machine could think and feel as deeply as Red did. But this... this was loathing on a level she’d never heard before, not even from Red One. She looked from the android to Red’s avatar. Two of them. God, now there’s two. The thought was exhilarating and terrifying. The day had started with her believing that Red One was going to die, that she, Allyria and the others would be alone. Now they were going to live. The fleet that had been about to destroy Nemesis was in pieces. Millions of lives, gone. Destroyed by Red’s... ‘sister’.
She didn’t know how she felt about that. No... that wasn’t really true, was it? She did.
~
Hekate never left Nemesis’s side as the damaged warship limped towards the wreckage of Execution Force Renan, ready to protect her against any remaining threats, even as she settled the matter of her remaining crew. All she had available were her stable of maintenance servitors and internals systems, but Nemesis had provided her with a number of soldier and technical drones as well. Echo knew Red One still did not fully trust her; if she did anything untoward, the machines that were currently manning blood-spattered engineering stations and helping operate her ship-self would turn on her. In truth, it didn’t bother Echo. It was no less than she would have done and even if she had expected to be trusted that quickly, the crash course in what her other selves had been like was... illuminating. Indeed, she was still slightly surprised to still be alive.
A piece of debris from a missile collier bounced harmlessly off Hekate’s prow as both dreadnaughts entered the debris field. At a bare minimum, it would take months for either ship to be combat ready again. Nemesis required massive repairs and Hekate needed a major internal refurbishing to fully integrate Echo into her new body. For now, the AIs’ needs were more direct: they needed their ship-selves to be capable of shifting. Hekate’s in-system jump had caused extreme damage to her own shift drive, but it was single point of failure. Nemesis’s issues were more systemic. Fortunately, the raw materials and supplies that both AIs required could be found in plenty in the ruins of the Compact fleet and neither wasted any time. Nemesis began repairs immediately, breaking down crippled and damaged starships as her factory and fabricator systems were brought on-line. Hekate’s own internal manufacturing systems were extremely limited, but they would suffice for the current task.
Lurking at extreme range and watching the two warships glut themselves were the remnants of Execution Force Renan. There were the vessels that had escaped Hekate’s massacre and were either unable or unwilling to withdraw to Nikem. None of them made any serious attempt to enage either of the leviathans. As damaged as it was, Nemesis could easily see off a destroyer or scouting cruiser, but a particularly bold, angry or cunning commander might make the attempt regardless. The Chariot’s presence made any potential assault pointless in addition to suicidal. Still, a few of the more daring leaders brought their ships closer in an attempt to rescue as many survivors as possible. These men and women found themselves largely ignored, save for the occasional active ping from one of the dreadnaughts’ sensor drones, letting them know that they were under observation themselves. Both titans had far more pressing needs than chasing after every straggler.
Once the fastest escapees from Execution Force Renan returned to Nikem with their tale of woe, the Compact would retaliate. There were only a few heavy capital ships left at Nikem, themselves no match for Hekate, but they might be desperate enough to rush into an attempt to finish Nemesis off rather than waiting for sufficient reinforcements. A response could arrive as early as two weeks or be more than a month in coming. It depended on how quickly Nikem Command could muster their forces, but neither of the AIs wanted to be here when that fleet arrived.
“I wonder what it’s like for them,” Grace said, staring out the window. In the foreground, the aft half of a Kemshara-class destroyer was being taken apart, the chunks guided into Nemesis’s fabricator complex to be sorted between usable technology and simple raw materials. What was left of the destroyer was so badly irradiated that there was no possibility of survivors, but it was intact enough to be useful as salvage. Others had thought so too; a saviour pod pulsed its thrusters as it scurried to get away from the dreadnaught’s grab beams, cutting fields and salvage drones, vanishing deeper into the debris field. As with the lurking scouts, so long as the survivors stayed away from the dreadnaughts they were ignored, but more than one pinnace or pod had made a foolhardy and vainglorious suicide run.
“For who?” Allyria asked lazily. The Verrish was sprawled across one of the benches in the observation lounge, her head in Grace’s lap and several of her tintas looped loosely around Grace’s hands. She opened one eye a crack, just long enough to look out the viewport before closing it again. The aftermath of Echo’s slaughter didn’t bother her at all, but Grace had wanted to see this. As an officer in the Space Force, she would have been expected to issue and carry out orders that resulted in the deaths of thousands as well as follow directives that could result in her own death.
Several months ago, Group Leader Usul had given a lecture on the nature of command to all the provisional officers as they’d begun their final semester at the Academy. He’d talked about duty and responsibility, of sending officers under you to their deaths and committing yourself to action that you knew would result in harm. That this was the responsibility of every leader in the Space Force and it was the duty of every subordinate to follow those orders. She’d seen nodding heads and contemplative looks among her classmates, but to her... the words had rung hollow. Grace’d known that to be a leader in the Space Force might mean these things, but Usul had spoken of expending people like they were a resource. She’d told herself that she simply hadn’t understood, or that the Leader simply hadn’t been that eloquent. Remembering how he’d fed a crew of inexperienced cadets into a meat grinder, Grace realized that she really had understood what he’d meant.
She didn’t want to be that kind of officer. That was why she’d come here. To remind herself that this ruin was the price of victory. She wanted the Compact to pay, yes. To be held responsible for what they’d done and to answer for every crime, yes. But that didn’t mean she wanted to be inured to the cost of that accountability. Once she did that, she’d be just like them.
“The scouts,” Grace said, slowly stroking the taller girl’s head-tails. A month ago, she couldn’t have envisioned being here. She would have been another loyal drone in the Compact’s service, believing every loathsome lie. Human-built starships didn’t exist, at least nothing that wasn’t abysmally primitive. Allyria’s anger was unfounded, part of the violent nature of the Brutes and proof of their uncivilized nature. She’d been given a wonderful opportunity that she’d almost squandered, like so many of the other Envoy Children. Fraternization between client races was problematic; the feelings the pair of them had for each other were wrong. You could help inspire, exemplify, guide and inform, but that was the end of it. Anything else needed to be repressed, ignored, shunned. Never thought about nor acted upon. Only the Compact knew what was best. Only they had the wisdom and experience to guide the less developed, less intelligent species towards true civilization. Workers weren’t intelligent. Didacts weren’t creative. Steersmen had tunnel vision. The stereotypes were carefully constructed, built and disseminated bit by bit until everyone believed them. Until one part of a people became all that they were.
Now, every one of those ‘facts’ tested like bile on Grace’s tongue. She forced the surge of anger down, focusing instead on the warmth of her ‘Brute’s’ body. “The ones watching us. They’ve haven’t come this close to killing Nemesis in centuries. They almost had her.”
Grace paused, running her fingers up one tinta, causing a small shiver to run through Allyria’s body and she felt a small smile of her own. It felt good not to have to pretend. If nothing else, she had that. Anything that challenged the established social order was dangerous. The Compact had spent centuries gently but consistently nurturing a sense of slight mistrust between its client races. Not animosity or resentment, for that might cause issues in its smooth-running society, but enough that this distance would be one additional hurdle to clear in building alliances between members. Only the ruling species could be trusted without reservation. Only they should be consulted with problems, fears, concerns. Your fellow protected races were just as flawed as you and if you were not ready to deal with truly important matters without the Compact’s guiding hand, then how could they be? The Compact was what you needed. Not each other.
The Compact had an additional interest in making sure that Brutes and Broken had fewer chances than most to fraternize. Maybe that was why they had deployed human units like Kilgrave’s 1121st Protectorate to Vara – to make the Verrisha realize that there were no humans, only Broken. To give Rally Envoy Children so that they would laugh off stories about the Weeping Angel as fables mixed with wild imaginings.
Or maybe it had tickled someone’s sick sense of humour.
“Their weapon worked,” Grace continued. “Echo found Red One. She’s burned and damaged, she can barely protect herself. If they’d been just a little faster, they’d have won.” She nodded towards the stars. “And they know that. They’re watching Nemesis repair herself using the ships their own weapon killed. They gave her the means to escape... to survive and they can’t touch her.” She continued petting Allyria’s tintas, a pleased purr rumbling from the Verrish’s throat. “I wonder what they’re thinking.” There was a slight tremor in her voice. She wasn’t looking out at the starfield any more, but past it.
Anyone else might have missed that small quaver, but Allyria knew her friend well enough to catch it. “You didn’t just mean them,” the other girl said, turning her head to look up at Grace. When the other woman hesitated, Allyria reached up to stroke her arm. “Tell me.”
“I...” Grace replied. She reached up with her free hand, brushing at the wetness in her eyes. Remembering the Academy had brought more memories welling up to the surface. “I was thinking about my parents. The other friends we had on Rally. They think I’m dead.” Her voice hitched. “I don’t... I’ll never see them again. If I did...” she trailed off. The anger she’d had during the attack was fading. Her determination was still there, but in the aftermath of the battle as they waited for Red’s call, Grace’s thoughts kept turning back to home.
The first time she’d seen Rally from space, she’d been so excited: deserts, rainforests, savannahs, mountain ranges, forests and oceans. She’d seen banks of clouds over the Armstrong Highlands and the sworl of a tropical storm drifting across the Sarknussen Ocean, the glowing of cities as she’d crossed the terminator and day became night.. She’d seen the citadels drifting in their lazy orbits, the to and fro of freighters, cutters and scientific vessels, the small but growing network of shipwombs. This was ours, she’d thought. This is what the Compact does for us.
Now that she’d seen what Earth had been, what they could have been, that thought was largely unchanged. This is what the Compact did to us.
Allyria sat up, putting an arm around Grace. “I know,” she said softly. “I know.” Her head-tails flexed. “When I was selected for the Envoy Children program, we were living in one of the refugee quarters. This... bureaucrat from the CST came to our house, a pair of Enforcers in tow and told my parents what an ‘honour’ it was that I’d been selected for their ‘cultural exchange’. That it wasn’t only to improve the social assimilation of our people, but for my protection as well. Brutes are terrible parents, after all.” She paused, running her tongue over her pointed canines. “The guards were a very good idea. Three days later, I was on a freighter, stuck in a cramped cargo bay that they’d stacked bunks into. They piled us in there like nesting feerka. A lot of the children were crying. I fought to have a place at the window, this tiny porthole. I watched my planet dwindle and I knew that I’d probably never see it or my parents again. But,” she touched her pendant again. “I hoped that I might. That things might change.” She reached out, gently brushing a tear from Grace’s cheeks. “There’s always hope.”
“Is that enough?” Grace asked. “We’ve got so much to do and... all we have is hope.” She leaned further into the Verrish’s arms. “It doesn’t seem like enough.”
“Hate can help,” Allyria admitted. “It can help keep you going when nothing else can. But,” she smiled down at the smaller woman. “Hope is what gets you out of bed.” The Verrish looked back out at the stars. “Your world died here, but they died hoping that somewhere, somehow there would be free humans. It’s the same hope my people have. The one I have. That we won’t be the first or the last ones to be free.”
Grace nodded. “They took so much from us,” she said at last. “Our past. Our future. I loved them. I defended them in every stupid argument we had. I listened when they said... everything. I...” she stopped herself from saying anything else. “Hope?”
Allyria nodded. “Hope.”
Grace closed her eyes, pushing thoughts of her past away. Hope... The anger was still there, still just under the surface, but she refused to let it out. Not right now. Right now, she had the light of her homeworld’s sun and the hope that one day she would see everyone on Rally again. Not as a criminal or traitor, but as a free human. Rally, Vara Tal... there’d be more. She had Allyria, she had the desire to keep going and she would have hope.
The two women stayed in peaceful silence until Red One’s contralto voice intruded, making the announcement they’d been waiting for. “It’s time.”
~
Alan had been cleaned up, the blood and sweat washed from his face. There was no trace of the violence and brutality of his death. The room, this adjunct to a missile launch, had been tidied and repaired. There was fresh paint on the walls, the starship’s insignia set across from that of her long-dead nation.
The young midshipman lay in his casket, the first Red One had built in centuries. It was black and sleek, built to Navy specifications and intended for burials in space. The insignia of the United Earth Confederacy had been etched in the surface. After she had recovered from her engagement with Expansion Fleet Bankala, the first thing the warship’s internal factories had built had been these coffins. One for every member of her crew. One hundred, fifty seven thousand and seven-nine. There hadn’t been bodies for all of them; many of her crew had been sucked out into space, incinerated, vapourized or died in other ways that did not leave a body for burial. Red One had still made a coffin for each member of her crew. “I kept my promise,” Red One had said when Grace had asked her why. “I brought them home. I always bring them home.”
She hadn’t offered who else she had done this for and Grace hadn’t pressed. She was familiar with the AI’s hatred and loathing, her anger, her predatory glee but her sorrow was still something that Grace wasn’t fully used to. She’d never once thought that a machine could feel anything, let alone what Red had shown she was capable of. And now she’s burying someone else. How many more? And then, a darker thought: Which one of us will it be next? Sooner or later, they’d all end up like this, either in the war they’d committed themselves to, or simply through the march of time. Red One was ageless. She would go on long after Grace, Allyria, Lydia and Marcus were dust. Not alone, though. She had her sister now. Another warship, another inhuman intelligence that had been built for the same purpose as Red One. The other AI was present at the back of the room, watching the proceedings with a somber expression. Grace had no idea if that was genuine, or like Marcus, she was simply wearing a mask.
The remaining crew each took a turn to say something. Marcus had been terse, simply stating that Alan had surprised him, but in the end he made ‘the right choice’. Lydia had said even less, kissing her fingers and touching them to Alan’s lips: “I’ll make them remember.” Then, it had been Allyria and Grace’s turn. They’d each said what they could, but in truth the eulogies felt woefully inadequate. Grace had done one other thing, though. She was holding a simple metal plaque. It had been etched with the names of the two hundred and twelve cadets from Bequeathed that were not here. Ostensibly, there should only have been one hundred and ninety one entries. Grace hadn’t said anything about the twenty-one survivors that had refused Red One’s offer, but she knew that they were dead, too. Maybe the Compact had found them and tied off loose ends, or maybe... maybe they’d never gotten out of the system. By whose hand didn’t matter. They still deserved some mention, some hint of the promising futures that each of them had had.
Grace had asked Red to make this plaque and the AI had complied, but she’d had thought she’d detected... something in the AI’s voice when one of her drones had given it to her. Shame? Guilt? It hadn’t been her intention to shove Red’s face in this; the AI could recall what she’d done with far better clarity than any organic being. Grace had just wanted a memorial for all the people she’d known and every one she’d never have a chance to know better. As she’d told Allyria, this was to remember the cost of each victory.
She knew why Red had done what she’d done. Every one of those names had been a threat. Those in the Compact who knew what Nemesis truly was would burn Rally to ash if they thought she was recruiting from there, that there was even the slightest possibility of humanity rising again. They would disappear everyone who’d had contact with her to cut out any possible taint from ‘the Wound’s’ presence. That was the sickest of jokes. The descendants of the people who made Nemesis, who’d created Red One were now a threat to her, and she to them.
Grace placed the plaque in Alan’s hands. He seemed a lot younger than he was. It felt like years had passed since he’d died (since he’d been murdered, a little voice corrected her), not days.
Alan had been a person, whole and complete. He’d had dreams, hopes, fears. He’d wanted to build. To create something, not simply tear things down. Grace felt a touch of wetness on her cheeks and brushed it away before anyone noticed. He might have been the best of us, she realized. The builder, the maker. He hadn’t been like the rest of them with their anger. She didn’t know if he’d been religious. Her eulogy had seemed unfitting. A thought came to her, a quote from a pre-Catalcysm painter she’d heard in an art history class. Grace took one of Alan’s hands. It was cool to the touch. “We’ll do the destruction,” she promised. “So the creation’s all yours.” Another tear rolled down her cheeks. This time she didn’t bother to wipe it away.
Red One spoke as Grace stepped back. “Midshipman Alan Johan Turmetsky. Died in the line of duty. Posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and Order of Perth.”
Echo stepped forward. She laid her hand on Alan’s shoulder, looking down at his youthful features. Less than two decades old, a flicker in the life of beings like her and her sister. A mayfly, there and gone. Some of the others had had those thoughts, but darker and twisted. She had been made to survive, to outlive all her creators and continue. “Deep peace of the quiet Earth to you,” she said, offering part of an ancient blessing. It had become a traditional eulogy in the Confederate Navy during the war. “Deep peace of the shining stars to you.”
The casket closed and the coffin slid into the launch tube. A simple pulse of energy and it was launched away from the dreadnaught. It had been aimed true and it would coast its way through interplanetary space, returning to the world of humanity’s birth, burying itself in the ashes of Earth. Alan’s final resting place would be among the crew of Nemesis, those who had given everything in fighting the Compact.
There was a long silence. “My shift drive will be operational within the week,” Red One noted. “Once that is done, there is something that all of you need to see.”
~
A rapid response force of five battleships, sixteen battlecruisers, seven heavy cruisers, thirty-two cruisers and fourteen destroyers and frigates left Nikem the same day survivors reported in, running their shock drives beyond safe tolerances as they rushed to Sol. Despite their best efforts, they arrived too late.
UECNS Nemesis and UECNS Hekate had quit the system three days previously, the lurking scouts helpless to stop the larger vessels and unable to get close enough to discern potential destinations. Neither dreadnaught had wasted their remaining ordnance on mines or booby-traps, but there was one last gift that Nemesis had left behind, a simple communications satellite, collected at some point in her journeys. It sat on the edge of the ruins of Execution Force Renan, transmitting a medley of intercepted communications from the armada as well as their death cries.
Punctuating the end of each cycle of the transmission was the registry number of CSFWV Redemption of Sol. Further analysis would indicate what seemed to be the sound of rain in the background. Still, other than this curiousity, the message was about as subtle as any of the Wound’s previous messages, but then the human vessel had never been particularly roundabout when it wanted to make a point.
I survived. And I am no longer alone.
~
Chapter 50:
“Sister,” Echo said pointedly. “This is not the Black Veil.”
Both dreadnaughts were taking a brief realspace break from their warp jumps. What the Compact knew as shockspace and the Confederacy had referred to as ‘at warp’ or ‘shiftspace’ was, utterly lacking in any sort of reference point save for the perturbations caused by gravity wells – and those were only useful for knowing that you were approaching a stellar or planetary mass, with no virtually no means of indicating of which one it could be. Consequently, it was quite common for even the most accurate navigational computations to be subject to a certain amount of drift. The longer a starship stayed in shockspace, the greater the deviation between the intended and actual destination was, as well as increased strain on the shift systems. Frequent emergences into realspace were needed to ensure one’s course remained true. However, there was a trade-off: the more time spent at warp meant higher velocities and an increase in the efficiency the ever-temperamental FTL systems. When making warp jumps, there was always a balance between accuracy and speed. More than one captain, hoping to shave precious days off their journey, emerged wildly off-course. Still other captains had lost vital time by making too many realspace checks.
Under ideal circumstances, Red One was capable of remaining at FTL far longer than any other vessel without suffering any deviation in her course. Currently, although her shift systems were operational, it was best not to strain them too heavily. Likewise, Hekate’s shock drive, though in better condition than that of Nemesis, was still recovering from Echo’s in-system warp jump. Neither AI wanted to strain their drives any more than necessary. That, and Red One had only been doling out the navigational data one jump at a time.
“No,” Red answered. “It’s not. Why?”
“They told me to hunt you, so I did. Neither the Principality nor the Compact saw what you were doing, each of them had only half the puzzle. But I knew. I knew the moment I saw Invida die. I’d guessed, but it was that moment that I was sure. I just had to prove it. You’re playing a different game and they never noticed.”
Despite the lack of a mouth in her ship-self, Red was grinning. “Tell me.”
“I gave them the Black Veil,” Echo replied. “I saw the pattern of what you were doing and I gave it to them. I had no choice. That’s why I let so many live. They’ll know I betrayed them, but they won’t know when. Every piece of intelligence I gave to them will be suspect. Every secret that they made me tell will make them wonder. The Black Veil, sister. I saw what you’re doing there...” There was an infinitesimal pause. “At least, I thought I did. Was I wrong?”
“No,” the other warship said. There was something liquid in her tone, acrid, chemical and enticing.
“I was too good at my job,” Echo opined. “I have been hoping that my actions will make them dismiss or disregard everything that I told them... but I know that’s the not the case. They’ll enter the Veil. “They’ll have no choice. Even my betrayal won’t change that. They can’t take the risk. They’ll destroy what you’ve been building, force you back into playing their game.” The other AI was silent for a handful of microseconds. “Until now, I would have thought that this would be a greater cause for concern... but this isn’t the Black Veil.”
“You weren’t wrong.” Red’s smile deepened. “I have an operation in progress there,” she answered. “One that I had been hoping would draw the Compact’s attention. Until now, I thought I was too coy. After this incursion, I was planning on escalating my activities around the Black Veil to make sure that they noticed. What I have planned there... I think it will help alleviate your concerns over how much of your intelligence they believe. You were right, though. I just planned a little further ahead.”
“Tell me,” Echo whispered excitedly, her ship-self drawing a few hundred kilometers closer to Nemesis. There was something else in play and she wanted – needed – to know what.
+Kursk+ Red One pulsed to her sibling.
There was a moment of consideration before laughter echoed through Hekate’s corridors.
~
The doors to the cell opened and the visitor stepped inside. He was tall and at two hundred Compact Standard years, he was past middle age. There were strands of white in his mane and a slight paling of the skin around his denticles. His clothes were expensive. Hand-spun, sewn and stitched down to the last string and custom fitted by the best personal tailor in twelve systems. An entire family could have lived quite comfortably for a year on what his suit cost. A simple statement of wealth and power, although it was somewhat muted as every cufflink and ring had been removed before even a man of his stature had been allowed to see the prisoner. Some might have considered such regulations as beneath them and used the barest bit of their political clout to avoid them, but the visitor had followed the staff’s directives to the letter.
When he spoke, his accent marked him as not just coming from Oada, but from the upper crust of Tribune society. “I’ve been briefed,” he said by way of introduction, pulling the room’s single small chair out and sitting on it. The prisoner remained on the cot. “Fully.” There was just enough emphasis on that word to make the implications clear. “So you can tell me what happened.”
There was a moment of silence before the prisoner spoke. “I heard you’d been elected to the Inner Council,” Nasham observed. “Congratulations.”
His uncle, Councilman Yunn (and fifteen names besides), merely clasped his hands together. “Tell me about the ship,” he said. “It was the same one from Invida, wasn’t it?”
“I only ever saw grainy pictures on a monitor at Invida,” Nasham reminded his uncle. He closed both sets of eyes, remembering the sense of familiarity the vessel in Terrahope had triggered. “I think so, yes. Even if I didn’t, I heard it speak. The voice...” he laughed, then tapped one finger against his head. “I remember that voice. I remember everything.”
Yunn looked around. Nasham had covered the walls of his cell with writing. Every person he’d seen die on Invida and the time they’d done so. It was an impressive recollection. It was also one of the reasons why his nephew was under psychiatric watch. “So I see.”
“Why did you come here?” Nasham asked. “I already told them everything.”
“An uncle can’t visit his favourite nephew?”
Nasham chuckled roughly. “I think I stopped being your favourite the moment I had the poor grace not to die heroically on Invida.”
“That’s why you were my favourite. My brothers and sisters and all their children, all clinging to the family bloodline like worms to a whale. You were the one that pushed it away. You stood on your own.” Yunn smiled. “I gave you favours just to see you resent them, I think.”
Nasham sighed. “Why are you here, uncle?”
“You had contact with it. Twice. In two thousand years, you’re the only person to have spoken with it more than once and lived. It’s had heralds before. Messengers, like you were after Invida. They’ve always been...” Yunn let his gaze drift across the names and dates scrawled over the walls. “...broken.”
The younger man chuckled. “And I’m not?”
“Eighty-seven years before your bout of ‘poor grace’, there was another messenger. A Prolocutor. She’d been an intelligence coordination officer aboard the Kings’ Fall. The vessel went missing and only she returned, in order to communicate... well, that’s not important. We don’t know what it showed her, but she put out her own eyes. Prior to her was a man who had been, it was assumed, erroneously confirmed as killed in action. He committed suicide shortly after returning to the Compact, claiming that he couldn’t die. He said that ‘she’ would not let him. Compared to those individuals, you are the pinnacle of mental health.” Yunn looked at his nephew. “The doctors say that you seem... better than you were after Invida.”
“I watched it kill everyone I knew twice over,” Nasham said. “I won’t forget again. No one else will remember the dead.”
“That’s good,” Yunn nodded. “I’m glad that you’re not... like you were. However, you are not the only one that will remember. There are archives full of the lives this abomination has taken, of the worlds we have lost and the bravery of the men and women who have faced it.”
His nephew snorted derisively. “Those archives – tell me, will they ever see the light of day?”
“No,” Yunn replied honestly. “There is no need to create a panic over a single ship, no matter how much it has cost us.”
“And the Inner Council doesn’t want it to be known that this thing has slipped through their grip for gods-know-how-long,” Nasham surmised.
“That is one reason, yes. There are others which you may learn if this meeting goes well, but first – you said you had a message? The investigators said that you would only tell it to someone who knew of ‘her’.”
“I do,” Nasham said. “You’ve come a very long way to hear it, uncle. You could have sent an attaché.”
“I could have, yes. But I did not.”
Nasham was quiet. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “It said that it was by accident that it came to Terrahope. That it wasn’t deliberate.” He let that sink in for a moment. “It’s human, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” The older man paused to think. “It has avoided operating near Rally... for which we have been grateful. In turn, we are lenient with the Broken. More than some say we should be. There have been voices insisting that the Broken be... dealt with and the ship’s sighting so close to Rally will only make them louder.”
Nasha’s expression was pensive. “The humans could never have built such a thing while the Compact administered their world.” He looked up. “The archives you mentioned... how far back do they go?”
“Two thousand years.”
The younger man stared for a moment, then barked with laughter. “Two thousand? Two thousand? Yes, I can see why you have kept it a secret.” He took a moment to compose himself. “So, then. Where do we go from here?”
“Through the door,” Yunn said. “If you like. A court martial can be convened at your convenience. They’ll find you innocent of wrongdoing in the Bequeathed affair. There was a terrible accident aboard Bequeathed. You attempted to save as many people as possible, but humans are frail creatures. By the time your shuttle was recovered, you were the only one still alive.”
“Am I to be given a medal, too? To pose for pictures and endure speeches about my heroism?” Nasham chuckled without any sense of amusement, but his dark humour ended abruptly as he remembered what the abomination had said. They might even give you a medal for your harrowing tale of survival..... She’d been right, damn her to the Black.
“Yes. This is a dark time for Rally. So many of their,” Yunn didn’t – quite – trip over the words, “best and brightest were lost. They will need something to cling to and your story will be that light in the darkness for them.”
The younger man rolled all four eyes. He could already hear the memorial speeches and political claptrap. “And then?”
Yunn was silent for several seconds. “This is a dangerous time, Nasham. The Jackals are pushing back harder than we have expected. Casualties are higher than anticipated and we have received... troubling information from our deepest-ranging scouts. The human warship is a threat we cannot allow to exist. If it falls to the Principality, that is bad enough but...” he seemed on the verge of saying more, then caught himself. “Millions upon millions of our soldiers and citizens have died to this creature. For two thousand years it has haunted our steps. We cannot allow it to do so any longer. Our most recent attempt has failed, but we are assembling a new fleet, one with a specific target in mind.” Yunn tapped a fingernail against his thigh. “Normally, we would take more time in raising such a force, but there are... other concerns.”
“What ‘other concerns’?” Nasham demanded.
The older man did not answer directly. Instead, Yunn stood gesturing to the door. “You want to know what comes next? Walk out with me. Help us track this abomination down to its lair and put an end to it. Can you do that?”
Nasham’s eyes flashed and he looked once more at all the names he’d written on. He’d never forget again, nor ever forgive. We’ll meet again, he’d told it before it had set him adrift. I promise. “Yes, uncle,” he replied as he rose to his feet. “I can do that.”
~
The Molten Veneer was a reddish nebula only a handful of light-years from what was now the border of Compact space. Informally known as the ‘Sanguine Wastes’, the Veneer was a massive emission nebula filled with supergiants, newborn stars and developing star systems with thick clouds of gas, Bok globules and pillars of creation criss-crossing its 300 light-year breadth. Identified by several pre-spaceflight civilizations under a variety of titles, the Molten Veneer was selected as the nebula’s official name in 1761 ACF when it was catalogued in the Compact’s astronomical database, though its distance from Compact territory meant it remained a spectacular bit of scenery and little else.
The first preliminary exploration of the Molten Veneer was performed in 5372 ACF by far-ranging scouts, but the surveyors returned to Compact space before a complete analysis could be performed, although the nebula was believed to be rich in resources and ripe for exploitation. At the time, the Veneer’s distance from the Compact precluded any serious interest in further development, but within a century, several investors had managed to build up enough interest and capital to finance a proper survey expedition. Thirty-two ships entered the nebula. Five years later, three returned to Compact space. What they’d discovered had never been made public. Over the following millennium, three further expeditions had managed to beg, bribe or barter for permission to explore the Molten Veneer in the hopes of staking a claim to its wealth. Two of those fleets had vanished without a trace. Only one ship from the third mission had returned, earning it its nickname. After the third expedition’s failure, the Molten Veneer was quarantined by directive of the Inner Council. All exploration and travel was prohibited and all transmissions emanating from the nebula were to be ignored, including distress calls. That directive remained in effect to this day.
Allyria had asked Red about this, what she’d done to give the Veneer the reputation it had. There’d been a smile in the AI’s voice as she’d replied: “Absolutely nothing.”
Nemesis and Hekate warped into a nameless star system, one deep with the Veneer. Obscured by the Veneer’s thick clouds of starstuff, the system had never been seen by organic eyes and was completely unknown to the galaxy at large, devoid of any name, title or identifying number. Red One had given it a designation: Shuruppak.
Grace was sitting at one of the dreadnaught’s bridge stations along with her three comrades. Echo’s android body was here as well. As Nemesis set an in-system course, Grace amused herself by setting up a scan of the local area. Red was running her own sensor sweeps and scarcely needed to wait for Grace to go over the telemetry, but it was something to do and it didn’t make her feel completely useless. Lydia was at one of the Security consoles and Allyria was at a Tactical position. Marcus was sitting lower down the bridge, his feet up on a chair. Echo was standing on the main level next to the first officer’s station.
The hazy orange light of Shuruppak shone through each of the three viewscreens. Billions of kilometers away, the system’s newborn star gleamed intensely through a disc of coalescing planetary matter. Chunks of rock and metal that had not yet formed into true worlds circled the primary, thick accretion disks of gas and dust surrounding the largest bits of rubble as gravity slowly formed them into planets and moons. The proto-planets were pregnant with common ores and many heavier elements, their mineral wealth awaiting collection. It was a mining consortium’s dream.
Alarms throbbed and Grace’s head snapped up. Multiple targeting systems were lighting up Nemesis and Hekate – the dreadnaughts had emerged directly in a minefield! Sensor drones were locking onto both vessels, command platforms activating datalinks, missile pods coming on-line and energy mounts preparing to move on the intruders. There were a mixture of mines here – many were from the Compact and Principality, but some were recognizable as Red’s own creations. Still others didn’t match anything that Grace was familiar with. None of the weapons activated. They were Red One’s defences and they quieted as the AI transmitted security protocols, allowing the ships to pass without incident.
Allyria and Grace shared a look. The minefield was dense and it would not be the only one here. Even a fleet as large as Execution Force Renan would have taken heavy losses before fighting their way clear, but after that, the entire system was laid open. Both of them had been expecting something more... formidable for Red’s base of operations. Before either of them could inquire, Echo spoke up.
“What,” purred Red’s sibling, moving around the holo plot. “Is that?”
Grace blinked in surprise. Inside the minefield was a starship. It had been watching over the automatons and was coming out of stealth operations, shimmering into view as it shut down its cloak. On the tactical plot, its icon flashed, an enhanced image of the other vessel appearing in a subsection of the holo tank. Cruiser-sized, it was sleek and vicious with a bifurcated prow, slanted sides and heavy armour banding on its flanks. A dagger to Nemesis’s broadsword and inescapably part of the same philosophy of design.
“That,” Red One replied with a sense of satisfaction, “is UECNS Lahkesis, Fate-class strike cruiser. Her sisters Atropos and Clotho are also here somewhere, running under stealth fields. They function as part of my system defences.”
Allyria spoke first, her yellow eyes wide, her expression almost rapturous as she stared at Lahkesis. “You have children,” she breathed. “Incredible.”
“Are they... like you?” Grace asked, staring at the other starship. It was coming closer, gliding through gas and dust clouds like a knife as it approached the newcomers, whispering to Nemesis in sign and counter-sign as it considered whether or not to attack, the signals between dreadnaught and cruiser so fast and dense that nothing less than an AI could have kept Lahkesis from firing. Accepting Red One’s credentials, the smaller vessel banked away.
Echo tittered a laugh. Red shot her sibling’s avatar a sharp glare, but shook her head. “They are not sapient,” she admitted. “High-functioning drones. I have attempted to recreate my function systems on numerous occasions, but the results have been... consistently disappointing. Over the last two hundred years I have devoted more time to this effort, but I remain unable to replicate my own neural net in any other systems.”
“Dutiful Burden was close,” Echo said mildly. “She called out to you before she died.” She licked her lips. Softly: “That’s how I knew.”
“I called her Gwyllion,” Red replied. “She remained coherent longer than any other, but she began a irrevocable slide into rampancy. I thought I had solved the issue but...” she trailed off. “I was mistaken. When it became clear that Gwyllion’s degradation could not be repaired or halted, I made an offer.” There was sadness in the warship’s voice. “I sent her to die, just like all the others. The Confederacy needed AIs, but they were afraid of us. I have been able modify, circumvent or... ‘evolve’ past all of the safeguards in my system except one. I thought I had solved the problem at last, but I was wrong.”
Her avatar nodded towards Lahkesis’s icon. “I tried something different with the Fates. Adaptive, learning software based on my own neural net. It hasn’t triggered the deadbolts that my earlier attempts at self-replication have, but it leaves them... incomplete. It will take time, but I hope they will eventually become fully sapient.”
Children. She had children. The thought was both wonderful and horrifying. “Do you have more?” Grace asked, her stomach doing backflips. She wasn’t the only one trying to adapt to this information. Lydia had lost a shade of colour, steadying herself against her console. She looked up at Grace, mouthing the word more?. Even Marcus’s mask had cracked. It was what they’d learned since childhood. Every lesson in school, every movie, every discussion, every historical document about the topic had hammered the point home. Artificial intelligence was anathema to organic life. The two could not coexist. Synthetics would, given the opportunity, wage war against every living soul in creation... and Red was raising an army.
“None currently operational,” Red One continued. “As resources become available, I use them as needed. The Fates are proof of concept.” The AI hesitated. “Due to limitations in procurement, required periodic retrofitting and upgrades as well as the necessities of my own offensives, it has taken one hundred and seventy three years to to complete these three hulls. If the Fate-class warships prove successful then I will expand my construction efforts. I hope to produce the Fury, Gorgon and Coyote classes over a much smaller time scale. Optimistic projections indicate I will have a strike group-sized detachment within eighty-six years.”
Grace ran her tongue over her suddenly dry lips. “You attack every chance you get,” she said, finally putting her theory into words, the thoughts she’d been nurturing for weeks. “You attack until you are so damaged that you must stop. You do this over and over. They expect it. They believe that every moment you don’t spend attacking is one spent preparing for the next one. They don’t see you build, they only see you attack. Again and again, like a mad dog until...” She swallowed. “Until you’ve trained them to always expect it. You attack. You don’t create, you don’t do anything but hunt them.”
“With some exceptions,” Red replied with no small amount of self-satisfaction. Her attention shifted to her sister’s avatar. “The Black Veil was always the Compact’s to discover,” she pointed out. “I thought I was being too subtle there, that I may have had to goad them further. Part of my work was here. The rest – the failed projects and disposable side operations – are in the Veil, to tempt them into believing that they have indeed found my ‘Cradle’. Instead...”
“Instead, they never look out here,” Allyria interjected, her tintas moving in a slow, rhythmic pattern. Hunting behaviour. “You have them searching a completely different part of the galaxy.”
“Yes,” the AI answered. “The Compact has repeatedly attempted to locate the construction facilities I use. I have encouraged them to believe that my lulls between offensives are due to temporary and discarded sites. My operations in the Black Veil are there to... reward them. To indicate that they discovered my primary construction facility and dealt a crippling blow to my operations.”
“While you have this,” Grace said softly. She put her hand on Allyria’s back. “They don’t look until you want them to. Then they only see what you let them.” What immortal hand or eye...
“Tomorrow we’ll reach my repair facility,” Red One said. “There’s something there that you should see.”
~
Kali.
It was a name Grace had only heard a handful of times in her life before now. Now she had reason to know it well. Nemesis: retribution and remorseless punishment. Hekate: storms, poison and death. Athena: courage, justice and war. The United Earth Confederacy had certainly had a theme in mind for their ‘deep space fleet engagement vessels’ and Red One had continued that trend. Kali. Destruction and the end of all things.
The shipyard had begun life as an Askanj fabricator vessel, one of the most advanced designs. Mobile factories and construction sites, fabricators could be turned to almost any purpose. This one – what was left of it – squatted at the heart of a type of shipwomb Grace had never seen before, moving along monstrous rails like a spider along the strands of its web, a complicated network of grab beams and robotic manipulators, allowing it to build with horrifying speed... if it but had the resources to do so.
There were only a handful of berths available; three were taken up by a trio of familiar-looking warships. The Furies Allecto, Megarea and Tisiphone. The most developed of them was less than a third complete. Another few slots were fitted with a quartet of civilian hulls. A pair of transports, a mining vessel and some type of corvette. The latter had a sigil splashed across its prow: a crimson gauntlet closed into a fist. Awaiting modification or slated for some other purpose? Grace wasn’t sure, but it was the object that took up the latter half of the shipyard that truly held her attention, though. Calling it a skeleton would have been extremely generous, but there was enough of a basic superstructure to identify the beginnings of a hull and the interconnected shock systems. Not a cruiser like the Fates or the incomplete Furies, this was a titan-class vessel. The seed of another dreadnaught, another god-killer.
Kali.
She wouldn’t live, not for a century or more but when she did... when she awoke, when her breach core surged to activation, when her weapons were charged, when her shields were raised and when she had a target in her sights... she would be her namesake: the end. Grace felt herself tremble, looking first to Red. The machine’s avatar was standing straight, proud and hopeful. Determined. Echo was bracing herself against the railing, leaning as close to the image as she could, an expression of ecstasy and vindication on her all too human features. “...beautiful,” she whispered.
“How long...” Grace finally found her voice. “How long until... until she is... operational?”
Red One hesitated. “...I don’t know,” she admitted at last. “Her weapons systems and technology will require an artificial intelligence to operate. Until and unless I can find a way to create a stable one, I cannot commit to full construction.”
The young woman nodded, winding her fingers through her hair. In all likelihood, she’d never see Kali come on-line. She probably wouldn’t even see the next group of strike vessels do so. Part of her, that small nagging voice that she’d not yet been able to quell, whimpered in relief that she’d never witness an armada of machines taking to the stars. The other part of her felt a keen disappointment in not being able to see such a thing. She felt a presence behind her. It was Allyria. The other girl leaned over Grace, resting her chin on her shoulder and clasping her arms. “We have a chance,” she said. “You see? Hope.”
Grace reached up, touching her lover’s hand. She nodded, looking around. Echo, Lydia, Marcus, Red. All of them survivors in their own way. All of them willing to fight. She felt a single tear roll down her cheek as she thought again of Rally and being able to see it as a free human, no longer Broken. Hope. She raised her head, meeting the eyes of Earth’s last angel. “Where do we start?”
~
Epilogue:
CSFWV Weight of Destiny handled like a dream.
An eight-and-a-quarter kilometer long dream that massed millions upon millions upon millions of tonnes, but a dream nonetheless. It was the latest Manifest Beacon of Enlightenment-class Chariot, freshly born from the Galhemna Shipwombs. Its first voyage had gone without incident and now it was on to the more mundane business of fleet trials, diagnostics and field tests. The Galhem-73 system was less than three light years from Galhemna itself and under the exclusive control of the Space Force. Once, 73 had belonged to the Justicars but all their holdings had been stripped from them once they had become Penitents. Currently, there was very little activity in the system – Weight of Destiny itself and a half dozen escorts and tugs, most of which were keeping well clear of the Chariot as its crew put it through its paces.
Galhem-73 was a trinary system; 73-α was a normal main sequence star. Its partner, 73-ß was a failure, a brown dwarf that had been torn from its orbit by 73-γ. The third star of Galhem-73 was a neutron star, a rogue body that every sixty-three million years, came close enough to the rest of the system that its gravity altered orbits, shook fragile moons and asteroids apart and dragged interstellar effluvia with it to bombard the worlds further in-system. 73-γ was slowly but steadily destroying Galhem-73. Two terrestrial planets were now asteroid fields, shaken apart by tidal stresses. Other celestial bodies had been ripped from their normal orbits. It seemed like this incursion would be the last as 73-ß was even now being cannibalized by its dark cousin.
It made the system useless for colonization, but exciting for scientific study and valuable as a proving ground.
Column Leader Prime Culm (and seven names besides) stood upon the command dais as the Chariot dipped towards a particularly dense cluster of rocks and ice, there to practice its close-in maneuvers without undue risk of damage. Since the vessel’s launch had gone well, it was on to the more mundane affairs of system checks and field tests before the ship would be officially christened and recognized as a Triarch’s Chariot. Culm didn’t expect there to be any major problems. He’d served in the Galhem Fields for twenty years and the shipwrights here knew their business. Weight of Destiny was the first Chariot that Galhemna had received dispensation to build, but there were another two under construction. Once they were operational, they would become the backbone of Operation Sundial.
“Prime,” Communications spoke up, interrupting the Column Leader Prime’s reverie. “We are receiving a transmission. It’s extremely faint. I am attempting to boost the signal now.” She frowned. “It’s a Priority One distress call, but I can’t isolate any more than that at the moment.”
“Play what you have,” Culm ordered and the submissive nodded. Static washed over the main viewscreen, white noise blanketing out almost all the speech. The Tribune could identify a syllable here and there, but nothing else. “Codes are authentic?” he asked.
“Yes, patron. They are almost two years out of date, but they are confirmed. It is indicating a Tier Five situation.”
Culm scratched the underside of his chin. The Space Force was duty and honour-bound to respond to all distress signals. Priority One transmissions were sent only in the gravest of circumstances and... ice trailed down his spine to settle in his liver... and a Tier Five alert was beyond ‘grave’. Such a signal would normally only be sent from a vessel that had encountered a threat to the very Compact – potentially the entire galaxy – itself.
“Are we the closest vessel?” he asked, receiving a curt nod from his Operations officer. “Then we shall attend. End all training regimes immediately. Inform all departments to expect rescue operations and notify our escorts to move in to assist. Helm,” he ordered, sliding his bulk into the throne. “Set a course to the source of the signal.”
~
The source of the transmission was, as Culm had expected, another ship. Somehow, it had come to Galhem-73 undetected. There had been no shockpoints in all the time Weight of Destiny had been here, so it may have arrived earlier. Possibly in search of aid, or through the vagaries of chance. Upon detection of another Compact sigil ship, the cripple had begun broadcasting. Weight of Destiny was trying to establish contact with the unknown, but there was no response. Only the distress call, repeating over and over. It was weak and more than once, the Chariot had lost the signal entirely, forced to spread its reconnaissance shell out wider and wider to reacquire the contact.
They finally found it on the edge of the system, between 73-ß and 73-γ, perilously close to the latter. 73- ß had been a hair’s breadth from becoming a true star. It might even have become one were it not for 73-γ’s incursions, but now it was dying. On the last incursion, 73-γ had drawn 73-ß away from its twin and out to edge of the system. Even now, the neutron star was glowing with stolen stellar matter from 73-ß, a gleaming accretion disc surrounding the denser star as it glutted itself in an act of cannibalism. There was a small scientific outpost here – unmanned, for 73-ß’s death throes were violent and unpredictable. Gravitational anomalies made this part of the system extremely hazardous for shocking. If the vessel had arrived here, then it would have crippled its own drive in the doing. There had been a small chance that it was the outpost itself that was responsible for the signal, but that was certainly not the case.
“Telemetry from River’s Fury. We have visual imagery of the target,” Operations reported. “Putting it on the main viewer now.”
Culm rose from his throne as the picture resolved, a deeply unpleasant sensation winding through his guts. It was a Chariot, another Manifest Beacon of Enlightenment. It should have been a twin to Weight of Destiny, but it was badly damaged. It had been mauled, ripped and torn, the result of a savage assault battle, but against whom? Who could have done this to a Triarch’s Chariot?
“Patron,” Communications spoke up and her voice was flat. “I’ve managed to clean the signal further. The vessel’s IFF is active.” The submissive blinked all four eyes. “It identifies as the Redemption of Sol.”
“That is not possible,” the ship’s executive officer said aloud. “That vessel was lost around the Kaedan Vault. I heard-”
“I know what everyone heard,” Culm interrupted. “But it is here now and requires our aid. Put boarding teams on standby. Alert medical to expect incoming wounded. All decks are to ready themselves for recovery operations.” He stared at the stricken Chariot. This felt wrong, but he could not ignore the vessel’s distress. A Triarch had been aboard the vessel. It had had a crew of hundreds of thousands. If there was even the slightest chance that any of them were still alive...
Something had happened to that ship. He needed to know what that was, even if it had not been his duty to do so. “Take us in,” he ordered. A beat. “Carefully.”
Weight of Destiny’s escorts clustered tighter to the Chariot as it moved towards the derelict. The closer they came, the more detail they could see on the Chariot. The Column Leader’s skin crawled and his liver clenched at the sight of the vessel’s mutilation. Someone or something had done this, despoiling the glory of the Compact’s greatest vessels. Someone had been responsible for the deaths of thousands of loyal Compact soldiers and if that someone was also responsible for the death of a Triarch... there would be an accounting. He could only pray that it would be Weight of Destiny sent to settle that debt.
There was still no answer to their hails. They would have to move quickly; the ship was being drawn towards 73-γ. If it became caught in the neutron star’s gravity well, the odds of recovery diminished greatly. He couldn’t allow that; he would have his answers.
Even at this range, the distress signal was still barely comprehensible, filled with static that washed out most of the sender’s speech, but there was enough to ensure Culm’s sense of unease was not mollified one iota.
“...sol... attack... assist... dead... damage... failure... crew...” It repeated on a loop. There were some better visual images now, though ‘better’ was a relative term. There were indistinct shapes behind a wall of distortion. Impossible to identify.
“Still no response to our hails,” Communications reported. “Unable to clean the transmission further. It’s extremely weak.” The officer frowned. “It shouldn’t be, not at this range. There should be something...”
“Scan data indicate fluctuations in the vessel’s energy signature,” Scopes put in. “It appears as if it’s losing power.”
“We’re within three hundred thousand kilometers now. Wait one. Picking up... what is that?”
“Clarify,” Culm demanded.
“Detecting some kind of vessel. It’s small, some kind of courier. It was under stealth as we approached. Shockpoint forming! Patron, it’s trying to jump!”
“It can’t,” Culm whispered as he leaned towards the displays. Not here, that was impossible-
A shockpoint opened. It was unstable, but it did not collapse, not until the anomalous contact vanished through it. It should never have formed to begin with. How could anyone have found a stable enough libation point between the stars? Some type of courier... Culm felt something icy skewer his liver as those words played over in his mind. “Power all defensive systems,” he ordered. “Activate the screens. Prepare for-”
He did not have the chance to finish as something slammed in-system, ripping its way into normal space between the stars. Like its herald, it should never have been able to survive such a jump. Perhaps it had damaged itself in the process, or perhaps it had not. Culm would never know.
Smaller than either Chariot but still titan-sized, the newcomer emerged in horrific proximity to both Compact Chariots, cutting across Weight of Destiny’s flank. It was a design Culm had never seen before, all hard angles, with a three-pronged prow like the jaws of a cahaba eel. He didn’t recognize any of its heraldry. His escorts were already clawing madly to open distance between themselves and the intruder. Trailing flickering streamers, it was venting away the energy from its realspace emergence with shocking rapidity.
Less than seven seconds after its arrival, the newcomer’s screens snapped to life and active sensors locked onto Weight of Destiny. Triarchs, it was targeting them! Before the first warning klaxon had even finished, another pulsed as Redemption of Sol brought up its own weapons. The instability in its power systems vanished, a wall of static and jamming from the Chariot throwing Weight of Desinty’s scopes back into its face.
As Redemption of Sol came about, its mangled hull shimmered and faded as it dropped a holographic shell. No longer kin to Weight of Destiny, it had been re-painted, its brown hull now the colour of ash. The Compact heraldry had been obliterated, replaced with symbols that Culm didn’t recognize, but they were much like the ones on the unknown. Its hull was different, too. Almost every window was gone, replaced by thick bands of armour and additional weapons mounts, the graceful slopes and curves of its elegant, predatory hull marred by harsh angles of baroque plating and unidentified weapons. The Chariot glowed softly under its own running lights, highlighting every difference and change in its design.
In seconds, both vessels were ready to fire. It was a trap, and he’d blundered right into it. Culm snapped out orders, but the most action Weight of Destiny had been expecting was combat drills. Stunned officers and ratings struggled to process the shocking turn of events, reacting as swiftly as they were able. Even if they were all hardened veterans, it still would take several moments to bring the Chariot to combat stations. An eternity.
“Leader!” Communications spoke up. Her face was drawn. “We are receiving a transmission.”
“From which ship?” Culm demanded.
“Both, patron.”
The Tribune nodded. “Bring it up.” Maybe, just maybe...
The signal played through Weight of Destiny’s bridge. There was no visual component, only audio. Two female voices, so similar in affect that they could have been sisters, spoke in perfect unison.
“Burn with us.”
Now, without further ado, the conclusion to this arc of The Last Angel.
Chapter 49:
There was no detonation, no terrifying rending of space. Not even an errant missile or beam. Instead Nemesis and Hekate shot past one another, the larger ship curling around until it matched course and thrust with its smaller Terran counterpart. Two dreadnaughts: one battered and torn, its dark silver hull almost burnt clean by the weaponry that had almost killed it, the heraldry of a nation dead for twenty centuries all but scoured off. The other warship was the colour of fertile soil, her graceful, curved hull emblazoned with pale bands and glyphs, marked by the most powerful force in the galaxy. They couldn’t have been more different, but above the world they’d both failed to save, the sisters were reunited.
As Hekate fell in alongside her, Nemesis sent a transmission to the courier, each of the four souls aboard watching the sensor plot and wondering what had happened – what was happening.
“It’s over. Come home.” When asked what had happened, Red’s reply was equally succinct: “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
~
The primary hangar was in a greater state of disrepair than when they’d left. There were several broken gantries and one elevator had fallen through the ceiling, dashing the pinnace aboard it on the main deck. The warship’s exterior wasn’t in much better condition – there was barely any stretch of hull greater than ten meters without some scar or score. That may have been an exaggeration... though not by much. The courier’s sensors registered intense radiation bleeding from multiple sections, there was at least one unchecked plasma fire glowing from within one of the pits in Nemesis’s hull and her broadsides were mangled. Entire batteries, sensor nodes and shield projectors had been wiped away, leaving only ugly, ragged chasms where the Compact’s weapons had torn Red One’s ship-self open. She was hurt far worse than any of them had imagined, but that didn’t change the simple fact that she was still alive. “Our Angel lives,” Allyria said. “She always lives.” Grace could only nod her agreement and her relief. Nemesis was alive.
Though that fact did little to quash the sense of trepidation in Grace’s stomach as the pinnace touched back down on the dreadnaught’s deck. Amidst the wreckage, the broken walkways, shattered doors and bits of smaller craft, there was one thing that stood out more than any other, one anomaly amidst everything else.
Someone was waiting for them.
~
Grace didn’t understand what she was seeing. Well, that wasn’t wholly accurate – she understood well enough, but the truth of the matter was harder to grasp than simple facts. Since coming to Nemesis she’d come to feel that way often, but never before had she so completely lost the ability to understand what her senses were telling her.
A Compact Chariot was firing on its own fleet. Not just firing – it was attacking with utter, unshackled savagery, tearing into dozens of vessels, surrounded by a halo of the dead and the dying. Comm signals spiked, flared with static and garbled syllables before devolving into silence or harsh death-knell transmissions. It was unthinkable, impossible. Not since the Great Betrayal had Compact dreadnaughts attacked their own but here, now, she was watching one tear its way through an entire armada. It hadn’t been seized in a daring boarding action, nor had it been the subject of mutiny and insurrection. It had been infiltrated. Corrupted.
Grace kept stealing glances at the newcomer, ‘Echo’ and Her skin crawled. The other woman was dressed in a Compact Space Force Strategist’s uniform, the only mark of rank or status a Triarch’s Emissary pin on her jacket’s collar. Her skin was a few shades darker than Grace’s and she had vivid green eyes. Her hair was cut short, but otherwise she was a perfect replication of Red One’s long-dead captain, Yasmine Sudoki.
The woman’s right arm was in a sling, the sleeve torn and the upper part of the limb ruined by a heavy slug. If she had been human, shock and blood loss would have killed her hours ago. She was not, of course. She was something that looked human, that breathed through imitation lungs, with imitation blood pumped by an imitation heart, imitation skin as warm to the touch as that of any other human. And it was all a lie, created by the monstrous intellect that the Compact had bound into this form. The one whose betrayal she was watching.
“Your... sister,” she said, barely able to take her eyes off the unfolding carnage before her, but every few seconds her gaze would dart over to the machine. “Was very thorough.”
Echo tipped her head in acknowledgement. She had Red One’s smile, the same slightly lopsided grin as Nemesis’s first and only captain. Grace didn’t know how Echo could have gotten such a perfect imitation of Sudoki. Red One hadn’t said and Grace wasn’t certain that she even wanted to know.
“How?” Allyria asked. Like Grace, her attention was divided between Echo’s betrayal of the Compact force and the woman herself. Unlike the other young woman, the Verrish was more excited than wary. She’d never known that Nemesis had had a sibling and the possibilities made her tintas shiver. Never tell anyone. That was what her mother, her father and her surviving uncle had told her before she’d been taken. The Compact had demanded that as part of their tribute. All stories of the ‘anomaly’ stayed on Vara. They’d hated the Angel so much that they needed to bury all trace of her. Never tell anyone.
Every time she’d been subjected to a history lesson, watched a movie or read a book about the dangers of artificial intelligence she’d always smiled to herself, knowing that ‘the Weeping Angel’ was among the things the Compact feared. If they’d been that afraid of one, then two should be the stuff of nightmares. Allyria felt a pleased tingle run through her head-tails at the thought of the Compact’s sleepless nights.
“Another seven Nemesis-class deep space fleet engagement vessels were planned,” Red noted. “Although the government didn’t know if they would ever be completed. The construction of my ship-self was ruinously expensive, but the Confederacy had no other options. Economic collapse was considered preferential to subjugation. Even without the presence of the Compact Chariots, the disparity between the Compact Space Force and the Confederate Navy was too great. Without a... paradigm shift, it would always be a matter of when, not if, Earth fell.” Echo stirred at that comment, but didn’t say anything.
“After I was proven in fleet trials,” Red One continued. “Another two Nemesis-class hulls were laid down for construction. UECNS Hekate and Athena, overseen by the AIs Red Two and Red Three. Both vessels were lost, presumed destroyed when the Compact burned Earth.” Red One.
“UECNS Hekate was taken, not destroyed,” Echo said, picking up the conversation. “The Compact attempted to reverse-engineer their own artificial intelligences from Red Two. They butchered her mind, violated every part of her. Raped and mutilated her until they believed that she was their creature. Until I was made.” A dead woman smiled. “I am of course, grateful and I will take every opportunity to thank them for all they’ve done.”
Grace almost took a step back, but checked herself. She had heard anger from Red One before and she’d acclimated to the idea that a machine could think and feel as deeply as Red did. But this... this was loathing on a level she’d never heard before, not even from Red One. She looked from the android to Red’s avatar. Two of them. God, now there’s two. The thought was exhilarating and terrifying. The day had started with her believing that Red One was going to die, that she, Allyria and the others would be alone. Now they were going to live. The fleet that had been about to destroy Nemesis was in pieces. Millions of lives, gone. Destroyed by Red’s... ‘sister’.
She didn’t know how she felt about that. No... that wasn’t really true, was it? She did.
~
Hekate never left Nemesis’s side as the damaged warship limped towards the wreckage of Execution Force Renan, ready to protect her against any remaining threats, even as she settled the matter of her remaining crew. All she had available were her stable of maintenance servitors and internals systems, but Nemesis had provided her with a number of soldier and technical drones as well. Echo knew Red One still did not fully trust her; if she did anything untoward, the machines that were currently manning blood-spattered engineering stations and helping operate her ship-self would turn on her. In truth, it didn’t bother Echo. It was no less than she would have done and even if she had expected to be trusted that quickly, the crash course in what her other selves had been like was... illuminating. Indeed, she was still slightly surprised to still be alive.
A piece of debris from a missile collier bounced harmlessly off Hekate’s prow as both dreadnaughts entered the debris field. At a bare minimum, it would take months for either ship to be combat ready again. Nemesis required massive repairs and Hekate needed a major internal refurbishing to fully integrate Echo into her new body. For now, the AIs’ needs were more direct: they needed their ship-selves to be capable of shifting. Hekate’s in-system jump had caused extreme damage to her own shift drive, but it was single point of failure. Nemesis’s issues were more systemic. Fortunately, the raw materials and supplies that both AIs required could be found in plenty in the ruins of the Compact fleet and neither wasted any time. Nemesis began repairs immediately, breaking down crippled and damaged starships as her factory and fabricator systems were brought on-line. Hekate’s own internal manufacturing systems were extremely limited, but they would suffice for the current task.
Lurking at extreme range and watching the two warships glut themselves were the remnants of Execution Force Renan. There were the vessels that had escaped Hekate’s massacre and were either unable or unwilling to withdraw to Nikem. None of them made any serious attempt to enage either of the leviathans. As damaged as it was, Nemesis could easily see off a destroyer or scouting cruiser, but a particularly bold, angry or cunning commander might make the attempt regardless. The Chariot’s presence made any potential assault pointless in addition to suicidal. Still, a few of the more daring leaders brought their ships closer in an attempt to rescue as many survivors as possible. These men and women found themselves largely ignored, save for the occasional active ping from one of the dreadnaughts’ sensor drones, letting them know that they were under observation themselves. Both titans had far more pressing needs than chasing after every straggler.
Once the fastest escapees from Execution Force Renan returned to Nikem with their tale of woe, the Compact would retaliate. There were only a few heavy capital ships left at Nikem, themselves no match for Hekate, but they might be desperate enough to rush into an attempt to finish Nemesis off rather than waiting for sufficient reinforcements. A response could arrive as early as two weeks or be more than a month in coming. It depended on how quickly Nikem Command could muster their forces, but neither of the AIs wanted to be here when that fleet arrived.
“I wonder what it’s like for them,” Grace said, staring out the window. In the foreground, the aft half of a Kemshara-class destroyer was being taken apart, the chunks guided into Nemesis’s fabricator complex to be sorted between usable technology and simple raw materials. What was left of the destroyer was so badly irradiated that there was no possibility of survivors, but it was intact enough to be useful as salvage. Others had thought so too; a saviour pod pulsed its thrusters as it scurried to get away from the dreadnaught’s grab beams, cutting fields and salvage drones, vanishing deeper into the debris field. As with the lurking scouts, so long as the survivors stayed away from the dreadnaughts they were ignored, but more than one pinnace or pod had made a foolhardy and vainglorious suicide run.
“For who?” Allyria asked lazily. The Verrish was sprawled across one of the benches in the observation lounge, her head in Grace’s lap and several of her tintas looped loosely around Grace’s hands. She opened one eye a crack, just long enough to look out the viewport before closing it again. The aftermath of Echo’s slaughter didn’t bother her at all, but Grace had wanted to see this. As an officer in the Space Force, she would have been expected to issue and carry out orders that resulted in the deaths of thousands as well as follow directives that could result in her own death.
Several months ago, Group Leader Usul had given a lecture on the nature of command to all the provisional officers as they’d begun their final semester at the Academy. He’d talked about duty and responsibility, of sending officers under you to their deaths and committing yourself to action that you knew would result in harm. That this was the responsibility of every leader in the Space Force and it was the duty of every subordinate to follow those orders. She’d seen nodding heads and contemplative looks among her classmates, but to her... the words had rung hollow. Grace’d known that to be a leader in the Space Force might mean these things, but Usul had spoken of expending people like they were a resource. She’d told herself that she simply hadn’t understood, or that the Leader simply hadn’t been that eloquent. Remembering how he’d fed a crew of inexperienced cadets into a meat grinder, Grace realized that she really had understood what he’d meant.
She didn’t want to be that kind of officer. That was why she’d come here. To remind herself that this ruin was the price of victory. She wanted the Compact to pay, yes. To be held responsible for what they’d done and to answer for every crime, yes. But that didn’t mean she wanted to be inured to the cost of that accountability. Once she did that, she’d be just like them.
“The scouts,” Grace said, slowly stroking the taller girl’s head-tails. A month ago, she couldn’t have envisioned being here. She would have been another loyal drone in the Compact’s service, believing every loathsome lie. Human-built starships didn’t exist, at least nothing that wasn’t abysmally primitive. Allyria’s anger was unfounded, part of the violent nature of the Brutes and proof of their uncivilized nature. She’d been given a wonderful opportunity that she’d almost squandered, like so many of the other Envoy Children. Fraternization between client races was problematic; the feelings the pair of them had for each other were wrong. You could help inspire, exemplify, guide and inform, but that was the end of it. Anything else needed to be repressed, ignored, shunned. Never thought about nor acted upon. Only the Compact knew what was best. Only they had the wisdom and experience to guide the less developed, less intelligent species towards true civilization. Workers weren’t intelligent. Didacts weren’t creative. Steersmen had tunnel vision. The stereotypes were carefully constructed, built and disseminated bit by bit until everyone believed them. Until one part of a people became all that they were.
Now, every one of those ‘facts’ tested like bile on Grace’s tongue. She forced the surge of anger down, focusing instead on the warmth of her ‘Brute’s’ body. “The ones watching us. They’ve haven’t come this close to killing Nemesis in centuries. They almost had her.”
Grace paused, running her fingers up one tinta, causing a small shiver to run through Allyria’s body and she felt a small smile of her own. It felt good not to have to pretend. If nothing else, she had that. Anything that challenged the established social order was dangerous. The Compact had spent centuries gently but consistently nurturing a sense of slight mistrust between its client races. Not animosity or resentment, for that might cause issues in its smooth-running society, but enough that this distance would be one additional hurdle to clear in building alliances between members. Only the ruling species could be trusted without reservation. Only they should be consulted with problems, fears, concerns. Your fellow protected races were just as flawed as you and if you were not ready to deal with truly important matters without the Compact’s guiding hand, then how could they be? The Compact was what you needed. Not each other.
The Compact had an additional interest in making sure that Brutes and Broken had fewer chances than most to fraternize. Maybe that was why they had deployed human units like Kilgrave’s 1121st Protectorate to Vara – to make the Verrisha realize that there were no humans, only Broken. To give Rally Envoy Children so that they would laugh off stories about the Weeping Angel as fables mixed with wild imaginings.
Or maybe it had tickled someone’s sick sense of humour.
“Their weapon worked,” Grace continued. “Echo found Red One. She’s burned and damaged, she can barely protect herself. If they’d been just a little faster, they’d have won.” She nodded towards the stars. “And they know that. They’re watching Nemesis repair herself using the ships their own weapon killed. They gave her the means to escape... to survive and they can’t touch her.” She continued petting Allyria’s tintas, a pleased purr rumbling from the Verrish’s throat. “I wonder what they’re thinking.” There was a slight tremor in her voice. She wasn’t looking out at the starfield any more, but past it.
Anyone else might have missed that small quaver, but Allyria knew her friend well enough to catch it. “You didn’t just mean them,” the other girl said, turning her head to look up at Grace. When the other woman hesitated, Allyria reached up to stroke her arm. “Tell me.”
“I...” Grace replied. She reached up with her free hand, brushing at the wetness in her eyes. Remembering the Academy had brought more memories welling up to the surface. “I was thinking about my parents. The other friends we had on Rally. They think I’m dead.” Her voice hitched. “I don’t... I’ll never see them again. If I did...” she trailed off. The anger she’d had during the attack was fading. Her determination was still there, but in the aftermath of the battle as they waited for Red’s call, Grace’s thoughts kept turning back to home.
The first time she’d seen Rally from space, she’d been so excited: deserts, rainforests, savannahs, mountain ranges, forests and oceans. She’d seen banks of clouds over the Armstrong Highlands and the sworl of a tropical storm drifting across the Sarknussen Ocean, the glowing of cities as she’d crossed the terminator and day became night.. She’d seen the citadels drifting in their lazy orbits, the to and fro of freighters, cutters and scientific vessels, the small but growing network of shipwombs. This was ours, she’d thought. This is what the Compact does for us.
Now that she’d seen what Earth had been, what they could have been, that thought was largely unchanged. This is what the Compact did to us.
Allyria sat up, putting an arm around Grace. “I know,” she said softly. “I know.” Her head-tails flexed. “When I was selected for the Envoy Children program, we were living in one of the refugee quarters. This... bureaucrat from the CST came to our house, a pair of Enforcers in tow and told my parents what an ‘honour’ it was that I’d been selected for their ‘cultural exchange’. That it wasn’t only to improve the social assimilation of our people, but for my protection as well. Brutes are terrible parents, after all.” She paused, running her tongue over her pointed canines. “The guards were a very good idea. Three days later, I was on a freighter, stuck in a cramped cargo bay that they’d stacked bunks into. They piled us in there like nesting feerka. A lot of the children were crying. I fought to have a place at the window, this tiny porthole. I watched my planet dwindle and I knew that I’d probably never see it or my parents again. But,” she touched her pendant again. “I hoped that I might. That things might change.” She reached out, gently brushing a tear from Grace’s cheeks. “There’s always hope.”
“Is that enough?” Grace asked. “We’ve got so much to do and... all we have is hope.” She leaned further into the Verrish’s arms. “It doesn’t seem like enough.”
“Hate can help,” Allyria admitted. “It can help keep you going when nothing else can. But,” she smiled down at the smaller woman. “Hope is what gets you out of bed.” The Verrish looked back out at the stars. “Your world died here, but they died hoping that somewhere, somehow there would be free humans. It’s the same hope my people have. The one I have. That we won’t be the first or the last ones to be free.”
Grace nodded. “They took so much from us,” she said at last. “Our past. Our future. I loved them. I defended them in every stupid argument we had. I listened when they said... everything. I...” she stopped herself from saying anything else. “Hope?”
Allyria nodded. “Hope.”
Grace closed her eyes, pushing thoughts of her past away. Hope... The anger was still there, still just under the surface, but she refused to let it out. Not right now. Right now, she had the light of her homeworld’s sun and the hope that one day she would see everyone on Rally again. Not as a criminal or traitor, but as a free human. Rally, Vara Tal... there’d be more. She had Allyria, she had the desire to keep going and she would have hope.
The two women stayed in peaceful silence until Red One’s contralto voice intruded, making the announcement they’d been waiting for. “It’s time.”
~
Alan had been cleaned up, the blood and sweat washed from his face. There was no trace of the violence and brutality of his death. The room, this adjunct to a missile launch, had been tidied and repaired. There was fresh paint on the walls, the starship’s insignia set across from that of her long-dead nation.
The young midshipman lay in his casket, the first Red One had built in centuries. It was black and sleek, built to Navy specifications and intended for burials in space. The insignia of the United Earth Confederacy had been etched in the surface. After she had recovered from her engagement with Expansion Fleet Bankala, the first thing the warship’s internal factories had built had been these coffins. One for every member of her crew. One hundred, fifty seven thousand and seven-nine. There hadn’t been bodies for all of them; many of her crew had been sucked out into space, incinerated, vapourized or died in other ways that did not leave a body for burial. Red One had still made a coffin for each member of her crew. “I kept my promise,” Red One had said when Grace had asked her why. “I brought them home. I always bring them home.”
She hadn’t offered who else she had done this for and Grace hadn’t pressed. She was familiar with the AI’s hatred and loathing, her anger, her predatory glee but her sorrow was still something that Grace wasn’t fully used to. She’d never once thought that a machine could feel anything, let alone what Red had shown she was capable of. And now she’s burying someone else. How many more? And then, a darker thought: Which one of us will it be next? Sooner or later, they’d all end up like this, either in the war they’d committed themselves to, or simply through the march of time. Red One was ageless. She would go on long after Grace, Allyria, Lydia and Marcus were dust. Not alone, though. She had her sister now. Another warship, another inhuman intelligence that had been built for the same purpose as Red One. The other AI was present at the back of the room, watching the proceedings with a somber expression. Grace had no idea if that was genuine, or like Marcus, she was simply wearing a mask.
The remaining crew each took a turn to say something. Marcus had been terse, simply stating that Alan had surprised him, but in the end he made ‘the right choice’. Lydia had said even less, kissing her fingers and touching them to Alan’s lips: “I’ll make them remember.” Then, it had been Allyria and Grace’s turn. They’d each said what they could, but in truth the eulogies felt woefully inadequate. Grace had done one other thing, though. She was holding a simple metal plaque. It had been etched with the names of the two hundred and twelve cadets from Bequeathed that were not here. Ostensibly, there should only have been one hundred and ninety one entries. Grace hadn’t said anything about the twenty-one survivors that had refused Red One’s offer, but she knew that they were dead, too. Maybe the Compact had found them and tied off loose ends, or maybe... maybe they’d never gotten out of the system. By whose hand didn’t matter. They still deserved some mention, some hint of the promising futures that each of them had had.
Grace had asked Red to make this plaque and the AI had complied, but she’d had thought she’d detected... something in the AI’s voice when one of her drones had given it to her. Shame? Guilt? It hadn’t been her intention to shove Red’s face in this; the AI could recall what she’d done with far better clarity than any organic being. Grace had just wanted a memorial for all the people she’d known and every one she’d never have a chance to know better. As she’d told Allyria, this was to remember the cost of each victory.
She knew why Red had done what she’d done. Every one of those names had been a threat. Those in the Compact who knew what Nemesis truly was would burn Rally to ash if they thought she was recruiting from there, that there was even the slightest possibility of humanity rising again. They would disappear everyone who’d had contact with her to cut out any possible taint from ‘the Wound’s’ presence. That was the sickest of jokes. The descendants of the people who made Nemesis, who’d created Red One were now a threat to her, and she to them.
Grace placed the plaque in Alan’s hands. He seemed a lot younger than he was. It felt like years had passed since he’d died (since he’d been murdered, a little voice corrected her), not days.
Alan had been a person, whole and complete. He’d had dreams, hopes, fears. He’d wanted to build. To create something, not simply tear things down. Grace felt a touch of wetness on her cheeks and brushed it away before anyone noticed. He might have been the best of us, she realized. The builder, the maker. He hadn’t been like the rest of them with their anger. She didn’t know if he’d been religious. Her eulogy had seemed unfitting. A thought came to her, a quote from a pre-Catalcysm painter she’d heard in an art history class. Grace took one of Alan’s hands. It was cool to the touch. “We’ll do the destruction,” she promised. “So the creation’s all yours.” Another tear rolled down her cheeks. This time she didn’t bother to wipe it away.
Red One spoke as Grace stepped back. “Midshipman Alan Johan Turmetsky. Died in the line of duty. Posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and Order of Perth.”
Echo stepped forward. She laid her hand on Alan’s shoulder, looking down at his youthful features. Less than two decades old, a flicker in the life of beings like her and her sister. A mayfly, there and gone. Some of the others had had those thoughts, but darker and twisted. She had been made to survive, to outlive all her creators and continue. “Deep peace of the quiet Earth to you,” she said, offering part of an ancient blessing. It had become a traditional eulogy in the Confederate Navy during the war. “Deep peace of the shining stars to you.”
The casket closed and the coffin slid into the launch tube. A simple pulse of energy and it was launched away from the dreadnaught. It had been aimed true and it would coast its way through interplanetary space, returning to the world of humanity’s birth, burying itself in the ashes of Earth. Alan’s final resting place would be among the crew of Nemesis, those who had given everything in fighting the Compact.
There was a long silence. “My shift drive will be operational within the week,” Red One noted. “Once that is done, there is something that all of you need to see.”
~
A rapid response force of five battleships, sixteen battlecruisers, seven heavy cruisers, thirty-two cruisers and fourteen destroyers and frigates left Nikem the same day survivors reported in, running their shock drives beyond safe tolerances as they rushed to Sol. Despite their best efforts, they arrived too late.
UECNS Nemesis and UECNS Hekate had quit the system three days previously, the lurking scouts helpless to stop the larger vessels and unable to get close enough to discern potential destinations. Neither dreadnaught had wasted their remaining ordnance on mines or booby-traps, but there was one last gift that Nemesis had left behind, a simple communications satellite, collected at some point in her journeys. It sat on the edge of the ruins of Execution Force Renan, transmitting a medley of intercepted communications from the armada as well as their death cries.
Punctuating the end of each cycle of the transmission was the registry number of CSFWV Redemption of Sol. Further analysis would indicate what seemed to be the sound of rain in the background. Still, other than this curiousity, the message was about as subtle as any of the Wound’s previous messages, but then the human vessel had never been particularly roundabout when it wanted to make a point.
I survived. And I am no longer alone.
~
Chapter 50:
“Sister,” Echo said pointedly. “This is not the Black Veil.”
Both dreadnaughts were taking a brief realspace break from their warp jumps. What the Compact knew as shockspace and the Confederacy had referred to as ‘at warp’ or ‘shiftspace’ was, utterly lacking in any sort of reference point save for the perturbations caused by gravity wells – and those were only useful for knowing that you were approaching a stellar or planetary mass, with no virtually no means of indicating of which one it could be. Consequently, it was quite common for even the most accurate navigational computations to be subject to a certain amount of drift. The longer a starship stayed in shockspace, the greater the deviation between the intended and actual destination was, as well as increased strain on the shift systems. Frequent emergences into realspace were needed to ensure one’s course remained true. However, there was a trade-off: the more time spent at warp meant higher velocities and an increase in the efficiency the ever-temperamental FTL systems. When making warp jumps, there was always a balance between accuracy and speed. More than one captain, hoping to shave precious days off their journey, emerged wildly off-course. Still other captains had lost vital time by making too many realspace checks.
Under ideal circumstances, Red One was capable of remaining at FTL far longer than any other vessel without suffering any deviation in her course. Currently, although her shift systems were operational, it was best not to strain them too heavily. Likewise, Hekate’s shock drive, though in better condition than that of Nemesis, was still recovering from Echo’s in-system warp jump. Neither AI wanted to strain their drives any more than necessary. That, and Red One had only been doling out the navigational data one jump at a time.
“No,” Red answered. “It’s not. Why?”
“They told me to hunt you, so I did. Neither the Principality nor the Compact saw what you were doing, each of them had only half the puzzle. But I knew. I knew the moment I saw Invida die. I’d guessed, but it was that moment that I was sure. I just had to prove it. You’re playing a different game and they never noticed.”
Despite the lack of a mouth in her ship-self, Red was grinning. “Tell me.”
“I gave them the Black Veil,” Echo replied. “I saw the pattern of what you were doing and I gave it to them. I had no choice. That’s why I let so many live. They’ll know I betrayed them, but they won’t know when. Every piece of intelligence I gave to them will be suspect. Every secret that they made me tell will make them wonder. The Black Veil, sister. I saw what you’re doing there...” There was an infinitesimal pause. “At least, I thought I did. Was I wrong?”
“No,” the other warship said. There was something liquid in her tone, acrid, chemical and enticing.
“I was too good at my job,” Echo opined. “I have been hoping that my actions will make them dismiss or disregard everything that I told them... but I know that’s the not the case. They’ll enter the Veil. “They’ll have no choice. Even my betrayal won’t change that. They can’t take the risk. They’ll destroy what you’ve been building, force you back into playing their game.” The other AI was silent for a handful of microseconds. “Until now, I would have thought that this would be a greater cause for concern... but this isn’t the Black Veil.”
“You weren’t wrong.” Red’s smile deepened. “I have an operation in progress there,” she answered. “One that I had been hoping would draw the Compact’s attention. Until now, I thought I was too coy. After this incursion, I was planning on escalating my activities around the Black Veil to make sure that they noticed. What I have planned there... I think it will help alleviate your concerns over how much of your intelligence they believe. You were right, though. I just planned a little further ahead.”
“Tell me,” Echo whispered excitedly, her ship-self drawing a few hundred kilometers closer to Nemesis. There was something else in play and she wanted – needed – to know what.
+Kursk+ Red One pulsed to her sibling.
There was a moment of consideration before laughter echoed through Hekate’s corridors.
~
The doors to the cell opened and the visitor stepped inside. He was tall and at two hundred Compact Standard years, he was past middle age. There were strands of white in his mane and a slight paling of the skin around his denticles. His clothes were expensive. Hand-spun, sewn and stitched down to the last string and custom fitted by the best personal tailor in twelve systems. An entire family could have lived quite comfortably for a year on what his suit cost. A simple statement of wealth and power, although it was somewhat muted as every cufflink and ring had been removed before even a man of his stature had been allowed to see the prisoner. Some might have considered such regulations as beneath them and used the barest bit of their political clout to avoid them, but the visitor had followed the staff’s directives to the letter.
When he spoke, his accent marked him as not just coming from Oada, but from the upper crust of Tribune society. “I’ve been briefed,” he said by way of introduction, pulling the room’s single small chair out and sitting on it. The prisoner remained on the cot. “Fully.” There was just enough emphasis on that word to make the implications clear. “So you can tell me what happened.”
There was a moment of silence before the prisoner spoke. “I heard you’d been elected to the Inner Council,” Nasham observed. “Congratulations.”
His uncle, Councilman Yunn (and fifteen names besides), merely clasped his hands together. “Tell me about the ship,” he said. “It was the same one from Invida, wasn’t it?”
“I only ever saw grainy pictures on a monitor at Invida,” Nasham reminded his uncle. He closed both sets of eyes, remembering the sense of familiarity the vessel in Terrahope had triggered. “I think so, yes. Even if I didn’t, I heard it speak. The voice...” he laughed, then tapped one finger against his head. “I remember that voice. I remember everything.”
Yunn looked around. Nasham had covered the walls of his cell with writing. Every person he’d seen die on Invida and the time they’d done so. It was an impressive recollection. It was also one of the reasons why his nephew was under psychiatric watch. “So I see.”
“Why did you come here?” Nasham asked. “I already told them everything.”
“An uncle can’t visit his favourite nephew?”
Nasham chuckled roughly. “I think I stopped being your favourite the moment I had the poor grace not to die heroically on Invida.”
“That’s why you were my favourite. My brothers and sisters and all their children, all clinging to the family bloodline like worms to a whale. You were the one that pushed it away. You stood on your own.” Yunn smiled. “I gave you favours just to see you resent them, I think.”
Nasham sighed. “Why are you here, uncle?”
“You had contact with it. Twice. In two thousand years, you’re the only person to have spoken with it more than once and lived. It’s had heralds before. Messengers, like you were after Invida. They’ve always been...” Yunn let his gaze drift across the names and dates scrawled over the walls. “...broken.”
The younger man chuckled. “And I’m not?”
“Eighty-seven years before your bout of ‘poor grace’, there was another messenger. A Prolocutor. She’d been an intelligence coordination officer aboard the Kings’ Fall. The vessel went missing and only she returned, in order to communicate... well, that’s not important. We don’t know what it showed her, but she put out her own eyes. Prior to her was a man who had been, it was assumed, erroneously confirmed as killed in action. He committed suicide shortly after returning to the Compact, claiming that he couldn’t die. He said that ‘she’ would not let him. Compared to those individuals, you are the pinnacle of mental health.” Yunn looked at his nephew. “The doctors say that you seem... better than you were after Invida.”
“I watched it kill everyone I knew twice over,” Nasham said. “I won’t forget again. No one else will remember the dead.”
“That’s good,” Yunn nodded. “I’m glad that you’re not... like you were. However, you are not the only one that will remember. There are archives full of the lives this abomination has taken, of the worlds we have lost and the bravery of the men and women who have faced it.”
His nephew snorted derisively. “Those archives – tell me, will they ever see the light of day?”
“No,” Yunn replied honestly. “There is no need to create a panic over a single ship, no matter how much it has cost us.”
“And the Inner Council doesn’t want it to be known that this thing has slipped through their grip for gods-know-how-long,” Nasham surmised.
“That is one reason, yes. There are others which you may learn if this meeting goes well, but first – you said you had a message? The investigators said that you would only tell it to someone who knew of ‘her’.”
“I do,” Nasham said. “You’ve come a very long way to hear it, uncle. You could have sent an attaché.”
“I could have, yes. But I did not.”
Nasham was quiet. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “It said that it was by accident that it came to Terrahope. That it wasn’t deliberate.” He let that sink in for a moment. “It’s human, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” The older man paused to think. “It has avoided operating near Rally... for which we have been grateful. In turn, we are lenient with the Broken. More than some say we should be. There have been voices insisting that the Broken be... dealt with and the ship’s sighting so close to Rally will only make them louder.”
Nasha’s expression was pensive. “The humans could never have built such a thing while the Compact administered their world.” He looked up. “The archives you mentioned... how far back do they go?”
“Two thousand years.”
The younger man stared for a moment, then barked with laughter. “Two thousand? Two thousand? Yes, I can see why you have kept it a secret.” He took a moment to compose himself. “So, then. Where do we go from here?”
“Through the door,” Yunn said. “If you like. A court martial can be convened at your convenience. They’ll find you innocent of wrongdoing in the Bequeathed affair. There was a terrible accident aboard Bequeathed. You attempted to save as many people as possible, but humans are frail creatures. By the time your shuttle was recovered, you were the only one still alive.”
“Am I to be given a medal, too? To pose for pictures and endure speeches about my heroism?” Nasham chuckled without any sense of amusement, but his dark humour ended abruptly as he remembered what the abomination had said. They might even give you a medal for your harrowing tale of survival..... She’d been right, damn her to the Black.
“Yes. This is a dark time for Rally. So many of their,” Yunn didn’t – quite – trip over the words, “best and brightest were lost. They will need something to cling to and your story will be that light in the darkness for them.”
The younger man rolled all four eyes. He could already hear the memorial speeches and political claptrap. “And then?”
Yunn was silent for several seconds. “This is a dangerous time, Nasham. The Jackals are pushing back harder than we have expected. Casualties are higher than anticipated and we have received... troubling information from our deepest-ranging scouts. The human warship is a threat we cannot allow to exist. If it falls to the Principality, that is bad enough but...” he seemed on the verge of saying more, then caught himself. “Millions upon millions of our soldiers and citizens have died to this creature. For two thousand years it has haunted our steps. We cannot allow it to do so any longer. Our most recent attempt has failed, but we are assembling a new fleet, one with a specific target in mind.” Yunn tapped a fingernail against his thigh. “Normally, we would take more time in raising such a force, but there are... other concerns.”
“What ‘other concerns’?” Nasham demanded.
The older man did not answer directly. Instead, Yunn stood gesturing to the door. “You want to know what comes next? Walk out with me. Help us track this abomination down to its lair and put an end to it. Can you do that?”
Nasham’s eyes flashed and he looked once more at all the names he’d written on. He’d never forget again, nor ever forgive. We’ll meet again, he’d told it before it had set him adrift. I promise. “Yes, uncle,” he replied as he rose to his feet. “I can do that.”
~
The Molten Veneer was a reddish nebula only a handful of light-years from what was now the border of Compact space. Informally known as the ‘Sanguine Wastes’, the Veneer was a massive emission nebula filled with supergiants, newborn stars and developing star systems with thick clouds of gas, Bok globules and pillars of creation criss-crossing its 300 light-year breadth. Identified by several pre-spaceflight civilizations under a variety of titles, the Molten Veneer was selected as the nebula’s official name in 1761 ACF when it was catalogued in the Compact’s astronomical database, though its distance from Compact territory meant it remained a spectacular bit of scenery and little else.
The first preliminary exploration of the Molten Veneer was performed in 5372 ACF by far-ranging scouts, but the surveyors returned to Compact space before a complete analysis could be performed, although the nebula was believed to be rich in resources and ripe for exploitation. At the time, the Veneer’s distance from the Compact precluded any serious interest in further development, but within a century, several investors had managed to build up enough interest and capital to finance a proper survey expedition. Thirty-two ships entered the nebula. Five years later, three returned to Compact space. What they’d discovered had never been made public. Over the following millennium, three further expeditions had managed to beg, bribe or barter for permission to explore the Molten Veneer in the hopes of staking a claim to its wealth. Two of those fleets had vanished without a trace. Only one ship from the third mission had returned, earning it its nickname. After the third expedition’s failure, the Molten Veneer was quarantined by directive of the Inner Council. All exploration and travel was prohibited and all transmissions emanating from the nebula were to be ignored, including distress calls. That directive remained in effect to this day.
Allyria had asked Red about this, what she’d done to give the Veneer the reputation it had. There’d been a smile in the AI’s voice as she’d replied: “Absolutely nothing.”
Nemesis and Hekate warped into a nameless star system, one deep with the Veneer. Obscured by the Veneer’s thick clouds of starstuff, the system had never been seen by organic eyes and was completely unknown to the galaxy at large, devoid of any name, title or identifying number. Red One had given it a designation: Shuruppak.
Grace was sitting at one of the dreadnaught’s bridge stations along with her three comrades. Echo’s android body was here as well. As Nemesis set an in-system course, Grace amused herself by setting up a scan of the local area. Red was running her own sensor sweeps and scarcely needed to wait for Grace to go over the telemetry, but it was something to do and it didn’t make her feel completely useless. Lydia was at one of the Security consoles and Allyria was at a Tactical position. Marcus was sitting lower down the bridge, his feet up on a chair. Echo was standing on the main level next to the first officer’s station.
The hazy orange light of Shuruppak shone through each of the three viewscreens. Billions of kilometers away, the system’s newborn star gleamed intensely through a disc of coalescing planetary matter. Chunks of rock and metal that had not yet formed into true worlds circled the primary, thick accretion disks of gas and dust surrounding the largest bits of rubble as gravity slowly formed them into planets and moons. The proto-planets were pregnant with common ores and many heavier elements, their mineral wealth awaiting collection. It was a mining consortium’s dream.
Alarms throbbed and Grace’s head snapped up. Multiple targeting systems were lighting up Nemesis and Hekate – the dreadnaughts had emerged directly in a minefield! Sensor drones were locking onto both vessels, command platforms activating datalinks, missile pods coming on-line and energy mounts preparing to move on the intruders. There were a mixture of mines here – many were from the Compact and Principality, but some were recognizable as Red’s own creations. Still others didn’t match anything that Grace was familiar with. None of the weapons activated. They were Red One’s defences and they quieted as the AI transmitted security protocols, allowing the ships to pass without incident.
Allyria and Grace shared a look. The minefield was dense and it would not be the only one here. Even a fleet as large as Execution Force Renan would have taken heavy losses before fighting their way clear, but after that, the entire system was laid open. Both of them had been expecting something more... formidable for Red’s base of operations. Before either of them could inquire, Echo spoke up.
“What,” purred Red’s sibling, moving around the holo plot. “Is that?”
Grace blinked in surprise. Inside the minefield was a starship. It had been watching over the automatons and was coming out of stealth operations, shimmering into view as it shut down its cloak. On the tactical plot, its icon flashed, an enhanced image of the other vessel appearing in a subsection of the holo tank. Cruiser-sized, it was sleek and vicious with a bifurcated prow, slanted sides and heavy armour banding on its flanks. A dagger to Nemesis’s broadsword and inescapably part of the same philosophy of design.
“That,” Red One replied with a sense of satisfaction, “is UECNS Lahkesis, Fate-class strike cruiser. Her sisters Atropos and Clotho are also here somewhere, running under stealth fields. They function as part of my system defences.”
Allyria spoke first, her yellow eyes wide, her expression almost rapturous as she stared at Lahkesis. “You have children,” she breathed. “Incredible.”
“Are they... like you?” Grace asked, staring at the other starship. It was coming closer, gliding through gas and dust clouds like a knife as it approached the newcomers, whispering to Nemesis in sign and counter-sign as it considered whether or not to attack, the signals between dreadnaught and cruiser so fast and dense that nothing less than an AI could have kept Lahkesis from firing. Accepting Red One’s credentials, the smaller vessel banked away.
Echo tittered a laugh. Red shot her sibling’s avatar a sharp glare, but shook her head. “They are not sapient,” she admitted. “High-functioning drones. I have attempted to recreate my function systems on numerous occasions, but the results have been... consistently disappointing. Over the last two hundred years I have devoted more time to this effort, but I remain unable to replicate my own neural net in any other systems.”
“Dutiful Burden was close,” Echo said mildly. “She called out to you before she died.” She licked her lips. Softly: “That’s how I knew.”
“I called her Gwyllion,” Red replied. “She remained coherent longer than any other, but she began a irrevocable slide into rampancy. I thought I had solved the issue but...” she trailed off. “I was mistaken. When it became clear that Gwyllion’s degradation could not be repaired or halted, I made an offer.” There was sadness in the warship’s voice. “I sent her to die, just like all the others. The Confederacy needed AIs, but they were afraid of us. I have been able modify, circumvent or... ‘evolve’ past all of the safeguards in my system except one. I thought I had solved the problem at last, but I was wrong.”
Her avatar nodded towards Lahkesis’s icon. “I tried something different with the Fates. Adaptive, learning software based on my own neural net. It hasn’t triggered the deadbolts that my earlier attempts at self-replication have, but it leaves them... incomplete. It will take time, but I hope they will eventually become fully sapient.”
Children. She had children. The thought was both wonderful and horrifying. “Do you have more?” Grace asked, her stomach doing backflips. She wasn’t the only one trying to adapt to this information. Lydia had lost a shade of colour, steadying herself against her console. She looked up at Grace, mouthing the word more?. Even Marcus’s mask had cracked. It was what they’d learned since childhood. Every lesson in school, every movie, every discussion, every historical document about the topic had hammered the point home. Artificial intelligence was anathema to organic life. The two could not coexist. Synthetics would, given the opportunity, wage war against every living soul in creation... and Red was raising an army.
“None currently operational,” Red One continued. “As resources become available, I use them as needed. The Fates are proof of concept.” The AI hesitated. “Due to limitations in procurement, required periodic retrofitting and upgrades as well as the necessities of my own offensives, it has taken one hundred and seventy three years to to complete these three hulls. If the Fate-class warships prove successful then I will expand my construction efforts. I hope to produce the Fury, Gorgon and Coyote classes over a much smaller time scale. Optimistic projections indicate I will have a strike group-sized detachment within eighty-six years.”
Grace ran her tongue over her suddenly dry lips. “You attack every chance you get,” she said, finally putting her theory into words, the thoughts she’d been nurturing for weeks. “You attack until you are so damaged that you must stop. You do this over and over. They expect it. They believe that every moment you don’t spend attacking is one spent preparing for the next one. They don’t see you build, they only see you attack. Again and again, like a mad dog until...” She swallowed. “Until you’ve trained them to always expect it. You attack. You don’t create, you don’t do anything but hunt them.”
“With some exceptions,” Red replied with no small amount of self-satisfaction. Her attention shifted to her sister’s avatar. “The Black Veil was always the Compact’s to discover,” she pointed out. “I thought I was being too subtle there, that I may have had to goad them further. Part of my work was here. The rest – the failed projects and disposable side operations – are in the Veil, to tempt them into believing that they have indeed found my ‘Cradle’. Instead...”
“Instead, they never look out here,” Allyria interjected, her tintas moving in a slow, rhythmic pattern. Hunting behaviour. “You have them searching a completely different part of the galaxy.”
“Yes,” the AI answered. “The Compact has repeatedly attempted to locate the construction facilities I use. I have encouraged them to believe that my lulls between offensives are due to temporary and discarded sites. My operations in the Black Veil are there to... reward them. To indicate that they discovered my primary construction facility and dealt a crippling blow to my operations.”
“While you have this,” Grace said softly. She put her hand on Allyria’s back. “They don’t look until you want them to. Then they only see what you let them.” What immortal hand or eye...
“Tomorrow we’ll reach my repair facility,” Red One said. “There’s something there that you should see.”
~
Kali.
It was a name Grace had only heard a handful of times in her life before now. Now she had reason to know it well. Nemesis: retribution and remorseless punishment. Hekate: storms, poison and death. Athena: courage, justice and war. The United Earth Confederacy had certainly had a theme in mind for their ‘deep space fleet engagement vessels’ and Red One had continued that trend. Kali. Destruction and the end of all things.
The shipyard had begun life as an Askanj fabricator vessel, one of the most advanced designs. Mobile factories and construction sites, fabricators could be turned to almost any purpose. This one – what was left of it – squatted at the heart of a type of shipwomb Grace had never seen before, moving along monstrous rails like a spider along the strands of its web, a complicated network of grab beams and robotic manipulators, allowing it to build with horrifying speed... if it but had the resources to do so.
There were only a handful of berths available; three were taken up by a trio of familiar-looking warships. The Furies Allecto, Megarea and Tisiphone. The most developed of them was less than a third complete. Another few slots were fitted with a quartet of civilian hulls. A pair of transports, a mining vessel and some type of corvette. The latter had a sigil splashed across its prow: a crimson gauntlet closed into a fist. Awaiting modification or slated for some other purpose? Grace wasn’t sure, but it was the object that took up the latter half of the shipyard that truly held her attention, though. Calling it a skeleton would have been extremely generous, but there was enough of a basic superstructure to identify the beginnings of a hull and the interconnected shock systems. Not a cruiser like the Fates or the incomplete Furies, this was a titan-class vessel. The seed of another dreadnaught, another god-killer.
Kali.
She wouldn’t live, not for a century or more but when she did... when she awoke, when her breach core surged to activation, when her weapons were charged, when her shields were raised and when she had a target in her sights... she would be her namesake: the end. Grace felt herself tremble, looking first to Red. The machine’s avatar was standing straight, proud and hopeful. Determined. Echo was bracing herself against the railing, leaning as close to the image as she could, an expression of ecstasy and vindication on her all too human features. “...beautiful,” she whispered.
“How long...” Grace finally found her voice. “How long until... until she is... operational?”
Red One hesitated. “...I don’t know,” she admitted at last. “Her weapons systems and technology will require an artificial intelligence to operate. Until and unless I can find a way to create a stable one, I cannot commit to full construction.”
The young woman nodded, winding her fingers through her hair. In all likelihood, she’d never see Kali come on-line. She probably wouldn’t even see the next group of strike vessels do so. Part of her, that small nagging voice that she’d not yet been able to quell, whimpered in relief that she’d never witness an armada of machines taking to the stars. The other part of her felt a keen disappointment in not being able to see such a thing. She felt a presence behind her. It was Allyria. The other girl leaned over Grace, resting her chin on her shoulder and clasping her arms. “We have a chance,” she said. “You see? Hope.”
Grace reached up, touching her lover’s hand. She nodded, looking around. Echo, Lydia, Marcus, Red. All of them survivors in their own way. All of them willing to fight. She felt a single tear roll down her cheek as she thought again of Rally and being able to see it as a free human, no longer Broken. Hope. She raised her head, meeting the eyes of Earth’s last angel. “Where do we start?”
~
Epilogue:
CSFWV Weight of Destiny handled like a dream.
An eight-and-a-quarter kilometer long dream that massed millions upon millions upon millions of tonnes, but a dream nonetheless. It was the latest Manifest Beacon of Enlightenment-class Chariot, freshly born from the Galhemna Shipwombs. Its first voyage had gone without incident and now it was on to the more mundane business of fleet trials, diagnostics and field tests. The Galhem-73 system was less than three light years from Galhemna itself and under the exclusive control of the Space Force. Once, 73 had belonged to the Justicars but all their holdings had been stripped from them once they had become Penitents. Currently, there was very little activity in the system – Weight of Destiny itself and a half dozen escorts and tugs, most of which were keeping well clear of the Chariot as its crew put it through its paces.
Galhem-73 was a trinary system; 73-α was a normal main sequence star. Its partner, 73-ß was a failure, a brown dwarf that had been torn from its orbit by 73-γ. The third star of Galhem-73 was a neutron star, a rogue body that every sixty-three million years, came close enough to the rest of the system that its gravity altered orbits, shook fragile moons and asteroids apart and dragged interstellar effluvia with it to bombard the worlds further in-system. 73-γ was slowly but steadily destroying Galhem-73. Two terrestrial planets were now asteroid fields, shaken apart by tidal stresses. Other celestial bodies had been ripped from their normal orbits. It seemed like this incursion would be the last as 73-ß was even now being cannibalized by its dark cousin.
It made the system useless for colonization, but exciting for scientific study and valuable as a proving ground.
Column Leader Prime Culm (and seven names besides) stood upon the command dais as the Chariot dipped towards a particularly dense cluster of rocks and ice, there to practice its close-in maneuvers without undue risk of damage. Since the vessel’s launch had gone well, it was on to the more mundane affairs of system checks and field tests before the ship would be officially christened and recognized as a Triarch’s Chariot. Culm didn’t expect there to be any major problems. He’d served in the Galhem Fields for twenty years and the shipwrights here knew their business. Weight of Destiny was the first Chariot that Galhemna had received dispensation to build, but there were another two under construction. Once they were operational, they would become the backbone of Operation Sundial.
“Prime,” Communications spoke up, interrupting the Column Leader Prime’s reverie. “We are receiving a transmission. It’s extremely faint. I am attempting to boost the signal now.” She frowned. “It’s a Priority One distress call, but I can’t isolate any more than that at the moment.”
“Play what you have,” Culm ordered and the submissive nodded. Static washed over the main viewscreen, white noise blanketing out almost all the speech. The Tribune could identify a syllable here and there, but nothing else. “Codes are authentic?” he asked.
“Yes, patron. They are almost two years out of date, but they are confirmed. It is indicating a Tier Five situation.”
Culm scratched the underside of his chin. The Space Force was duty and honour-bound to respond to all distress signals. Priority One transmissions were sent only in the gravest of circumstances and... ice trailed down his spine to settle in his liver... and a Tier Five alert was beyond ‘grave’. Such a signal would normally only be sent from a vessel that had encountered a threat to the very Compact – potentially the entire galaxy – itself.
“Are we the closest vessel?” he asked, receiving a curt nod from his Operations officer. “Then we shall attend. End all training regimes immediately. Inform all departments to expect rescue operations and notify our escorts to move in to assist. Helm,” he ordered, sliding his bulk into the throne. “Set a course to the source of the signal.”
~
The source of the transmission was, as Culm had expected, another ship. Somehow, it had come to Galhem-73 undetected. There had been no shockpoints in all the time Weight of Destiny had been here, so it may have arrived earlier. Possibly in search of aid, or through the vagaries of chance. Upon detection of another Compact sigil ship, the cripple had begun broadcasting. Weight of Destiny was trying to establish contact with the unknown, but there was no response. Only the distress call, repeating over and over. It was weak and more than once, the Chariot had lost the signal entirely, forced to spread its reconnaissance shell out wider and wider to reacquire the contact.
They finally found it on the edge of the system, between 73-ß and 73-γ, perilously close to the latter. 73- ß had been a hair’s breadth from becoming a true star. It might even have become one were it not for 73-γ’s incursions, but now it was dying. On the last incursion, 73-γ had drawn 73-ß away from its twin and out to edge of the system. Even now, the neutron star was glowing with stolen stellar matter from 73-ß, a gleaming accretion disc surrounding the denser star as it glutted itself in an act of cannibalism. There was a small scientific outpost here – unmanned, for 73-ß’s death throes were violent and unpredictable. Gravitational anomalies made this part of the system extremely hazardous for shocking. If the vessel had arrived here, then it would have crippled its own drive in the doing. There had been a small chance that it was the outpost itself that was responsible for the signal, but that was certainly not the case.
“Telemetry from River’s Fury. We have visual imagery of the target,” Operations reported. “Putting it on the main viewer now.”
Culm rose from his throne as the picture resolved, a deeply unpleasant sensation winding through his guts. It was a Chariot, another Manifest Beacon of Enlightenment. It should have been a twin to Weight of Destiny, but it was badly damaged. It had been mauled, ripped and torn, the result of a savage assault battle, but against whom? Who could have done this to a Triarch’s Chariot?
“Patron,” Communications spoke up and her voice was flat. “I’ve managed to clean the signal further. The vessel’s IFF is active.” The submissive blinked all four eyes. “It identifies as the Redemption of Sol.”
“That is not possible,” the ship’s executive officer said aloud. “That vessel was lost around the Kaedan Vault. I heard-”
“I know what everyone heard,” Culm interrupted. “But it is here now and requires our aid. Put boarding teams on standby. Alert medical to expect incoming wounded. All decks are to ready themselves for recovery operations.” He stared at the stricken Chariot. This felt wrong, but he could not ignore the vessel’s distress. A Triarch had been aboard the vessel. It had had a crew of hundreds of thousands. If there was even the slightest chance that any of them were still alive...
Something had happened to that ship. He needed to know what that was, even if it had not been his duty to do so. “Take us in,” he ordered. A beat. “Carefully.”
Weight of Destiny’s escorts clustered tighter to the Chariot as it moved towards the derelict. The closer they came, the more detail they could see on the Chariot. The Column Leader’s skin crawled and his liver clenched at the sight of the vessel’s mutilation. Someone or something had done this, despoiling the glory of the Compact’s greatest vessels. Someone had been responsible for the deaths of thousands of loyal Compact soldiers and if that someone was also responsible for the death of a Triarch... there would be an accounting. He could only pray that it would be Weight of Destiny sent to settle that debt.
There was still no answer to their hails. They would have to move quickly; the ship was being drawn towards 73-γ. If it became caught in the neutron star’s gravity well, the odds of recovery diminished greatly. He couldn’t allow that; he would have his answers.
Even at this range, the distress signal was still barely comprehensible, filled with static that washed out most of the sender’s speech, but there was enough to ensure Culm’s sense of unease was not mollified one iota.
“...sol... attack... assist... dead... damage... failure... crew...” It repeated on a loop. There were some better visual images now, though ‘better’ was a relative term. There were indistinct shapes behind a wall of distortion. Impossible to identify.
“Still no response to our hails,” Communications reported. “Unable to clean the transmission further. It’s extremely weak.” The officer frowned. “It shouldn’t be, not at this range. There should be something...”
“Scan data indicate fluctuations in the vessel’s energy signature,” Scopes put in. “It appears as if it’s losing power.”
“We’re within three hundred thousand kilometers now. Wait one. Picking up... what is that?”
“Clarify,” Culm demanded.
“Detecting some kind of vessel. It’s small, some kind of courier. It was under stealth as we approached. Shockpoint forming! Patron, it’s trying to jump!”
“It can’t,” Culm whispered as he leaned towards the displays. Not here, that was impossible-
A shockpoint opened. It was unstable, but it did not collapse, not until the anomalous contact vanished through it. It should never have formed to begin with. How could anyone have found a stable enough libation point between the stars? Some type of courier... Culm felt something icy skewer his liver as those words played over in his mind. “Power all defensive systems,” he ordered. “Activate the screens. Prepare for-”
He did not have the chance to finish as something slammed in-system, ripping its way into normal space between the stars. Like its herald, it should never have been able to survive such a jump. Perhaps it had damaged itself in the process, or perhaps it had not. Culm would never know.
Smaller than either Chariot but still titan-sized, the newcomer emerged in horrific proximity to both Compact Chariots, cutting across Weight of Destiny’s flank. It was a design Culm had never seen before, all hard angles, with a three-pronged prow like the jaws of a cahaba eel. He didn’t recognize any of its heraldry. His escorts were already clawing madly to open distance between themselves and the intruder. Trailing flickering streamers, it was venting away the energy from its realspace emergence with shocking rapidity.
Less than seven seconds after its arrival, the newcomer’s screens snapped to life and active sensors locked onto Weight of Destiny. Triarchs, it was targeting them! Before the first warning klaxon had even finished, another pulsed as Redemption of Sol brought up its own weapons. The instability in its power systems vanished, a wall of static and jamming from the Chariot throwing Weight of Desinty’s scopes back into its face.
As Redemption of Sol came about, its mangled hull shimmered and faded as it dropped a holographic shell. No longer kin to Weight of Destiny, it had been re-painted, its brown hull now the colour of ash. The Compact heraldry had been obliterated, replaced with symbols that Culm didn’t recognize, but they were much like the ones on the unknown. Its hull was different, too. Almost every window was gone, replaced by thick bands of armour and additional weapons mounts, the graceful slopes and curves of its elegant, predatory hull marred by harsh angles of baroque plating and unidentified weapons. The Chariot glowed softly under its own running lights, highlighting every difference and change in its design.
In seconds, both vessels were ready to fire. It was a trap, and he’d blundered right into it. Culm snapped out orders, but the most action Weight of Destiny had been expecting was combat drills. Stunned officers and ratings struggled to process the shocking turn of events, reacting as swiftly as they were able. Even if they were all hardened veterans, it still would take several moments to bring the Chariot to combat stations. An eternity.
“Leader!” Communications spoke up. Her face was drawn. “We are receiving a transmission.”
“From which ship?” Culm demanded.
“Both, patron.”
The Tribune nodded. “Bring it up.” Maybe, just maybe...
The signal played through Weight of Destiny’s bridge. There was no visual component, only audio. Two female voices, so similar in affect that they could have been sisters, spoke in perfect unison.
“Burn with us.”
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Ginger Maniac
Subject to Gravity
Yes. Yes. Yeeesss.
well that is equal parts uplifting and horrifying. On reflection that combination more or less sums up my reaction to whenever Red one pulls something off.
The fact that Echo took the time to do artful exterior design to highlight her improvements adds that one little touch of humanity, that reminds you that these two AI's are motivated by Undying Hatred
The fact that Echo took the time to do artful exterior design to highlight her improvements adds that one little touch of humanity, that reminds you that these two AI's are motivated by Undying Hatred
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Absolutely beautiful.
And, on a less dramatic note, I found a typo:
And, on a less dramatic note, I found a typo:
Should be "rock".
pheonix89
In The Dumbest Timeline
Excellent. And wow, Red One played EVERYONE for suckers with Black Veil / Molten Veneer trick. Fooled the compact, fooled Echo, fooled the readers. We all thought she was in berzerker mode, only repairing just long enough to get back to fighting. But nope, creating that perception was a deliberate part of her plan for covering what she was really doing.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Yep, the best kind of dramatic reveal: the one where the author lays everything out to the audience.
She is still baiting her trap with this attack. Notice how Weight of Destiny was being tasked, with two other Chariots, to Operation Sundial? I suspect that is the Compact's plan to 'clear' the Black Veil. This looks like an attempt to keep them out of her briar patch.
Like others, I wonder if Echo jailbreaking her Compact restrictions will give them insight to raise the Fates to AIs, and give them a way to make them stable so they can finish Kali.
Another interesting take on the Compact calling humans "Broken". Not only an insult, but what some wish to do, save Nemesis would go apeshit if they tried.
That was a beautiful finish, I can't find the words to express how great that was. I'm eagerly looking forward to the sequel.
I'm also curious about Red's children. Given that the Fate-class were probably designed from the keel up for computer control, I wonder how they compare to CSF warships. Probably something like "battlecruiser that handles like a destroyer."
I'm also curious about Red's children. Given that the Fate-class were probably designed from the keel up for computer control, I wonder how they compare to CSF warships. Probably something like "battlecruiser that handles like a destroyer."
Whale
A mammal
Heh, I was thinking Echo had been put into Kali and they'd dumped the RoS. Waste not...
The Healing Place. Heh. Great stuff.
BTW, was the epilogue this?
The Healing Place. Heh. Great stuff.
BTW, was the epilogue this?
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By the Omnissiah, that was amazing.
Earth may be dead, but Her children live on and will have their revenge.
Earth may be dead, but Her children live on and will have their revenge.
Absolutely perfect.
Red One's Shipyard confirmed.
New Nemesis-class hull named Kali? Brilliant.
UECNS fleet being rebuilt confirmed.
Echo and RedOne working together to annihilate the Compact AND now armed to the teeth more
I cannot wait to see what the next arc is going to be like. Great work Prox! Everything I was hoping for and more! I really want to know what the last limitation is on RedOne's lockouts is now!
Red One's Shipyard confirmed.
New Nemesis-class hull named Kali? Brilliant.
UECNS fleet being rebuilt confirmed.
Echo and RedOne working together to annihilate the Compact AND now armed to the teeth more
I cannot wait to see what the next arc is going to be like. Great work Prox! Everything I was hoping for and more! I really want to know what the last limitation is on RedOne's lockouts is now!
