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Author Topic: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection  (Read 3065 times)

dantrew

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Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« on: May 21, 2023, 09:00:55 PM »

Hello Space Friends,

As I have played Starsector, lo these many years, I often find myself ruminating on bits of story as I am plodding my way across the sector (usually laden with too many metals that I'm trying to sell). I've decided to start writing these ruminations up as short stories. Some of them are based on the lovely planet descriptions that really get the mind turning (why does that planet have a giant orbital warning beacon, what's the deal with the phase lifeforms on that gas giant, etc.) others just on the world-building in the setting.

I've tried to stay as true to the established bits of lore as I can, but obviously this is just my headspace for the setting as it is currently drafted. We may get a definitive lore answer to who the mercenaries that invaded Kanni were, and it might make my personal head-cannon factualy wrong. But I think of these more of stories you'd hear an old spacer at the bar tell than an in-setting non-fiction biography.

Hope y'all have as good of a time reading as I had writing.

First one I'd like to share is a story called "Sindrian Dreams" set before the collapse at an indeterminate date.
Content warnings: themes of crowd panic, claustrophobia

"Remember my children why we toil so in the heat of the star's warm embrace. For the Creator hath cast us forth from the Garden so that we may work the land. And he has placed at the gate a guardian with a flaming sword to protect the way to the tree of life" Recorded Holo Sermon 17, The Love of the Creator - Church of Galactic Redemption, first broadcast c23.04.25

Sindrian Dreams
"Remember my children why we toil so in the heat of the star's warm embrace. For the Creator hath cast us forth from the Garden so that we may work the land. And he has placed at the gate a guardian with a flaming sword to protect the way to the tree of life" Recorded Holo Sermon 17, The Love of the Creator - Church of Galactic Redemption, first broadcast c23.04.25

Sindrian Dreams
A small holo tag hung neatly on the bulkhead door: Domain Chief of Colonial Affairs Mining Division - Melissa Marsh. Underneath the holo tag was a small box for depositing Ident-Files for potential candidates to join an expedition to the Persean Sector. Melissa had been eyeing a system with a red giant for some time. It had taken a series of bribes and small army of lawyers to drown the other Chiefs in paperwork so severe that all other fuel mining prospects were at least 5 cycles out. The Domain needed a forward fueling base and the new sector showed a lot of promise.

Gate haulers had just deployed in several key systems and low-level murmurs from the survey corps seemed to show that this sector had more potential terraformable plants per star than 3 times the galactic average. Whoever staked their claim early with key resource generating operations would end up controlling the whole sector. It was a land grab and Melissa had the first pick.

"Red giants are unstable, the ones around Medara throw so much from their coronas that we have a hard time keeping relays operational," said Melissa's chief of staff Amanda Taylor. "What makes you think this one will be any different?"

"We've got good readings from the first planet. Intense magnetic field. Mostly metallic ores. Geologically stable. It's basically a bunker for a planet," said Melissa.

"Didn't the scans show a water planet too?" asked Amanda.

"No that was a moon, and it's too far away from the primary. Sure you can grow modified kelp there, but what good is food if you can't get it off planet?" said Melissa. "We need an antimatter and fuel pellet production facility somewhere on the other side of the gates, and this place practically makes it for us!"

"Ok, do we have all the support from the Explorarium?" asked Amanda as she jotted several careful notes on a holo screen pad.

"No. But we don't need it. I've got authorization from both Fabrique Orbitale and Eridani-Utopia to begin exploitation of the system. They both seem to have their sights on other bodies in-system. That water moon? Eridani's got some genetically modified crab they want to try out on a new planet without people to interfere," said Melissa making little crab-claws with her hands and pinching at Amanda's holo pad.

"Without the Explorarium drones how are you going to set up the infrastructure?" asked Amanda tapping the back of Melissa's hands with her stylus.

"I've got a good lead on some researchers at Tri-Tachyon developing superior working drones. The Explorarium's monopoly on early system development is about to be broken wide open!" said Melissa. With that she pressed a call button on her desk. "Jacob, can you get Mr. Adeyemi to give me a quote for shipping, oh, colony supplies and equipment for 10,000 people."

The call button stayed red for a moment while Melissa frowned. Finally Jacob replied, "I'm sorry ma'am, Mr. Adeyemi is no longer with our company. I'd be happy to get one of our'"

"That's all right Jacob," Melissa said as she terminated the call. "***."

"I can see if Mr. Adeyemi is employed with one of our other contractors," said Amanda trying to mollify her boss's sudden disappointment.

"No." Melissa paused. "I was afraid of this after we got the news about the uprisings in the Gallean sector. The admiralty will have tied up every legal transport company getting supplies to their fleets for the next 3 cycles at this rate. And anyone running anything other than a tight smuggling operation will have their assets seized going in and out of the whole damn sector."

Melissa slumped low in her chair and looked out the holo window overlooking a domed city on a distant world. She pointed her finger at a smudge off in the projected distance. "That's an ore mine. You can tell by the height of the trailings pile. They only take the good stuff. Leave the rest of the regolith for someone else to sift through. I oversee 6,000 of these mines across 2,700 different star systems. Do you know how many units of ore it takes to make one Domain Battleship?" Asked Melissa, not looking away from the smudge.

"No, ma'am," said Amanda curling the corner of her holo pad.

"No one does. You can do the math based on the mass of the hull, but that's only half the story. There's machinery to make the parts for the machines that make the parts for the ship and each one of those needs ore and supplies to keep running. And food to feed the workers, and more machines to make the food," said Melissa. "We mine the ore because there's a demand. That's all." Melissa stood up. "I'm going to buy a ship, a really big ship."

"Do you have sin in your life? Absolved! Do you feel the weight of the Molochian pact on your soul? Achieve enlightenment! Do you have an ever-present fear of the unknown? Find meaning! Join the Church of Galactic Redemption today! Visit ChurchofGalacticRedemption.ludd" - Subversive Media Containment Unit, Example 3C - Hegemony COMSEC encryption level QUARTZ

The first few moments out of hyper sleep are the truest test of resolve any one person can face. To use muscles that have not be activated in years and to breathe air in lungs that have been filled with nearly frozen liquid will test even the strongest person to their limits. Mark Patel was a fit man in the years before his service, a heavy suit operator he was used to being confined in equally uncomfortable environments. This kicked his ass.

Hyper sleep architects say they put grated flooring and fresh water supplies near the pods to aid in recovery efforts, really it's to wash the vomit away. Mark made liberal use of this design space and was indeed grateful of some ship designer who was probably dead and happy. After a few moments Mark helped several of his bunk mates to the water and help them wash themselves.

By most counts there were expected to be losses in the transit. Small percentages compounded over dozens if not hundreds of cycles. Looking around Mark saw a sea of red indicators on pods, failures in machine or man. Until he found a terminal he couldn't be sure of the exact count but so far out of the 200 in his pod section only 35 people had emerged. It wasn't great odds and he hoped other sections had faired better.

Mark and a tech whose name Mark heard but couldn't understand made their way to the central hub. The hyper sleep ships were arranged so that each section opened to an access pathway that would have the medical facilities and supplies necessary to prepare the colonists before they all gathered in the spine of the ship. The spine had an automated arcology and the equipment necessary to start a colony on the world preselected by the Explorarium for seeding and terraforming.

Fortunately the medical facilities did not suffer the same casualty as the sleep pods and Mark received a number of inoculations and supplements that made him feel nearly his old self again. The tech, whose name was Melissa, wasn't a tech she was a goddam Domain Chief for the expedition. She was a little slower on the meds than he was, but he asked her pointedly what happened to all the pods. She looked back at him confused and he pointed to the sea of red pods behind them. She shook her head, and said anything from sabotage to random cosmic rays. Mark felt wholly dissatisfied by this and accosted a nearby medical terminal.  Without administrator privileges he could only look at the history of his pod.

Nothing stood out to him, which might be why he was reading it. Melissa pushed him firmly to the side and began tapping furiously across multiple status screens. Her form eased into weariness. The pods weren't dead, at least not all of them. Most seemed to be a default state that would require advanced medical facilities to resuscitate the individuals trapped inside. Nothing too terribly wrong, just a safety precaution to allow those with marginal problems to survive. It looked like they would have about 3,000 out of the 10,000 the ship had launched with ready to go to planetfall.

Mark felt like he could do the work of 3 other people, but that didn't mean he wanted to do that work. He walked back to the pod rows and found the one containing his partner. He had met them in weeks of preparation leading up to the big sleep. Lots of practice drills, emergency prep, and systems overview. Neither of them were entirely sure where the ship was heading off to but it was certainly better than the mines in the newly designated Domain Development Volume. The DDV encompassed 15 sectors that were already heavily populated and were suffering overcrowding issues. Feeding trillions of people is a lot easier when you put 15% of them to sleep for 30 cycles.

Mark and his partner had been drafted to serve, lucky winners of an all expense paid trip to the middle of nowhere to probably die. They had found each other in the chaos of the draft and spent their time reflecting on the path they were on. No amount of Domain authority could take that from them. Mark said a quick goodbye before heading back through the medical bay.


"The Creator hath not given us the spirit of lust, but of restraint and gentleness. It is within us to recognize the evil ways we hath been tempted away from his guidance. For those that seek him know not of anguish and pain, but duty and promise. Fear not for the light of the Creator shines from the heart of each man." - The Book of Ludd, Fires 3:4-7

Melissa felt lost without Amanda. Her chief of staff was locked away for some unknown reason that the computer refused to tell her until a proper medical facility had been established. She had made planetfall 6 orbits prior and so far had no luck in convincing the system that everything was fine and it could wake everyone up now. Mostly because that was very much a lie.

The star was even more unstable than either the Explorarium or the other corporations had imagined. Vast quantities of the star were constantly being blasted into space by folding magnetic fields. Askonia was a temperamental lady and Melissa often felt like an old Earth cult leader willing to make a sacrifice to the volcano if it prevented an eruption in the next cycle. Fortunately she had been right about one thing. Sindria was indeed a bunker of a planet. She had set to work immediately building a vast underground network, but had only managed to partially excavate an already open ancient lava tube.

The crust of Sindria was so laden with metallic ores that the standard drilling rigs simply could not maintain a reasonable rate. It was a boon for anyone that wanted to make sure they would never be invaded, but it was hellish to establish a foothold. The magnetic field of the planet was also incredibly strong. Auroras danced across every latitude and even the low grade antimatter distillers were pulling in high yields. If they could establish a base of operations and bring down the big processors they could make enough fuel to power 3 whole battlegroups, and their support ships.

The team leader Mark had been a huge help, in both the metaphorical and literal sense. He made the power suits look like overcoats. His unsettling demeanor brought him down slightly in Melissa's regard. He could operate a machine about as well as anyone she had ever seen, but he also had a distinct way of dealing with people the Melissa found off-putting. He was too personable and talked with them too much. A small cult seemed to follow him around and they would participate in regular nonsecular activities. Domain policy was cloudy at best in this area, she couldn't chastise him for practicing any religion, but he was encouraging the workers to band together and request shorter mining hours and reduced time on the surface.

All things that would slow down the progress that needed to be made. Her machinations had worked fine while she was still in the DDV, but out here it was impossible to influence the powers controlling the Domain. It was only a matter of time until someone else filled her shoes and the supply ships would be routed to another promising planet conveniently not under her charter. Rumors had already started percolating through the supply shipments that the Domain's admiralty board was changing its fleet doctrine. Whether the gun-jocks wanted bigger ships or smaller didn't really affect Melissa's end goals, but it did mean it would change a lot of the manufacturing base and which corps had money to throw around.

Eridani had always been a safe bet. There were always going to be worlds that needed their terraforming technologies and colony development gizmos, but they had yet to show themselves in the Askonia system. A troubling development that would make anchoring this system as the premier Persean sector colony difficult. A couple development proposals had come through to expand their operation to the other planets in-system. She had vetoed them all. Living conditions didn't mean anything if there was no reason to live here. Askonia needed the fuel production systems up and running before the next cycle or they would need to abandon the colony.

Bribes were the primary way to incentivize traders and the fuel would be a bartering chip. Every trader needed fuel to make the long traverse from the DDV to the outer sectors. Subsidizing the route to her system would give her first look at any tech coming through the routes. Things like water distillation equipment, power excavators, fullerene spools, and the odd bottle of high-test alcohol only came from the Domain's production centers. If she could get her hands on some production chips the fabricators they brought with them would be even more valuable than the fuel. Right now they were little more than centrifugal ballast on the sleeper ship still in orbit. The contract she hired to supply the ship had failed to mention that the production licenses she purchased would expire before they reached their destination.

Amanda would probably have been able to con a company into unlocking the chips, but she was ballast now too. Melissa curled into a ball on her bunk which somehow felt harder than the rock her room was carved from. All the fears of the colony sped through her brain seemingly at once followed by the shakes. She never had anything like this when she lived on a central planet. The sensation would travel over her whole body-a thousand needles poking at her skin and then an uncontrollable tremor. At first she had thought it was a symptom of the hyper sleep, but the medics had found no signs. The massive magnetic fields could do weird things to human bodies, but no-one else seemed to suffer in the same way she was.

The door chime sounded and she gathered herself before inviting the visitor in. It was one of her senior techs, Kesel. He wrung his hands nervously as he entered the room.

"Ma'am. We just got the solar forecast for the next orbit," Kesel said his hands turning pale from the pressure.

"Bad?" asked Melissa.

"Very bad ma'am. Everything about this star is faster than we had predicted. The survey drones weren't here long enough to really get a good picture of the'" he said but Melissa interjected.

"Enough about the past mistakes. What's the problem?" She asked with ice running through her veins.

"There will be massive solar flares that will completely envelop the planet. We're going to be practically inside the star for about 80 hours starting in a little over three shifts from now. If we had better satellites'" he said trailing off as Melissa looked past him.

"We'll need to move the sleeper ship," she said even colder than before. "Put out an advisory, all surface work is postponed until the solar weather improves. Actually," she paused "No one is allowed outside the main tunnels. Double the mining shifts," she said grabbing a holo pad from her desk. "I want all the habitation wings complete by the next orbit."

"Ma'am," Kesel said in affirmation. He turned slowly towards the door and left almost silently. Only the scuffing of his soles were audible as the pressure door closed behind him.

Melissa scrolled through the work shifts on her holo pad and tapped a handful of worker profiles adding them to the mining teams. She then prepared a voice message to the shift supervisor on duty. "Fisher, this is Marsh. I'm going to be updating the work schedules over the next few hours. I'd appreciate you and the other supervisors working to keep everyone productive as we go through a difficult time. We need the habitation areas finished so we can start work on the refineries by the start of the next orbit." She closed the recording and checked the file was good before hitting send.

She had never been so tired.


"They that have faith in the Creator shalt banish debauchery and fear; they shalt be protected from the serpents." - The Book of Ludd, Fires 1:17

The power suit demanded careful attention. It was not, as some miners put it, the easy work. The suit only added its strength to already exerting muscles, a worker got just as tired lifting multi-ton slabs of rock as they would lifting smaller loads by themselves. It just looked a whole lot more impressive. The double shifts were brutal in the close confines of the drilling heads. The shafts were not made with power suits in mind so Mark had to remain either perpetually crouched or slightly hunched.

His crew had finished boring out the main passage for a surface launch system. It struck him as odd why they were focusing on preparing things to launch materials into orbit when they needed so much more brought down. It had been 16 standard shifts since the surface lockdown had been implemented and Mark had worked all but 4 of them, most miners had. They were creating the spaces needed for large-scale industry when they were all hot-bunking in the same dormitories that had been constructed the first week after planetfall.

The caverns had been excavated to house everyone, or more specifically the everyone that was awake. Two-thirds of his friends and compatriots were still floating in their pods somewhere unreachably far above his head. His thoughts often turned to his partner as he pressed through the endless work. They would have no concept for how truly horrifying it was to wake up alone. Mark was determined to ensure that whatever they built down here it would lead to their awakening.

The first indication something was amiss came from the shifting of the tunnel around him. Nothing on this planet moved after it was cored, but this tunnel was rotating. The stabilizer gyros' whining confirmed his suspicions. He yelled back up the shaft, "This tunnel is unstable! Everyone out!" No sooner had he yelled when his voice was drowned out by the sound of rock giving way. The passageway he was looking at vanished as a sheer rock wall took its place. No dust or debris, just a solid expanse of rock where there had once not been.

The rescue efforts lasted for all of an hour before it was very clear there would be no survivors. A detailed seismic survey showed that a previously undiscovered fault line had yielded and the entire suspended slab came down as one unit. The 14 miners likely never felt the blow.

Mark charged up to the supervisors' office and slammed the door open. "We're digging too fast without taking the time to do proper safety inspections!"

"Patel, we wouldn't have seen that fault if we had spent 10 shifts analyzing it!" said Fisher.

"***! We've got enough problems already with the labor shortages, we can't afford to loose any more people!" said Mark moving further into the room and standing within arms' reach of Fisher.

"I've got nothing I can do. I don't make the work schedule. We all knew it was going to be dangerous work'" Mark's hand grabbed Fisher's dusty overcoat cutting him off.

"You know none of us had any choice about coming here." He let go of Fisher and backed towards the door. "We didn't want this." He gestured openly to the ceiling. "Any of this." Pointing a finger at Fisher, "No more digging until we all have a place to sleep. You can make that call. We don't need a launch system right now, we need *** beds." Mark stepped out of the office and hurled the door closed so hard it nearly flew off the rails. A vision of his partner flashed through his mind again. He wouldn't lift another rock until he was sure there was safety for them.


"Beware! The sins of the world tempt you at every turn. The demon Moloch is present in the hearts of men who would seek to bring about our destruction. I say we bring destruction to his kingdom and let him reap an empty field!" Intercepted Transmission from Luddic Path Cell Leader Augustus Poseidon, 3 days before the Mayfield bombings, Hegemony COMSEC Encryption DIAMOND

Melissa pressed her palm to the security terminal as two marines in power armor flanked the doorway. The light changed to green and the marine to her right welcomed her aboard. As the airlock opened she was greeted by the warm face of Admiral Olympus Doud. "Melissa! Such a pleasure to see you again, I had hoped to bring my fleet by sooner. It's a wonder what you've built here on this rock!"

"Thank you, sir. It's been a tough couple of cycles, but we've finally got something fit for the Domain," she said, the color in her voice absent after cycles of temperance.

"I think this is one of the most productive fuel outposts in the last 80 cycles, and most certainly the fastest anyone has ever built one. You'll be a strong candidate for a regional governor. Not just this system, mind you, but I think they plan on giving you command of the whole sector. Imagine what can be accomplished on worlds far simpler to build upon than the gate to hell you started with," said Doud. He poured a dark amber liquid from a decanter into a set of glasses offering one to Melissa.

"Thank you, sir. I look forward to the opportunity to help bring glory to the Domain," she said as she lifted the glass to her lips and pretended to drink.

"Now about this unrest problem you have," he said through a large smile.

"Yes, sir. There's been trouble with some of the laborers. Starting when we first arrived here," she said swirling the contents of her glass.

"You handled the situation up until now, what seems to have changed?" he asked as the smile drifted from his face.

"Thank you, sir. I believe it is due to the decision by the Eridani-Utopia Terraforming Corporation to have the remaining pods awoken on Askonia II-B, Opis is the new designation as I recall. The laborers seem to believe that this will preclude them from visiting their friends and relatives still asleep," she said with practiced precision.

"Certainly any of them would be able to purchase passage to the new colony?" asked Doud, his face continuing to darken.

"No, sir. Eridani-Utopia has made it abundantly clear to both the colonists and to myself that the new colony will have to be quarantined for several cycles as they awaken the pods. There are' medical' complications with the pods," she said as a small tremor struck her left hand. She quickly placed it into her suit pocket.

Doud's friendly demeanor had completely faded. "Do you have any credible threats to security?" he asked.

"No, sir. At this point, I lack the resources to engage in a full scale inquiry to ascertain the probable agents of chaos and any methods they would employ. I suspect the fueling station is a likely target. It is the economic center of the sector at the moment. Furthermore, without an independent security detail it is guarded by potential agents of the dissenters. I would call upon the strength of your flotilla to enforce peace in this area as to a time that we may be able to provide for our own protection," she said knowing that Amanda would have prepared a better argument and provided options that allowed her to keep more autonomy without seeking direct military intervention.

Doud moved to the holo tank and pressed a call button, "Please have Mr. Nakamura prepare for an assignment." Addressing Melissa he said, "I will give you one of my best agents. He has rooted out numerous rebellions while in the employ of the Domain. I will also leave in your system two patrol craft, The Komodo and the Allison King. Both are fine ships with ample marine complements to assist you with any dirtier problems."

"Thank you, sir. I was wondering if you could also spare a fuel hauler. None of the recent traders have been willing to part with any and we desperately need a way to get our production out of system and to the other depots in the sector," Melissa said knowing fully this was well above the normal ask of an admiral, even one from a potential sector administrator.

"Yes. We can spare a smaller vessel," said Doud scrolling a list of ships on the holo tank. "The Larder Raven should serve you well. Her crew has been with her for several cycles now with a spotless service record. She does have a dirty drive which is not ideal for stealth ops but she'll make a perfect regional hauler." Doud pulled up all three ships on the holo tank for Melissa to peruse.

"Thank you, sir. These ships will be invaluable," said Melissa as she looked over each ship in turn.

"Was there anything else you needed? If not, I'd like to have you brief the commands of these ships on the situation in the system. There's some fiddly paperwork as well, but I have staff for that," said Doud as he pulled up comm streams for the ships. "Ms. Marsh, you have their ears."

The remainder of the meeting passed uneventfully. Melissa managed to sneak the contents of her glass into a recycling drain before departing. Nakamura would transfer to the planet at the end of the next duty shift and the three ships she had briefed were already breaking formation and moving into safe orbits around the planet.

Perhaps with enough military power she could force the Eridani corporate agents to give her the rest of her colonists. She didn't have direct authority to command the vessels, but she could dictate their orbits and designate who was allowed in and out of the system. A little show of force and austerity would go a long way to helping her get what she needed.

She eyed the drive trails of the Komodo as it paralleled her own course to the planet. The long filaments of spent fuel had a distinct reddish hue that matched the glow of the star. In all probability many of those heavy elements would wind up back in her fuel refinery. The Larder Raven wasn't visible out of the shuttle's window, but she turned the shuttle's hull cameras towards it. The drive tail was a rustier color that looked nearly brown. She made a note to have one of her techs take a look at it. Unlike the two combat ships, this one would enter a low planetary orbit and dock with the  automated fuel-storage station. A space elevator tied the lightweight platform to the refinery under the surface of the planet. It wasn't the most cost effective, but it was the best way until the mass drivers were constructed.

Melissa looked back to the control panel. A blinking light indicated she was receiving a priority hail from the colony. She tapped the accept button and her head of security's face appeared before her awkwardly framed.

The stern woman straightened the feed, "Ma'am. Bad news."

"Look not upon the works of humanity as divine, they are sinful creations made to deceive and corrupt. Covet not things wrought by human hands, they will not sate the thirst for meaning. Pursue not the pleasures of the flesh, they will perish as all must. Seek the truth of the Creator for in his light all things are made equal. Find in him the alms of the spirit." - Recorded Holo Sermon 18, The Creator and his wisdom - Church of Galactic Redemption, first broadcast c25.1.13

Mark had not wanted to attend the riots. The holo vids of the Domain fleet entering the system had caused a low rumble in the backrooms of the worker's homes. He knew the tensions were already running high, but he didn't want violence to spill into the corridors. The covert leaders of the independence movement had asked his opinion on a number of issues. He had made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with insurrection.

The message had been passed along at the shift change. With so many people moving about it was nearly impossible to properly conduct surveillance. The first person to tell him that something big was going to happen at the next shift change was a gruff refinery man with a voice as jagged as the planet's surface. When Mark asked the man for more details, he shrugged and continued towards the tram station. The second was a lithe mechanic mostly covered in lubricating oil and emanating a fine odor of ozone. They had provided a little more detail; no weapons, peaceful protest, the administrators were going to be off-planet.

Whatever this was, Mark already had plans. He had been saving his extra wages and had made contact with an Eridani corporate agent. He could sign a new contract with the corporation after he bought out his old Domain one. That would put him first in line to help offload his partner on the newly designated paradise of Opis. Eridani was in the process of finishing the terraforming process, but the planet was already very habitable. Lush forests and a few small oceans, it was a boreal paradise similar to the colonies near Mark's home. A perfect place for them to live.

He finished his meal at the local bar and was making his way back to his apartment when there were several shouts and the crowd around him began to push. The sea of people moved down the hallway as instigators at the edges told them to keep going and this was it. No one around Mark knew what "it" was.

The corridor opened up to the high ceilings of the administration complex. It had been excavated higher than most other chambers to allow for the disassembly of the original drop ships that brought everyone to the planet. It gave the room a cathedral quality with polished metal facades reflecting the artificial light in dazzling bursts of color. There were few windows owing to the lack of them generally on space ships, but the few there were had a significant opulence about them. Mark could just barely see the original command capsule in their design.

The sea of people slowed their progress as more directors told them where to go. He saw several people with makeshift demolition charges passing them out to other workers. Secret commands were exchanged and he got the sense the majority of people there were not aware of a secondary plan. A chant was started at the far side of the chamber and it began to cary across the crowd as indistinct cacophony. Mark could see over the heads of most of the workers and by the looks of it almost every one of them was there in the hall. He immediately began to wonder if the air handling equipment could accommodate this many people in one section of the colony.

He turned towards the exit and saw several workers brandishing dark objects. Likely mining equipment, but their posture said they were to be used as offensive weapons against anyone looking the leave the chamber. Mark tried to force his way to the side of the crowd where he might be able to find an alcove or doorway to hide in. He had only managed to push by a few people when the first explosion went off. The first thing Mark noticed was the heat from the blasts.

Then he saw darks clouds boiling from the administrators' buildings. Bits of superheated metal flew into the crowd and he could see people recoil in pain. However everything was far too quiet now and as he felt the warm tickle at his cheek he knew his eardrums had ruptured. Fools had set off charges in a confined space. The mining explosives they used were designed to create shockwaves and fracture rock. They were not tuned for use against metal. The buildings showed small blemishes where the contact detonators had hit the buildings, but little more. Fools, all of them.

Then the push began. It started as someone's hand on Mark's back, but soon a whole body was pressing harder and harder against him. He could feel the cries and shouts but he could not understand them and in vain he cried out for people to stop. The world around him began to darken and he could feel the people around him begin to droop. That wasn't the push. The air was beginning to turn in the whole room. He had to get to an exit. Mark pushed himself between people as they began to slump and with intense discipline found an overhanging balcony. He hauled himself over the edge and collapsed gasping for air. There were no exits, just the overhang suspended above the roiling crowd below. A firm hand grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved something in his face.

Awareness flooded back into him as he breathed oxygen. Someone dressed in full riot gear pointed to his ears and Mark shook his head in a negative. The riot officer gave the signal for are you hurt? Mark replied with a quick no gesture. The officer gave the signal for bad air. Mark gave an affirmation and made a gesture for exit. The officer visibly straightened and gave a deliberate no, followed by a locked gesture. After pausing they signed explosion hazard and pointed at Mark. He must have looked confused because the officer pointed at the crowd and made the same gesture. Mark frantically signaled no repeatedly and wracked his brain for any signal that could explain his situation. He signed end of shift, no, end of shift, no, explosion hazard, end of shift. The officer relaxed and signed an affirmation then motioned for Mark to stay where he was.

The officer moved like they were making a call on a radio but Mark could hear nothing. Two more riot officers descended on filament wire and grabbed Mark by the shoulders. They slung a rescue harness around him and clipped him into an automatic ascender. He rose slowly from the platform towards a series of artificial lights. The air temperature rose dramatically as he neared the ceiling. Mark turned his head to look out over the crowd. The sea of people was no longer moving but around the edges hunted the riot officers, pulling individuals from the mass. A blast of cool air caught him off-guard and spun him on the wire.

Mark looked at the vent as it moved further away from him. They had turned the air back on, at least they weren't going to kill everyone in the room. The ascender slowed and another pair of gloved hands reached out and pulled Mark to the edge of an access hatch at the top of the chamber. He swung through and immediately a hand slapped something cold to the side of his head. The world exploded into sound. Sirens and klaxons blared and pointed shouts could be heard echoing from the chamber behind him.

"Can. You. Hear. Me," asked a synthetically augmented voice.

"Yes," replied Mark still in a bit of a haze.

"Good, that patch is designed for vacuum trauma but it seems to be working. Your ear drums are gone but your inner-ear is still intact," said the voice.

"Thank you," said Mark mumbling the words together. "Bad air."

"Yes, we cut the recyclers. You, and everyone else, should be fine after a few shifts," said the voice.

A sharp stabbing sensation hit Mark in the side of his leg. He immediately felt hyper aware and alert. "I'll take two of that, please," said Mark now much more alive than he had felt at any point in life prior.

"First, you need to tell me why you were down there," commanded the voice a little more stern than it had been prior. 

Mark relayed to the masked figure that he had been caught in the flow, that most people had been. There were some instigators, and, no, he could not identify them.

"Did you catch all of that ma'am?" asked the voice and for a moment Mark didn't realize there was a holo pad set up next to him.

"Yes, and I recognize this one," said another voice from the holo pad. "He may not be directly involved, but I want him detained. I have an agent on his way down now. He should be able to start interrogations at the start of next shift."

"Wait, I wasn't a part of'" another sharp poke, this time in his arm, and Mark fell unconscious. "'anything to'" Mark awoke suddenly and with a sharp realization that he was not in the place he had just been. A plain room made of dull metal surrounded him. A small holo tank sat on the floor directly in front of him and it began to whirr as its projector lamps warmed up.

"Welcome back," said a voice with a thick Domain accent as a looming figure appeared in the tank. "My name is Helios Nakamura and I just want to ask you a few' questions."

"I wasn't involved. I don't know anything about the riot, or the explosions."

"Operator First Class Patel. I believe you know' more' than even you realize," said the bright blue hologram. "Several conspirators that we have already questioned mentioned you, quite vehemently in some cases. And before you raise a fuss, no it was not in relation to this' particular' event."

Mark flexed his arms and felt the restraints for the first time. He set his jaw and looked back at the figure in blue.

"Operator. Do not worry. You are not' implicated' You are not going to be charged with sedition, attempted murder, or conspiracy to commit a crime. We simply want to know who it is you have been dealing with, who has approached you for your support, and if you feel as though any of them could have committed the heinous acts you' experienced' earlier." The man said somehow managing to pull off the impossible feat of looking Mark in the eye through a holo projection. The man opened his palm to Mark. "I will only ask once, Mr. Patel. After that I cannot help you."

Mark winced at a sudden pain in his legs. How long had he been in this room he wondered, as his nerves screamed at him for inactivity. A memory of waking up from the hyper sleep pods flashed through his mind, and Mark thought of his partner still floating in the atrophy-attenuating slop.

"Thank you for your time," said the man.

"Wait," said Mark. "I'll give you names. I didn't' don't know what they are planning' and I was contacted mostly through proxies' but the colony is only so big and' and' I'll give you names."

The blue hologram unsettlingly shifted and looked Mark in the eyes again, a low smirk beginning to form.

"And so the one-who-was Ludd, The Peacemaker, gave himself to protect one of the many wayward souls. In this we are meant to follow in the Path of Ludd and find in ourselves the power to sacrifice ourselves in service those who cannot. Remember, it is not the heart of humankind that is corrupt and evil; no soul is beyond redemption in the eyes of the Creator; no being cannot be freed from the shackles of the demonic pact that bore us from our home." - Inscription on a shrine dedicated to the 9th step on the Path of Ludd

"Ma'am, the inquisition has eradicated the cells responsible for the bombings," said Nakamura eyeing a particularly plump fruit on the Chief's desk.

"Good. Do you suspect any further action by other groups on the colony?" asked Melissa as she stared out the triangular viewport. The vast rock of Sindria stretch out below across a twilight terminus and the flicker of a solar flare caused the shadows to dance wildly across the surface.

"No, ma'am," said the agent reaching slowly for the fruit. "I doubt there is much extremist sentiment after a number of the' protestors' were caught in the blasts."

"I thought there were no deaths reported," asked Melissa turning away from the viewport as Nakamura shrank back into his chair.

"Yes, that is correct," said Nakamura. "However, there were many' injuries' among the populace."

"My staff informed me there was to be no effect on the productivity of the colony, aside from a few shifts to get everyone treated," said Melissa returning to her chair.

"I believe your staff have' misrepresented' the severity of many things. Historically and currently," said Nakamura worrying his hands together. In a hushed, eager tone he added, "There is much going on that your staff have obfuscated from you."

Melissa took a long breath and a swell of anger began to rise in the pit of her stomach. "Nakamura, you have been extremely helpful in sorting out this attempted uprising." She paused, weighing the significance of what she was about to ask the agent. "But I need you to root out any who are disloyal to Domain authority." "To my authority," she added.

Nakamura practically oozed excitement. "Of course ma'am, there will have to be many interrogations to find all of the forces working against you."

"Whatever it takes," she said and looked at the plate of fruit. She slid it across the table and the agent who would be in charge of cementing her power hummed with delight.

In the orbits that followed many supervisors and administrative personnel were brought up the space elevator to the impromptu offices Melissa had set up on the Larder Raven. Either of the two combat ships would have made for a more impressive seat of power but she couldn't exercise the same level of command on ships still under the flag of the 16th fleet. The Raven and her mostly civilian crew were easy to bend to her will, however. She had changed several decks of the ship to act as a diplomatic council chamber, command center, and her personal residence. It was not ideal but the symbology of the leading fuel producer's offices being themselves a fuel hauler had a certain appeal to her sensibilities.

Nakamura provided an update before the start of every shift. Despite some of his more unsavory aspects, he was impeccably prompt. In his reports he outlined the estimation of those who would hamper Melissa's absolute authority over the planet. Any nascent objections to her rule, and any who fed her falsehoods. The list was comprehensive and it made her wonder what else the agent could be used for. She called him back up to her office at the start of the following shift.

"You have done a great service to the Domain, Nakamura," she said as he entered the room.

"Thank you, ma'am. All in the name of the Domain," he scuttled noiselessly to the unoccupied chair.

"I have another task for you," she said as she pulled up a chart of the entire Askonia volume. She highlighted several moons around the second planet, Salus. "These moons are currently under contract with several corporations."

Nakamura stretched out a long finger and pulled one closer to him. "Yes. The charters offer a level of' autonomy' to the corporations," he said a frown forming over his taught face.

"Exactly. The Domain has certain rights it can exercise in these frontier systems," she said pulling the moon back to her. "But they cannot be invoked unless certain requirements are met for the protection of Domain assets."

"Ahhh, of course," said the agent cooing softly at the thought of covert action. "Given the recent' unrest' the system has experienced it would be unfortunate if it were to be discovered that the plot originated somewhere else in the system."

"Truly," said Melissa in a hushed tone. "I want to make sure that when the time comes to hand the system over to a proper Domain authority that there are no security issues to contend with." She spun the forested world in front of her. "Especially concerning the mishandling of Domain citizens in hyper sleep."

"That is a capital offense, ma'am. If someone were to be found guilty of such an act they would have to be' dealt with' accordingly," said Nakamura his frown intensifying.

"Precisely. I don't want that to happen to Ama'" she stopped herself. "The sleeper ship currently in this system," she said firmly.

"Of course, of course," said Nakamura folding his long fingers together. "I will set about to working on a' solution' immediately." Without so much as the rustle of clothes he rose and exited the room.

Melissa sighed. She did not like the idea of owing so much of her success to one agent. It left many opportunities for failure. She would have to set up alternate methods just in case this one did not pan out. Then again, Nakamura had been frightfully efficient. She looked out the viewport in time to see the transit of the sleeper ship. She put a hand up to the hull and wondered what plans Amanda would have in this situation. Would she depend on the eel of a man who had just been in her office, likely not. Amanda always had more direct ways of dealing with opposition.

She had always been the first to recommend cutting ties with a contact at the onset of any misgivings. Various representatives, corporate lawyers, and even a Councilor had been in their web, but none were ever too precious to be let go. She counted in her head the number of cycles it had been since she had stepped out of the hyper sleep pod. It had been at least 10. Would Amanda even be able to recognize Melissa after 10 cycles of age difference?

As she watched the last glimmer of the sleeper ship move beyond the viewport she saw the flash of a shuttle leaving the ring dock. Likely Nakamura getting underway, he was impeccably prompt after all. She watch the engines of the shuttle light and accelerate away from the Raven, towards the planet. Odd, why would Nakamura head to the surface first?

If the shuttle had not departed the way it had she would never have looked down the elevator cable. She spotted the characteristic flash of a fuel shipment pod on its way up the cable. Only it was coming up far too fast. She ran to her desk and hit the command channel. It would link her directly with the command deck of the Raven where she would warn the captain of a rogue package and they could separate from the ring station before it could cause any damage.

The command line was open and she yelled into it for an emergency launch. No confirmation came back across the line. She tried another and again no reply. Not even the usual static from an open line. She opened her desk and pulled out a holo pad. It had a weak signal uplink. She keyed the frequency for the ring station's dock master. The connection turned green and she immediately pressed the transmit button and told the dock master to cut the cable. When she let off the transmit button a squelch of static came from the device and she heard the unmistakable voice of Nakamura.

"'Priority command, there has been an attack by dissident elements on the Larder Raven, ring station, and elevator complex. A rogue detonator attached to a regular fuel shipment'"

Melissa threw the holo pad against the hull of the ship sending glass flying through the air. She had been betrayed by Nakamura. She went back over to the window and looked back at the elevator. The cart would usually take an hour to transit from the surface to the ring station, but she had no idea how long one that didn't need to stop at the end would take. Minutes? She ran back to the broken holo pad. The display flickered irregularly and the edges of the projection were awash with colors incorrectly diffracting.

She found the messaging protocol and found a stable uplink to the sleeper ship. She entered the address in-ship for Amanda, there were 192 messages in the buffer. She turned on the recording. "This is Domain Chief Melissa Marsh, this message is for my chief of staff Amanda Taylor. I know I made a lot of promises about making sure I'd be there when you woke up' and' I want to say that everything' everything that I did on this Hell of a planet was so that I could be there' So that we would have something to share. Whatever the final report is for me know that I just wanted us to be together." Melissa closed the connection and confirmed the packet upload. The sleeper ship would be transiting the other side of the ship soon. She crawled over to the opposing viewport and looked out to where she knew the sleeper ship would be.

The red light from Askonia made for terrible reflections, but the glimmer of the sleeper pods was unmistakable. There was a rumble from deep within the Raven. Melissa heard mechanical clanking like an airlock being cycled and a deep roar that faded quickly. She looked back out the window and saw the exhaust plume of a single missile leaving the hull of the Raven from just below her office. It streaked towards the glimmer and Melissa let out a sobbing wail.

There was a single flash and the glimmer of ten thousand dreams spread across the sky. From the surface of Sindria there would have been two new stars in the sky.

"The Creator reached out to us and bestowed upon us the great gift of life. When we looked upon the forest of the cosmos, across the river of stars, we saw timber to harvest and fish to eat. And lo it was bountiful. But I ask you, friends, where we have passed through the house of the Creator-and he has given us our fill-what have we left behind as thanks?" Recorded Holo Sermon 4, The Path of Ludd - Church of Galactic Redemption, first broadcast c34.10.04

The shifts following the blast were a chaotic mess. Funeral services were held for those lost on the sleeper ship and vigil was set up in remembrance of the the Chief. Mark had spent much of the shifts sullen and listless in his dormitory. No work was being done out of respect for those lost so he couldn't even go punch at the planet to work through his emotions. Finally after four long shifts several of his friends came to his bunk and they all split a bit of smuggled booze.

The next day Mark woke up with a splitting headache and he went to the bathroom to freshen himself up. Today he would go down to the common area and pay his respects at the memorial. On his way there someone whispered a rumor in his ear that the two Domain warships in orbit had sent a bunch of marines to the surface. He figured this was the beginning of a long period of marshal law under the heel of the Domain. The marines would probably start rounding up folks in the orbits to come.

This time Mark hadn't even heard about the attacks. None of his contacts had either. No one seemed to want to take responsibility for bombing the fuel hauler and sleeper ship. Whoever did it wanted to keep a low profile. If Mark ever found them the marines would be the last of their worries. He didn't care if he went to a labor camp, he was basically already at one and with a looming crackdown conditions weren't going to get any better.

He sifted down to several local haunts and met with the community leaders there, giving them word that the marines would be landing soon. He told them to destroy or use any contraband this shift and that if the marines tried anything too drastic there were ways of working the system.

Finally he made his way down to the memorial. A sculpture in the shape of a hyper sleep pod with a holo display inside that cycled through the names and faces of those lost. Mark spent a moment going through the list of loved ones and finally found his partner. Their face materialized in the blue holo projection rendered peacefully asleep. Mark put his hand to the glass of the holo pod and stood there for several moments.

As he departed a young person, no older than the colony, walked up to the pod followed by an older woman. A father never known came up on the pod's display and the older woman began to weep. Mark turned away and began the long walk back up to the dormitories, but on the way he began to notice marines. Not dressed in their usual powered armor, these ones were meant to look like the colonists; to folks that didn't know every face there it would have been a good camouflage.

Mark ducked into a side corridor that led to an air processing plant, an old resistance hideout and safe house. Mark could lay low in there for a few more shifts and then emerge when the dust had settled. On his way he passed several miners and gave them the heads up and the job to spread the word, the marines were here.

At the access panel he pressed a small hatch open and entered a sequence on the pad hidden inside. The panel shifted and Mark eased the rest of it open just wide enough to squeeze into. Before he could he felt two small jabs in his calf followed by a searing pain. Strong arms grabbed him around the waist and hauled him back up the corridor. Dizzy and disoriented he wasn't sure where they were taking him, but he recognized the smell of idling drop ship engines.

The sudden roar brought him back into reality just as the g-forces dropped him to the floor and he lost consciousness. His next memories were inside a docking tube; the name Komodo was painted on the side of the airlock. There was no Komodo on Sindria, this must be one of the orbiting ships thought Mark. Two security guards had him by the arms and were leading him somewhere. Maybe to another interrogation, or maybe just a quick tribunal and sentencing. Either way he had made his peace.

Mark blinked his eyes as he was led into the overly bright room. The two security guards let go of his arms and formed behind him to block the door.

"Operator First Class Patel, we meet again," said a snake-like man from across an ornate wooden table. Mark didn't recognize him at first but then he smirked and instantly remembered the blue face in the darkness.

"I'm sorry, I don't remember your name," said Mark. "I was under a lot of stress the last time we talked."

"Helios Nakamura," said the snake. "That's quite alright, though. I can understand how a man in your' situation' would block out certain things. But please, have a seat, we have many things to discuss."

Mark sat down in what felt like a real wooden chair with an actual cushion. "Thank you. Why did you bring me up here, Mr. Nakamura?"

Nakamura pushed a small tray of wrapped candies towards Mark. "Mr. Patel. I'm sure you're aware of the recent tragedies that have befallen this system in recent shifts?"

"Yes, none of us really liked the Chief, but I didn't think there was anyone who had the connections to pull off that attack. I'm sorry but I don't have any names for you this time," said Mark looking away from the man's eyes and down to the floor.

"Ah, Mr. Patel. You have nothing to fear from me. We already have the' perpetrators' taken care of. No. I want to make a deal with you Mr. Patel," said Nakamura standing from his side of the table and walking around to Mark's. "You see, a man with your' connections' and way with the people could make it very far. Yes. Very far indeed." Nakamura sat down in the chair beside Mark and set a hand on his shoulder.

"I appreciate the offer, Mr. Nakamura. But after the loss of the sleeper ship a lot of us are looking at buying out our contracts and heading back to the core systems. There's a lot of pain out here for us and we'd rather not spend any more time here," said Mark looking back up to meet the man's eyes.

"I see. I see. I may have a' solution' for you, Mr. Patel," said Nakamura as he brought out a small holo pad and faced it towards Mark. A passenger manifest was visible and highlighted was his partner's name. "We made some arrangements to transport some personnel off of the sleeper ship several orbits before the' tragedy' and we have them safely awakening at a care facility on Opis. The lovely folks at Eridani-Utopia were most helpful."

Mark was speechless, he looked from the holo pad to the man and back again. "They're' They're alive?" he asked.

The man smiled, "Very much so Mr. Patel. Very much." He put the holo pad back in his pocket. "Now, Operator First Class Patel, how would you like to be' System Administrator' Patel?"

"I' don't know' it's not exactly my trade'" said Mark unsteadily.

"Not to worry Mr. Patel! Not to worry. I think you'll find the job much easier than lifting rocks all day. Besides, I think you'll like the offices we have' set up' on Opis," said Nakamura standing again.

"On Opis?" asked Mark. "You mean you want me to be on Opis, not on Sindria?"

"Why of course!" exclaimed Nakamura. "Did you think the Domain was going to put the system capital on that'rock? Oh no, Mr. Patel. The jewel of the system is the seat of governance."

"This is all great, Mr. Nakamura, but all the staff and administrators are here on Sindria," said Mark.

"Oh! Mr. Patel. We've had the administrators working on Opis for several orbits! I've been interviewing them and sending the people you helped identify to work in much more' suitable' conditions," said Nakamura clapping his hands together. "The fact is Mr. Patel, they all admire you, and many of them would follow you into Hell itself." He gestured at a small display of Sindria on the table "most of them already had!"

"I' see," said Mark. "When do I start?"

"Right now, if you wish Mr. Patel," Nakamura motioned to the guards at the door. "These' upstanding citizens' will take you to a shuttle, your shuttle, and from there the system is under your jurisdiction."

"Do not worry my faithful for I am always with you, I go off to begin the redemption of all mankind." - Final recorded statement for prisoner L-127.65 Hegemony COMSEC encryption GARNET
[close]

Here's another story from the time before the collapse titled "The Promise of Future Stars"
Content Warning: Some mild PG-13 violence

This one was one of my favorites to write. I love good sci-fi thriller. I've titled it "Moonlight" but it could easily be "Three Body Problem" it's set post Askonian Crisis in the Askonia system. Everybody loves the ol' lobster system.
Content Warning: There is a good bit of violence and smattering of gore

This story is set in Yma system and covers the close of the First AI War and the beginning of the second. It's titled Atrocity.
Content Warning: pretty PG, aside from the genocide

Here's one set at the cusp of the AI war on a little planet called Daedaleon, it's called Operation: Departing Dawn.
Content Warning: PG

This is a slice-of-life story set during the first AI war in the Naraka System.
Taking Stock part 1
Taking Stock part 2
Content Warning (for both parts):
PG action, claustrophobia

« Last Edit: August 13, 2023, 10:49:38 AM by dantrew »
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Network Pesci

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Re: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« Reply #1 on: May 22, 2023, 02:08:39 AM »

Not bad at all!  You posted this at a very unfortunate time, a couple of weeks after the long-awaited new version came out, the odds are astronomically against anybody reading it, but because of the odd circumstances of my job, (I've been being paid to sit here and post all night on the weekends as long as I don't play video games or watch movies) I read it.  Nice sensory details and I can tell despite the fact this is your first post on the forum that you've been playing the best video game ever for years.

If you post more of your stories in this topic, I will read them.  I won't commit to reading them on any kind of schedule, I have a campaign to play and the rest of my favorite mods might well get updated this week and then I'll have a sequel campaign for when I'm done with this one, but I will read them.

Also check your PMs.
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dantrew

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Re: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« Reply #2 on: May 23, 2023, 12:07:22 PM »

Thank you for the kind words! I actually wrote a bunch of these and was about to post them when the new version came out, so I had to do my own vanilla run to see if any lore had been updated. I knew there was stuff on the Luddics and I’ve got a whole series outlined around them, so I’m excited that I got some new toys.

If you’ve got any suggestions or notes feel free to let me know. I’m always looking to get inspiration or alerted if I’ve left off a preposition or two. *shakes fist at dyslexia*
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Network Pesci

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Re: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« Reply #3 on: May 23, 2023, 03:40:27 PM »

Well, I proofread the first two stories, here you go.  There was about a dozen typos in each entry, one time "Moloch" wasn't capitalized in a Pather quote, once in a while you had "its" where "it's" should be or vice versa, trivial things like that.  Looking forward to the next entries whenever you get around to posting them.

(Please check my formatting, I probably messed up your paragraph transitions by opening the file in Notepad, I'm sure it stripped out the lines between chapters and the like.)
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dantrew

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Re: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« Reply #4 on: May 23, 2023, 05:28:05 PM »

Here's another story from the time before the collapse titled "The Promise of Future Stars"
Content Warning: Some mild PG-13 violence


“There are no dreams in hyper sleep//We abandon them to the void//Better to slumber in the dark//For what awaits is a nightmare” - Last transmission from Domain Sleeper Ship Celydon’s Prophecy en route to the Persean Sector
The Promise Of Future Stars

The solar flares could be seen in three places at once; first on the surface of the orange star, once again reflected in the hulls of the new sleeper ships, and a third time illuminating the face of a man.

Joseph Witt was now part of the “third wave.” A lucky winner of the Domain’s policy to send 1-in-5 people to new colonies to help establish them and to ease the burden on the Domain’s more populous sectors. He reflexively scratched at a scab behind his left ear where the implant resided.

This new implant (provided free-of-charge by the Domain) would transmit vital body statistics to his sleeping pod’s built-in intelligence. It also held his personal information: resource extraction specialist, lieutenant-grade; A-positive blood type; allergies to several classes of antibiotics and anticoagulants; below average height and weight; several genetic markers that made him more susceptible to radiation as well as having red hair; and a long string of numbers and letters that formed his identity in the metaphysical sense but also acted as a checksum for the other data. The med-tech that injected it also told him that if he died in a horrible conflagration the chip was hardened and should be recoverable. It wasn’t as reassuring as the med-tech had wanted it to be.

The final days before shipping out to the meat-packing station (that had a much nicer sounding official title of “Colony Development Center”) were filled with holo-vid calls to his friends and relatives. All communication was monitored. As he had found out when a nice agent showed up at his door and expressed a “strong recommendation” to use the approved language found for the Colony Development Center and the Domain’s colonial initiatives.

As a child he had watched with awe as the gate haulers had departed known space followed by a fleet of sporeships—packed with survey drones and terraforming equipment. It had driven him into the field of Xeno-Mineralogy so that one day he could be the first to set foot on the worlds revealed by the Domain’s Explorarium. Now faced with the realities of the task, it was much less glamorous than the holo-documentaries had made it seem.

Joseph looked back out the window at the site of another flare. It was maddening to comprehend the scale of the place. Each of the 30 or so ships he could see at the end of the hundred-kilometer station would hold millions of people. Entire cities sent in one shot to settle unknown worlds. It harkened back to the first exodus from Earth and the generation ships that brought colonists to the stars.

A chime from his holo pad alerted him to a new appointment. It was time for his ship assignment; time for him to go to sleep and wake on a new frontier.

“It is not lightly that I say the following. We stand at the beginning of a new era in human history. With the launch of this gate hauling ship we usher in a new epoch of faster-than-light travel. No longer will distance between stars be measured in weeks and months but in mere moments. This new network of gates will give us domain over all of known space, a new Human Domain.” Councilor Magnus Keller, excerpt from speech at first launch of gate hauler

In the countless emergency drills, tech explanation courses, and droning presentations on “what to expect the you arrive” after the euphemistic “long sleep” they (being the bouncy transport agents, and guileless Domain career placement specialists) purposefully do not mention what waking up feels like. Not that they would know. No one books a return trip.

The closest word is awareness. Awareness that every part of you has undergone something wholly unnatural and that all of you hates you for it. Joseph’s pod stood ajar while he took his first natural breaths in 30 cycles. A soft warm substance collected at the back of his throat and he remembered his training: tilt your head forward so your sinuses can drain all of the breathing fluid.

He attempted to exhale through his nose and was met with solid resistance. A stronger squeeze from his diaphragm and a plug of the mucus shot from his nose. He wished for it back immediately as smells began to come to him. It could have been the most soothing scent from his childhood and it would still have made him nauseous. Unfortunately, the scent of 30-cycle-old sleeping human was not on the short list of positive childhood smells and he vomited.

When the heaving had finished he remembered he had eyes and looked out at the numerous others going through the same experiences. He could make out the rough shapes of people he knew from training, but everyone looked emaciated and the unnatural wetness gave their skin a reptilian appearance. As another plug of goo slid from his ears he was confronted with the horror of sound.

He called for assistance as his barely functioning limbs began to buckle under his weight. What came from his throat was unrecognizable to him as human, it could have just as easily come from a sheet flapping in the desert wind. No one rushed to his aid. A soft chime and glowing green light directed his attention towards the middle of the room. A dais sat raised above the grated floor and in the middle of it was a hydra of hoses and nozzles. Salvation in the form of water to drink and with which to clean himself.

He crawled along the floor in jerking motions. The water activated at his approach and it was a salve to everything that ailed him. In a few moments he felt the energy to stand and take inventory of the room. There were others at the fountain now. He recognized several people from the ship’s medical staff and a couple more from the command staff. As far as he could tell he was the ranking officer awake. He looked for captain Soyuz Hill’s pod and saw it had a blinking amber light. The captain would be waking up soon, but at least two of the other officers had red lights on their pods. They would not be waking up.

Joseph stumbled over to the captain’s pod with the assistance of a med-tech named Keller and when their leader was freed from his pod they helped him over to the water fountain. Captain Hill coughed a thanks and directed everyone to the automated med bays to get checked over. Joseph sat in the padded chair and a scanning aperture moved over his body making harsh clicking sounds as if it chided him on a sedentary 30 cycles.

A report scrolled by on his left. Green bars for things like his lungs and brain, and a couple worrying yellow bars around for his heart and stomach. There was a small hemorrhage in his stomach wall that would heal fairly quickly with some medications that the automated health unit spat onto a tray. The heart condition was a small murmur from a defect in his right ventricle created by the artificial blood and it could not be treated. Fortunately the health unit in the sleeping pod had not detected it or he would not have been woken up. He would live a perfectly normal life unless he did something like go into hyper sleep again.

He looked quickly at some of his less-fortunate shipmates. One had developed a serious lesion in his lungs and would forever have to use a special inhaler, another had a brain bleed that had been caught by the scanner but would need immediate surgery. Almost everyone had a small problem arising from the prolonged suspended state. While none of it was terribly unexpected it was alarming to think of how much of the facility would be devoted to fixing or simply helping the colonists cope with whatever long-term ailments they acquired on the trip here. Wherever here was.

Joseph swiped the medical displays to the side and brought up the Azure Dawn’s status screen. The screen reported on things like ship atmosphere conditions and reactor function levels, but what he really wanted was a datalink to one of the ship’s hull-mounted telescopes. After rifling through several menu levels he finally found the correct interface and pulled the live feed.

An enormous red star dominated his view. The ship must have used the star’s gravity well as the jump point, falling out of hyperspace in an efficient if precarious method. Unlike many of the other red giants Joseph had studied this one seemed relatively tame. Perhaps it had only recently (in stellar terms) run out of hydrogen fuel and hadn’t yet settled into the self-destructive cycles of expansion and mass ejection that would one day turn this volume to a hot cloud of gas.

Panning away from the star was difficult; it filled most of the telescope’s gimbal range. Joseph abandoned the feed and switched over to the comms channels. He tapped on the portrait of Captain Hill and immediately the Captain’s angular features filled the screen. “Yes, lieutenant,” he said.

“Sir, I just took a look outside, we’re very close to the system’s primary. Looks like a default jump. Might be a stable star, but without a good stellar weather satellite constellation I can’t tell if we’re headed for a massive flare or if we’re all clear,” said Joseph in practiced tones.

The captain looked away from the feed on his end and frowned. “Damn automated guidance,” he said under his breath easing a hand up to a stubbled chin. “As soon as one of the navigators is cleared from medical we’ll get underway.” The captain looked back to the feed. “If you’re ready head up to the command deck, I want a report on the system as soon as you’re able.”

Joseph nodded an affirmation, “Yessir.” He closed the comm channel and pulled up the ship schematic. His preflight training told him the command deck was vaguely behind him, but the ship’s layout was slightly different in reality than it had been in the simulator. He charted a quick route and sent it to his personal holo pad. He gave the whirring medical scanner a quick pat of affirmation and stood up to head to his post.

The ship itself seemed to still be waking up from the long voyage. The longitudinal lift took a couple of prods to register his intended destination, but it eventually jolted forward before smoothly accelerating him along the length of the ship. Almost the entirety of the other colonists would remain asleep until they could verify they had arrived in a habitable system.
He passed bay upon bay of still-dark pods and it made the Dawn feel desolate and somewhat hostile. The darkness seemed to pull the light out of the lift as he went and he shifted his focus to the small display counting down until he reached his destination. The lift began to slow as the number neared zero and as it came to a halt automated lights snapped on, bathing the lift terminal in antiseptic white light.

It dazzled Joseph at first, but as his eyes adapted to the harsh lighting he made his way towards the primary airlock for the command deck. A synthetic voice welcomed him and announced him as the ranking officer on the deck. Projector lamps made audible hums as they warmed up displays for the command staff. He made his way to the small en suite surrounded by glass walls and proudly displaying Colony Control in bold metallic letters. The terminal under the name placard reading “Joseph Witt: Survey and Mineralogy” was the only one illuminated. He slid a chair along the anchor rails to his terminal and unlocked the screen with a wave of his hand.
His view was tailored to his position and was intrinsically designed to show information on nearby planets’ composition and relevant survey data. Screens upon screens of empty density maps and elemental composition graphs littered the display. He dismissed all of them and pulled up a simple terminal interface.

Last login: ERROR DATE FILE CORRUPTED
Welcome to DOMAINnetOS 3.5.6 (f5g21a)
~/Azure_Dawn/Local-host/users/JWITT$

Joseph brought up the log information for the ship. He wanted to know first off why they had been woken up. He spotted an interesting note 86 hours earlier.

New DOMAIN_EXP Signal id “signal 1”
Pan COMM_1 128.35 -narrow
ESTABLISHING SECURE CONNECTION
DOMAIN-INT broadcast_ship_id “Azure_Dawn_0080FF”
***
***
ACCEPTING HOST CALL
DOMAIN protocol EXP-1156 on pathway 3e6c:9830:765c:c739:6d0e:3c27:c436:db10
DOMAIN-INT declare 1 priority 2a authorization QUARTZ
CALL Course_Plotter_AI on “signal 1” -quiet -overwrite
HOST CONNECTION TERMINATED AT SOURCE

The Azure Dawn had detected a Domain signal emanating from this system and when it attempted to connect to it a deep level security override had told the ship to completely change course and head for this system. It was not uncommon for a survey or sporeship to have found a particularly habitable or profitable world and call in a colony ship bound for a different system. However the sleeper ships usually used the carrier signal to home in on the automated vessel. When the connection dropped the navigation software must have decided to drop the ship on top of the star having no data on where the jump points were.

He skimmed through some basic tools attempting to find an active sensor array and began sweeping it across the volume. The next thing to do was find out who, or what was in the volume with them. A waterfall display showed blips and static across most of the the detectable spectrum. Most of the signals were likely due to the proximity of the star but some could be back scattering from other celestial bodies. The array picked up a faint repeating tick in the high energy bands and he narrowed the sweep to cover the source.

Everything from nearby reactors to a neutron star a thousand lightyears away could produce the high energy streams he saw on the display. If it was a reactor that would mean there was another ship in the volume with them and perhaps that had been the ship that had pulled them there.

On one of the passes the display showed the unmistakable quad-band carrier wave of a Domain sporeship. Joseph quickly panned a comm antenna towards the source and attempted to establish a data link.


Pan COMM_3 85.12 -tight
local-host# ./get_host.exp "Azure_Dawn_0080FF" "tools" “signal 1”
Using Diffie-Hellman with standard group "group14"
Doing Diffie-Hellman key exchange with hash SHA-1
Host key fingerprint is:
ssh-rsa 2048 53:74:61:72:73:65:63:74:6f:72:72:6f:63:6b:73:21
Initialised AES-256 SDCTR client->server encryption
Initialised HMAC-SHA1 client->server MAC algorithm
Initialised AES-256 SDCTR server->client encryption
Initialised HMAC-SHA1 server->client MAC algorithm
ESTABLISHING SECURE CONNECTION
***
***
***
TIMEOUT
RETRY (Y/N) Y
ESTABLISHING SECURE CONNECTION
***
**
CONNECTED TO HOST
RETURN ship_ID: “DOMAIN_EXP_Sporeship_CB4154”
RETURN ship_STATUS: “Nominal, awaiting command”
CALL FTP.scrape /DOMAIN_EXP_Sporeship_CB4154/survey -v
com.fs.starfarer.loading.scripts.B  - Loading class: data.scripts.world.systems.Penelope
1   Penelope's Star, Red Giant
2   Asteroid Belt I
3   Thrinakia (Penelope's Star I), Volcanic World
4   Ithaca (Penelope's Star II), Desert World
5   Ogygia (Penelope's Star III), Barren-Bombarded World
6   Calypso (Penelope's Star III-A), Barren Bombarded World
7   Penelope's Inner Jump-point
8   Aeolus (Penelope's Star IV), Gas Giant
9   Telepylus (Penelope's Star V), Gas Giant
10   Dorus (Penelope's Star IV-A), Barren World
11   Xuthus (Penelope's Star IV-B), Toxic World
12   Penelope's Outer Jump-point
13   The Cyclopeans (Asteroid Belt II)
14   Ismara (Penelope's Star VI), Cryovolcanic World


Joseph pressed a small comms button on his screen and brought up Captain Hill’s portrait again. He saw the connection turn green and, before the Captain could say anything, spoke quickly, “Sir, I’ve identified an Explorarium Sporeship in-system.”

“Status?” asked Hill.

“It’s got unstable comms, but otherwise looks good, sir,” said Joseph. “We’ll know more when we get closer.”

“Good, we’ll be up there in 15,” Captain Hill’s expression lightened slightly “and see if you can get any information about this system.”

“Already on it, sir,” said Joseph as he closed the connection.

He looked over the survey reports coming in from the sporeship and marveled at the new worlds. Six planets was a lot for most systems with a red giant primary and the sporeship had identified at least three notable moons. Joseph drummed his fingers on the console with excitement as more data began to filter in. Soon he was awash in multi-spectrum surface scans, atmospheric composition diagrams, tectonic models, gravity wave and neutrino diffraction observations, preliminary soil samples, electromagnetic field simulations, and petabytes of unfiltered data. He began assigning tasks to his cohort he knew were awake and clapped his hands with anticipation of getting to do real work.

“Of mortal creatures, all that breathe and move, earth bears none frailer than mankind.” Homer, Iliad
 
Joseph Witt exhaled slowly so as to not cause condensation to build up on the inside of his faceplate. The brilliance of the desert planet below illuminated every corner of his command shuttle. There was always something about seeing the worlds without the filters the ship-based systems applied. A rawness to their visage that calmed the raging seas within his soul.

He braced himself against the hull to prevent any accidental rotation and shifted his harness where it dug into his hip. Penelope’s Star visibly belched a gout of plasma millions of kilometers long in the background. The high-energy particles from that event would reach Ithaca in a few days and cascade through the planet’s practically nonexistent magnetic field and tear apart millions of the precious molecules that he had created in the planet's atmosphere. Such was the cost of doing business on such an unrelenting planet.

For nearly 60 cycles Joseph had coerced ice-laden asteroids from the far reaches of the system and instituted massive mining and refining operations, all with the intent to transform this barely habitable dust ball into a jewel amongst the stars. The process was now in full swing and with each passing cycle he could see changes on the surface.

Where once there had been low unrelenting dunes blown by a thin atmosphere there was now a thick band of thunderstorms that boiled in the heat of the day. Most rain evaporated before hitting the surface, but another few cycles of ice deliveries would provide enough water for small lakes to form. The glint of the first skeletons of the orbital nurseries would grow the generations of plants for the seeding of the world.

Unseen somewhere else in the volume was the sister planet Ogygia. Joseph had been persuaded to let his second in command attempt to improve the conditions on that world as well. It was in much rougher shape than Joseph’s prize below, but it was often on the route for the materials haulers so it made sense to try and bring it up at the same time. It would take another 60 cycles before Ogygia reached the same level as Ithaca, but it would happen.

A sharp reflection of an ice hauler transiting caught his eye. It would soon release its megatons of cargo in a decaying orbit as a loose cloud of floating chunks. Those chunks would rain down over the course of the next few hours and add their contents to the stew below.
Joseph closed his eyes and the shape of the world lingered in an afterimage. He pictured the spreading of the green belts and the growing oceans he had simulated countless times before. He could walk on the surface of the world and admire the beauty of a flower in bloom and breathe air that he had not been through a recycler. He could feel the warm, sandy soil between his toes and feel the wind on his skin.

A priority transmission tone brought him out of revelry and the blinking light in the corner of his vision turned a dull yellow indicating a mission critical update was being sent to him. His eye moved to look at the indicator and the system popped the comms display over his faceplate in response. The holo projection blocked his view of Ithaca.

“This is Administrator Witt,” he said wearily.

“Sir, high-priority message from Telepylus,” said the young voice on the line.

“Proceed with transmission, code aleph-seven-sierra,” said Joseph with a little more command in his tone. Due to the 90-minute delay to the station a prerecorded message began to play. One of his junior officers' panicked voices came over the speaker. There had been an emergency signal from a regular patrol craft sweeping the Cyclopeans for pirate activity. An emergency response team was already being assembled but there had been no further transmissions from the patrol and a spike in radiation was detected near the source of the signal.

Pirates had been a mild nuisance for the last 30 cycles. Most of them were a disgruntled band of colonists who had been woken up to help with the mining efforts. They were led by a charismatic rabble-rouser who had been a somewhat successful entrepreneur in the core sectors. He had expressed disgust at having to work in the mining operations and instead took to selling low-grade stimulants to the miners. When the Azure Dawn’s security forces had tried to break up the racket he had escaped with a few dozen others on a skiff.

The thriving black market let him slowly recruit a following, but they lacked any real weapon to fight with. The odd mining blaster or charge thrower had been converted into more of a threat of violence than actual instruments of war. It was enough to shakedown a lone transport of a handful of miners, but they didn’t have the forces to take on even a light Domain frigate. At least not until now. He pressed the intra-ship comms button on his arm, “Lieutenant, I’m coming back on board.”

The airlock door latched with a resounding thud that could be felt through the floor and the hiss of vents let Joseph know the room was equalizing. He took off his helmet and popped his ears, it never was quite the right pressure in the suits. A sharply dressed young Lieutenant greeted him on the other side of the shuttle’s door. There hadn’t been any children born in the volume, to Joseph’s knowledge, but they had proceeded in waking up more people. In all reality the Lieutenant was older than Joseph, but not in waking years.

“Sir, the ship is ready to head back to Telepylus at your command,” snapped the Lieutenant.
“Let’s get going then, I don’t want to miss the show,” said Joseph. The Lieutenant saluted and gave an order into their sleeve. The ship rolled and the slight change in the artificial gravity was the only sign it was now under the effects of a faster-than-light drive. Joseph barely had time to get the EVA suit off and dressed in regular clothes before the ship was within the arrival pattern for Telepylus.

The station was not the greatest architectural marvel of the Domain, but it may have been the fastest assembled. In the cycles following their sleeper ship’s first arrival in the volume they had hastily taken apart the original sporeship that made up the core of the station. The sporeship had suffered a catastrophic failure and was barely able to maintain its orbit when the Azure Dawn came upon it. Captain Hill had made the call to try and salvage the ship, but a reactor malfunction damaged the Dawn’s drive system. With no ability to repair the system the colonists made the tough decision to try and complete the work the sporeship had started and terraform the planets.

Crews worked at every shift to disassemble the modular sleeper ship and repurpose it into a logistics station. Vast swaths of the sleeper ship were turned into habitation rings and docking bays while the production and autofabs on the sporeship were re-tooled into the industrial zones necessary to produce the materials needed for terraforming.

The station had a slow rotation that kept it stable, and around it was a cloud of mining skiffs and makeshift transports. Most were just crew cabins strapped to simple reaction mass drives. They had awoken most of the sleepers in the original pods, but only about half were still alive. The small health issues that arose from the hyper sleep compounded with the stress of frontier life made the life expectancy unfavorably short for the colonists. Joesph had held off on reviving the last 30,000 sleepers as a symbol of the original intent of the mission. Many of them would require advanced medical treatment that simply did not exist in the volume to survive the process anyway. He had sent a message via a hyperwave comm relay to the Domain colonial affairs board. They had promised him two more sleeper ships were expected to arrive sometime within the next cycle.

Several other colonies in the sector were up and running but the added stress of cryorevival facilities would threaten their stability. Joseph’s project was a good place for these sleepers to go to be slowly revived as needs arose and eventually, when there was a new habitable planet, for all of them to find a home.

Joseph turned to his Lieutenant, “Any word yet from the response team?”

“No, sir. Judging by this intelligence report they should be arriving within the next few minutes,” they said pulling a system map up on the central holo tank. Five red triangles moved along an arced path towards a yellow circle. An estimated arrival time was displayed along the bottom of the dotted path.

“What’s the comm delay from there?” asked Joseph. He was not used to the pace of military command. He usually thought in scales of cycles. There would be little he could do to aid the captains of these vessels regardless if the delay were moments or hours, but he wanted to know how long he had before messages could be expected from the group.

“Light delay is about 2 hours,” said a tech operating a tactical screen behind Joseph.

A few startled gasps and then pointed shouts rose at the opposite side of the deck. Joseph looked over to the source of the commotion and saw a message from the hyperwave relay. He had to stifle his own cry of alarm.

THIS IS A PRIORITY MESSAGE. GATE NETWORK OFFLINE. CAUSE UNKNOWN. DO NOT ATTEMPT TRANSIT AT THIS TIME. REPEAT. GATE NETWORK OFFLINE. ALL SHIPS ON SCHEDULED TRANSITS ARE TO RETURN TO NEAREST DOMAIN PORT AND AWAIT FURTHER DIRECTIONS.

Questions flew across the command deck. No one could come up with a reason why the gate network would, or even could stop functioning. More critically still what was to happen to the numerous life-sustaining shipments that were due into the sector. Joseph’s system couldn’t manage the terraforming without regular shipments of equipment manufactured within the Domain. Surely the network would be operational within a cycle at most. They had enough supplies to continue regular operations for at least that long.

The Lieutenant called Joseph’s attention back to the central holo tank. “Sir, I’ve got reports from all over the volume. All of them more or less the same.” The Lieutenant shifted uncomfortably. “Something about a ‘Ludd,' no, not a thing. A…person?”

Warning klaxons screamed as the lights in the command deck went to automatic combat mode. Joseph had never even known that the lights could do that.

“Explosions on… on…” The Lieutenant swallowed hard and regained their composure. “Explosions on Telepylus. Massive damage to habitation and industrial zones. Confirmed extreme radiation leak. There will be no survivors. Moving to minimum safe distance.”

Joseph looked first at his white-knuckled Lieutenant and then at the new frame in the holo tank. It was a feed from just before the explosions. The small cloud of skiffs and transports swirled like bees around a hive. Then, from somewhere deep within the station, came a slow, unnatural bulge. The bulge expanded the belting holding several hab rings and then burst with gouts of orange and blue flames. It was only after he realized the scale of the explosion did its speed make sense. The station was dozens of kilometers long and the blast had separated a third of it cleanly off. “What could have done…that?” he asked, pointing a finger at the dying station.

From over his shoulder came the voice of tech he did not recognize, “Ludd’s righteous fury.” There was a sudden flash and Joseph felt something hot and heavy hit him in the shoulder. A second flash and he looked up to see the Lieutenant with their service weapon drawn. Then the pain came, first as discomfort and then as waves of anguish passing over his body. Joseph collapsed forward onto the holo tank and he could see blood splattered across it. He felt his chest and his hand came back covered in the same.

The Lieutenant’s voice came from somewhere distant, “Secure the command deck, get a med tech!” The world began to fade out.

A sharp jab in Joseph's leg brought everything into sharp focus. A med tech was applying a medical foam to the wound in his chest. He was still on the command deck but laid out over the top of several consoles. Breathing was extremely painful but Joseph was able to form coherent words. “Lieutenant!” he coughed, “Lieutenant, what is happening to my system?”

“Insurrection, sir.” Said the Lieutenant from somewhere nearby. “It would seem the pirates we have been dealing with have been replaced by some new threat. They broadcast their demands.”

“Unconditional surrender?” asked Joseph.

“No. Unconditional termination. Telepylus is gone.” The Lieutenant paused for a moment. “After the explosion several frigates of unknown designation appeared out of hyperspace and began hunting fleeing ships. We managed to destroy one before we were outnumbered and forced to retreat. They have irradiated the station and opened the remaining hyper sleep pods to vacuum.”

“We need to get to the relay,” said Joseph.

“Sir, there are hostile patrols at every corner in the volume. The jump points are under heavy guard. We’ve gotten reports they have bombed the facilities at Ismara into dust. They will likely be heading to the relay to destroy it as well. We will need to hide until an opening appears at one of the jump points and make our way to a Domain controlled volume.” The Lieutenant’s voice was becoming ragged with stress.

Joseph sat upright and was able to see his command staff. Each one of them had a look of far away distress, their usual tidy uniforms were dirty and ruffled. They had been fighting for their lives just as surely as he had. The Lieutenant especially looked tired. When Joseph had recruited them he had seen in them the hopes and dreams he had when the first reports about the system began to come in. They had boundless enthusiasm for their role, and now they had lost everything.

The holo tank mixed with the red emergency lighting to produce an otherworldly glow to each of the crew on the deck. Their ghastly features made Joseph think he was already dead and these were the spirits to escort him to the afterlife of dreams and sorrows.

But not everything had been lost. He looked the young Lieutenant in the eyes and said, “I need to show you something.” He motioned for the Lieutenant to help him off the console. They obliged and he walked with assistance to the holo tank. It displayed estimated force locations and hundreds of red triangles crossed out and the word “DESTROYED” underneath each. Joseph wiped his own blood off of a control pad and keyed in a passphrase.

The holo tank reset and a new display appeared showing inbound vectors for two hyper sleep ships. “There are over 5 million souls on these ships,” Joseph said gesturing at the holo tank and turning back to his crew. “This system and the dream it represented is lost. But there are still 5 million dreams waiting to wake up on those ships. We owe it to them to give them the best chance we can.” Joseph’s crew stared back at him, the light was still gone from their eyes. His whole body ached as he drew a rattling breath and entered another code. Each of the crew’s portraits appeared and next to them a profile indicating their position prior to entering hyper sleep and a long list of personal details ending in long string of numbers and letters.

But underneath that was a note that Joseph had entered. He had interviewed every crew member shortly after their awakening and he had asked them what their dreams and aspirations were. All before they had known where they were. There were future farmers, people looking to start families, big ideas about what the new frontier could offer, and at the very bottom of the screen was Joseph’s portrait with the word “paradise”. The crew looked on and Joseph made another quick motion all the portraits zoomed away and millions more flooded the display. For every person that had been on the Azure Dawn there were little vignettes of what they wanted their life to be.

“Each person has a right to dream,” said Joseph.

A tech from the side of the room called out, “The relay has two inbound frigate-class ships of unknown model. We can beat them there by 10 minutes at maximum burn.”

The Lieutenant gave the first command, “Ready the shuttle for emergency burn! Battle-stations!” They looked over to Joseph and gave him a reassuring nod. “We’ll get you to the relay.”

Joseph struggled to pull the EVA suit on. It felt ten times heavier than it normally did and each time he ratcheted it a little higher he had to take a few breaths. The overrides on the relay were intentionally designed to prevent remote tampering. Joseph would have to be physically on the platform in order to broadcast the redirection codes to the inbound sleeper ships. With the last of the suit fastened he positioned himself by the airlock door and opened a live comms feed to the Lieutenant. “I’m in position at the airlock, what’s our ETA?”

“15 minutes to arrival, we’ll be coming in at FTL and do an emergency stop. It might blow the drive, but our window has gotten shorter. The enemy ships will arrive 7 minutes after we do,” said the Lieutenant in a confident voice.

“Stick to the plan,” said Joseph. “The priority is the relay.”

“Affirmative, we drop you and draw them off,” said the Lieutenant in an almost business-as-usual cadence.

Joseph cycled the inner air lock door and stepped through. The EVA pack would give him control but the closest they expected to get to the relay was still several dozen kilometers and with a considerable relative velocity. It would take most of the onboard propellant to match up and approach. He tapped the automated control switch. He expected to lose consciousness under acceleration but the suit should be able to do all the calculations and approaches without much problem. It was the waking up after he dreaded. The med tech had installed two emergency stimulant packs if things started to go badly. The tech knew about his heart condition and told him under no uncertain terms that if he used them he would probably die. He coded them to deploy if he did not immediately wake up on arrival to the relay.

“2 minutes to drop.” Came the Lieutenant’s voice over the comm.

“Opening outer airlock,” said Joseph as if he were an experienced drop marine. He had rarely seen outside a ship while the drive bubble was engaged. The stars were long streaks radiating from wherever he looked. He could see individual objects if looked straight at them but everything else was a blur. A strong sense of vertigo began to overcome him, but he closed his eyes as he did on so many trips out the airlock and a sense of pervading calm filled him.

“Engaging emergency stop…” the Lieutenant paused. “Good luck sir, see you on the other side.”

A massive wall hit Joseph in the chest and his head felt like it was going to explode. The universe imploded around him and the stars came into bright focus. His suit identified the relay and began plotting best approaches. A small group of numbers began rapidly counting down and when they hit zero he launched out the airlock. “I’m clear,” he grunted into the comm as the suit fired its thrusters and he blacked out.

Joseph was standing on a desert planet. In front of him was a solitary white flower sprouting magically out of the sand. He reached down and inspected the flower. Glossy dew drops rolled off of its petals and where they hit sand more flowers erupted out of the ground. He exclaimed in joy and looked up to the sky where two fireballs streaked across the sky. Two bees stung him in two different locations and he immediately awoke from the dream.

The hyperwave relay platform loomed in front of him. At the end of the central axis its main segmented dish dwarfed the rest of the platform, its pearlescent polish catching the starlight and creating a rainbow of colors. Several other transmission antennas positioned along the spine poked out at odd angles acting as the local dispatch. The suit had a trajectory laid out for a cluster of reactor pods and an exterior control panel. It had done its job perfectly.
Joseph looked over at his comms status. There was still a green light indicating a good connection with the shuttle. “Status update,” he said into the open channel.

“We’ve marked the enemy vessels on approach, ETA 1 minute. Will try to engage,” the Lieutenant said with an even tone.

“I am at the relay, will update on mission status change,” said Joseph. He found the combat chatter coming easier to him now. He had confidence in the Lieutenant to do their part, and in that confidence he found his own to carry out this final task. The braking thrusters eased him onto the platform and he clipped the security strap to the maintenance frame with surprising speed.

Again with agility he did not know he possessed he swung over to the main command terminal and flipped out the keypad automatically turning on the status screen.

Please enter valid DOMAINnetOS password:
JWITT
ITHACA_DREAMS#638d6435bb3e
Welcome to DOMAINnetOS 4.9.11 (e37b11)
~/DHR_11204/Local-host/users/admin$

Pan COMM_HW 12.42 -wide
SEND DOMAIN-INT declare 0000 priority 10 authorization EMERALD
ESTABLISHING SECURE CONNECTION
*
CONNECTED TO HOST
CALL Course_Plotter_AI on func_RAND_long -quiet -overwrite
CALL EM_Standby -countdown “120”
SEND log_update “Good luck dreamers”
CONNECTION TERMINATED AT HOST
Local-host/Log_update -remove -all -secure

Joseph panned the hyperwave relay in the general direction of the two sleeper ships and keyed in the overrides for their automated guidance protocols. The segmented dish rippled space around it as the transmission was sent. He ordered the ships off in random directions and engaged their emergency standby modes. Without active transponders and a reduced reactor signature they would be nearly impossible to find. Perhaps in a couple cycles when the gates were back up the domain could organize a search for the missing ships. But for now they would be safe in the anonymity of space, and that’s what really mattered. “Mission is success, repeat mission is success,” said Joseph on the comm channel. Joseph looked for the green indicator on his display that would mark their position. He finally found it down and behind him. Without the highlight he would never have noticed the speck of dust moving rapidly across the stars.

“Received. We are merged,” came the reply from the Lieutenant their voice augmented by a suit’s external speaker. A sudden pitch shift in the static meant they were accelerating hard. They didn’t close the comm, either by accident or because they were distracted. The Lieutenant barked commands through the comm, “Bring us to 128 mark 35. Maintain current vector. Main guns ready, fire. Accelerate 92 mark 15.”

Another voice broke into the channel, “Confirmed hit on kilo one. Splash.” A bright star appeared near where the dust mote had been. It faded quickly into a reddish glow of superheated dust.

The Lieutenant’s voice came back over the comm, “Target kilo two. Bring us to…BRACE” The sounds of metal giving way filled the channel and the system’s auto-leveling brought the sound down several decibels. Joseph watched as a second mote of dust drifted towards his highlighted one and they touched. Where they were erupted into another brilliant flash and the highlight faded out.

Joseph’s mouth felt dry. He tried to speak but his tongue wouldn’t make the right shapes. He finally managed to say, “This is Administrator Joseph Witt, calling Command Shuttle. Lieutenant?…” The only reply was a slightly higher than normal amount of static. Joseph suddenly felt extremely fatigued. His suit’s bio-monitor started buzzing at him, but he couldn’t muster the energy to silence the alarm. He looked up at the relay and his last thoughts were about how the relay looked like a flower.
[close]
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Network Pesci

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Re: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« Reply #5 on: May 30, 2023, 07:53:31 PM »

All right, here you go.  I sent you some style notes in a PM, there's a few things that need your final word as the actual author of the piece, you know what you intend, I don't.  It's well worth my time and I'm keen to see where the story goes from here.
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dantrew

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Re: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« Reply #6 on: May 31, 2023, 08:11:48 PM »

This one was one of my favorites to write. I love good sci-fi thriller. I've titled it "Moonlight" but it could easily be "Three Body Problem" it's set post Askonian Crisis in the Askonia system. Everybody loves the ol' lobster system.
Content Warning: There is a good bit of violence and smattering of gore



How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. - Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild (1931)
Moonlight

People pay for a story. If they knew the dirty truth of what was behind some of their favorite holo vids they wouldn’t spend a single credit on them. Not that Zosma really cared all that much about the details. She was only interested in what the story was worth and as an information broker on the backwater world of Cruor all information was valuable. The Diktat had severe controls on what could and could not be freely distributed under their baleful gaze. Any information, no matter how seemingly insignificant, took on value when it was hard to come by.

Zosma paged through her contacts in her private booth. She was eager to find someone with an insight into the latest arrivals on the planet. A newly docked transport had disgorged a fresh batch of colonial hopefuls looking to escape the doldrums that was life on Volturn. She had Volturnian Lobster before, it was buttery and smooth but it had the kind of deep blandness that can only be created by synthetic evolution. Nothing would ever have evolved to be so utterly flavorless. That ennui seemed to ooze from every person who came from the planet reinforced her belief that nothing truly exciting ever happened on Volturn.

Nevertheless shiploads of technicians left the water world for the hostile environment of Cruor in droves. Some sought their fortune as prospectors on the surface as they looked for new exposed deposits of precious transplutonic ores. Others hoped to strike it rich in one of the few places the Diktat allowed a black market to openly exist. You could buy a handful of hover tank parts on the black market on Sindria, but you could buy a fully assembled and battle-ready one on Cruor (and the dealer would probably throw in a couple guerrilla-grade weapons for good measure).

Zosma was one of the few people on Cruor who had been born there. Her parents had decided that the government stipend for raising a child was a solid financial decision, but they had not factored in the fact that they were living on a constantly changing and mostly uninhabitable rock with an annual birth rate that usually rounded down to zero. There were no child care facilities on the entire colony, so Zosma was raised by the people closest to her—the incarcerated workers her parents oversaw.

Rivas had shown her what materials the security scanners could not see through and how to conceal anything on your body. Surya had taught her how to make a weapon out of common materials and what parts of a person were the softest. Jamux had taught her to listen and how to sneak through the checkpoints without notice. But a soft-faced man named Shrapnel had been the most kind and taught her how to make deals with people and given her the first job she ever did for the underworld.

She was 17 standard cycles old when Shrapnel had placed a small information cube into her hands. He had given her express instructions to deliver it to a dead-drop on the main docking level for the ore freighters. She hadn’t thought twice about it when she slid the little cube into the side of her Tri-Pad. In the contents of the drive were thousands of records for ore shipments, mostly incredibly boring and mundane things like departure times and inspection certificates. She was nearly ready to close the viewer and disconnect the drive when she noticed all the dates were for the following shift. Only the port authority and government police would know these schedules. Anyone else who did could use them to bring a shipment at the right moment under the guise of a regular ore freighter.

Zosma dutifully brought the data cube to the dead drop and left it in a crevice behind a loader-charging port, but Not before she had made several copies of the contents on several spares she purchased from an electronics dealer on the commercial concourse. She spent the next shift at the Three Body Problem, a local dive-bar notorious for its more lucrative side operations. Zosma had made her first true information broker connections that shift, ones that she still depended on to this day for their consistently good information.

Today, though, they were giving her nothing. The Queen of the Gates sat empty in her berth and not a soul on the station could feed her more than the manifest. She pulled up a video feed of the docking complex and focused down in the Queen. There was precious little to be gleaned from the cruise-ship-turned-transport’s shining hull and total lack of defining character. It lacked a functioning faster-than-light drive field generator and had little in the way of shielding beyond a cursory radiation protection system. The ship had arrived in the sector before the collapse as a thrilling adventure for wealthy families to see how the new colonies were coming along. When the gate network shut down the families had been touring the Askonia system and marveling at the namesake red giant’s flares. The ship had never left the system after that. None of the crew or passengers had access to their Domain-backed funds and the passenger ship languished at the periphery of the system unable to purchase passage out.

Enterprising colonists had sought to purchase it from the remaining crew but arrived to a grisly scene of carnage onboard. Numerous legends around the murder of the crew and passengers persisted, but were unprovable. At least no one mentioned them at the fare gates as they booked more and more travelers. The ship ran double-duty as a bulk transport for people looking to relocate within the Diktat’s sphere of influence and as a sight-seeing ship for the massive electrical storms on Salus.

Zosma pressed an icon on her Tri-Pad that signaled the bartender for another drink and sighed deeply. The manifest would have to do for now.

“Our two greatest problems are gravity and paperwork. We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.” - Wernher von Braun, Chicago Sun Times, July 10, 1958

Ayala shielded their eyes from the harsh light of the docking bay. The weight of the travel bag bit into their shoulder for the first time in a week. The transport they had booked had taken its leisurely time in making the trip from Volturn to Cruor. The conventional drives made the ship slow to begin with and the cheapness of the captain meant that most of the trip was spent without acceleration. The novelty of zero-gravity wears off the first time you have to use a toilet.

Ayala was a field technician in Philip Andrada’s Grand Vision. They had spent most of their youth performing regular maintenance on the organics processors on Volturn, toiling away at ensuring the Diktat had the right materials to create the Standard Meal Rations. SMRs were essential to the Diktat just as surely as the fuel production. Without either the Diktat would not survive. Without technicians like Ayala the Diktat would not survive. Only the Diktat didn’t pay nearly enough for technicians like Ayala to survive.

They had left the relative placidity of Volturnian life to seek fortune elsewhere within the Diktat. Passports to leave the Askonia volume were only available to those with adequate financial support. Papers had to be filed correctly by greedy bureaucrats who only took payment from equally greedy deal-makers. Without the correct grease in the correct wheel applications for travel often got stuck in terminal loops—passing from one desk to another within the great government machine. All that before the costs of booking a real transport or purchasing working permits for one of the interstellar trading companies.

Ayala desperately wanted to leave this system and its giant red star as soon as possible and that meant heading to Cruor and trying to find a profitable claim. They had a penchant for mechanical things, often able to diagnose a faulty bearing in a fractioning plant by feel alone.

They had seen fit to tell one of the crew that the Queen of the Gates’ primary air handling loop had insufficient pressure to properly circulate to every cabin. The crew member had shrugged and walked off. Ayala spent the next two days creating an automatic diverter that could be inserted into their cabin vents and would direct more air flow from that corridor to their cabin. This had made their cabin feel a little less claustrophobic for the following four days.

Ayala felt a hand push into their back and they nearly topped over with the new force. Catching themself on the handrail they turned back to see a sea of people eagerly pushing forward towards the end of the docking ramp. Every one of them had the same plan as Ayala. A deep worry set in for the first time, there was so much competition for resources here that it would be nearly impossible for any one person to make enough to afford a trip out of the system. The government bureaucracy was designed to prevent that.

They steadied themself and pushed back into the flowing column of people heading down the ramp. Ayala would need something special to break out, a lead on a claim or perhaps early rights to mine a particularly profitable claim. Perhaps there was someone on the station that could point them in the right direction. Ayala new from their time working for the lobster union that all the old-timers liked to talk up their stories at the bar.

They had gotten a particularly juicy story from a man in his second century as he told them about how he had once had to wrangle, by hand, a lobster so large that it would not fit into the standard shipping container. The man had shown several scars on his arm where the supposed giant crustacean had grabbed him with its claws. Most of them looked like burn marks from an overheated drum bearing. The story had been good though, and at the end of it the man had given Ayala his battered transfer papers to start work in the organics processing facility. The lobster life was all he knew and all he wanted.

The extra income from the organics job had paid for Ayala’s ticket to Cruor. Maybe there were equally old men with equally tall tales of ore veins and volatile geysers waiting to be exploited. There was a holo ad at the end of the docking bay for a bar called Three Body Problem and Ayala pulled up a navigation panel on their Tri-Pad.

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? - Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

The Tri-Pad produced a synthesized two-tone chime that let Mathis know he had a new order for delivery. He grabbed a single drink from the automatic dispenser and made for one of the private booths in the Three Body Problem. On the way back a different set of tones let him know he had a booking for the evening as an escort. The service industry on Cruor had its reputation and Mathis had been working in it since he was able to buy his freedom from the mining prison. Piloting a temperamental mining rig used the same set of skills as consoling a visiting diplomat and both involved heavy amounts of synthetic alcohol before and after. It was work he excelled at.

He paused at the entrance to the private booth and confirmed the booking on his Tri-Pad. Returning to the job at hand he knocked lightly on the door and said, “Ma’am I have your drink order.”

A sharp, mousy, voice replied from inside, “Thank you. You may leave it on the serving stand outside.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said a touch of disappointment in his voice. Another perk of the job was getting information he wasn’t supposed to have, and the private booths were often filled with such things. He had never been able to get inside this one however, and it’s keen-voiced occupant had rebuffed several attempts. As he was about to leave the hallway he caught sight of a slender hand reaching out of the booth to pull the new drink in and seized an opportunity. “Pardon me, but if you have an empty glass I can take that from you.”

The door opened fully and a pair of nearly black eyes bored into his unflinchingly. “Thank you,” said the woman holding several empty glasses. Mathis broke eye-contact with the woman and looked down at the glasses. He bit the inside of his lip and sent a signal to the cybernetic implant in his retina to take a picture of everything in his field of view. A warm sensation washed over his eyes and for a moment flecks of static appeared in his vision. He looked back up into the woman’s eyes without missing a beat.

“You’re welcome ma’am,” he said, taking the glasses in hand and giving a short bow, again without breaking eye contact. The woman closed the door to the booth and a small red “do not disturb” hologram floated above the latch.

On his way back to the bar Mathis passed his Tri-Pad over his temple and downloaded the captured images. A 3D scene reconstructed itself before him based on the captured information in his implants. It was woefully sparse. The only thing he was able to make out was the open ship manifest for the transport currently docked. He personally knew the captain of the vessel, and had spent nights with more than a few of the crew. They were all regulars to the vices of Cruor.

The details of the manifest were mostly worthless; the staff at the port authority sold that information regularly and cheaply. However the fact that someone was looking at that manifest in this bar meant a little more. This woman was interested in what was on that ship. He was able to run a facial identity check against the Diktat’s population database but came up with nothing. Any serious data broker would be able to have their identity removed from any government database or pay to have their face reconstructed.

He opened a communication interface and sent a message to his handler for the Askonian Revolutionary Council based out of Umbra. He immediately got a reply: Priority Contact, Install Listening Chip, Perform Tailing Operation. He sighed and closed the interface paging over to his scheduler. He tapped cancel on this evening’s booking.

“For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible.” - Stephen Hawking, British Telecom advertisement (1993)

Ayala’s Tri-Pad chirped that they had reached their destination. They looked up at the garish faux-neon sign illuminated in a blood-red. Three orbs chaotically danced around the bold lettering Three Body Problem. “This is it,” they thought and walked up to the front door. The automatic opener gave slight gasp as the door slid to the side revealing the dark interior.

This bar was unlike the ones on Volturn they were used to. Those bars often smelled like salt-laden filters on an aquaponics system; this place smelled of mildew and decomposing aromatics from the synthetic alcohol. There was no lively banter or shouts of exuberance; everyone here looked like they were in the midst of a funeral.

“C’mon, order something or get out of the door,” said a tall muscular man next to the bar. A two-tone chirp came from somewhere nearby and he grabbed a drink and walked off. Ayala moved up to where the man had been standing and opened their Tri-Pad. A proximity window opened and showed several drink options available for purchase. It took several seconds of scrolling before they found something even remotely appealing. After confirming the purchase a glass with a thin layer of dark brown liquid slid from the automated dispenser.

Ayala swirled the liquid in the glass looking for anyone who even remotely looked like they would chat. A pungent peaty aroma wafted up from the glass and enticed them to drink. Ayala downed the shot in a neat flick then looked for a receptacle for their glass.

They were interrupted by a quick tap on their shoulder. “I’ll take that,” said a calm strong voice. Ayala turned and stood eye-to-eye with the large man from earlier.

“Thanks,” they said and handed the glass over. “Is this place always so quiet?”

“Yup. And the clientele pay to keep it that way,” the man said with disinterest as he started to return to the bar.

“I’m not looking to cause trouble, I’m just looking for some information,” Ayala said trying to keep up with the long strides of the man.

The man stopped and turned abruptly to face them. A practiced expressionless gaze assessed Ayala before the man said, “Information does not come cheaply. Do you have something to barter or knowledge to trade?”

Ayala thought hard for a moment. “I have the security codes to the ship that just docked,” they lied.

The man’s eyes betrayed a sudden shock. “Is that so?” He asked drawing out the last syllable. “How did you come about possessing these codes?”

“I was a passenger on the last run, and they wouldn’t listen to me about the air system so I took matters into my own hands,” said Ayala. They knew the best lies were always built on a foundation of truth.

The man nodded almost imperceptibly. “And what would you like in return for a trade?” He asked.

“I want to know about any lucrative mining opportunities,” said Ayala.

“It is impossible, by the way, when picking one example of anything, to avoid picking one which is atypical in some sense.” - Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1965)

The drink was flat by the time Zosma got around to it. She pulled up the security footage of the technician that had entered the bar a few hours earlier. There were rarely visitors that stood out so much and obviously had no idea what they were doing. Most people took one look at the Three Body Problem and kept walking to one of the other bars in the colony.

She had already run the usual background checks and database lookups and found absolutely nothing interesting. They had departed the transport ship without incident, and all the paperwork for their transit actually seemed legitimate. For all appearances this “Ayala Langsdale” was just another technician lost in the hostile world of Cruor.

But lost technicians don’t walk out of the bar with the highest paid male escort in the district without something going on. Conveniently their path away had been obscured by several large transport skiffs and neither face had been picked up in the last hour by the security scanners. They had effectively disappeared.

Zosma set her drink down again and furiously tapped through multiple feeds looking for any sign of their presence. A notification from one of her informants in the mining guild told her that someone matching Ayala’s description had just rented a survey craft. She checked the registry and the credit account matched the one used to pay for the passage to Cruor.

Immediately she had four screens open to track all the planetary vessels until the transponder linked to the rented craft appeared on the traffic display. The craft was outbound at full speed from the colony and headed over an area know for its instability. She had to find out where this technician was headed and why, nothing a little interrogation wouldn’t uncover. Zosma placed a call to her personal shuttle pilot and told him to begin preparing for a rapid launch.

It took 15 minutes to get from the commercial districts to her personal docking bay and another 3 to brief the pilot on her plan. Before she had even strapped in to her chair the ship glided out of its docking restraints and the low rumble of the shuttle’s engines rolled through the hull.

Her tracking software would be able to keep a close watch on the survey craft for as long as the transponder was active. She knew it was possible to disable them on the rental craft but she had bribed the rental company to provide her with their proprietary tracking frequencies just in case. The craft was crude and designed to skim only a few hundred meters above the surface. Her shuttle, with several orders of magnitude more performance, would be able to intercept the craft in relatively short order.

The little craft buffeted close to the surface. Its pilot clearly not used to the extreme convection currents that boiled up from the rapid release of heat in the constantly shifting crust. Zosma’s own pilot was an expert and had been flying combat bombers for the Diktat before she had recruited him. He aligned their vectors perfectly and descended almost on top of the small craft before it veered wildly. The shuttle was equipped with a hidden EMP projector disguised as a laser comm array.

There were no wasted shots from Zosma’s pilot.

The survey craft’s engines sputtered and it rapidly lost altitude. It glided towards the surface completely uncontrolled and impacted with relatively little fuss. The shuttle circled closely overhead before Zosma ordered the ship down and the rest of the crew to prepare for an important guest.

A dusty pressure suit was hoisted out of the wreckage and corralled at the end of several CP-carbines into the loading bay of the shuttle. When the bay was repressurized one of the hired marines began removing the figure’s helmet.

Zosma looked at the dazed face before her and waved her Tri-Pad over their face to confirm it was the same technician from the bar. The ID system returned a 95% match, the discrepancies were notably in areas where some swelling was starting to occur. The shock of off-white hair on their head was tamped down by sweat and grime. “Who are you?” asked Zosma forcibly.

The person began, “I’m Technician First Class Ayala…”

“No.” Zosma interrupted them. “No technician of any rank has the ability to completely disappear from station security for 3 hours and then somehow appear in a rented ship heading towards one of the most desolate regions of the planet. Who. Are. You.”

“I don’t… I don’t know what you mean. I went with that man from the bar…” said the technician, clearly confused.

“That… Man… happens to be a very skilled consort with many connections to people far worse than me,” said Zosma, contempt filling her with rage.

“I just asked him about claims he may have heard about,” said the technician. “He gave me these coordinates and said there was rumors of a massive deposit of transplutonics.” They tapped a couple buttons on their wrist terminal and a set of points illuminated on a map of the surface. Zosma leaned in and scrutinized each point.

“He gave you nothing. Two of these are empty basalt flows that are ancient by Cruor standards. And the other is an abandoned wreck known to harbor pirates.” Zosma paused. “I take it back. He was probably trying to get you killed. What did you give him for this information?” She asked wrapping the words around the technician like a boa constrictor.

“I tried to give him fake security codes for the Queen of the Gates,” said the technician with a weak voice.

“Did you have the real codes?” asked Zosma coiling the words tighter.

The technician looked ashamed and began worrying at a fold in the pressure suit. “No. I lied. I figured I could come up with a persuading enough fake to fool all of them long enough to get to a ship and stake a claim before they figured it out.”

Zosma tensed. “Wait. Who was it you made a deal with?”

“I don’t know their names, but the man brought me to a hotel and in one of the rooms there was a holo-presence suite. There were at least three others with different avatars waiting. I offered them the codes and they told the man to ‘give me what I asked for,'” said the technician, obviously hiding something. Zosma opened her Tri-Pad and accessed the colony’s data streams. A holo-presence suite would create noticeable traffic on the network for anything other than local transmissions. The packets practically screamed their presence to her. The comm buffer on the colony only stored the first relay hop for the packets but it was enough to be sure.

Zosma looked the technician directly in the eyes and asked, “The avatars. Were they a dragon, a polar bear, and gryphon?”

“Yes. That’s them exactly,” said the technician excitedly.

Zosma straightened and backed away from the technician. “You have made some very, very powerful enemies today. Those were the leaders of the Askonian Revolutionary Council, or at least some form of them. The ARC has many voices to fill the roles of the three as needed.” A sudden realization spread across her mind. “The man that brought you to them, did he mention anything else to you. A meeting location, dead drop, anything at all to follow up with you?”

The technician worried at the fold again. “No. I don’t think so.”

One of Zosma’s marines moved to her side and whispered in her ear, “The Queen of the Gates is getting ready for departure ma’am. Unscheduled. Flight plan as filed is for the standard sight-seeing tour, but there are no VIPs on the manifest.”

Zosma nodded an understanding and looked back to the technician. “I have a developing situation that you may be of use for.”

“So Einstein was wrong when he said, ‘God does not play dice.’ Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen.” - The Nature of Space and Time (1996) by Stephen Hawking

Mathis pressed his palm against the concealed flechette pistol. Its weight created unnatural folds in his jacket and anyone astute enough would be able to see it. Nothing else had quite the same effect it had when used appropriately and he needed certain tools to complete his new assignment.

Earlier he had returned to the bar to find his target had already left. He opened a line to his handler and reported his failure. He waited for a reprimand but none came. Instead a new line of orders came through, these ones marked as high priority. The long list of coded phrases instructed him to board the Queen of the Gates and secure the command deck shortly after departure.

The ship was to rendezvous with another transport in low Salus orbit and take on a new crew. The Queen was already slated to perform the standard sight-seeing tour along the same route. This new objective wouldn’t raise any traffic control concerns and the ship could proceed to Sindria under normal scrutiny.

The ship was originally to then to pick up a load of political dissidents from Sindria and bring them to Cruor for assignment to labor camps. Instead of delivering them to the labor camps they were going to free them under the auspices of the ARC. It never hurt to have a few hundred politically motivated rebels owe you a favor.

Mathis had been working towards this mission for nearly three cycles. He had surreptitiously stolen access codes, ship diagrams, and loads of other information on the Queen from her many crew, most of whom had booked nights with him or one of his fellow operatives. However the final key was the security codes provided to him by the unwitting technician.

The council had instructed him to give the technician coordinates for one of the clandestine operations on the planet. The mercenaries stationed there would capture the tech and interrogate them for any additional information. After that it was none of Mathis’ concern.

He loped up the boarding ramp for the transport ship and made a sharp left turn. He knew from memorizing the ship diagrams that there would be a maintenance access here. That access would take him to a damage control station and from there he could follow a spider web of infrastructure to the command deck.

All the panels on the loading decks had a low-security bypass for emergency personnel. He had acquired the codes from an unscrupulous EMT a month prior. The biometrics he had stolen from the quartermaster would get him into the DC station. The last piece of the puzzle was how to unlock the ship when the crew inevitably retaliated to his take over of the command deck. Armed with the new security codes he would be able to wrest control of the ship and guide it to the waiting ARC transport.

The plan was perfect, but he knew better than to blindly trust a plan. The first thing to go badly was the sudden lurch in his stomach from the ship accelerating. The Queen wasn’t supposed to undock for another 3 hours. Mathis had checked the loading status before attempting his own unscheduled departure; almost none of the VIPs had boarded yet.

He maneuvered in the tight crawl space and double-checked his Tri-Pad. The ship was definitely leaving early, but the flight plan was still the same. It was still over two days’ journey to Salus on the ship’s ancient drive. That was plenty of time to neutralize key members of the crew and prepare the ship for its new occupants.

Mathis swapped the Tri-Pad for his flechette pistol and checked the charge on the weapon. The three status indicators glowed a dull green. With the ship underway the crew was more likely to be performing random checks of systems and Mathis didn’t want any delay in dispatching witnesses. He made his way meter by meter down the access and soon a closed hatch appeared around the curve of the passage.

Mathis pressed his palm against the sealed doors and felt the cold, unyielding metal. The sensory implants in his hands could pick up minute vibrations; technically they were designed for medical applications where trauma kits and auto-medics would need to be able to sense even the faintest of heartbeats. He occasionally used them for their original purpose, but most of the time he employed them as a way to listen through walls.

He sensed the low thrum of the ship’s reactor and the irregular impacts of someone moving objects in low gravity, but he picked up nothing from the space immediately beyond the hatch. The security here was an easily spoofed signal and the hatch dutifully unsealed and opened to reveal the central damage control station.

Racks of tools stood by in magnetic holders illuminated by the soft low-power lighting. Emergency patch kits were haphazardly lashed against every available surface and the room gave off a claustrophobic feeling of immense clutter. As Mathis swung himself out of the crawl space the door indicator flashed green and someone began entering the room. Mathis spun and trained the pistol on the door.

The door slid open as his fingers pressed on the trigger mechanism. The pistol shaved off several darts from its caseless ammunition and fed them to an electromagnetic launcher. The only sound was a zipper-like buzz as the darts whizzed through the air.

A crew member’s face appeared for a moment and was replaced by a slowly inflating balloon of red blood. In an incomprehensibly fast motion Mathis had the floating corpse by the waist and was dragging it into the room. A quick glance up and down the hallway assured him this crew member was alone and he closed the door.

He used one of the patch kits to attach the body inside an access passage and sealed the hatch. No one would find it in the next few days but he made a mental note to tell his employers about it so that it wouldn’t be too much of a mess. Mathis tucked one of his errant hairs back into place and consulted his Tri-Pad.

There were two ways of getting to the command deck: he could crawl through yet another interminable access passage or simply walk up through the passenger compartments. He suspected that with the lack of bulk passengers and a limited load of sightseers he would go mostly unnoticed. The counter argument was that because there were so few people on board anyone moving around was likely to be under higher scrutiny.

Mathis ran his hand along his pistol thoughtfully. If he had thought to bring a carbine he could make short work of the entire crew, as it stood he had limited confidence in his current tool’s ability. He exhaled slowly through his nose and closed his eyes. A mental map of the ship played through his mind; two minutes along this deck, go up one level—likely no-one, four minutes back along the main axis—likely three to four contacts, open a security door, three minutes through crew quarters—likely five to six contacts, the CIC would be locked down during flight—one minute to override, standard flight compliment was four plus officer on duty—five contacts. It was too risky.

He sent the override to the access tunnel and began to climb in. Once inside there was no room to turn around so he cycled the hatch with his foot. He felt a slight shudder in the ship, but not the same as a drive correction. Someone had docked with the ship. His contacts knew he was on the ship, had they come early?

“Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.” - Werner Heisenberg, "Critique of the Physical Concepts of the Corpuscular Theory" in The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory (1930)

The ship’s captain floated gracefully along the docking tube flanked by a set of well-armed security guards with their mag rifles lazily pointing up the tube. His face was set in a stern expression and he wore a rumpled jumpsuit that had been hastily put on in the last few hours. Ayala kept their feet firmly planted on the shuttle’s hull and greeted her welcoming party with a broad smile.

“What is the meaning of this interruption in our flight,” said the captain with a strong colonial accent.

“I am so sorry Captain,” said Ayala stressing every syllable and genuflecting appropriately. “But I was unaware of the early departure of your ship and very much wanted to see the lights of Salus, so I contracted with this shuttle crew to bring me up here at much expedience so that I might rejoin you on your voyage.” They put as much gentle intonation as they could and flashed their best winning smile.

The captain grumbled something about the dock authority before asking, “I’ll need to see your travel credentials. Diktat policy, I’m afraid.”

“Of course Captain,” said Ayala handing over a small unbranded holo-pad.

The captain took it and immediately his face fell. He brought up his own Tri-Pad to confirm the details and then handed Ayala’s pad back to them. “I’m sorry for the confusion Councillor. We departed dock early to get back to Volturn for the Lobsterfest. We’ll get a berth ready for you immediately.”

“Thank you Captain.” Before Ayala could finish she felt a small vibration on their leg that let her know Zosma and her agents had successfully made the transit and were secured on board the Queen of the Gates. Ayala readied theirself for the next phase of the mission, “While your crew is readying my berth could I possibly take a tour of your fine ship?”

“Of course Councillor, where would you like to begin? I’d be happy to provide a tour with one of our security detail,” said the captain now extremely generous in his attitude.

“I would love to see how this ship is run, there may be things we can implement in the Diktat’s larger mercantile fleets. Supreme Executor Admiral Andrada has taken a more focused approach to trade in the last few cycles and I would love to give him new ideas at the next council meeting,” lied Ayala with a gentle touch on the captain’s wrist. “Lead away my good Captain.”

The captain looked momentarily flustered and confused but acquiesced to Ayala’s implicit command. He turned and began leading Ayala and the two security staff back into his ship. Both officers held their weapons tighter to their chests and scanned the hallways repeatedly, clearly taking their job more seriously than when they floated up the docking tube. The captain stammered slightly as he began by giving the specifications of the ship like a first year lieutenant filling out port authority forms.

“Oh, Captain, if I wanted the keel-capacity of your ship I would ask the port master or the shipwright. I want to know how your ship is run; how do you manage duties, who does your navigation, things of that nature.” Ayala said, chiding the captain and giving him gentle direction. “Let’s head to your command deck and you can go over your shift structure on the way.”

The captain nodded and relaxed slightly. He led the troop up and into the quiet command deck. The space was haphazardly arranged with many of the ship’s stations plastered with dozens of information screens showing various outputs of on-board generators and hull-mounted cameras. Few if any of the ship’s original luxury accommodations were found here, replaced by spartan chairs welded to the floor and harsh orange lighting.

A junior officer looked momentarily confused by the captain’s presence on the deck accompanied both by security officers and a stranger. The captain gave a leer visible from the back of his head and made a gesture mostly obfuscated by his body. The effect was clear though as the officer immediately straitened and shouted, “Captain on deck.”

Confused heads swiveled towards the group with more than one holding a food item in their mouths. As the moment registered across the room scuffling could be heard as drink containers were stowed and command screens hastily changed from non-sequitur video feeds to engine readouts and sensor arcs. The captain coughed and introduced his flight crew. Ayala nodded to each in turn and took interest in the navigation station.

They glided towards the ensign at her post and looked over her shoulder at the projected flight path of the Queen. “So close to Salus, you could practically touch it,” said Ayala.

From behind her the captain said, “Indeed Councilor, we are going to pass through the very upper portions of the giant’s atmosphere. We have to take special precautions not to accumulate too much charge on the hull. We’ve been struck in the past.”

“By the planet’s storms?” ask Ayala genuinely interested.

“Yes. The lightning is spectacular. I’m glad you were able to make it aboard to see it,”said the captain.

“As am I, Captain,” said Ayala. They slipped a small object out of their pressure suit’s utility pocket. “Are those the engine diagnostics?” they asked of a screen at the far side of the deck. When the captain and crew distractedly looked across Ayala placed the listening bug on the underside of the navigation console.

“Yes, Councilor. We use reaction mass drives exclusively, this ship was never equipped with a KL drive. It makes for a leisurely pace, but our operating costs are much lower. Much less power demand, you see, no fusion reactor,” said the captain posting to a different screen. “We can run off of the waste from most of the bigger ships.”

Ayala floated up next to the captain. “Captain, that may well be the thing we need in the Diktat’s fleets. I will be sure to mention your cooperation and insight when I next see The Supreme Executor.”They provided the captain with a small gold lion-emblem. “For now I would like some rest, can you direct me to my quarters?”

The captain looked wide-eyed at the Lion’s Guard token before snapping back to the moment. “Of course Councillor. The security detail will take you there immediately.”

Ayala walked with the two guards until they left the crew quarters and descended into the original luxury berths on the ship. One of the officers gestured at a set of real-wood doors made from a tree that had grown on Old Earth. Ayala nodded politely and grabbed both officers' gloved hands in their own. “Thank you for your service in the name of the Diktat.”

The flash of the stun sticks illuminated the entire hallway for a moment as two agents emerged out of nowhere and felled the security guards. Zosma stepped out from the wooden doors. “I knew where they would take you. This suite is practically a palace. I might have to move my office…” she trailed off in thought gesturing for Ayala and the agents to follow her.

The agents made quick work of disarming the guards and assuming their identities. The two officers were bound and taken further into the cavernous suite. Ayala gawked at the opulent padding on every surface; a full-sized piano was bolted to a far bulkhead and a truly massive transparent-aluminum viewport opposed it. Seemingly suspended in the middle of the room was a circular table with chairs also magically bound in place. Seated at the far side of the table was Zosma, engrossed in something on a Tri-Pad.

“Ma’am,” said Ayala. Zosma did not look up. “Ma’am, did the bug I planted work?”

Zosma moved her eyes to stare at Ayala without even the slightest motion of her head. “Yes. It is providing very valuable information on this ship’s course.”

“Was there any information on why the ship left early,” asked Ayala.

Zosma slammed her Tri-Pad on the table and bored a hole in Ayala’s forehead with her gaze. “Ask the captain that question,” she yelled.

Ayala wanted to reply but found they had accidentally floated a few centimeters above the bulkhead and were now rotating slowly backward. They heard Zosma sigh.

“Tuck your feet to your chest and breathe in, when you rotate around, breathe out and extend your feet,” said Zosma in a gentle tone.

Ayala did as they were told and found their feet gently touching the pillow surface of the bulkhead again. The magnetic anchors activated and they were pulled back into solid contact. “Thanks, I’ve never really spent a lot of time in microgravity. I mean, I never got to leave my cabin when I was on this ship before,” said Ayala.

Zosma appeared concerned for the first time Ayala had ever seen. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You did a better job than any of my agents could have done. I’m just…” she looked back down at her Tri-Pad again a look of surprise on her face. “There’s another ship.”

“What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character ... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word ‘reality’ is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.” - Niels Bohr, Philosophy of Science Vol. 37 (1934)

Mathis risked discovery but he had recognized the voice on the other side of the hatch to the command center. There was no way they had gotten on board the ship without outside assistance, and outside assistance did not factor into his plans. Unable to turn around he had crawled backwards along the same corridor he had just climbed up. His shoulders ached and neck was sore from holding his head up, but he pushed the bodily sensations aside and focused back onto his assigned tasks; take over the ship, prepare for the arrival of the other crew, eliminate any witnesses.

Those objectives had not changed, just the methods he was going to use were flexible. He climbed out into the familiar damage control station and did a quick survey of the hallway outside. The coast was clear. Mathis walked out of the station and proceeded towards the passenger compartments. He estimated they would have a decent head start but he could probably overcome the guards and interrogate that tech in short order.

He stopped at every hallway and intersection and cleared it before proceeding forward. It would do him no good to be caught now. He heard them before he even got to the corner. They were talking to the guards about serving the Diktat, they would be distracted, now was the time to strike.

Mathis leveled his pistol and turned the corner just as the flashes went off. He jumped back assuming it was some sort of flash-bang, but there was only muffled grunts and the sounds of a momentary struggle. He was truly confused and then he heard another voice he recognized. The information broker from the bar was here, on the Queen of the Gates.

He grabbed his Tri-Pad and overrode the secrecy mode. He pressed a link into the communication panel and was able to connect through the ships comm array to the relay on Cruor. He knew his handler would be listening. All he had to do was send the right starting code and his message would be received no matter where he sent it on the planet.

He keyed in the activation phrase and a short code-worded message that would let his handler know the mission parameters had drastically changed. He hit send and waited for a reply. It came faster than he anticipated: Understood. Sending ark. New primary task, subdue target and associates.

Mathis adjusted his pistol to a non-lethal setting. The flechette darts would travel slower and probably wouldn’t have enough energy to penetrate body armor, but they also wouldn’t go through bone. They would hurt and possibly maim but unless they hit something sensitive they would be unlikely to kill. It would be enough to distract or injure his targets and leave them more easily knocked out.

He rounded the corner and jogged towards the suite’s door. He made it there in a few bounds and pressed his hand to the door. Unlike the metal hatches it was difficult to hear through, something about it muffled the sounds on the other side. He had little time, the waiting ship would be spotted as soon as it left the upper atmosphere and then he wouldn’t have surprise as a tool.

He braced against the door frame and tucked his legs to his chest. In the microgravity hitting the door would likely cause it to obstruct his targets in the room beyond. He would have the initiative but they would have cover. There was a yell from the room. He kicked with all his strength and the door flew off its hinges and sailed into the next room.

The door hit something solid and stopped a few meters in. Mathis ducked through the opening and sailed through the air to his left. A security officer with an assault weapon stood flat-footed in front of him. He squeezed the trigger and a set of darts zipped from the end of the gun, impacting the weak points of the armor around the guard's shoulder.

Blood spurted from the wounds as the guard reeled from the impact. A moment later Mathis collided with them at full speed; driving his feet down and elbow up and under the guard's face shield. The officer’s head lifted and Mathis drove the barrel of his gun under the guard’s chin and squeezed. A wet crunching sound reverberated in the helmet.

Mathis turned towards the middle of the room and saw three other targets, his combat implants cataloging them instantly. His primary target was unarmed, the tech from Volturn was knocked unconscious by the impact with the door, and another guard with a rifle stood a few meters from him. This one had time to react and was already leveling their weapon at him. He wasn’t close enough to a wall to launch himself directly at them. He did have some cover. He pulled the body of the dead guard to shield himself.

The rifles the guards had were designed for use inside spacefaring vessels, as was his pistol. They didn’t pack enough energy to break through a hull and depressurize a ship. That had the side effect of making pretty much everything effective cover. The other guard fired uselessly into the corpse as Mathis closed the distance between them.

He could feel the solid thuds of the slugs impacting the body as more blood expanded in a fine mist around him. He was very glad it was not his own. The guard, realizing the futility of their actions, dodged to the side to get a better shot. They were good, but they weren’t nearly as fast as Mathis.

He had already brought up his pistol and switched it back to the lethal setting when the guard realized their mistake. A hail of flechette rounds struck the guard across the chest and neck sparking against the ceramic plates. The armor absorbed much of the impact but several rounds found weaker spots in the fabric and tore through to the flesh beyond.

The guard spun and let a last burst of automatic fire tearing at the room’s padding and raking up Mathis’ left leg and arm. A fair exchange, he thought, as he finally got close enough to the guard to grapple them. The guard struggled with him for a small eternity by most standards. Mathis’ left arm was ruined and his leg was starting to go numb, but he was still far stronger and faster than the injured guard. Soon he had them subdued. He didn’t waste time and dispatched them with a quick shot through the neck.

The guards were dealt with so Mathis turned again towards his primary target. She was still in the middle of the room glowering at him. He raised his pistol and aimed at her leg. He would incapacitate her and prepare her for interrogation by the ARC. He fired a burst of flechettes.

He could see the darts sitting there mere centimeters from their target. He fired again and more darts slowed to a halt in mid air. The table and chairs his target was sitting at were also suspended; held in place by an inertial-confining electromagnetic field.

Mathis cursed and he heard her say, “Just *** shoot him!”

To his right the technician from Volturn was holding one of the guards’ rifles. “Yes ma’am.” The slugs passed mercifully through his brain.

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” - Richard Feynman, written on his blackboard at the time of death (1988)

Zosma passed the scanner over the former bartender's body. “He’s got loads of unregistered cybernetics; retinal cameras, endocrine boosters, a full suite of skin sensors in almost every electromagnetic range, and all very clandestine.”

“You mean had. He had those things,” said Ayala who was standing over the body with the gun still pointed at its chest.

“Yes, he’s fortunately very much in the past tense. The encryption is bad on the data vault in his skull, also fortunate you didn’t just blast it too,” said Zosma.

“What was he doing with all that tech?” Ayala asked, shouldering the rifle a little tighter.

“The same thing I do, but for different masters,” said Zosma.

Ayala nodded an affirmative, and took their eyes off of the body for the first time. “Who do we work for?”

“You work for me. That’s as much as you should know,” said Zosma dismissively. She eased slightly. “This man worked for anyone who would pay him, he had no masters save the one giving him credits. I have more loyalty than that, and let’s just leave it there.”

Ayala looked slightly confused. “He worked for the rebels on Umbra? The revolutionary council? Right?”

Zosma looked over Ayala, “What do you know about the ARC?”

“That’s… That’s what you said when you tracked me out…out to the wastes,” said Ayala clearly flustered.

“Relax, I’m not accusing you of being an operative. The ARC is a bogeyman held aloft by pirates who think they’re good and noble for standing up to the Diktat, or the Hegemony, or the whole Domain of Man. There’s always been an ARC and even if, in the slightest chance in hell, they did manage to overthrow the government, this system is so full of rebels that want to rebel nothing would really change.” Zosma looked down at her chiming Tri-Pad. “And that’s the data vault cracked. I’m going to forward this to that burner I gave you earlier. Do. Not. Lose. It.”

Ayala looked down at the unbranded holo-pad at her hip. “Yes, ma’am.”

 “Now how about we go have a chat with our dear captain friend.”Zosma stood up and grabbed Ayala’s shoulder. “Thank you.” She squeezed slightly and continued walking towards the door.

If she had the ability to she would have kicked the door of the command deck open. As it was a solid pressure door she settled for a dramatic opening and confident stride to the captain’s console. Heads turned around suddenly at the sounds of mag boots crossing the deck for the second time that shift, only this time most of them showed signs of terror.

“Captain. I am informing you of an assassin that has been neutralized on board your ship.” Zosma said with extreme confidence. The captain looked from Zosma to Ayala and back.

“Councilor, why are you carrying a rifle, and is that blood?” Asked the captain with a bewildered look on his face.

“Not a councilor, listen to her,” said Ayala gesturing at Zosma with the rifle.

“Right. That ship you’re tracking from Salus. Full of pirates. I suggest we run. Preferably to Cruor, though if you’ve got other suggestions I’ll hear them,” said Zosma moving up to the navigation display.

The ensign at the station looked up at her with awe. “We estimate intercept in 2 hours ma’am.” Said the ensign.

“If we turn and burn with everything how much does that widen the gap,” asked Zosma, engrossed in the screen.

“This ship’s not really built for that kind of travel, but we could sustain a burn for maybe an hour. It’d widen the gap to 4 hours. We’d still have enough reaction mass to slow down into the planet, but we’d be 6 hours out at time of intercept,” said the ensign.

Zosma was still staring at the screen. “Not good enough.” She turned to the captain. “Everyone needs to get off this ship. I can fit thirty people on my shuttle. I’m down two crew and I know there’s seventeen people on board right now. We’ll all fit. Let’s go.” Without even waiting for a reply she turned to leave the room. “You may want to scuttle the ship, those pirates are going to use her to smuggle criminals onto Cruor.” She nodded to Ayala on her way out.

Ayala said to the room, “We're cutting the docking line in 30 minutes. Anyone not on board is staying here.” They followed suit out of the command deck.

Back on her shuttle Zosma pulled up a much more detailed navigation display and planned an escape vector away from the Queen. Her pilot confirmed the flight plan and set to work preparing the ship for an emergency burn. In the minutes that followed all seventeen people still on board the Queen made the decision to board her vessel.

After the last crew member boarded Zosma stood by the airlock and prepared the ship to disconnect. She had undone two of the locking clamps when her pilot came running up the corridor. “Bad news ma’am, I ran the numbers again and it looks like even if we emergency burn away that other ship is too close and already up to speed. They’ll be able to catch us and force a combat volume. I don’t think we have the firepower to take out a fast destroyer, even a pirate one.”

Zosma thought for a moment. The vast horizon of Salus was just beginning to disappear as the two ships passed inexorably through the gas giant’s penumbra. A flash of lightning rolled a third of the way along the planet below. She pointed at the fissures of light snaking through the clouds.

“Yes, ma’am,” said the pilot.

“A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.” - Richard Feynman, "The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics," (1965)

Ayala shifted uncomfortable in the command chair. There were so many little things that could go wrong with their plan and they all played across their mind; what if the pirate vessel recognized there were two ships, what if the pirates fired early and hit them while they were still connected, what if the pirates were faster and more maneuverable than the pilot had predicted, what if the storms on Salus were more severe, what if their ship broke apart from the atmospheric stresses, what if they just died right there from all of the stress.

Zosma’s strong voice came over the suit coms, “Buckle up folks, we’re about to light the drive.” Ayala had been given command of monitoring engine output. Normally this task would be handled by the ship’s computer, but the ship’s computer didn’t know how to fly through a dense atmosphere of ammonia. Not that Ayala did either, but they did know how to feather a throttle on a repair sub to get back to the floating habs. It seemed like a close enough match.

A countdown clock showed the time remaining until the pirate vessel was within range to detect the two ships. The crew of Queen of the Gates had rigged their ship to burn hard and dirty towards a gravity-assist trajectory. It was a somewhat logical escape plan under normal circumstances. The pirate ship would have to alter course in order to keep up. The only problem was that the Queen had abysmal engines and the most they could do was barely a blip on a KL drive-equipped ship.

What it really did was bring their intercept point very close to Salus. They would separate from the Queen and use her bulk as a shield until they could force their way into the upper clouds of the gas planet. The captain had said he had done this maneuver countless times and the trick was to skim across the different gas layers; plunge too deep and you burn up, aim too high and you would get buffeted apart by the convection currents. He had never done it on the night side though, with the inky blackness of the clouds only occasionally seen by the blue flashes of lighting edge-lighting them.

Then there were the electrical storms. The vast amounts of convecting gasses created spectacularly massive bolts of lightning. The captain had mentioned something about depolarizing the hull to protect against strikes and he set about with an industrial degaussing tool. More power to him if it kept the ship from being struck by gigajoules of energy.

The automated countdown went down into seconds and Ayala reflexively grabbed the edges of their chair. The burn would be initiated by the pilot but she would have thrust control shortly after they entered the atmosphere. Zosma’s voice counted down the last remaining seconds. A sudden jolt threw the ship aside as the docking port was sheared off with explosive bolts. The pilot leaned into and the ship raced away under a full emergency burn.

The shuttle was equipped with a low-power KL drive, but this close to the planet and the pirates it was useless. Ayala felt the ship roll to present the larger aspect to the roiling black clouds that rapidly approached. The exterior feeds showed spikes in temperature on every major hull section. They were in it now.

The pilot called out inbound intercept missiles loaded with EMP warheads and engine-seeking guidance. The missiles were not designed to fly though atmosphere and in the wake of the shuttle they spiraled off into the abyss of darkness below. The pirate ship had abandoned their prize and was attempting to reach them now. The distance callout was advancing at a worryingly low pace.

The element of surprise had worn off and the enemy was giving full chase, only they weren’t being slowed by friction with the atmosphere. At least not yet. The pilot gave engine control to Ayala and told them to watch the temperature on engine 2, it was already outside of the standard safety margins.

Ayala looked back and forth from the outside pressure gauges to the engine temperature screens. They were trying to keep the two stable and in the green bands recommended by the captain. It was delicate work and Ayala’s eyes began to water from the concentration. Zosma’s voice broke their revelry calling out that the pirate ship was now in the same soup they were in.

A bright red bolt of light sailed just over the windows in the cockpit. The pilot shouted curses at the pirates in reply. Ayala permitted herself to look up at the flight deck. The pilot shouted back down to them to get back to her job and they looked back just in time to see the pressure indicators rising far into the warning zones. The engine temperatures seemed to be falling in this zone, though, and the ship was handling much smoother. She called for a new bracketing based on their current pressure readings and the screens updated accordingly.

Both ship were now screaming through the black clouds maintaining the same relative distance. The captain of the Queen burst up from the lower decks and screamed something about the lightning. Zosma gave the order to climb and Ayala gave the engines full power. Strange, iridescent flames began to gather at the corners of the flight deck. The captain began to wail in a strange language in a tone that definitely sounded like final rites.

The shuttle burst out of the top-most cloud layer into the star-filled sky. From somewhere deep below the ship a lash of electricity exploded into a million filaments arcing and forking below in a chaotic dance. The hull mounted cameras found the pirate ship for a moment before it sank deep below the clouds. A bright white flash of a failing reactor core was the last evidence of its passing.

Ayala let out a long breath and returned engine control to the pilot. The shuttle limped back to rejoin the Queen of the Gates now out of fuel and drifting harmlessly above the clouds of Salus. It looked almost peaceful after the horrific events of the last day.

Ayala spun her chair around to face the captain and asked him, “How did you know the lightning was about to strike?”

The captain pointed to his leg and revealed a metal prosthetic. “When the charge builds up I can feel the tingles in my leg.”

Ayala stifled a laugh. “I’m glad you were here with us, Captain. We’d be crushed in the depths of Salus by now if you weren’t”

The captain smiled and called up to Zosma, “Hear that, sounds like you owe me a favor.”

Zosma’s cold voice boomed down from her command chair, “I saved your sorry ass from those pirates twice already.” Then in lighter tone. “But I’m willing to call it even… for now.”

The captain shrugged and disappeared back down to gather his crew.

A personal communication from Zosma appeared on Ayala’s screen. They tapped the icon and a map of Cruor popped up. On it where several highlighted zones. They heard Zosma’s voice on the suit comm, “Those are proprietary survey locations from a recent satellite flyover. They’re all yours to file.”

Ayala simply yelled “thank you!” back up to her command chair.

The captain and his crew negotiated a fair trade for just enough fuel to get them back to Volturn in exchange for providing Zosma with detailed information on their passengers and cargo. Their transfer took even less time than the evacuation and soon they were underway. Ayala wished after them, wondering if the life of an interplanetary hauler was a better job than a prospector on a constantly shifting world.

Zosma put that prospect out immediately when she told Ayala how much the average hauler made and following it up with how much each claim she had given them was worth. Several orders of magnitude were hard to argue with.

Upon reaching the private docks on Cruor Zosma said goodbye to Ayala and she headed off towards a meeting with a contact concerning a smuggled shipment of harvested organs that was recently confiscated by the port authority.

Ayala went to the rental office and was about to rent another survey skiff when the clerk recognized them.

“Don’t you already have an ongoing rental?” asked the clerk. “I could have sworn we were down one skiff…”

“I think you’re mistaken. I’ve never rented here before,” they said convincingly.

The clerk looked them over slightly skeptically, but sighed and said, “Fine, yours is in bay 28B. No insurance, bring it back without a scratch on it.”

Ayala smiled and walked briskly to the skiff. She stopped dead in her tracks when the familiar silhouette of the bartender walked out from behind the craft.

“God does not play dice” - Albert Einstein

Mathis smiled at the technician from Volturn. The scar on the back of his neck itched where the clinic had uploaded his saved personality into the data vault designed to be decrypted, uploaded, recovered, and reinstalled in a fresh body.

 “Hello, I think there’s some things we should chat about. Won’t you join me for a little afternoon drive?” The lithe man jumped into the craft with astonishing agility and motioned for the technician to join him.
[close]
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Network Pesci

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Re: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« Reply #7 on: June 09, 2023, 12:15:17 PM »

All right, next chapter proofread as promised.  You keep writing them and I will keep reading them.  I've been wanting to see one of those go off since I saw them mentioned in a blog post, it did not disappoint.
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dantrew

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Re: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« Reply #8 on: June 09, 2023, 06:58:00 PM »

I was working on this story when the .96 patch was released and we got some really evocative imagery and beautiful writing from the shrines quest. If you haven't visited all of the shrines for the Church I strongly suggest you do that first and then come back and read this over. I love, love, love all the world-building around the Luddic faithful and I'm excited to explore more of what nuances surround their Canon.

This story is set in Yma system and covers the close of the First AI War and the beginning of the second. It's titled Atrocity.
Content Warning: pretty PG, aside from the genocide



“They teach you what high-energy weapons do to the human body in the academy. There are courses on how to mitigate radiation exposure. Instructors give lessons on best practices for amputation and how to regrow or replace a limb with prosthetics. Every way to possibly heal the flesh after it has suffered an injury. But what of the soul?” - Church of Galactic Redemption Holo Sermon, First broadcast 10.21.93, Two days after the battle at Killa
Atrocity
The shuttle broke through the clouds on the night side of Hanan Pacha. It glided noiselessly across the sky; the only signs of it passing were the blinking navigation lights. Artificial stars that, for a moment, joined in the sea of others. One of those stars was Sol, the long lost home very few people on the planet knew. Other, brighter stars were those of the nearby systems in the Persean sector; the last vestiges of civilization for all anyone on the planet knew.

Lieutenant Morgan Mars preferred to keep command of the shuttle even if the automated landing and approach systems did a better job. They both followed the same set of transponders and stayed within the same corridors; it didn’t matter to anyone who or what flew the shuttle on its way down. He sent the activation code for the landing pad lights and a series of yellow and red highlights burst into existence several kilometers ahead.

The glistening pearl of Warawara was just starting to come over the horizon. Its pure white light cast soft shadows across the thousands of acres of carefully managed auto-culture. The food production on planet had been the economic saving grace for Hanan Pacha in the time since the collapse. Without regular supplies from the Domain many colonies had faltered and those that had survived formed a tenuous network across the vast expanse of space.

Hanan Pacha was one link in that chain. Its food exports went to babies born in the Persean League, academicians in the Tri-Tachyon Corporation, and soldiers in the Hegemony. Few things were as universally needed as food. Perhaps starship fuel was another but the First AI War had seen to it that even starships needed food for the people on board. The Yma system had seen its fair share of the fighting in that war.

The nearby moon, Killa, had been the host of a massive battle between an automated fleet and a mostly Luddic Church reaction force. Lieutenant Mars had been a lowly ensign in the Hegemony auxiliary during the start of the war. His job had been to man the target painters for the Harpoon guided missile system on the Hero of Eventide, a very hot-running Enforcer-class hull. His Lieutenant at the time had given them a rousing speech before the battle and morale was running high. The Luddic-Hegemony forces had won key battles in the previous year and the tide was looking to be in their favor.

The AI fleet was being chased from the system and his group—the Hegemony force—was hiding behind the moon waiting for the message to intercept. They would engage the AI ships and impose a battle to which the main Luddic fleet would join as reinforcements. It was a tactic that had proven successful dozens of times against the AI menace.

A hyper-wave signal gave them the orders to emerge at full-burn and when they crested the horizon of the moon they were met with an unexpected surprise. The AI fleet had turned to engage the main force. Unprepared for the direct engagement, the formations had been out of position and several capitals had already been destroyed.

The Hero and her sister ships made a hurried advance on the deteriorating battle. The AI warships turned to face this new threat and in doing so were able to be routed. They had won out, but at a terrible cost. Of the 40 combat ships fielded by the force only 15 limped away to the repair facilities at Chupi Orco’s siphoning station. Hundreds of crew members perished in the vicious fighting and thousands needed medical attention.

The Hero had taken a hard hit from a phase lance directly to the CIC just as it was initiating a hard maneuvering burn. Most of the command crew had been turned into a cloud of energized particles instantly. The uncontrollable ship had tumbled wildly until it collided with a large piece of debris. The impact crumpled the front half of the ship where Morgan was stationed. He had survived pinched between collapsed bulkheads, but the impact had crippled his legs.

Many of the injured had been sent to the main settlement on Hanan Pacha to rest and recuperate. A temporary dormitory was constructed to house the infirm by the local Church chapter and many others on the planet had aided in its mission. Ensign Morgan Mars had been presented with several medals and an honorary rank of Lieutenant by the Hegemony for his service, but he had not been reinstated.

The bones knit and the cuts turned to scars but he still had no use of his legs. The Luddic counselor on staff recommended moving to a zero-g facility where Morgan could live out the remainder of his life in an environment where his non-functioning legs would have less of an impact on his mobility. Frustrated with his lack of recovery he placed calls to every contact he could think of; someone on this planet had to have a connection to a cybernetic corporation.

A few months later his diligence paid off. One of his former shipmates had met an unlicensed doctor willing to perform implant surgeries for a modest fee. What was more appealing was that he had a full cargo ship loaded with various bits and bobs. They had simply fallen out of a shipping container mid-transit and the doctor had been incredibly fortunate enough to find them drifting through space. Morgan arranged a consultation for the next evening.

The doctor’s ship was a jungle of network cables and coolant lines. The whole ship dripped with ammonia compounds and it made Morgan’s mouth taste like old coins. The doctor emerged from behind a particularly thick snarl of cabling. “Welcome to my little home away from home,” he said, wringing his hands together excitedly. “Your compatriot informed me that you were interested in a little modification.”

“Yeah,” Morgan said, looking around subtly. “This isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

“This is all research in… a different field. I can perform the necessary procedures in the operating theater located towards the front of the ship,” said the doctor gesturing along a curiously curved corridor. Morgan cautiously eased his wheelchair forward, terrified that something else would drip on him. They crossed a compartment hatch fixed open by a pair of girthy coolant lines. The room beyond was stark white and clean; it looked like it had been grafted onto the ship behind them.

In the middle of the room was a robotic surgical bay. Its many arms were raised in a state of implied anticipation and at the end of each stainless tools gleamed in the too-bright light of the room. There was a small cabinet to the side of the bay with glyphs known only to the surgical system. The doctor approached the cabinet and slid open the top-most drawer. He withdrew a small cranial implant and cradled it gently in the palm of his hand. “This is the beginning. The first step in realizing your true potential,” said the doctor without taking his eyes off of the delicate bundle.

Morgan eyed the long golden threads coiled next to it before asking, “What does it do?”

“It is a neural link designed to directly interface with your existing neuron matrix converting the chemical and electrical signals into machine readable assembly code,” he paused, looking at Morgan again. “It takes signals from your brain and converts them into instructions for anything else you want to install. This is the one-way version, there is no feedback into your brain.”

“Why wouldn’t I want it to be able to talk back?” asked Morgan.

“You have no experience in controlling cybernetic implants, if we installed a complete piezo-nucleic interface there is a chance you would fry the ends off of your neurons rather immediately.” He frowned. “I don’t do them on new patients.”

Morgan nodded in agreement, “Let's start simple.” He thought for a moment, feeling a peculiar tickle at the base of his neck. “How long before we can restore function to my legs?”

The doctor knelt in front of Morgan and took out a small holo-scanning device. He made several sweeps over the extent of Morgan’s lower body before standing and letting out held breath. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

“But you told my…” Morgan started but was cut off by the doctor.

“Your friend did not have a complete nervous system diagram for you. It would be easier to grow you new legs than it would be to get these ones to function,” said the doctor looking disappointed.

“You can do that?” asked Morgan, surprised.

“No. I cannot. There were facilities in the Domain that reportedly could regenerate an entire body from a single cell, but we are not in the Domain.” The doctor said with a cold tone. He softened slightly, “I could try to grow you a new nerve pathway but it would result in more trouble than providing you with a decent-quality prosthetic.”

“That’s a big step from rubbing some gold-leaf on my head to cutting off both my legs,” said Morgan derisively.

“Your legs have no functioning nerve pathways. It is only a matter of time until the low gravity results in you developing a blood clot that causes your flesh to die and you shortly after,” said the doctor pointing at Morgan’s legs.

“Ok! I get it,” said Morgan. “I’ve got a little saved up that I was going to spend on a fast pleasure craft, so let’s go with something a little better than ‘decent-quality’ for my legs.”

The doctor directed him to the surgical bay and in a few moments a thin needle was administering an anesthetic and the cybernetic installation had begun. Over the course of the next few cycles the doctor added progressively more and more comprehensive cybernetics. As original parts failed on Morgan’s body new enhanced ones took their place: a spleen here, a digestive tract there.

As the cycles wound by the Church’s ties to the planet grew stronger and soon a majority of the population were walking in the Path of Ludd. Morgan had taken to wearing a jumpsuit at all times to hide how extensive the replacements had become. The rank and file of the Church would probably not bat an eye at a cybernetic enhancement or two, but even the most questioning of believers would have a tough time accepting the level Morgan had progressed through.

He now operated a trans-orbital shuttle company that brought Luddic pilgrims down from the station to the memorial of those lost in the AI war. It was a simple job, but it gave him something to do as he no longer really needed to buy food to eat. The landing pad grew in size and he called over the radio, “Kon traffic, this is shuttle ICC-1538 on final approach to landing pad Charlie-8.” The automated traffic controller approved his landing and within a few moments he had shut down the shuttle’s engines and was making his way to help his passengers disembark.

At the bottom of the loading ramp a short, elderly pilgrim took his had and said, “A pleasure flying with you Mr. Mars. Would you like to join our group in a prayer of gratitude?”

Morgan shook his head negative. “I’m sorry ma’am, but I’m not a member of the Church.”

The elderly pilgrim’s face appeared suddenly sad. “That is no concern of ours, but we understand. Not all who walk in the light of Ludd walk in his path. Thank you again Mr. Mars and may the blessings of the Creator be upon you.”

“And also with you,” said Morgan, giving the pilgrim’s hand a small squeeze before letting go. He would offer most of them a ride the following day back to the station. Some would choose to stay and work on the surface as a symbol of penance; others had been invited to the planet by elders in the Church and would go on to promote its teachings across the world.

Now on the cusp of yet another war the governors wanted to make sure Hanan Pacha remained neutral in the conflict. Rapidly propaganda was spun up on the planet. This war was not to be an existential threat to all human life, it was just the larger powers jockeying for position and influence. The people in Yma-Warawara were not to be involved in picking sides. The Church broadcast messages of peace and temperance and most people believed that they would never see fighting.

Three weeks into the war and they were wrong.

A weakened Hegemony battle group limped into the system broadcasting distress calls on every band. The station at Hanan Pacha refused their ships, instead directing them to the larger and more capable docks at Chupi Orco. The Hegemony commander grew irate at this refusal and threatened to destroy any ship in a berth one of his could occupy. In a moment of panic a ship on the station broadcast the Hegemony position and disposition on an encrypted Tri-Tachyon communication line.

Before the Hegemony ships ever made it to Hanan Pacha station to make good on their threats a Tri-Tachyon fast picket jumped into the system and intercepted them. The battle was one-sided and ended with the complete annihilation of the Hegemony forces. Morgan could see the particle beams flashing from the observation lounge on the station.

He knew that whatever the fight brought the Hegemony would never actually attack the station. It had just been a bit of strong-arming of the locals that had gotten out of hand. The war sucked for business and so he spent most of his days drinking synthetic brandy in the observation lounge. From there he could watch the massive tramp freighters make their climb out of atmosphere to begin their voyage to every corner of the sector peddling the crops and base organics produced on the planet below.

On that day there was no other traffic. Indeed there would be no more traffic for the next week. The Tri-Tachyon corp had staked a claim over the whole system and dared the Hegemony to try and take it. The fast picket had holed up in Chupi Orco where they could easily produce more fuel and perform repairs. Though neither station at Chupi Orco or Hanan Pacha were really equipped to service warships; they didn’t even have ship-scale weaponry.

Morgan, finally bored out of his mind, rounded up a shuttle-load of fresh food and set off to try and peddle some potatoes to the cooks on board the Tri-Tachyon ships. He broadcast his intentions and was met with an enthusiastic greeting. As it turned out the people on board the slick blue ships like starchy foods as much as those on the phoenix-orange ones.

Morgan also brought a couple of the better bottles of synthetic brandy to try and ingratiate himself with the command staff. That worked even better than the potatoes and soon he was part of the end-of-shift officers’ meeting. “You folks in blue sure know how to down a bottle,” said Morgan slurring most of his l’s though his stomach could stop processing the alcohol at any time he wanted.

“Damn straight,” said an officer with two stars pinned to his sleeve.

“What are those for?” asked Morgan pointing at the stars obtrusively.

The other officers grew eerily silent and the frivolity in the room died. A senior officer, likely the fleet commander, finally spoke up. “Those are white stars. They are awarded to deceased members of the corporation for heroic action. They are worn by those who survive because of that sacrifice. To wear one is an honor, to wear two was unprecedented before the start of this war.”

“I served on two ships that were lost,” said the officer with the stars. “One was a frigate shot apart by one of those filthy Luddic ships, the other was a cruiser disabled by a Hegemony ‘inspection’ team.”

Morgan felt his stomach churn in subdued rage. “You dishonor their sacrifice by disrespecting your enemy.”

An officer behind him said in a low tone, “Careful pal, that sounds an awful lot like you’re disrespecting the living.”

Morgan twisted to look at the red-faced junior officer. “If you forget the dead of your enemy you forget the costs of war. If your enemy is just a number then you can count it and be done, but there are no ways to quantify the human experience.”

“What do you know of war old man!” Shouted the junior officer.

Morgan pulled a tattered ribbon from his jumpsuit pocket and set it on the table. He met the officer’s gaze and left the room to walk back to his shuttle. A small commotion was occurring on the station. Crews were running back to ships and warning klaxons periodically started and stopped. By the time he had returned to the cargo gantry a number of the Tri-Tachyon ships were launching, umbilicals still attached.

The first blast made the whole station lurch sideways. If he hadn’t been wearing magnetic boots Morgan would have been thrown into one of the empty docking bays. He sprinted the last hundred meters to his shuttle and hit the emergency cycle on the loading ramp. The station was still under pressure but he wanted to get to a pressure suit as soon as possible.

For the next few minutes it felt like someone had picked up the station and was shaking it. The docking controller wouldn’t respond to his repeated requests to depart. Morgan nearly fired up the engines and forced his way out when a section of the station collapsed beside his shuttle. Bits of superheated metal splashed across the shuttle’s hull as another high-speed projectile blew through more of the superstructure.

He didn’t wait for the next one. The shuttle had relatively small engines for a surface launch-capable craft but they had enough power to shear what was left of the docking restraints. As the shuttle cleared the docking bay Morgan could now see what was going on.

As many as four dozen Hegemony ships had set up a kill box and were firing constantly through the Tri-Tachyon forces pinned against the siphoning station. There was no concern for collateral damage as round after round removed more and more of the Tri-Tachyon ships and the station behind them. Morgan cut his engines hoping to look like a piece of debris and not attract any of the Hegemony wrath.

For the most part he was successful, but he got a first-hand look at the devastation that was wrought upon Chupi Orco. Long after the last of the corporate ships were destroyed the Hegemony beat the station with missile barrages and energy lances. They stopped short of completely destroying the station but from what Morgan could see through the cloud of debris and vented atmosphere there wasn’t much left.

Three thousand people had worked on Chupi Orco. The governors could not spin that number down. Hegemony loyalists blamed the Tri-Tachyon; Tri-Tachyon loyalists blamed the Hegemony. The Church continued to provide sermons on peace and reverence for the dead. Through it all an undercurrent of civil unrest was forming into something far worse, extremism.

Morgan did not tell the news stations that he had seen the attack first-hand. Several of the state-run branch outlets ran stories of who attacked the station and which side left with most or all of their fleet intact. A reporter for a local broadcasting company based on the station had checked the flight plan information of the day of the attack. He asked several pointed questions of the “Lieutenant Mars” but his perfunctory answers were not news-worthy. Morgan remained obscure and unknown.

Several more weeks of increased tension on the planet and a couple other battles in nearby systems fanned the flames of discontent brighter and hotter. Morgan didn’t even venture down to the planet surface for pilgrims anymore. “Too dangerous,” he would say to any looking to book passage. “Not worth the possible damage to my ship or your life,” and he would go back to his synthetic brandy.

A travel-weary set of pilgrims sat beleaguered in his usual spot by the view port. He went back to the bar and grabbed a stack of extra glasses and jar of water. Even if he couldn’t give them what they wanted he might as well offer them a drink. He set the glasses gently on the table and spoke softly to the group, “Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all,” said a younger pilgrim, her robes dusty and scorched in places.

“Before you ask, no I can’t take you to the surface,” Morgan said as he sat down. “Too dangerous…”

“Not worth the damage to your ship,” said the pilgrim, completing his usual denial. “We’re not looking to get to the surface.”

Morgan eyed the group suspiciously, “All right I’ll bite, where do you need to go?”

Another, older voice, thick with the sound of one too many times in a low pressure environment said quietly, “We are looking for a relic left on the moon here.”

“There’s nothing but dust and ghosts on Killa,” said Morgan looking down into his glass.

“We know you are familiar with the moon, Lieutenant Mars, that is why we sought you out,” said the older voice, its source obscured by a woven hood.

“There’s not a goddamn thing on that moon,” said Morgan standing up from the table.

Several soft hands grabbed at his own gloved ones and beckoned him to stay. “We do not wish to bring you any torment, Mr. Mars,” said the voice. Two wrinkled hands pulled the cowl back and revealed a horribly scarred face. “I, too, was at the battle of Killa. I know what is buried there and what still haunts the survivors to this day.”

“That was a long time ago, and I’ve dealt with my ghosts,” said Morgan, pulling his hands free.

“Death comes for us all, Mr. Mars,” said the voice, more of a gasp than actual words. “Will you aid one you once called a comrade in their final wish?”

Morgan stared at the face of the Luddic before him. Time and age had washed clean any traces of emotion. There was no subtle tell nor way to glean any information other than what was spoken. He sat back down and looked across the table at the myriad of young pilgrims accompanying this ancient believer on their final voyage. “I will take you to the moon,” he said and poured himself another drink.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” said the voice as the skeletal fingers returned the hood to hide once again.

Morgan was given a set of coordinates near the polar region of the moon on the fringes of an ancient lava sea. Craters dotted the unnatural smoothness of the basalt flows giving precious few navigational aids. The light from Warawara glinted off of something metallic on the surface and a pilgrim excitedly pointed towards it. The old voice, electronically magnified over the ship comms, whispered “that is it, that is our salvation.”

Morgan skillfully maneuvered the shuttle to ease onto the surface without stirring up to many dust clouds. The lack of an atmosphere meant that the dust had razor-sharp edges and points that could foul engines and pressure seals. The less dust he would have to contend with the better it would be for everyone involved.

“Everyone good, I’m going to crack the hatch,” he called over ship comms. His suit flashed a pressure warning and then indicators showed that the cargo hold was depressurized. “Watch your step, this is microgravity, not zero-g. You will fall and if you crack your suit I am not paying for it,” he said to the pilgrims as they lined up to exit the ship.

Morgan watched as the pilgrims departed his ship, and for a moment he contemplated going with them. “Let the bones turn to dust,” he thought. Minutes later an uncoded distress call blared over the comms. “What happened?!” Morgan called over the channel.

“It’s the elder, I think he’s dying,” said a young panicked voice over the comm.

Morgan grabbed the emergency kit from its storage locker and bounded out of the ship’s hold. “He’s probably having a cardiac emergency from the low gravity and lower oxygen supply than he’s used to. Keep him stable, I’m on my way,” he said over the channel hoping to reassure the young pilgrims.

He moved with agility over the mixed terrain following the footprints of the group. As he crested the rim of the crater the footprints fanned out but he could see on the far edge a cluster of pressure suits. “Almost there, what’s his status?” Morgan asked calmly. There was no reply. He double checked his frequencies and switched over to a wide broadcast. “What is the elder’s status?”

“Redeemed,” said a chilling voice from the suit comms. Two pilgrims burst out of the dust at Morgan’s feet. He tried to kick them away but they managed to grab him around the thigh. “I have found at last the salvation for this world and many more like it.” Said the voice. Morgan tried to punch one of the pilgrims but a sudden electric jolt coursed through his body and he went limp. He could see several suit-clad figures carrying a battered weapons crate from the remains of an old Luddic battleship.

“What are you doing?” asked Morgan, grunting with the effort.

One of the figures stopped and ambled slowly towards him. They stopped a few meters in front of Morgan’s prostrate body. A gloved hand pointed to the crate and then to the orb of Hanan Pacha. “Over 100 cycles ago I was tasked with the keys to this planet-killer. I was told that we would rain righteous fury upon those who despoil the Garden of Eden. My body was nearly destroyed by the wretched AI and now we fight again to ensure our future. For a century I have been fueled by the fires of hatred and now I have the chance to exact my revenge. I shall destroy this temple to Moloch! I shall bring down the chains of oppression that burden our souls. Only the true believers, those that follow the true Path, shall be saved in the end. And now, my former brother in arms who has been corrupted by sin. You shall watch as the Creator’s fury is wrought. Be still and save your strength, for you shall have eternal vigil in this place.” The suit turned and left over the ridge.

Sensation slowly began to return in blossoms of pain across Morgan’s body. The shock had damaged many of his cybernetics but he was beginning to be able to move his fingers and toes. A column of dust rose over the crater ridge and he knew his shuttle was gone and with it a weapon that had been buried for over a century.

His suit was still connected to the shuttle and it reported the flight plan dutifully. The shuttle was headed straight towards the equatorial settlements. Which one he could not say from here, but there were 5 million people on that planet that he knew.

It was a painful series of hours as each myomere woke up in his body and announced painfully that it had not enjoyed what had happened to it. He had seen to cleaning the dust off of his suit the best he could but there were still streaks of abraded material that would fail in enough time.

He had started a countdown timer and set his suit to broadcast an emergency flash code to destroy the shuttle at first contact but he had gotten no confirmation his message had been received. The countdown reached zero and he watched as painful minutes ticked by, hoping that the shuttle had been destroyed or suffered a critical malfunction.

Slowly like the opening of a flower in the morning a red spot bloomed on Hanan Pacha. The planet killer operated in two stages. He was now witnessing the first and most horrible. A self-sustaining wall of flame that would sweep the planet until all oxygen had been depleted from the atmosphere. Everything short of ferro-crete would be consumed in the conflagration. Every plant, every animal, every person not sheltered in a blast-proof bunker would be rendered into ash.

The flames were slow when viewed from millions of kilometers away, but Morgan knew that they were speeding across the surface far faster than any ship could flee. After an hour the spot had consumed most of the visible side of the planet and the second stage had begun.

The weapon fired a single delayed antimatter charge straight towards the middle of the planet. The single-shot phase projectile launcher mounted inside the weapon would fire the round anywhere from 500 to 1,000 kilometers into the planet. The round would spontaneously re-enter real space after slowing and the charge would detonate.

The blast would cause massive volcanic eruptions and trigger catastrophic tectonic events. The philosophy behind this part of the weapon was to hit anyone who escaped the firestorm by retreating underground. The planet would undoubtedly remain volcanically active for centuries turning the atmosphere into a toxic miasma. Even if people from the planet survived, the planet itself was destined to be a lifeless rock for the foreseeable future.

The planet killer was evenhanded in its destruction and it would not discriminate by faith or allegiance. It would leave nothing behind to remember its passing.

Morgan was able to receive wide-band broadcasts and news reports that the space station had been sabotaged and was also in a decaying orbit. He would occasionally catch snippets of transmissions as they bounced off of the remaining satellites; most were pleas for help on broad frequencies. So many shouted into the void that the void itself became the cries of the hopeless. 

In the days after the initial blast the first refugee ships started appearing on the moon. People that had been close enough to the space ports or who had somehow survived in underground shelters were making their way to Killa’s only settlement. Morgan tried to avoid the others on his place of exile. He did not have the heart to try to explain how a lone man was already on the moon in the first place.

He watched as the first of the raiding parties fed on the defenseless. They split open the habs like a nut and feasted on what was within. Soon the raiders would exhaust all of the easy targets and, in their hunger for the spoils, turn on each other. The moon quickly became a killing field once again. Burned out hulks and debris slowly rained across its surface.

From his vantage Morgan watched as a crippled auto-transport was chased across the sky by a trio of pirates nearly overhead. The pirates were firing inconsistently and likely as intimidation in an attempt to force the transport to hand over anything of value. The large transport flashed as a projectile from the pirates hit something sensitive and Morgan could feel the radiation prickle at his skin. The aft section had vanished in a ball of fusion fire but the front was descending rapidly.

Doing some quick estimation Morgan realized the bow would hit the surface within a few kilometers of his vigil. He stood and began hopping across the terrain in the low-gravity. The bow of the transport drifted near the surface for hundreds of meters with someone of at least moderate skill able to still control the stricken craft. When a piece finally caught on the lava fields the mangled structure crumpled and a plume of dust kicked up obscuring the final moments of the crash.

Morgan pressed on, his desire to see another human overriding his sense of guilt. The dust would take hours to completely settle and with no wind it would hang over the wreckage like a veil. The twisted forms of bulkheads and hulls had buried themselves deep into the surface of the moon. There would be no survivors.

There was a mostly intact access hatch that Morgan was able to force open. Inside the twisted corridor beyond were the remains of the cargo. Bodies lay jumbled and broken. Hundreds if not thousands of refugees had found the safety of the auto transport only to find their end on the surface of the moon.

A small data pad flickered by the doorway. On its screen was a prayer of repentance: None are lost who follow the light of the Creator/We find forgiveness for our sins through devotion/May the sweat on our brows purify our souls. Morgan collapsed in the doorway; the weight of everything he had witnessed seemed unbearable. The click of the comms channel connecting brought him back to the moment. He opened the channel and waited for someone else to speak.

For long minutes the connection light remained green and after he could take it no longer pressed the transmit button and said meekly into the suit mic, “Hello.” A moment later his own voice came back over the line, a muted “hello” distorted by signal processors. The ship’s communication system was malfunctioning, but that meant it was still receiving power and the buffer was intact. Morgan could salvage it and possibly hear the final transmissions of the dying ship. The only problem was he had no idea where it would be in the snarled remains.

He worked out a crude triangulation system using the delay between his mic clicks and the return signal. In under an hour he had isolated the comms system to a half-melted part of the hull. Among the debris he was able to find a cutting torch and slowly he peeled back the layers of material until the bundle of wiring for the comms system came into view.

He patched in a hard line to his suit and looked through what remained. A very compressed voice began to speak to him from the past. It was difficult to understand and much of the message was disjointed, but he was able to discover that this ship had been the final life raft for a Luddic settlement. Many of the people on the ship were ones that had contracted for his services. Pilgrims that had found a new home on Hanan Pacha.

Morgan disconnected the power supplies and packed the repeaters away in a tool box. As he clambered out of the hull he contemplated what brought the Luddics here. The simple agrarian lifestyle that the planet offered was certainly a factor, but many of the pilgrims had waited to stop at the monument to the AI war and pay their respects.

The disc of Hanan Pacha was setting on the horizon; the fires of intense volcanism visible from even this far away. Morgan could do nothing for the dead of that world. There was a number he could imagine—a cost to his actions—but he could not contemplate the vastness of humanity that had been erased by a single act. He would remember them, and in doing so dedicate his life to their memory and their shared existence.

Lieutenant Morgan Mars opened the identification file on his suit. He erased the contents and knelt on the surface of the moon. He placed one of the repeaters down and hooked it to a spare cutting torch power cell. He opened the connection and keyed his mic. His mouth felt dry and his throat ached from disuse. When he spoke the words began to fill his spirit, “Come only in peace. Let rest the dead. We pray now in the words revealed to Ludd...
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dantrew

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Re: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« Reply #9 on: August 02, 2023, 06:30:09 PM »

WELCOME TO TRI-NET
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Opening Log File Specialist Jupiter Graves...

Entry Date 4.4.60

My supervisor suggested I start a personal log. He said it would ease the stress of transferring to a new assignment within the corporation. I honestly really liked my job rigging-up old terraforming equipment that salvagers would bring back from expeditions to the lost colonies. I never got to experience the excitement of the glistening colony ships as they came through the gate network. We only had a handful of holo vids in the corporate archive and I’ve studied a ton of the drone ship debris. I know what they looked like, and what each of them did. But the gates have been silent for 60 years and I only know the stories I’ve heard from my parents.

My parents were corporate researchers for Tri-Tachyon brought to the sector as part of the last wave of colonists through the gate. The corporate liaison advised them to have several children to help stabilize the population after the gate network collapse. They handed me and my 4 siblings over to the development creche as soon as I was born. Three of my siblings were deemed exceptional and their genome was sequenced for the artificial womb programs. In a way 1 in every 4,000 people in the corporation are my siblings. Their DNA is randomly mixed with other candidates so it’s not like every one is an exact clone, but my family’s nose must be linked to a particularly favorable marker because I see it everywhere.

My parents’ longevity implants are all sponsored and by their estimation they should be able to live for another 60 cycles without any need for assistance. We have occasional chats. Most of the time it’s very research focused. They have shifted over to a huge corporation-wide initiative that is under a very high security clearance. We can’t even mention it in encrypted communications anymore. Whatever it is seems like a big deal and it’s taking most of higher-end research jobs and almost all the recovered drone components.

I’ve heard rumblings about project “Omega” from other sources and I think that’s what my parents are working on. I want to continue my work on the terraforming programs we’ve been able to salvage from the old Domain tech. If we could restart the work on the borderline planets we might be able to create more habitable worlds in the sector in a few decades. The infrastructure was already put in place dozens of cycles ago, so it’s just a matter of getting the ball rolling again.

I was super excited when I managed to persuade a salvager group to sell me the broken components to a stellar mirror control module. There was a very primitive artificial intelligence inside that, while too corrupted for any direct applications, gave me a clue to the location of several terraforming seed ships near the core worlds. I was able to sell the information to the same salvagers in exchange for a sizable berth and getting first look at the salvage.

The voyage to the system took about 2 months, but during that time I was able to perfect some of the protocols for interfacing with the terraforming AIs. The salvagers gave me a berth on their flagship, an old Apogee-class ship called Einstein’s Folly. It was the perfect vessel for a researcher to be stuck on for many weeks. I spent countless hours looking through the raw sensor data as it came in directly from the powerful arrays all over the ship.

The first glimpses I caught of our destination system were high-energy spikes from the massive blue giant star. The star must have been in the process of switching to fusing a heavier element in its core because it would occasionally let off massive flares detectable from light-years away. These solar-belches from the star’s aging digestion made the system uninhabitable for any long-duration colony and might even be indicative of an impending supernova in the next few million years.

What was more impressive was that even from so far away we could make out the distinctive hyperspace ripple of a massive object other than the star in the system. As we got closer the gas giant became even more prominent and we transitioned back into real space using its mass-stabilized jump point. It was a mighty sight with rust-colored bands of gasses swirling in thousand-kilometer-long storms. Strung around its equator were hundreds of small moons and standing apart from them were 4 “shepherd” moons of a much larger size. They corralled the smaller moons into neat resonance orbits and overall made the network of bodies a stable arrangement without any interference orbits.

Two of the larger moons orbited close enough to the gas giant to be protected by its incredibly strong magnetic field. The other two had been stripped of any atmosphere by the high energy particles streaming from the star. Both inner moons were large enough to produce a comfortable gravity on the surface and enough atmospheric pressure to forgo the use of pressure suits. It was no surprise the survey probes had marked these moons as candidates for terraforming. However the strong magnetic field and constant radiation from the gas giant would mean any settlements would need massive shields to be viable. It was those same factors the would doom the terraforming ship. A guidance error or other malfunction from the constant exposure would cascade into larger and larger problems.

After several days of scans and sending out ground teams we were finally able to locate the crashed terraforming ship. Nestled into a section of rolling hills on one of the habitable moons, the atmosphere processors were actively trying to create a habitable region. The atmosphere was already rich in nitrogen and water, but lacked any way to generate oxygen or carbon molecules. The processors were spewing out complex molecules that would act as catalysts to start the creation of the necessary gas compositions. To their credit there was a small bubble of breathable air around the crash site. Breathing it though would leave a strange metallic taste in your mouth so we opted to keep the rebreathers on for the duration of the salvage expedition.

Most of the fabricators and gas processors were intact, but the control circuit and AI pod were badly damaged. I packed up as much of the sensitive equipment as I could into the salvage rigs and left the hard demolition to the salvage team. They stripped components off of the fractured hull in record time. When the last shuttle lifted off only a small scar remained on the surface where the ship had skidded along the hills. The crew wanted to poke around the system for a few more weeks to make sure there wasn’t anything else of value drifting around. I wasn’t invested in the continued search and began working on the salvage. Most days were spent combing through the equipment looking for ways to replicate the technology with the limited resources in the colonies.

I isolated several key production systems and was able to use parts of damaged nano forges to produce the catalytic molecules. There was no shortage of damaged equipment in the corporation stock piles so I sent my preliminary findings back to my research supervisors. The FTL probe would get back to the core worlds months before the salvage team was scheduled to return. I had hoped in that time my superiors would be able to get production prototypes up and running and I would return to oversee their installation.

Instead I’m returning to a new posting somewhere on the edge of colonized space. I’ll be briefed on the new assignment upon my arrival to Daedaleon. It is a Diamond-Level posting so the pay should be fantastic, but the accommodations are extremely limited. The Church of Galactic Redemption has set up a couple operations on the other planets in the system, but it should be good cover for the research we intend to perform there. The mostly agrarian population would be receptive to the proposed increase in crop yields the terraforming tech can bring. I’m due at the transfer docks in a few hours so I better wrap this up and get some rest.
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Opening Log File Specialist Jupiter Graves...

Entry Date 17.6.60

The facilities here are amazing! I’ve never had this much access to Domain tech. Some of it looks like it hasn’t even been deployed before. I’ve completely rewritten my code for the catalyst production using the original Domain production schematics. It looks like the equipment falls back to a less-efficient method when under stress. It’s less intensive on the production units but it uses way more resources and in-situ regolith to manufacture the required components.

I’ve also managed to work out a replication process that can be automatically engaged in the nano fabs if they degrade beyond a certain production percentage. It’s in trial stages now, but I think we can do a sample test in module C this month. If all goes well we’ve got a clandestine tanker ready to disperse some of the product on the nearby colony. If we see improved growing conditions in the test area we can begin rapid fabrication for whole-colony application.

I’ve made unsanctioned contact with a fellow from The Church who was very interested in the work we were doing. He said to tell him when the trials were being prepared so he could make sure we had an appropriate target. I think everyone will be grateful for the food production increase. There have been a lot of rumors about food rationing going back into effect. A couple of the more aggressive sects have threatened action if they do. I hope that any violence can be avoided. There’s no way to make some of this equipment anymore so we are all looking at a dwindling future if we don’t come up with ways to stabilize what we already have.
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Opening Log File Specialist Jupiter Graves...

Entry Date 30.10.60

We’ve done it! I have the nano fabs producing entirely new fabricators when a degradation limit is reached. There are diminishing returns, but we’ve been able to keep the catalyst production at a high level for 60% longer than the default methods would allow.
I’ve tailored a specific strain of the nano fabs to focus on soil enrichment and we’ve loaded a sample on the ship for immediate live trials. My contact informed me of a target near one of the settlements on Tartessus that would work perfectly. It’s a small farming outpost that is on the border of the original terraforming expedition. The soil there is poor, but there’s plenty of organic compounds to allow the fabricators to do their work.

My contact has told me the Luddics don’t really believe in technology so they will never notice the dispersal or have any way of discovering it aside from the increased yields. This is so exciting bringing this tech back from the brink and being able to see it work to directly improve people’s livelihood.

I couldn’t tell the dispersal team how I knew where to test exactly. I made something up about organic compounds detectable in the air and the infrared survey of the planet. Which would have been a reasonable way of going about it if I didn’t have an inside man. One of the techs for the dispersal team made an offhand comment about the real program and when he was going to get a chance to test it on the Luddics.

Perhaps he was referring to the atmosphere models. None of the planets in this system would really benefit from the catalyst process because they’re already inhabited. That did get me thinking though about direct molecular fabrication. It would be less efficient than dispersing the catalysts into the air to create the molecules everywhere, but we could make large enough processing arrays that change could be made in close proximity to settled areas.

I’ll have to double-check my numbers but my intuition says it’s possible. If that were the case we could make many of the marginally habitable planets in the sector much more suitable for humans. It would take more investment but the technology is widely available onboard the ships. I’ll make a note in the research priorities to look into it after we get data from the current trial.
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Opening Log File Specialist Jupiter Graves...

Entry Date 15.12.60

The test was a trap. We saw the feeds live from the dispersal ship as they were intercepted just before entering the atmosphere. Two fast-moving shuttles carrying mining equipment and painted in a light green livery none of us were familiar with appeared from over the horizon. They were dangerously close to the entry path for the ship so the captain tried to warn them off. Instead of replying they launched a salvo of mining charges at the ship and it broke up immediately. Everything on board would have been incinerated during descent.

A month of work completely destroyed and not to mention all the lives lost on the ship. It was an intense tragedy for everyone on the station. We all had friends on that ship. The chief research team is launching an inquiry into how the ship was positively identified as a target. I haven’t made contact with my “friend” yet. I’m afraid he may have been compromised by a terrorist cell and I worry about his safety. In the meantime I have been told that I am being transferred to a new department in the facility.
The terraforming project has been temporarily suspended and we’re to start adapting the tech to different applications. One of my research partners mentioned something about reversing the molecular fabricators. It must be to create P-wave energy generators that can use any material in the local volume to create power for the other fabricators. I’m told that’s the principle behind the gate network power systems. But we’ve been trying for 60 cycles to get the gates powered up again with no success. It would take something much more powerful than a few nano-scale replicators set to reverse to create the necessary power flow.

Not to mention the problem with creating the stable navigation bridge for ships to be able traverse the ring. I’ll focus on setting up the fabricators for the project. If nothing else we might be able to produce enough power to replace the aging cells on the power loaders in the docks. The workers there were especially angry at the destruction of the ship and they could use a morale boost.
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Opening Log File Specialist Jupiter Graves...

Entry Date 18.5.61

I’ve been so busy these last few months perfecting the P-wave energy manipulators that I hadn’t been keeping up with my log entries. I was still very dubious about the direct application of the tech so I did my due diligence. I’m almost ready to quit the corporation over it.

One of the other associates told me what they’re working on. It turns out this is some kind of colony-killing weapon. We’re designing a dispensable fabricator swarm that can be tailored to each colony to wipe out the specific industry for that target. The soil enrichment fabricators I had worked on had been switched out the last minute for ones that actually destroy the agricultural capability of an area.

I’m glad they destroyed that ship. I don’t want my work to go towards destroying what’s left of our worlds. If this gets into the wrong hands we could see the end of every industry in the entire sector. There would be no food, no fuel, we wouldn’t even be able to produce basic electronics.

I told all of this to my contact at The Church and he listened to me for hours and hours as I nearly cried with disdain for Tri-Tachyon. He agreed we needed to do something about the weapon and I think I’ve decided to join him as a Brother of Ludd on the greater path to salvation. It will cost me my research position, but my brother assured me that there was a place for me at The Church when this is over.

I gave him the specifications of our network and he was able to come up with a purge worm. All I have to do is upload it to a central research terminal and it will corrupt all of the data on the station and in the backups on the orbiting satellites. He said it was better than deleting the data because deleted data is recoverable with enough time, the corrupted data would confound anyone who tried to recover it for effectively forever.

I also figured out how to set all the nano fabs on the station remotely using a hyperwave transmitter. The process will burn out their command circuits so they can never be reprogrammed. I think the best setting is to put them into the P-wave generator mode. They will consume each other until they’re exhausted and all of the research capabilities on this station will turn into vast quantities of useless energy. I wasn’t sure of the best way to broadcast the command signal so I conferred with my brother.

The station’s hyperwave transmitters are locked down tightly and I don’t have a high enough clearance to access them. It would take several marines to breach the security detail there, but a ship near the station could do the same job. It would need to be fast and light ship to avoid detection by the station and be able to get close enough to break through the containment shields. My brother agreed with my assessment and assured me he could find a ship that could do this and simultaneously act as my escape. I uploaded the command protocol to my brother and he will make sure the ship’s captain knows how to broadcast the required signal.

After I install the worm I will broadcast a go signal. A small shuttle will blast the instructions on their hyperwave transmitter to the nano fabs and I am to perform an EVA at the right moment for them to pick me up in transit. It all seems like a perfectly planned operation, and I am truly glad I was able to confide in my brother all of my misgivings. He is truly an inspiration with how quickly he came up with a good strategy to end this threat to our civilization.

I have a regular shift near the main research terminals every 3 days. I will get a message from my brother when everything is arranged on their end and I will perform my designated tasks. Now all I must do is wait.
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Opening Log File Specialist Jupiter Graves...

Entry Date 27.5.61

I have received my activation message. I walk in the path of Ludd.
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Opening Log File Specialist Jupiter Graves...
!WARNING! Log File improperly truncated. Open Anyway: (Y/N)
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Opening Log File Specialist Jupiter Graves...

Entry Date 27.5.61 (2)

Py05yFNVlUnB9hxxIOLK9I1dmXT8OcgZVeXRvQdhUT3x4f5BMqYucUTkGQrjeoWE I am writing this through the dictation protocol on my EVA suit, hopefully there’s enough left of the station to receive this. I’ll set it to automatically rebroadcast until the suit batteries die. I’ll append all of my personal logs to this message.

I was set up by a terrorist cell to eliminate the Tri-Tachyon research base. My contact was part of a splinter organization called the “Luddic Path” and was never able to offer me a place in the church. He used me to find out the location of the base and to determine what we were researching here.

I uploaded the purge worm to the main data repository and immediately alarms started going off throughout the station. I thought it was because of the upload so I sprinted to the airlock on the upper decks. On my way there I ran into one of the lab techs who told me something horrible was happening to the nano fabricators.

She had been working on a batch when they suddenly started dissolving their container and another tech who had been standing nearby had been exposed to an aerosolized version. They had completely dissolved his clean suit and were chewing through chunks of his flesh. She had hit the emergency containment alarm and had gotten clear of the room immediately. The automated deactivation commands weren’t doing anything and every lab was reporting similar problems with their samples. Everyone was to head to an emergency shielded shelter until a containment team could sweep the station.

I gave her some technical reason for why I was heading away from the shelters and got to the airlocks just in time for the automated warning alarms to change to priority alert confirming the station was going to be abandoned. I got into the emergency EVA suit and hit the eject button on the airlock, but I forgot to purge the air from inside the chamber so I was blown out onto the planet.

I tried to signal for my pickup but there was no confirmation. All I was able to pick up was an automated broadcast of the steps along the path of Ludd. I was able to make it to the rendezvous point about 2 kilometers from the station and I continued to broadcast my pickup code and flashed my location beacon.

After a few painful minutes the suit’s tracker pinned an inbound ship. It was still moving at full cruising speed and wasn’t decelerating to match velocities with the planet. It was very clear they were planning on ramming the station. At their indicated velocity I had about 45 seconds until they would make contact with the surface. I ducked down behind a bluff to try and shield myself from the impact.

The ship snapped through the atmosphere and plowed into the station. There wasn’t enough time for the ship to be in the thin atmosphere for it to heat up or cause any sound. The ground dropped away from me before it came back up far too quickly. I was thrown dozens of meters into the air by the shockwave traveling through the ground and then the air blast sent me about 600 meters across the surface. If the atmosphere was any thicker on the planet I would most likely have been vaporized by the fireball.
I just woke up after being unconscious for an indeterminate amount of time. I think I broke both my arms and at least my right leg. There’s a sharp pain when I breathe. The suit is still showing a seal so I don’t think it’s as bad as me, but I’m not going anywhere. I have a green connection to whatever is left of the station or maybe one of the orbiting satellites. I am writing this through the dictation protocol on my EVA suit, hopefully there’s enough left of the station to receive this. I’ll set it to automatically rebroadcast fXxeN6R63JbPRps8CgUpXlfNErKC8WHhtnW5NM9vOT8Ex7C

End Log File.
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Network Pesci

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Re: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« Reply #10 on: August 02, 2023, 09:53:33 PM »

Glad to see you're still going with these!  You have my eyes, to paraphrase that famous dwarf.
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dantrew

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Re: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« Reply #11 on: August 13, 2023, 09:00:41 AM »



This is the first part of a slice-of-life story set during the first AI war in the Naraka System. I hit the character count with this one so it's a longer read.
Content Warning (for both parts):
PG action, claustrophobia



Taking Stock part 1
My family left the makeshift habitation domes on Nachiketa for the open expanses on Yama a half-century after the great collapse. I was born in those hardscrabble fields of dust and grain. Nothing truly grew well in the poor soil; like my grandfather, the grains were destined for a different world and did not take to the environment they found themselves in. Now the craters are starting to lose their sharp edges as the winds wear away at them like they do everything on the planet. Perhaps hundreds of cycles from now they will be faint memories of those that lived through the horrors of invasion.

“Amalia,” called a baritone voice roughed by years of dust. “Amalia, I need you to take your brother to the docks.”

The orange light from Naraka always felt warm on her coffee-colored skin. The breeze twisted over the ground and kicked up billows of dust. The orange light shaded to darker crimson through the haze and another closer shout made her jump. “Amalia Perez, where are you?”

She popped up out of the irrigation channel and replied, “I’m here, father.”

From out of the haze emerged a cloaked man. The edges of the hood were tattered and buffeted in the wind occluding the face of the dust mask. Somewhere behind all of that was a frown that could be felt in the words, “Amalia, it is nearly the end of dust season and I need to you be more careful. Your brother already developed the cough by your age and you will too if you don’t wear your mask.”

“Yes father,” She said, pulling the black silicone mask over her mouth. “Why are we going to the docks?”

“I convinced one of the food transports to take on Nayar as an apprentice,” he said, the frown in his voice losing its edge to sadness.

“I’m sure he’ll love working on the ships, he always enjoyed watching them take off,” said Amalia. “When does he leave?”

“We’re packing his things now, but the captain said they won’t be leaving until the winds settle down in the upper atmosphere.” The man gripped Amalia’s shoulder as the dust began to settle. He lowered his hood and the two of them walked back towards the low-set buildings that were the family homes. Their brutalist construction was the only thing that could stand the test of the long dust season. The curved roof lines were polished smooth by the wind; the only breaks in the monolithic structures were strictly for access. “You should take the cargo transport, its fuel cells are low and you can refill them at the docks.”

Amalia nodded and kicked a small stone. It skipped along the cracked soil, eventually falling into one of the larger holes. “When can I take an apprenticeship?”

Her father stopped and turned to face her. “We need you to help on the farm, you’re old enough to…”

“Most of the work is done by the auto-combine,” she cut him off. “I can’t just make grain for the rest of my life. Granddad was my age when he got on the Domain colony ship, you and mom left Nachiketa, I want to do something for my future.”

“This farm is the future Amalia, the entire sector needs the things we produce here.” He sighed and his shoulders fell, sullen, “But I can see that it may not be exactly what you want right now.” Her father pointed to the house. “Go help your brother pack and be ready to leave in a few hours. We will talk about it more when you get back.”

Over the following hours, Amalia helped her brother weed out the non-essential items from his room. The ship would have ample supplies for things like cleaning soaps and he would receive a uniform. She triaged his collection of ship models, placing an Eagle cruiser painted in XIV battle group livery and a highly-detailed Prometheus tanker back into his travel pack. Nayar cupped a delicate model of a Wolf-class frigate between his hands. He had painted it with the standard colors of the Hegemony and a golden phoenix glimmered behind the main command deck.

“I want you to have this one,” Nayar said, holding it out to Amalia. “Watch out for the sensor boom, the glue didn’t bond well there and it likes to fall off.”

Amalia took the model and examined the fine details where Nayar had painstakingly scratch-built modifications to the missile hardpoints and ornately decorated the beam weapon on the nose of the craft. “It’s beautiful. Did you give it a name?” She asked, looking back to her brother.

“No, proper ships earn their names. I only finished this one at the start of Dust and haven’t had time to give it one,” he said pointing to the blank space along the spine of the ship.

“I’ll send you a message when it gets one,” Amalia said cradling the special craft. Nayar nodded in agreement.

They loaded the pack into the back of the cargo hauler and strapped it to the decking. It was out of place on the large flatbed usually loaded to capacity with canisters of grain and root vegetables. The weight of the small travel sack felt more massive than the biggest bundle of wheat for what it represented.

It would take most of the remaining day to get to the docks located near the planet’s equator. Nayar made small talk pointing out the clouds on the horizon that signaled the start of the sprouting season. Amalia made cursory replies trying not to think about what the next season meant without her brother helping on the farm.

Slowly the silver towers of the spaceport rose over the horizon illuminated by their warning lights. The weary hulls of the trade ships stood next to the towers, still moored waiting for their final loads of goods and supplies. Nayar pointed to a blue ship at the outskirts of the cluster and Amalia steered the loader in its direction. The loading ramps were covered with a fine layer of melted glass beads from the heat of the landing engines melting the ever-present dust.

Nayar stepped out of the cargo transport and complimented his new home. “They must’ve recently repainted the ship, there’s barely any micro-meteor impacts.” The ship was freshly cleaned of dust and small clouds of escaping gasses formed around the fueling ports. The dock lights illuminated the hull in sharp cones and cast eerie shadows into the night.

Amalia stood next to her brother and gazed up past the nose of the ship. Far away the outline of the orbital station glowed faintly white against the night sky. It was washed in haze that gave it an ethereal quality. A dock worker yelled across the quay, “Are you the kid we’re expecting? Nayar Perez?”

Nayar looked startled at hearing his name and managed a reply, “Yes, that’s me.”

The worker looked him over sucking air through his teeth. “You’re a little late, the captain’s already started launch procedures.”

“But I thought we weren’t leaving for a few days?”

“Weather’s cleared up and the cap wants to get back to the trade convoy, they spotted an enemy invasion force near…” The dock worker suddenly got very quiet as if he just remembered something he was not supposed to do before stammering, “Not that there’s an invasion coming here, mind, just that there is one. Out there. Not here though.”

Both of the siblings looked at each other with concern. There were rumors of war but Yama was a backwater and news rarely reached the planet in a timely manner. At the behest of the dock worker, they shared their final goodbyes and hugged for several long moments. Tearfully Nayar boarded the ship and waved to his sister before ducking through the airlock. Minutes later an automated warning announced the lift-off of the transports and gave the minimum safe distance for everyone to retreat to.

Amalia quickly loaded a new fuel cell from the dock and began to drive off as the main engines of the fleet of ships began to warm up. Turbines whined as they spun up and massive jets of gas were directed into the flame tunnels. Amalia heard the automated warning again, but it was cut off by a different voice from a real person. “Attention, all ships are departing immediately please clear the launch facilities. Attention, all ships are departing.” Even through the suspension of her cargo transport, she could feel the deep roar of the orbital engine’s fire.

The world behind her disappeared in a massive swirl of steam and dust. The unmistakable crackle of rockets made her teeth rattle. She had never seen the entire dock depart at once before. One-by-one transports poked out of the cloud and ascended on vapor trails all arcing in coordinated maneuvers; each engine’s glow diffused through the expanding gas.

Amalia increased the speed of the cargo transport. She would waste some of the fuel cell, but she had to tell her family what the dock worker had said.

I was sixteen when the first bombs from the AI warships fell on Yama. In a terrible moment, the skies changed to be forever streaked by the scars of war. I can still feel the deep roar of the orbital defense batteries intercepting the missiles. Their mutual contrails joining in a momentary flash and lingering cloud of debris. That day the defenses held. The corporation and its automated servants underestimated the power of human spirit.

Amalia shifted in the hard chair. She hated driving the auto-combines from the central controller. She much preferred to be out in the fields even if that meant walking the kilometers back home. There was just something about the constant input delay and seeing the world through the combines’ video feeds that made her hate it. A knock at the command pod’s door startled her.

“Amalia, we need you to go to the docks and pick up some components for one of the downed planting units.” Her mother’s voice was soft and firm, perfectly used to giving out compliments and commands in the same sentence.

“Can it wait? I’m halfway through the north fields,” She pleaded. There was nothing between the family farm and the docks and in the early part of the sprouting season what passed for roads would be mostly mud. It would take her all day and she would hate it even more than staring at the endless rows of grain furrows. “Can’t one of the field techs do it?”

“No. They all have their hands full getting the sprouting maintenance done so we can get the seeds in the ground.” Her mother added, “While you’re there can you check to see if your brother has sent a message?”

Amalia rotated the controller’s chair and looked at her mother holding a small datapad and frowning at it. “Don’t you have a connection to the off-planet network?” she asked.

“No, I keep getting some error message about the Hegemony communications network.” Her mother looked up and smiled, “We really need those parts, Amalia.”

Amalia sighed excessively and took off the interface helmet. “Can I at least eat before I go? The food at the docks always tastes like the inside of a recycler.” A few slices of homemade bread and synthetic meat later and she was underway in the cargo transport towards the docks. Its large tires would help with the mud but the going was still slow.

Large fenders were added to the transport during the sprouting and growing seasons and they made the transport look like a sad flightless bird. They did their job though and most of the transport remained mud-free. This was especially appealing to Amalia as it was her responsibility to clean the transport at the end of the season.

The roads became deeply furrowed as she got within a few kilometers of the docks. There wasn’t usually this much traffic on the roads and it bogged down the transport on several occasions. Finally, after the ruts became deeper than she was tall she veered off of the main road and drove down an uncultivated plot of land. The areas around the spaceport were usually the first to be planted and the first to harvest, but this Sprouting there were none of the neat rows that usually filled the fields.

The launch towers were mostly empty which wasn’t unusual for the season when there were no crops to export. The docks closer to the manufacturing and refining plants were much busier but this spaceport was mostly used by farmers and so it too followed the seasonality of the planet. A lone Hegemony navy ship disgorged troops and equipment onto the docks. Striations of logistics crates and heavy weapons radiated from it.

The port authority refused to let Amalia enter the military operations area. Instead, a large local cargo skiff brought out the components her parents had ordered. Its standard loading clevis locked neatly with her cargo hauler’s frame and she barely needed to attach the secondary restraints. She asked the operator of the skiff if he had heard anything about the trade convoy that departed last season. He shook his head no and sped back towards the main terminal.

Back inside the driver’s compartment, she opened a comm channel to the port authority again. “Hello, this is Perez. I was wondering if you had any inbound messages for my family?”

A wall of static filled the speakers until a voice came over the line, “This is port comms. No inbound messages.” The reply was unusually formal, and almost immediately a different voice came through. “All civilian personnel are to leave the spaceport immediately.” Warning klaxons screamed and Amalia could see uniformed people running around the docks.

The ground split to the right of her transport. Massive armored doors groaned open on dust-filled bearings. A two-meter wide barrel encased in the ornate filigree of heat management systems and electromagnets began to rise out of the doorway. The air at the end of the barrel shimmered as waste heat was pumped out of the rapidly warming superconductors.

The barrel swiveled with an unnatural smoothness, pointing at some unseen target far away in orbit. A tingling sensation swept over Amalia’s body and she felt her cargo transport start to slide across the ground. Filaments of dust aligned along magnetic field lines, suspended mid-air, and a split second later the world ended.

The blue-white afterglow of the railgun’s round passing through the atmosphere blinded Amalia and the crack of the shockwave nearly toppled her transport. She grabbed the control yoke and urged the transport away from the cycling cannon. Her ears rang and she felt more than heard other railguns sighting onto targets and firing.

Fire-tipped columns of smoke rose out of the ground and arced toward their programmed targets as ground-based missile systems’ rippling fire shook the ground. The sky was pocked with lingering clouds where the missiles had intercepted a threat. Debris caught the light in odd ways as it tumbled toward the surface. She desperately wanted to be far away from this place when the pieces began to rain down.

All around her hidden weapon emplacements revealed themselves through yawning hatches. Her cargo transport felt sluggish and unwieldy as she attempted to steer around the new obstacles. More than once, one of the large wheels of the vehicle would skirt dangerously close to the edge of a launch tube that, hours before, was part of the field.

The transport cleared the furthest of the primary fixed defenses concentrated within two kilometers of the spaceport. From Amalia’s position, she could make out several other clusters of launchers by the pillars of smoke and vapor left behind. They would form a defensive band around the equator of the planet and would make any planetary invasion foolhardy. At least she hoped that was the case, how long could the defenses fire before they overheated or ran out of ammunition?

The return trip was already going to be longer because of the added weight of the parts container anchored to the bed of the transport. To Amalia, it also felt much longer than any return trip ever had with the weight of the day’s events on Amalia’s mind.

She tried multiple times to ping the local comm net. The terminal in the transport gave the same cryptic message her mother’s had on the farm. The signal was strong, unusually so, but all the system would give her was a flat denial to access any kind of network. Most of the network was based on old weather satellites and their automated repeaters.

The Hegemony Navy had probably shut down the planetary network, or the battle had resulted in their destruction. That left the old point-to-point radios as the only way to communicate over long distances. The transport’s short-range comms system would only be useful within 20 kilometers in the best conditions. She would have to be nearly home before she would be able to tell her family about the attack she witnessed and the subsequent retaliation by the defenses.

A few hours into the drive she noticed several auto-combines idling in their fields. The combines were programmed to always be working so as to maintain the heavy demands that cultivating crops demanded on the planet. She attempted to patch into the local command network but found the main carrier frequencies scrambled and unusable. The realization of what the comms blackout would mean to the planet slowly dawned on her.

Her family farm was one of the few that had a local system for controlling the combines; most of the larger farms utilized the planetary network to coordinate their field operations. With the network down the commands to the combines stopped. She looked out across endless fields of crops that would need careful tending in the coming season, tending that would not come if the combines did not reactivate. Symptoms of the attack would be felt for cycles regardless of the outcome of the raging space battle.

The orange glow of Naraka turned a blood red as the star began to fall below the horizon. Amalia flipped on the lighting system and put as much extra power into the comms system as she could before the burnout warnings let her know she was about to void the warranty. Static filled every channel, occasionally punctuated by a high-energy burst that changed the pitch.

Finally, the comm system produced a tone letting her know she was in the range of the receiving tower on the farm. She placed a hurried call to her father, “This is Amalia in CT-1 calling Perez homestead.” There was no reply but the carrier tone was getting stronger and clearer. “This is Amalia in CT-1 calling Perez homestead, does anyone copy?” She waited agonizing minutes. “Father, this is Amalia, please respond.”

“Amalia, this is Perez homestead.” Her father’s voice sounded hollow and distant but it welled up in her chest as a growing warmth. “One of the neighbors told us there was an attack on the orbital station, we’re so glad to hear your voice. How far out are you?”

“I’m just about to the edge of the South Fields. I should be home in a few minutes.” She didn’t want to be alone in the cargo transport anymore so she recounted her story as the first glimpses of the lights along the family home came into view. She was still telling her father about the sensation of being so close to the railguns when she brought the transport to a stop and jumped into her family’s arms.

I watched as mobile artillery units moved across our family farm. Their tracks left deep furrows in their wake that pooled the sprouting season rain. Somewhere, near the spaceport, radar trackers identified targets and the launchers would stop and pivot in unison. Gouts of fire would rise from our fields and pass unfettered through the clouds. That day the defenses held. The corporation and its automated servants underestimated the ingenuity of human spirit.

Amalia’s father had reassured her that no one would be interested in a few dirty seeds and barely functional cultivating equipment. Without the planetary forecast systems, they were all left guessing as to when storms were due to sweep across the northern territories. The storms were a byproduct of the long-abandoned terraforming project.

The original weather manipulators on the orbital station had broken down dozens of cycles ago, and basic functions had been moved to the polar regions. There the regulators would spin up massive cyclones that would drive cold air across the planet. The cold air would condense all of the moisture that had evaporated throughout the dust season and it would fall back to the planet in torrents.

Each storm that passed would dump centimeters of rain in a few hours. In their wake, dense banks of fog would linger on the farm fields for entire days. Eventually, the heat from the star would burn away the fog and a few days later another storm would roll through and repeat the cycle.

The attack had changed this, like so many things, in unpredictable ways. The first storm to pass over the farm had been far more intense than any Amalia had ever remembered. After it abated she led a work team to repair the radio masts that had been blown down in the high winds. None of the buildings had suffered damage as they were built to withstand even the most ferocious of storms for hundreds of cycles. The radio masts were little more than metal sticks and it was no surprise to Amalia that they had collapsed.

A dense soup of water vapor saturated everything. It made Amalia’s jumpsuit stick to her body in uncomfortable ways and it played havoc on the myriad of sensitive electronics she was investigating. It mixed with the dust and smeared into orange streaks on every surface. Suspended magnetic particles fouled connections and generally made Amalia’s life terrible.

She hooked up each of the arrays to her testing kit and verified their functions before stripping them from the stricken masts. Broken ones would get recycled for parts and the functional ones would be marked with the inspection date and handed over to one of the other teams. They would reattach them to the new mast and hoist it into position in the coming days once the fog cleared.

The end of the third shift brought much-needed respite, but her father called her over to the main vehicle hangars. “Amalia, I just spoke with one of the workers in the East Fields. They spotted some large tracked vehicles moving up the equipment road.”

“They’re not farm equipment?” She asked.

“No. He didn’t know what they were, but they looked military.” Her father looked to the East and squinted into the fog as if his eyes could see through it to the mysterious vehicles beyond.

“Are they Hegemony?” Amalia asked, worried that the invasion was going to find them in her corner of the world.

“Almost definitely. They were far too large and unwieldy to be moved by a drop-ship.” Her father said, something in him slipped and he looked tired for the first time in Amalia’s memory. “I need you to go to your mother and start preparing to move to Tharus. We’ll be much safer in the city.”

Amalia had never been to Tharus or any of the seven cities on the planet. Her brother had gone with some of the workers several cycles ago. Their father did not like the city and had expressly forbid Amalia from joining the group.

They had traded a transport of grain and vegetables for new furniture and several bolts of cloth. Her brother had haggled with a local vendor and managed to procure a holo-sim experience of the Phoenix—a propaganda-laden heavy cruiser decked out in Hegemony regalia and demonstrating both a technology level and craftsmanship simply not available in the time after the collapse they lived in.

Amalia had been able to hack the firmware to remove the recruitment personality so they could jump straight into walking around the idealized decks of the cruiser. They had spent so much time immersed in the sim they knew the ship by heart. Her brother had attempted to scratch-build it but soon realized that many of the decks in the sim did not line up to their respective locations on the exterior model and indeed the whole ship was largely out of scale.

Now as she was packing things to leave to homestead she found the projector for the Phoenix in a crate of things her brother had left in his room. Spider webs of cracks covered the cheap plastic surface finish. The power indicator showed a minimal charge. Certainly not enough to wander the corridors for long, but enough that she could start the sim.

The familiar, highly compressed Hegemony Anthem played and a floating phoenix emblem spun. The hologram flickered as the aging projector lamps struggled to maintain the proper brightness. There was a quiet hiss followed by a sharp pop as one of the lamps failed and the image shifted into a distorted blue-green-hue. Amalia turned the power off before more components failed. She wrapped the projector in an old shirt and tucked it back into her brother’s things.

There simply wasn’t going to be space for sentimental items like that on the cargo transport. Each member of the family farm would have a single personal container. It didn’t seem like a lot but there were twenty people living on the farm. They would be pushing the maximum weight on the cargo transport before they accounted for extra fuel cells, water, food, and other supplies.

It felt like she had filled her container far too quickly for what she had tried to pack. Most of her clothes were practical one-piece jumpsuits, but even just two of those took up a quarter of her available space. She removed some of the larger specialized tools and maintenance equipment; perhaps she could convince her father to pack a separate tools-only container just in case.

The piles surrounding the crate grew larger and she was having trouble deciding between bringing a universal datapad analyzer or an extra 2 pairs of socks. A muffled shout came from somewhere outside her house. Amalia rushed to the front door and cycled the dust locks.

When the outer doors slid open she saw one of the farm workers running towards the workshops. She was shouting for Amalia’s father and moments later it became obvious why.

Large objects in the post-rain fog never truly emerged. Their bulk was always partially obscured by a fine mist of water droplets; the first things to be seen are never really the things themselves but the shadows they cast. When Amalia saw the first dark swirls curl in the distance she knew something far larger than an auto-combine was moving up the farm lane.

The shadow grew in immensity; the darkness featuring away for meters. Great rivers of the mist were drawn towards the shadow and the outlines of massive cooling intakes glistened with condensation. It was eerily quiet for how large it was. Only the tracked drives made a low rumble as they flattened the ground.

Amalia’s father stepped out from beyond the side of the house and walked confidently toward the tracked shadow. He held a small datapad in his hand that Amalia could just barely see from her position. Her father suddenly turned as a group of foot soldiers in exo-suits appeared from the fog.

She couldn’t hear the conversation but the body language of her father was clear. He was as strong and confident as always and the soldiers didn’t seem to be threatened by him. Their weapons remained holstered at their hips. Her father pointed at the house and Amalia saw one of the soldiers look directly at her. They pointed and her father turned to look at her as well.

She tried to duck behind the lip of the doorway but knew she had been seen. The intercom on the dust lock turned green and her father’s voice came through the small speaker, “Amalia, come here.” She peeked out from the doorway and saw her father beckon her again.

When she was close enough to hear the conversation she overheard the soldiers talking about the weather. “…COMSEC protocols forbid us from reopening the planet network until the threat has passed, we’re just as in the dark about the storms as you.”

Her father nodded in agreement. “This is my daughter, Amalia. She was at the Maha docks during the first attack.”

“I saw the railguns fire from a few meters away,” she interrupted.

“You’re lucky, the minimum safe distance from one of those when they fire is 10 meters.” Said one of the soldiers, a symbol on the thigh of their suit marked them as a squad leader.

“I was in the cargo transport when it went off, probably the only reason I wasn’t turned to mush by the shockwave.” Amalia looked into the eyes of the squad leader and saw the corners of their eyes crinkle into a smile.

“Don’t try that with these ones,” they gestured over their shoulder the slowly creeping shadow. “They aren’t shielded and the EM fields will strip any ferrous objects from in or off of you within 20 meters.” A red light blinked at the edge of the soldier’s helmet and they seemed to be listening to something. “Time to go.” They gestured to the other soldiers. “I suggest you all get inside. It’s going to get very loud.”

Amalia’s father firmly grabbed her shoulder and led her back to the house. “We should’ve left for the city days ago. There are drop ships landing on the northern fields.” He looked down at Amalia’s surprised expression. “Not ours, the polar farms. They exploited a weakness in the planetary defense grid. Those soldiers are on their way to fill it.”

Amalia felt a familiar tingle on the back of her neck. “They’re charging up the guns?”

“Probably the drop ships trying to bring the forces south. It’d take weeks for them to go by land with all the mud and I don’t think they accounted for that when they landed so far north.” Her father’s pace hastened slightly as he looked over his shoulder at the shadow now receding into the fog.

They sat at the kitchen table with her mother and two of the farm workers. Her father brought up the camera footage of the front of the house. The cameras were augmented by a synthetic aperture radar that also displayed detected objects as blue outlines. It was useful in dust storms and heavy fog to keep track of people and equipment as they moved around the farm. Now it drew a dozen shifting outlines as it tried to make sense of the enormous mobile cannons and people in exo-suits moving in the fields.

The camera feed turned to static and there was a sharp crack that shook the house. Dishes on the counter rattled as another thunderous boom rolled throughout the home. Amalia lost count as more and more sounded and began to overlap. The camera feed returned momentarily between the blasts but all that it could see were the deep furrows the tracked vehicles left behind.

A new sound came from the ground. It was a staccato rhythm of pulses that felt like someone tapping their fingers. Amalia tasted something metallic in her mouth and a massive explosion ripped into the side of the house. She instinctively ducked under the table and covered her ears and shut her eyes. An intense wind roared around her and she could smell the acrid scent of ozone and burnt metal.

It felt like months passed before the noises began to subside. The deep bass of the defense guns was moving further and further away and now she recognized the sound of small arms fire produced by the foot soldiers as it too faded into the mist.

She opened her eyes and saw her mother and the two workers cowering with her under the table. She looked frantically for her father and eventually saw his outline standing just outside of the kitchen. He was edge-lit by a flickering orange glow and when she stood up to join him she saw why.

A giant wound had been opened in the front of the house. Shards of twisted blue metal were embedded in the walls and floor. Through the hole in the side of the house, she could see the burning remains of some kind of ship. It was rounded in an almost organic way, but the sheen of metal reflecting the fire surrounding it belied any natural element.

Her father put his hand up warning her not to go further. Amongst the wreckage was something moving. Its body jerked in unnatural rhythms and long spindly legs attempted to free themselves from their restraints. A mechanical wail echoed across the landscape that made all the hairs on Amalia stand on end. It was unmistakably the sound of a predator.

A blue-green beam of light pierced through the smoke and fog twisting the air as it passed. Amalia’s father pushed her back behind the wall and shielded her with his body. There was a blinding flash as the beam swept across the house. Amalia blinked spots from her eyes and saw the beam had melted the tips of some of the shards and scorched the surface of the walls.

Her father had disappeared in the disorienting light, and she called out to him to no reply. The whine of straining mechanical joints and motors grew louder followed by the scream of yielding metal. Amalia looked around the corner and to her horror the thing in the flames was standing up. Six legs extended up from a low-slung central mass. Two of the legs were badly mangled and protruded off at odd angles.

The mass in the middle swayed slightly before snapping rigidly in place. It rotated smoothly and an array of red and blue irises opened and closed. It stopped as a large central eye stared straight at Amalia. She wanted to run away but found her legs did not respond. A manipulator moved a carbon-scorched tube in her direction.

Heat waves roiled around the thing as it took a tentative step forward. A fast-clicking sound and electrical buzz came from the legs as they drew the central mass up and over the wreckage. One of the workers was standing by Amalia’s side now and she could feel him trembling.

“What is that thing?” He whispered. Before Amalia could reply the second worker attempted to run out of the kitchen and out the hole in the house. The large iris tracked his movements and before he could reach the edge of the foundation a bright white bolt shot out of the end of the tube in a flash of blue fire. The projectile moved with impossible speed and Amalia saw the body of the worker thrown back before she heard the crack of the round.

The iris swiveled back to look at the two people still huddled in the kitchen doorway. Amalia felt a tug at her waist and both she and the worker were pulled into the kitchen. The wall where they stood exploded in sparks as rounds chewed away at the ferro-crete. Her mother pointed to the opposite end of the room where a staircase led down into the cellar.

All three of them bolted for the doorway and made their way underground. The cellar had an exit at the back of the house they used to load fresh produce from the fields. Her mother was the first to the bulkhead and she felt the door with the back of her hand. “There’s no fire on the other side,” she said.

“Not exactly safe out there, though.” Said the worker, his hair plastered with sweat.

“That thing will find us in here sooner or later,” said Amalia. “We have to get them to cargo transport and get out of here.”

“Where’s your father?” asked Amalia’s mother. Amalia just shook her head and her mother’s expression turned dour. “The transport is the only fast way out of here. We head West away from the guns and that thing and get to Tharus.” Both Amalia and the worker nodded.

Amalia opened a control panel for the bulkhead and set it to manual override. Her mother and the worker pushed up and out and the heavy doors swung free. The doors crashed into their stops with a loud clang and the worker poked his head out of the loading access.

“All clear. Transport’s sitting at the far side of the workshop.” He stepped back into the loading corridor. “Do we all go at once or…?” He asked, looking at the two women in turn.

Amalia’s mother firmly said, “Altogether. When I say ‘go’ we sprint as fast as we can.”

Amalia and the worker nodded in agreement. And both turned to look at the fog lit by the late-afternoon light and fire. Everything glowed red-orange and the air stuck cloyingly to Amalia’s throat.

“Ready…” said Amalia’s mother as all three of them tensed. “GO!” Her mother was fast and was already a stride ahead of Amalia and the worker when they cleared the loading dock. She heard the clicking and whine of the predator somewhere behind them and she rejected the urge to turn to see the thing.

There was a sudden sensation of heat and a bang that nearly caused Amalia to lose her footing. And shouting. Her father’s voice was shouting something. She turned her head and saw her father standing at the edge of the workshop holding an enormous weapon.

The end of the gun flashed with bright red flames and the sound of heavy machine-gun fire filled Amalia’s head. She could hear the rounds pinging off of something far behind her. A fountain of dirt and dust erupted to her side and the worker disappeared behind it. More eruptions popped around her at random and she tumbled to the ground.

She rolled to her back and saw the predator looming over the edge of the house. Many of the irises were shattered and their mechanical louvers hung at odd angles, blown from their mounts. The machine was having difficulty steadying itself under the hail of rounds her father’s weapon produced. Its own weapon hung tenuously, swinging below its central mass on broken manipulators. Occasional flashes would erupt from it in an unaimed and futile attempt to end the assault.

A stream of fire came from somewhere over her shoulder and a rocket crashed into the side of the predator. This final attack finally disabled the thing and it crumpled in a waterfall of limbs along the side of the house. Firm hands reached under Amalia’s arms and hoisted her to standing. The worker took her by the arm and half-drug her to the cargo transport past her parents still aiming their weapons at the predator.

I ran when the first drop ships made it past the shattered hulks of the orbital cannons. Their metallic skin torn apart by the energy beams that split the air like lightning. The ships opened and released their torment upon the world. Legions of blue-and-black metal poured forth and crashed upon the city’s defenses. That day the defenses held. The corporation and its automated servants underestimated the tenacity of human spirit.

The wreckage of the downed dropship had torn holes in every building on the farm. If they had been any lesser structures most of the farm would have been leveled by the disaster. There were casualties; five workers had died from the initial impact of the debris, three workers had been killed by the AI spider-mech, and another six would succumb to wounds over the next few hours.

Everyone agreed that they should head to Tharus as soon as possible. The sounds of large guns had faded, but they had seen strange flashes of blue light that seemed to fill the whole sky. The long rolls of thunder that followed them and the lack of response by the guns were ominous.

The fog had always been a welcome thing at the end of Dust; now it seemed to press in on Amalia. She thought she saw the long legs of the predator materialize out of the swirling mists and reach out for her more than once.

They left their personal items behind and packed only the barest minimum to get them to the city. The transport would still be loaded down, but it would be able to traverse even the muddy fields with relative ease and, more importantly, speed.

The cargo transport was only designed to carry two people in the control cabin. Amalia was the best operator on the farm and her father’s arm was wounded in the fight to take down the predator so they shared the cabin. The workers that had survived the attack had jumped onto the back of the transport. Amalia’s mother had opted to go back with them and helped them set up a small fairing that directed some of the wind away.

Amalia piloted the survivors away from their family farm and as the last of the approach lights faded into the night she felt a part of her stay behind. Her father reached over and gently laid his hand on her shoulder. Amalia looked over at him and felt the tears begin to well up in her eyes. “We will rebuild and remember those we lost today,” he said, a gentle tone to his voice.

“I know, it’s just…” she tried to speak through the tears. “What if they attack again?”

“Then we will fight them,” said her father, the edge back in his voice. She felt the certainty in his conviction and a small amount of warmth crept back into her stomach.

The route to Thalus would take an entire day during the better seasons. With the mud bogging them down it would take nearly two. Every few hours they would stop to ease the weather from their bones and replenish their energy. Amalia’s father took shifts with his daughter driving the transport so that each of them would have time to sleep.

Part of the way through their second day they found an actual road. The paved surface made for much faster travel and soon they were passing the outskirts of the city. Low modular housing units were stacked neatly next to the road. In regular intervals there was an open space followed by a branch road; the dendritic housing units extended away from the core of the urban areas.

The fog was less dense here, the latent heat from all of the buildings and hardened surfaces raised the temperature just enough that the fog clung barely to the roofs of the buildings. At the very end of the road, they could see the original walls of the city. They were not the fortifications of a feudal empire but the remnants of a localized environment stabilizer.

In the days of the Domain, the city would have had a massive shield emanating from the wall. That shield would have kept the atmosphere inside the city at perfect living conditions while the rest of the planet was still undergoing the terraforming process. The shield had come down not because the planet had finished but because the people had made demands. Those who settled outside of the original boundary resented those who lived in the bubble; after a number of years outside Domain rule a revolution had seen the shield wall come down.

They were still several hours from the city when they reached the first checkpoint. Amalia’s father had been driving at the time and the guards asked many pointed questions. Eventually, the guards let them through after they verified everyone’s identities and confirmed the reports of the drop ships. A particularly aggressive officer informed them they would not be able to enter the city but they could camp with the other refugees along the eastern wall.

They stopped when the transport was out of sight of the checkpoint and discussed their options. Amalia’s mother wasn’t thrilled at the idea of sitting in a camp of refugees while a possible invasion was being planned. She asked each of the workers what they wanted to do and most wanted to take their chances on their own. A large group was hard to manage in a refugee camp and it would be easier for all of them to find work and a place to sleep if they went their own way.

Amalia’s father thanked each of them for their hard work and sacrifices. He gave each of them a share of the food and water and assured them he would bring them back on at the farm when this was over. That left the Perez family to themselves. Her father drove the transport off of the main road and parked it in a commercial area. Walking into the camp would bring less attention than arriving with the transport and the family could always come back to get it if they wanted to leave.

They loaded up tool packs with the remaining supplies and set off on foot towards the east wall. It was still a long walk to get there and when they arrived they found themselves among a sea of people. Most of the surrounding neighborhoods had left their homes and tried to gain access to the walled portions of the city.

High on the wall anti-aircraft weapons swept arcs across the sky and heavy military mechs braced against hard points. Soldiers in exo-suits walked regular patrols through the camp while some in plainclothes handed out supplies; blankets, water, and small food rations. Amalia’s father approached one of these guards on duty.

“Excuse me, sir, is there a place my family and I can set up a camp?” Her father asked.

The guard looked around, clearly confused why someone was talking to him specifically. “What do you mean? Just sit down somewhere.” He went back to handing out blankets.

Amalia’s father shrugged and they found a small alcove near a power transfer station. Amalia was about ready to unpack her sleeping pad when a man with a thick accent called out, “Who are you, you can’t sleep here.”

Her father approached the man like he would a frightened animal, “I’m sorry, we asked and we were told we could set up anywhere there was room.”

The man sneered, “Who told you that? I don’t recognize you from the district, what’s your address?”

Amalia’s mother broke in, “Sorry sir, we’re not from Thalus. We’re from a mid-lat farm…”

“Then get out of here. This area is for residents of District 2. We didn’t work our way there to have some dust-pusher move in and take our spot.” The man spat on the ground and stared angrily at Amalia’s parents. At the behest of the man they all packed up and her father gave the man a small amount of food as an apology. They wandered around the camp asking the current occupants if they could settle down there. They received unanimous rejections. After what felt like kilometers they found themselves near an access hatch for one of the ancient shield generators. The sea of people had thinned out significantly. There were no signs the guards made it out this far and many of the people they saw looked sallow and weary.

Amalia didn’t bother to roll out her sleeping pad; she just sat down and propped her shoulder against the cold metal of the shield wall. The weight of the day began to bear down on her shoulders and she felt herself drifting to sleep. She was vaguely aware of the blanket her mother spread over her before she began to dream.

In her dreams, she heard the rustling of a grain lizard. A native of the planet that gnawed at the base of grain stalks and could ruin entire plots if left unchecked. She picked up a stick and went to the sound. She spread apart the thick stalks and found a small lizard munching away. As she raised her stick to kill the lizard it suddenly exploded and thousands of robot spiders began pouring from the place where the lizard had been.

She jumped awake from the dream and noticed a set of sunken eyes staring at her. A young boy was rifling through her tool pack. At first, she thought it was still part of the dream until the boy jumped up and ran away with several water containers. Amalia woke her parents and they checked their supplies.

The boy had only stolen a couple of liters of water. Fortunately, he had not been aware that just next to the water was the condensing unit that would have given him practically unlimited water. Amalia’s father offered to stay up and keep watch and they could rotate throughout the night. Amalia tried to fall back asleep but the thought of the terrified look on the boy’s face made her think of her brother.

She sat up next to her father and looked out at the misty homes illuminated beyond. The city had shut off power only a few blocks away from the wall. The rows of houses seemed to gently fade into the night fog. She looked up at her father. His beard grew in rough patches across his face; he had been clean-shaven his entire life. A relic of living life on a crowded station, all body hair was kept short to prevent parasites and for ease of cleaning in microgravity. He had not changed his habits even though her mother had let her hair grow out into long dark waves.

“How long do you think we can stay here,” she asked her father.

“We have enough food for a week if we stretch it,” he said, not looking at her.

“Do you think we can really stay by the wall for a week?” she asked him more pointedly.

“No.” He let out a long breath. “If we can’t find a way into the city or a way to find work we might as well go home.” He finally looked down at her.

“And face whatever we find there?” Amalia said, finishing his thought.

In the morning her father packed a small satchel and set off walking back towards the main city entrance. The light of Naraka was fading by the time he came back. “Amalia, I have good news,” he said with his characteristic lack of enthusiasm.

“You found a way into the city?” Said Amalia practically buzzing with excitement.

“Yes, for you. I called in a favor and got you a job as a tech on the inside. It’s not a full job, they can’t pay you, but it’ll be like an apprenticeship.” He said very quickly and pointedly.

Amalia looked down to her mother who was smiling up at her. Confused, she asked, “What about you two?”

“We’ll be fine sweetheart,” said her mother soothingly. “We’ll have plenty of supplies and time to try and find our own way in.”

Amalia hugged her father and nearly began to cry. Her father told her she would have to go with him immediately as they could only hold a spot for a short time. All three of them walked to a small industrial port far away from even the most lost of refugees. There a man in welding goggles welcomed Amalia onto the shield wall maintenance crew. He had known her father from his station days working the repair docks. He had apparently owed her father a significant gambling debt that her father had never collected.

The man motioned for Amalia to enter a small skiff and she bid tearful goodbyes to her parents. As the skiff rose off the ground the man began going over the details of the wall and how it required nearly constant work. The shield generators were finicky and actually still worked at a very low level. They used just enough power to keep the dust out but did not create any visible atmospheric effects. It placated the people living in the district housing but kept the city dust free.

The man alighted the craft on a landing pad just inside the wall. A turret tracked them the whole way to the ground and only pivoted back when an armed guard in an exo-suit trained their own weapon on them. The man explained that the city was on a very tight lockdown, and there were rumors that most of the defenses on the planet had been bombed from orbit. Invasion was imminent and the city officials didn’t want agents sneaking into the city to cause chaos.

The man elbowed Amalia in the ribs at the last comment and laughed, but sobered when Amalia didn’t respond in kind. Amalia asked if he had fake papers for her so she wouldn’t be arrested. The man laughed again and said there were no police in the city. No one would ever be allowed in the city without proper clearance so there was no need to do any checks. He pointed at the skiff’s data screen. On it was the registration of the ship and the two passengers. Amalia’s name was clearly written and under that her position as a technician’s assistant.

She looked back up at the man and he shrugged. “’Nough money in the right place and everything is taken care of,” he said.

After a few days of following around the man—whose name was Will—and she had already completed every task he had in his backlog.

“Hey Will, I’ve got everything done on that list you gave me.” She said. “Can I go see my parents?”

“’Fraid not,” Will said, not looking up from the conduit access he was arm-deep in. “No non-essential travel outside of the walls.”

“What! Why?” Exclaimed Amalia.

“Guard cap’n told me a secret. Drop ship’s on its way. Whole place is about to become a war zone.” He said grunting as he tightened something deep inside the access.

“I have to go warn my parents!” she almost ran out of the room before a large man in a guard’s uniform stepped out from around the corner and blocked her way.

“That’s her, cap’n,” said Will, finally extricating himself. “She snuck in the other night. I gave her some jobs to do if that’s alright. Felt bad for the lass.”

The guard captain nodded and produced a set of arm restraints. “I’m sorry miss, but we have a strict policy against outsiders entering the city at the moment.”

“But I was supposed to be here, I had a job working for Will,” Amalia said looking back to the technician.

“Yes, the technician reported your entrance to the city and we approved a temporary work permit,” said the guard. “Unfortunately that permit has expired and we must ask you to leave.”

Amalia backed away from the guard and eyed every possible escape route. “Will you take me to my parents? They should still be outside the wall.”

“Of course, but we can go there the easy way or I can put these on you.” He said, holding the arm restraints prominently.

“Easy way.” Said Amalia, and she lowered her head.

“’Erribly sorry,” apologized Will. “I had no choice.” He shrugged and went back to his work.

The guard led Amalia to a main thoroughfare along the axis of the city. At the far end, she could see the massive metal gates flanked by armored vehicles. They separated the shining city from the dusty world beyond. There was surprisingly little traffic on the main road, and no one was milling around on the street. The city seemed deserted.

“Where is everyone?” Asked Amalia.

“We’re expecting trouble any day,” said the guard.

“Did you warn the refugees?” The guard simply pressed her forward. “You have to warn them!” She shouted at the guard and started running towards the gate. She heard a cry and a muffled expletive as the guard started chasing her down. Amalia got to the gate well ahead of the guard and squeezed her way past the checkpoint vehicles and beyond the wall.

The sea of people was still milling about completely unaware of the danger they were in. Before Amalia could shout she was tackled to the ground by a different guard. She cried out, “You have to tell these people. You have to let them know. You’ll get them all killed.” The world began to gray out as she felt the sharp sting of a stun stick hitting her ribs. The crowd was unmoved by the sight of another refugee subdued by the guards. They assumed, undoubtedly, that it was another runaway that tried to make it past the checkpoint.

A large guard appeared from behind the checkpoint and helped lift the unconscious body. They moved into the back of the armored troop carrier that formed part of the barricade. When they emerged again the large guard pointed out to the crowd beyond. Glazed eyes sunken with hunger and thirst leered back at him but pair-by-pair they turned away returning to their aimless wandering. The other guard’s posture slackened and he made several pleading gestures with his hands.

The large guard turned away and entered the troop carrier, sealing the hatch behind him. The other guard watched him go and made a call into his radio. Guards on patrol and those on humanitarian duties all ceased what they were doing and began walking back towards the checkpoint.

Far away and above them a portal irised open and a rounded cylinder slid free from its restraints. A compressed gas charge expelled the cylinder before a primary engine roared to life. In the supersaturated atmosphere, a cone of vapor condensed along the nose of the cylinder as it accelerated past the local speed of sound. The cylinder, on orders from its corporate masters, raced towards the ground below. It would skim a dozen meters above the surface at a speed usually reserved for deorbiting spacecraft.

When the cylinder was only a few hundred meters from the city wall it burst; its package of unstable fluorocarbons aerosolized and ballooned outward in a fine cloud. A second smaller pop ignited the fuel. The shockwave traveled even faster than the cylinder had and from a distance, the only sign of its passing was the eruption of the ever-present dust from every surface.

None of the many thousands of people milling about knew they were about to die. The fuel-air bomb crushed, burned, and then churned their remains with their ash and dust in the span of seconds.
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dantrew

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Re: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« Reply #12 on: August 13, 2023, 10:46:38 AM »


This is the second (and final) part of a slice-of-life story set during the first AI war in the Naraka System. Brace yourself for the thrilling conclusion to... Bum Bum... Taking Stock... Bum bum...

Content Warning (for both parts):
PG action, claustrophobia

Taking Stock part 2
I picked up my first weapon when the soldier commanded me to run. Its sleek polycarbonate shell hid a vicious claw that lashed out at the advancing forces. Its violence tore at my shoulder and staggered the monstrosity long enough for a rocket to remove it from existence. It was one of thousands that clawed and scraped their way across our world only to find their doom. That day the defenses held. The corporation and its automated servants underestimated the fortitude of human spirit.

This was new pain to Amalia. Her ribs stung where the stun stick had hit her but her head ached as if someone were squeezing it with a vice. She was vaguely aware of muffled sounds and a wet warmth around her cheek but all around her was a deep blackness that pressed in on every sense. She littered herself uneasily onto one arm and tried to blink the darkness from her eyes, but there was no light to be seen.

There was a source of heat somewhere behind her, but it did not produce any visible evidence. The air around her stuck to her and made each breath feel like an effort. There was a sweet metallic taste to it that reminded her of a faulty auto-combine. Amalia probed the darkness and her hands found nothing but empty air. She decided to crawl away from the source of the heat, slowly inching along the slick surface.

After what felt like kilometers her hands found something soft. As she explored the slow realization of a human form came to her. As she felt the familiar shape of the hand restraints she let out a small gasp. This was the body of the large guard who had tried to escort her out of the city.

It was still warm to the touch, but there were no signs of life. His corpse was wet with the same substance she had been crawling through but she was able to locate a pocket with a data pad. She raised the terminal and the Hegemony seal popped into existence. It filled the space with a warm orange glow though very quickly Amalia wished for the darkness. A grizzly scene was revealed at the edges of the lit area.

The guard’s body was unnaturally bent and crumpled; blood pooled around him from unseen wounds. The same blood covered Amalia and at once she realized what the sensation along her face had been. She retched but recovered as she refocused her mind.

Amalia had no idea where she was, but she knew she had to leave. Jump seats were arrayed along the ceiling and floor and tangles of equipment hung from ajar compartments. She held the data pad up to see if any of it was usable. Most of it seemed to be for emergency response: chemical fire suppression canisters, auto-medics, trauma kits, and several lockers containing riot gear.

She found the end of the chamber and recognized the shape of the rear hatch to the armored vehicle that had been at the end of the street. There was seemingly no power to the control panel but just below the hatch, she found the emergency releases. She twisted one and the pressure seals gasped as air rushed out of the chamber. With the retaining latches retracted she gave the whole thing a strong kick and the hatch fell out onto the street.

Blinding daylight dazzled her for a few moments before the overwhelming odor of burnt metal and ash made her cough violently. Amalia stepped through the open hatchway and onto a scorched street. The armored vehicle she had been in was several dozen meters back from the checkpoint. Rough gouges in the road surface traced the route the vehicle had tumbled back toward an apocalyptic scene. Thick clouds of smoke rose from masses of barely recognizable human remains; fire clung to the edges of the buildings and vehicles. Something in the air burned her throat and made her eyes water.

Amalia reached back into the transport and pulled a breathing mask from the riot gear storage. The filters did not completely remove the metallic taste to the air but she found she could take deep breaths without coughing. She picked her way through the tangled barricades and makeshift canopies. From somewhere far away she could make out the thrum of the transports as they took off to respond to the disaster in front of her. There would be no need to search for survivors amongst the refugees. An exo-suit-clad guard might have been able to survive whatever did this, but anyone outside of a sealed compartment would have had no chance.

The heat of the blast had burned off a large amount of the lingering fog over the edge of the housing district. Amalia could see the first few rows of houses leaning at odd angles; glass from their shattered windows glittered on the street below and their walls cracked and unstable. These structures were not built to the same standard as her family’s home, but even those old sturdy walls had sundered when the drop ship fell.

Amalia was about to turn back to the city when the first shimmer of movement on the edge of the fog caught her eye. An automated turret somewhere further along the wall saw it at the same time and a glowing stream of projectiles buzzed through the air. Sparks erupted from the ground and Amalia saw the familiar shape of an AI spider-mech momentarily revealed. It now occurred to her just how badly damaged the one on their farm had been. The general shape was the same, but where there had been the single manipulator there were now at least six, with each carrying its own weapon.

Another wall-mounted turret let out a gout of projectiles and this time Amalia could see the beast staggered by the hit. The cannon targeting systems had moved their aim points up and the projectiles hit the main body. More and more cannons were now starting to fire into the edge of the fog. The spiders were not alone however and a more human form was moving up below them. Enemy soldiers moved from cover to cover advancing up the roadways. Amalia decided to not be there when the forces arrived at what was left of the checkpoint.

She crossed back along the debris as the sounds of battle intensified behind her. A military hover transport gilded around a corner and shot down the street toward her. A set of twin autocannons flashed and projectiles whizzed a meter above her head. The craft spun and came to a stop behind the armored vehicle Amalia had crawled out from. The front of the transport opened and it settled onto a set of support struts. A dozen armored soldiers neatly ran out and assumed defensive positions on the street.

A golden phoenix was printed on each of their shoulders under an embossed bronze “XIV”. One of the soldiers stepped out from behind cover and planted the base to a massive recoilless rifle. The soldier sighted it on something behind Amalia and a moment later a fireball flashed behind the soldier and a projectile rushed to meet an enemy target. Amalia heard the explosion of the round and then another sound she recognized that filled her with terror.

The wail of a spider-mech dared Amalia to look over her shoulder. When she did she saw the looming presence of the thing mere meters behind her. It had fallen slightly to one side; part of its leg had been destroyed by the soldiers. She saw the unmistakable glow of the thing’s energy weapon followed by a lightning crack as it fired. Behind her metal screamed as it was superheated and rapidly cooled. The soldier and his weapon had been replaced by an expanding cloud and scorch marks. Amalia screamed and tried to run.

She made it several meters before a pair of strong arms grabbed her by the waist and hauled her behind a wall. The space where she had been was ripped apart by a hail of high-velocity rounds. Amalia screamed again. A set of gauntleted fingers dug into her shoulder and a commanding voice bellowed, “Are you hit?”

Still, mostly in shock, Amalia managed to stammer, “N…no…the blood’s not mine.”

“Good,” said the voice. “Now stay back or that thing will kill you.” The soldier the voice came from stood up and moved closer to the corner. She made a circling hand motion and a group of soldiers at the opposite side of the street moved in unison. One of them carried a similar-looking weapon to the now-vaporized soldier.

“You have to take out its arms,” yelled Amalia to the soldier.

The soldier turned to face her, “You fight these before?”

Amalia shook her head in affirmative, “Under the body, all its weapons are there.”

The soldier nodded their own affirmative and said something that Amalia could not hear. The others on the far side of the road changed their positions and attached something to the ends of their weapons. They rounded a corner simultaneously at different heights. The sounds of their weapons firing overlapped and Amalia could hear the groans of the creature as it reeled under the weight of the assault. The soldier in front of Amalia rounded her corner and her gun produced a loud thud as a heavy projectile launched from it. There was a tremor from the round hitting the target and the second one when the spider-mech toppled. Amalia heard cheers from the soldiers and she, too, shouted a war cry.

The soldier in front of Amalia turned back to her, “Who are you?”

“Amalia Perez, ma’am.”

“Well Amalia, Where’d you come from?” Asked the soldier.

Amalia didn’t respond for a beat, unsure if a truthful response would get her thrown back out of the city. These soldiers were clearly not from Tharus and they would hopefully not have the same compulsions as the guards. “I’m from a mid-lat farm, my family had to leave when one of those spiders attacked. We…killed it, but it got a bunch of our farmhands.”

“Impressive,” Said the soldier. “I’m Sergeant Lasalle, of the 182nd Marine Detachment. We’ve got a cruiser in orbit ready to rain hell on these soulless bastards. Just need to push them back from the city.”

Amalia’s surprise showed on her face. “We won the space battle?”

“For now,” Said Lasalle as she pointed up toward the sky. "Still a lot of fighting up there."

"A lot of fighting down here," said Amalia deadpan.

The lieutenant laughed, "Damn straight, and we better be getting back to it." She said something into her comms and the hover transport rose off the ground, its autocannon swinging into a firing position. It belched flame and shockwaves roiled dust on the street. Amalia ducked further behind the corner to shield herself from the heat of the autocannon and the loudness of the battle.

The alley she had been pulled into went for a few dozen meters before hooking around a side of the building she was huddled against. Amalia poked her head out and saw the marines engaged in a pitched battle; Lasalle had moved out to the middle of the street and was confidently firing at some unseen foe. The other end of the alley was a little dirty but relatively peaceful by comparison. As much as she admired the coordination and power the soldiers exhibited she didn't really want to hang out near the battle for much longer.

Amalia wound her way through the maze of interconnected alleyways looking for a familiar landmark. She had not been in the city long but she had come to know several of the neighborhoods near the shield wall. If she could find her way into one of the secondary access points she could slip through the wall and maybe find her parents on the other side.

The familiar power conduit access markings were painted above a moveable metal grate. Unfortunately, she didn't have her usual equipment; her cutting torch would make short work of the corrugated sheet. Tucked in a storefront she did find a recycling bin that she estimated was heavy enough to bash her way through. She hefted the bin above her head and brought it down and into one of the security bolts. The head of the bolt sheared off on her first attempt. After a few successive blows, the panel fell open with a rattling crash.

The corridor beyond was tighter than she expected and several newer cables had been routed through the passage constricting it further. She was determined to squeeze through if there was even the most remote chance of finding her parents again. Amalia took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She just barely fit through the first constriction but on the other side the cables slackened a bit and she was able to move quickly if a bit awkwardly.

After a few meters, the corridor began to rise at a sharp angle. Amalia steadied herself on the high-voltage cables hoping their insulation was still adequate after cycles of neglect. She climbed higher and higher until she was sure she was nearly level with the top of the wall. The corridor had steadily widened as several of the cables turned into their destinations or terminated in junction boxes. Amalia now stood balanced on a particularly thick data cable with her arms reaching up to hold onto the last pair of power cables.

She could see where the corridor leveled off and she inched her way up the transition. When her head rose above it she peered into the next chamber. In it sat one of the massive shield projectors for the wall. It hummed softly and the blue glow of Cherenkov radiation swirled around the top. Amalia stared at it unsure if it was safe to approach it while it was active. Will had never given her training on the actual shield projectors.

A control panel to the side of the chamber chimed and a series of yellow warnings flashed on its display. Amalia couldn't make them out from here, but she figured if there was a control panel it was perfectly fine to stand in the chamber. She hoisted herself over the edge of the corridor and rolled into the chamber. Her elbows came to rest in the second strangely warm fluid of the day. This time she knew what it was. Dielectric fluid soaked the floor and Amalia could see several large capacitor banks with obvious damage.

She stood up and walked over to the terminal fairly sure she knew what the fault was. The screen was in the process of auto-scrolling through the myriad of fault codes and alerts when Amalia cleared them and opened a login screen. Will hadn't bothered to give her a personal login and she doubted he ever changed his password. His credentials were accepted and the system welcomed "Technician William F. Sorrel" to an old DomainOS interface.

Amalia prodded the system's built-in keyboard trying to find a schematic of the local area. The terminal was woefully disconnected from any of the other systems in the shield wall and contained very few details on the chamber, projector, or even the terminal’s own functions. It followed the classic Domain principles of compartmentalized knowledge and infrastructure which was very good at keeping intruders—like Amalia—from accessing sensitive information.

Minutes ticked by and she was no closer to finding anything of use in the terminal. She closed the command interface and opened the stored maintenance logs. The last entry was nearly a cycle prior: a technician had reported a failure in this projector’s power feeds, and a subsequent repair order was filed but never completed. Interestingly and most likely a gross violation of standard protocols, the technician that filed the repair order included the security access codes for one of the exterior access panels. Amalia couldn’t be sure exactly which panel the codes were for, but if it was Will who filed them then it was going to be the closest to the projection chamber.

Amalia walked the perimeter of the chamber until she found a small alcove with a security pad. She typed the access codes and a small success chime followed by the sounds of relays releasing the door locks let her know she had found a way out.

She was higher on the wall than she had thought. The projector sat at the very top of an armored blister. Below her, she could see the scattered debris from the massive explosion she had been unconscious for. Large humanoid shapes moved in and around the debris—exo-suit-equipped soldiers jockeying for position. Every few moments one of the suits would flash as their arm-mounted weapons fired. The reports overlapped with their own echoes and became a muddled thunder.

A new sound startled Amalia. It was the high-pitched whine of a cargo skiff under heavy load as it tried to crest the shield wall. Amalia snuck around the access walkway and spotted the little craft carrying a fixed gun that would have looked more at home on a small cruiser. The skiff was close and she could make out the insignia on the pilot’s shoulder—the same XIV over a phoenix that had been on the marines’.

She stood and waved her arms over her head hoping to attract the attention of the skiff’s pilot. He was struggling to keep control of the overloaded craft and was focusing on the controls. Amalia jumped and made even larger motions with her hands. As her excitement began to fade into fatigue she slumped against the railing.

The skiff was gaining altitude meter-by-meter but at its current rate, it would collide with the top of the shield wall. The pilot was startled and even Amalia could see the flashing proximity alarm; he looked up and realized how close to the shield wall he was. In that moment he also noticed the slight girl watching him. He looked back down and fumbled with something far down on the controls. Soon a squelch tone blared out of the skiff’s loudspeaker. The pilot fumbled with another control and the squelch was replaced by the static of a live mic. Finally, a voice came from the skiff, "Do you require aid?"

Amalia wanted to ask the pilot the same question, but she pointed toward a large access dock a few meters below her. She made a landing motion with her hands, the pilot nodded. The ladder that led down to the platform was oddly dusty. Few things on this side of the shield wall ever accumulated enough dust to notice. It made the descent a little more tricky than Amalia had planned.

The pilot, too, was trying desperately to control his descent to the platform. The skiff hovered a few centimeters above the surface of the decking and the pilot was frantically adjusting the little craft's thrusters to keep it from toppling. Amalia walked over to the skiff, careful to shield her eyes and mouth from the swirling cloud of dust and ash. She reached out with one hand and pulled down with all her weight.

The skiff hit the ground with a ringing thud and the landing gear groaned under the excessive weight. Amalia shouted to the pilot, "You're on the ground now, you can turn off the thrusters." The pilot's eyes widened and he pushed the throttle closed. The whining of the engines slowed to a low growl and the pilot opened the hatch.

He didn't take off his helmet but Amalia could see the square jaw she had seen on many dock workers from Jangala. "Lasalle radioed a local girl was running around. I'm Ensign Hansen," The pilot said, extending his gloved hand. "The LT was impressed by you and told us to keep an eye out."

Amalia took the pilot’s hand and gave him a firm handshake. "I'm trying to get out to the districts," said Amalia with an air of authority she didn't know she had.

"I'd give you a ride but this thing's a little touchy. Probably shouldn't have put the whole heavy mortar on it." The pilot looked over the massive gun emplacement.

"You've got a class two skiff, it should be able to lift that, what's your VCS setting?" Amalia pushed past the pilot and checked the control console. "Oh, no wonder, you've got this thing on manual control." She flipped several switches on a small panel by the hatch. "There you go. This thing is designed to be remotely piloted with as much as a 2-second input delay." The pilot looked confused. "It's got a full-auto flight control system designed to take the flight duties off the pilot, all you really need to do is set the waypoints in the nav console or if you want to be a cowboy just point the nose by pushing the floor pedals and adjust the direction of travel with the yoke."

"Do you want to fly this?" asked Hansen. He pointed to the gun, "I can control that monster."

"Where are we going?" Asked Amalia.

"I was going to set this down on the top of the shield wall and fire off some close support,” said Hansen mock-firing the big gun. "But if you can actually fly this thing I've got a request to drop some shells on enemy movements to the East of the city."

Amalia tried to remember the layout of the district as they walked in. She might be able to make it to the cargo transport if they landed close enough. Her parents had kept hand-held radios that used the transport as a relay. If they were still alive she could use the transport to find them. "Deal." She said and without a pause hopped into the pilot seat. Hansen had barely made it onto the skiff when Amalia hot-started the engines and the skiff bucked into the air.

The pilot tapped on the rear viewport and pointed to a comms panel. He signaled a frequency and Amalia switched over to it. "This is a completely different ride," He said, his voice now vibrating the entire cockpit.

Amalia quickly turned the volume down, "What's the grid reference for setting this thing down?" Hansen gave her a long string of numbers and letters and Amalia plotted it on the skiff's navigation interface. As soon as the craft had cleared the rim of the shield wall Amalia pointed the nose down and they plummeted in a death-dive. She pulled the ship into a graceful turn and bled the vertical speed into horizontal, skimming meters above the debris on the streets. They passed over the remnants of a residential building and Amalia flinched when she came under her first enemy fire.

Red tracers flew out of the ruins. Their arcs closed like a web over her and she tried to pitch the skiff into a hard turn. The extra momentum of the gun made the craft unwieldy and she caught one of the landing struts on a shattered wall. The momentum that caused the crash also carried her through it. The skiff buffeted and she knew the strut was torn to shreds but they were still in the air. The impact had also damaged a thruster and she felt the skiff starting to lean.

The landing point was only a few hundred meters away and she had plenty of speed. Amalia feathered in more throttle to keep the craft stable. It took even more agility out of craft's capabilities but it would get her there. She knew the shape before her eyes had even fully realized what she saw.

A spider-mech's torso smoothly rose above a rubble pile. Its manipulators were busy lifting a heavy weapon when its attention snapped to the skiff. In an impossibly fast motion, it turned and the heavy weapon tracked their motion. Amalia was about to try another hard maneuver when an explosion rocketed the craft dozens of meters.

At first, Amalia thought the craft had been hit, but she was still flying. A fading pair of vapor trails drew her eye across the landscape. Where the spider-mech had been was a smoldering crater. "Hoo-Rah! Now that's some firepower!" shouted Hansen over the channel.

Hansen's enthusiasm was infectious and Amalia found herself shouting back, "Looks like we're clear to land." She keyed the skiff over to a manual mode and wrestled the limping vessel into a landing configuration. The ship bucked as Amalia used each thruster pack to its maximum. Landing procedures would normally only involve ten to twenty percent of the control thrusters but Amalia doubted the original engineers ever imagined their design would be equipped with a stripped-down heavy mortar.

Amalia's target was the burned-out remains of a district office. The main facade was built out of tougher stuff than the rest of the district; the roof was stable and most importantly free of debris. It offered a commanding vantage of the area that would give their massive uptick in firepower ample opportunities to turn the battle around them. Deep inside the building, something acrid was still burning and the smoke billowed out in thick black clouds onto the streets below. The downdraft of the skiff created vortices and fanned it into two sinuous arms radiating out from the building.

Amalia registered an unnatural shift in the smoke. She yelled out to Hansen but he could not hear her over the sound of the skiff’s engines. Bright streaks of light snapped inches behind Amalia’s head and stitched along the hull of the skiff. Thin wisps of smoke marked the death of the small engines and the skiff became eerily quiet. In the stillness, Amalia could now hear the pilot curse vigorously. The craft remained aloft for a few more moments as the last gasps of power in the systems faded and it began to sink.

Another burst of projectiles passed over her head with a sharp crack, but they had been aimed high and the rounds passed by harmlessly. Then, as if a rope had been cut, the skiff dropped. It hit the ground with a shriek of yielding metal as a cloud of dust obscured it from view. Amalia saw stars and unbuckled her harness to help the pilot but when she got out of the crumpled heap she found Hansen already gone.

“Get down!” yelled the familiar voice of Hansen. She obeyed and hit the ground without thinking. More silvery projectiles cracked through the remains of the craft. Amalia crawled towards the source of the voice and soon found the pilot sprawled low against the side of a stormwater gutter. He motioned for her to join him and he produced a small sidearm. Hansen whispered, “Do you know how to shoot?”

Amalia looked over the weapon. It was much more compact than the semi-auto carbines her family used to get rid of the larger pests. “I’ve shot at grain lizards.”

“Good enough. Safety’s on the right side. Fifteen rounds of armor-piercing flechettes. Not a lot of kick but it should be enough to flatten anyone not in an exo-suit.” Hansen paused as Amalia looked over the pistol. She reached out and took it. The pistol felt too light in her hand for the weight of what it could do. “One shot per trigger pull…” Hansen was interrupted by the sound of heavy footfalls. Seemingly out of nowhere, he produced a large weapon like the marines had used earlier. He nosed it over the edge of the building. He trained it back and forth across the rubble of the city block. He twitched and then froze his eyes, the only thing that dared to move on his body.

His off hand lowered slowly and he made a hand signal that Amalia was not familiar with. She moved her head slowly from side to side hoping the pilot would see it in his peripheral vision.

Hansen’s jaw slackened slightly and he made a low growl, “One enemy, stay down.” He made the hand signal again and said the words that corresponded to each movement.

Amalia nodded slowly. She pressed her body hard against the edge and raised the pistol to her chest. She could feel her heart beating in her ears. She willed herself to move slightly but Hansen hissed a no at her. Almost imperceptibly Hansen's weapon moved to line up a shot. His offhand braced the bottom of the weapon and his finger curled around the trigger.

In stark contrast to the stillness that had preceded it Hansen's gun let out a fiery bark and a controlled burst of three armor-piercing rounds sailed down to meet their target. Hansen adjusted for the recoil and his target's movement and let another three rounds out to find their mark. Four more times Hansen fired at their assailant until he said in the same unmoving growl, “Target down."

Amalia peered over the edge of the building and she saw the remains of a yellow and blue exo-suit in tatters amongst the rubble. Hansen whispered, "You keep watch, I'm going to check over our ride. Gun's got a built-in power supply that should still be intact."

Amalia nodded and dutifully scanned the edges of the district administration square. Nothing moved and the smoke was starting to obscure her vision. The smell of it burned her eyes and she had to blink away tears. It soon forced her back from the edge and she called out to Hansen, "I can't see through the smoke, do you have a scanner on that thing?"

Hansen poked his head out of the cupola, "Yep, give me a second to get it online." He disappeared into the vastness of the gun emplacement and a few moments later a whirring noise filled the air. Hydraulics protested as the entire emplacement rose nearly a meter before stabilizing legs extended and leveled the entire assembly. The final structure dwarfed the remains of the skiff, now crushed from the descent and the gun's stabling legs. Hansen's head popped out again, "Got her up and running." He smiled broadly." I've already got fire-support calls coming in so I think you should hop in here and give me a hand with the targeting." Hansen brought a hand out and pointed to an access hatch. "I'll open that up for you."

Amalia slipped the pistol into her waistband and climbed up the side of the gun. The hatch swung open just as she got to it and Hansen's face beamed out at her. "Looks cozy," she said.

"The real ones on the Avalon are much more spacious," said Hansen.

"Is the Avalon your ship?" asked Amalia excitement creeping into the edges of her voice. She squeezed into the side compartment and sat on the edge of the hatch opening.

"Yep. I've been a gunnery expert on her for 12 cycles. Cap sent me down with the marines to give them a hand with stuff like this," said Hansen as he gestured above his head. "I'm going to be in fire control, you sit up there in the commander's seat. It's a pretty standard setup, if you could pilot that skiff you can handle this." He showed her the various command interfaces and how to receive, prioritize, and send the target information to his station. "Now just because you're up here in command doesn't mean you outrank me." He winked. "One last thing." Hansen switched the side display to a waterfall readout. "This is the comms system. Normally we'd have a comms officer here to do the actual relaying of information, and I'm going to have my hands full getting this girl on target and doing the firing calculations. Stick to readbacks and callout 'fire for effect' and no one will ever know you weren't a comms officer."

Amalia nodded and set to work. The commander's position was well shielded and she barely heard the reports of the mortar. She could still feel them though. Each shot shook her teeth and she hoped that the skiff's crash didn't do too much damage to the roof's structure.

She hadn't realized how intense the fighting was until she saw it playing out on the information screen in front of her. Small blue dots representing the friendly forces jostled slowly with pink and red dots. The pink ones were estimated enemy positions and the red ones were actively tracked. By her count, there were thousands of each, scattered across the entirety of the city's districts. Hansen and here were resented by a small yellow dot to the north of the main gate into the city. A dotted yellow outline showed their effective engagement range and anytime a red dot appeared in it she would forward the target's information to Hansen.

He would swing the big guns to bear and if everything went well the red dot would disappear. For hours she tracked and he eliminated red dots in their little circle. A small cloud of blue dots moved close to them and Amalia heard a familiar voice.

"This is platoon echo-five to mobile artillery hotel-lima-two. We are moving to support your position. What is your status?" Said a heavily distorted voice that Amalia could still recognize as Lasalle.

"This is hotel-lima-two, status is good," said Amalia searching for the right technical term.

"Tell them we're no longer 'mobile' artillery," came Hansen's voice from below.

"This is hotel-lima-two, we're actually...um...fixed artillery. The transport skiff was destroyed but the mortar is fully functional." Said Amalia over the radio.

"Copy that hotel." There was a moment of dead air as the Lieutenant held the channel open. "Is this the civy girl who knew about the spiders?”

"Yes ma'am." Said, Amalia. "Ensign Hansen gave me control of comms."

“Ensign Hansen should consider joining the commissioning office if he gets tired of plotting shot trajectories,” Said Lasalle. A red light blinked on, indicating the Lieutenant had switched the connection to private, “Why don’t you hop out of that thing and join us down here and we’ll send up one of our techs.”

“Yes ma’am,” said Amalia. “Hey Hansen,” she yelled down to the gunnery position, “I’m getting out to talk with the Lieutenant, she’s sending up an actual comm-tech.”

“It’s been fun,”  There was a long pause while the Ensign thought. “If we meet again in a less hostile setting the first round’s on me.”

“I’ll take you up on that,” said Amalia as she twisted open the side access hatch. She clambered down the ladder built into the side of the turret and picked her way down to the ground through the remains of the administration building. Marines had already begun fortifying the ground floor. They placed several pintle-mounted heavy weapons behind sloped piles of rubble. Several of the soldiers gave her formal salutes as she passed and they directed her towards Lasalle’s command center.

The walls of the building were scarred by fire but nestled in the middle of the building were a set of massive metal doors. A laser stencil “FOB-HL2” had been haphazardly applied to one of them. As she got nearer to the door a marine in a partially damaged exo-suit moved from the shadows. Their arm-mounted weapon was extended menacingly and the dull glow of an infrared illuminator swept over Amalia.

“Civilian Amalia to see Lieutenant Lasalle,” barked an augmented voice from the exo-suit.

“Enter,” came the Lieutenant’s voice from the same loudspeaker. The metal doors unlatched and swung open revealing a cavernous meeting room. The original ceiling lamps were burnt out but the room was still brightly lit by dozens of holo projectors. Amalia immediately recognized several of the screens as zoomed-in versions of the mapping system she had been using. Others displayed long lists of callsigns and status indicators and even more had an inscrutable series of live camera feeds mixed with scouting reports and annotated still images. The sheer amount of information on display made Amalia slightly dizzy.

Lieutenant Lasalle stood at one end of the room holding yet another holo device, but this one had a security lock that prevented Amalia from seeing its contents. Lasalle spoke without looking up, “Sorry to pull you from your new job, but you said your last name was Perez, correct?”

“Yes ma’am,” Said Amalia, slightly confused.

Lasalle looked up from the display and squarely met Amalia’s eyes, “I think we found your parents.”

Amalia nearly jumped in surprise, “What? Where are they? Are they hurt?”

Lasalle raised a hand to temper Amalia’s barrage of questions. “One of my scouts found a damaged civilian transport and reported two feisty non-combatants nearby. The transport’s toast but the two people were uninjured. Looks like they tried to get out of town but got hit by an enemy strike team.”

“Can I get to them?” Asked Amalia, nearly pleading.

Lasalle turned the security screen off and handed the display to Amalia. “I’ve got a strike team ready to secure that region.” The display showed a series of small blue triangles with a collective callsign “O34” and a dashed red circle outlining an area about 3 kilometers away. “Your artillery work has cleared most of the heavy elements in that zone but we still suspect a couple of teams of infantry are still holed up.” Lasalle gestured and the map panned and zoomed to the extent of the dashed circle. She pointed to an intersection at the bottom of the circle. “That’s where we think your parents are. If you can get to them we can radio in an air transport and get you all to the Avalon.”

“When do we go?” Asked Amalia.

“The team’s suiting up now. For liability reasons, I can’t officially give you a gun or armor.” Amalia reflexively felt the sidearm tucked into her waistband and Lasalle smirked. “That one doesn’t count, I didn’t give it to you.”

“Yes ma’am,” said Amalia.

“Your team leader is Sergeant Campion, and he should be heading out in an APV by the top of the hour. Amalia gave the Lieutenant a crisp salute like the ones she had seen the other soldiers give her and Lasalle responded in kind. “Dismissed.”

Amalia didn’t have any equipment to inspect or pack so she headed straight to meet with her new team. She found the strike team packing the last of several large ammunition crates into the back of the APV. The four-wheeled vehicle looked like a slightly more rugged version of her family’s transport, but where the flatbed had been there was a massive armored box. She spotted the Sergeant talking with another soldier dressed in a red jumpsuit.

“I can’t take this thing up that route, there’s too much damage to the roads and buildings,” said the man in red.

“We need to get up there, and I don’t want to take the scenic route,” said the Sergeant.

“Excuse me, sir. I’m supposed to join your team,” Interrupted Amalia.

The Sergeant looked over to Amalia and glanced back to the man in red. “Get me and my team up there, end of discussion.” Then to Amalia, he said, “Right, Perez. LT told me I can’t outfit you, but you’re more than welcome on the team. Most of the marines call me Camp.” He extended a gauntleted hand and Amalia shook it firmly. Campion showed her how to strap into the APV and went over the basics of their team movements. Amalia’s job was to locate her parents and call in the transport when the area had been secured. Campion explained that it wasn’t a true combat operation and that his team was expecting only a handful of enemy contacts left in the area.

The APV moved abruptly and each bump lifted Amalia several centimeters out of her chair. It was extremely unpleasant, but after a few minutes, she heard the order to prepare to disembark. Amalia was the last out of the transport and no sooner than her feet had cleared the exit hatch the transport roared away in a cloud of dust. The strike team moved with precision from corner to corner.

She could hear the occasional cough of a mortar or rapid snap of smaller caliber weapons echoing in the distance but their area remained quiet. The Sergeant signaled to Amalia to move up next to him. He pointed to an intersection a dozen meters up the road. Embedded into the former side of a building was her family transport. It was scorched in several places and the back tires had seemingly been blown off by an explosion. The crew compartment looked mostly intact and no battle wounds perforated its structure. “That’s where the scout encountered the two folks,” said Campion to Amalia. He made two more hand gestures and four members of the team jumped up and ran forward. “Let’s go get your parents.” With that Sergeant Campion also stood up and began running along the edge of the street.

Amalia tried to keep up with the strike team but their augmented armor gave them much more powerful strides. They were nearly at the intersection when an explosion cracked over their heads like thunder. Bits of white-hot shrapnel hit Amalia in the arm and she cried out in pain. Other yells filled the air and the sounds of gunfire soon masked them. The entire team had taken up firing positions and were aiming down the remains of a side street.

Occasional orange streaks from tracer rounds shot out of the street back at the team. One soldier collapsed as an invisible fist punched through his shoulder and splattered the wall behind him in a crimson spray. A new sound came up over the din of battle. The whine of a high-speed electric motor rose up and then exploded with a deep rumble that Amalia could feel in her chest. The cover in front of several of the soldiers disappeared in a wave of immense force. When the dust began to clear the soldiers too had vanished.

Amalia felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around to see her father’s face covered in dirt and soot. She gave him a powerful hug as his own strong arms pulled her closer. He beckoned her to retreat into a collapsed storefront, but as she stood up rounds cracked all around their hiding spot. Unable to move they watched as a massive blue exo-suit emerged from the opposite street. Slung low at its hip was an equally massive rotary cannon.

The barrels of the cannon were a blur as they spun in their carriage. The suit’s controller fired disciplined bursts from the barrels at the strike team’s positions as it relentlessly advanced. Amalia saw the Sergeant lean around a corner and fire from his weapon. The rounds were inaudible in the continuous roar of the blue suit’s weapon but they found their mark. Sparks flew from the carriage and the sound of yielding metal replaced the cannon’s report.

The blue suit examined the damage to its weapon and then dropped it. More sparks flicked along the edges of the suit as the marines retaliated, but the suit continued to walk forward, its built-in weapon system deploying along the right arm. It leveled the arm at the marines and a new wave of projectiles slammed into their positions.

Amalia heard the Sergeant yell a retreat and the marines began to fall back along the street. Amalia’s father grabbed her shoulder again and pointed behind the stricken transport. If her father hadn’t pointed she never would have seen the human form tucked amongst the rubble. Her mother was now trapped between the retreating marines and the slowly advancing exo-suit.

Amalia acted before she had even thought of the plan. With startling quickness, she sprinted to the fallen marine and grabbed his heavy rifle. She fumbled with the controls on the side and tucked it tight to her shoulder. The suit’s controller seemed to notice her and the torso twisted to face her.

The under-slung grenade launcher thumped and the rifle recoiled into Amalia’s shoulder. A high-explosive grenade arced on a trail of smoke and impacted the chest of the suit. It disappeared behind a cloud of smoke and fire and Amalia examined the rifle again. She switched it to another fire mode and pointed at the place the suit had been. The suit advanced again as smoke continued to pour out of a jagged wound in its armor. Electronics sparked in the cavity and the left arm hung limp at its side, but it still shuffled forward.

Amalia squeezed again and this time the rifle let out an automatic cascade of armor-piercing rounds. She lacked the reinforced structure of the marine's armor to keep the heavy weapon pointed straight and the round pinged wildly over the surface of the exo-suit. The impacts slowed it and each hit seemed to take a small amount of life from the hulking mass.

The scream of a rocket motor came from somewhere out of her vision and in an instant, the exo-suit was again engulfed in fire. Another scream and blast followed by another and another until the suit collapsed into a smoldering pile.

Amalia hadn’t noticed she had stopped breathing. The first breath she took burned and she felt her stomach start to turn. She dropped the rifle to her side and just stared at the remains of the suit. A marine found her and shouted to someone outside of Amalia’s awareness, “Hey Camp, I found her, she’s been hit in the arm.”

The Sergeant’s face appeared at the edge of Amalia’s vision. “Hey, stay with me,” Campion said.

Amalia felt a sharp poke in her left arm and suddenly the world flooded back into her consciousness. She shook the disorientation from her head. “Are my parents OK?”

“We’re fine Amalia, thanks to you,” said her father as she felt his firm hands grasp hers. Her father was kneeling by her side and standing just behind him was her mother.

“I’m going to call in the evac shuttle, I’ve got five wounded marines and you should get that arm looked at,” said Campion. “They’ll take your parents too.” He nodded to them. “You raised one hell of a fighter.”

Another marine came over carrying a large container. “Camp, here’s the flag.”

The Sergeant nodded to the marine and pointed to a spot next to Amalia. “Would you do us the honor of setting up this flag?”

Amalia looked confused as Campion gestured towards the flat black box. “How?”

“It’s a high-power holo lamp. We’ve already configured it so all you need to do is activate it with this key,” said Campion holding out a small key chip.

Amalia agreed and sat up. Her shoulder ached but she was able to insert the small key into the control panel. The familiar Hegemony fanfare played on the same cheap speakers that her brother’s holo experiences used. Relays inside the case clicked and a holo lamp hummed as it warmed up. A hegemony crest slowly materialized in the space above them. Cheers erupted from the marines around Amalia as the phoenix rose from the ashes of the city into the sky.

It has been three years since the bombs fell and in that time we have torn and burned and gnawed and survived. Every battle is hard-fought and we know that every ship we lose brings us all one step closer to annihilation. The XIV is nearly exhausted in this war but the Hegemony is as vast as it is mighty and our allies in the Church remain vigilant in their commitment to our aid. We took vows to end the AI threat and serve until our jobs were done. We were born to the stars on the wings of starships. We fought against the other in the endless vastness of space where magnetically accelerated projectiles danced in the vacuum against a backdrop of energy beams and missile trails. The enemy now knows what it is like to feel fear and we look to rout them from our home.

Amalia’s uniform was freshly pressed and her dark hair was pulled tight against the back of her head. Her toes hooked under the railing of the corridor kept her from drifting as she awaited the final docking process. Twenty-seven other recruits, all fresh from their commissioning, anchored in silence. Of those twenty-seven nearly all of them were from Naraka and had joined the Hegemony after the failed attempt at invasion of Yama. Thousands of soldiers had died at the actions of the AI-led fleet and tens of thousands of civilians had been murdered in their atrocities.

It had been the mutual spark that ignited the recruits’ fire for revenge. They had been put through the rigors of basic combat training and then on to flight school. Most applicants ended up in the auxiliary as technicians or assigned to other support vessels. Amalia’s cadre had instead been commissioned by the Memory of Sideris, a monitor-class hull so fresh off the production lines the paint was still drying.

Their shuttle ride from the military academy on Nachiketa was blessedly short. In three years the news from the front lines had done nothing if not fan the flames of revenge hotter and brighter. Every newly commissioned officer on the shuttle would have given their life to take down the corporation. They were all eager to take the fight to the enemy.

A muster tone came over the shuttle’s loudspeaker and they dutifully pulled themselves into attention. There was a final bump as the ships joined together and the automated callouts announced a proper airlock seal and positive pressure on both sides of the main hatch. Amalia could hear the mag-booted footfalls and the sharp click of soldiers moving to attention.

The shuttle’s hatch hissed and slid neatly out of the way of the Sideris’ commanding officer. A thin man in a Luddic Church uniform kicked off the threshold and spun gracefully to the center of the group. A nimble hand practiced at maneuvering in low gravity caught the edge of a railing and pulled the thin man into an upside-down orientation to the rest of the crew. He spoke with a booming voice that belied his thin frame, “Welcome to the crew of the Memory of Sideris, I am Knight Dudley Howe of the Church of Galactic Redemption.” His dark eyes surveyed the assembly below him. “I know you’re all eager and bloodthirsty to take the fight straight to Artemisia Sun, but we have important work to do getting this ship combat certified. You all will be instrumental in her formal shakedown cruise. We will join up with a small reserve combat fleet currently escorting a trade convoy en route from the outer jump point to Yama. We should meet them as they start to pass through The Servants. The inbound asteroids and other debris should make good target practice and excellent tests of our target tracking systems. From there we are scheduled to depart the system with the trade convoy and escort them to Aztlan. A Hegemony task force is assembling there to take on one of the largest remaining Persean League armadas raiding Hegemony colonies. With any luck, we’ll be fully certified and able to join the task group in about 2 months’ time. Now.” He released himself from the gantry and pushed off towards the airlock. “Let’s get to work.” He passed through the hatch and out of sight down the docking tube.

Two thicker men rounded the corner from where Howe had vanished and barked orders to the new crew. “I’m XO Gibbs and this is Naval Oversight Officer Mosley. We’re the ones that will be running all of the drills to make sure both you and this ship are up to the task of serving in the combined Church-Hegemony Navy.” Both men surveyed the fresh crew in a more severe way than the Lieutenant had. “Report to your berths and be ready for your duty stations in 30 minutes. Dismissed!”

Amalia broke from her stance and pushed off towards her storage locker. On her way, she overheard several of the other crew:

“Hell of a posting.”

“I know, right? Brand new ship. Serving under a Luddite. We might as well sign our commissioning bonus away right now.”

“Yeah, do you think we’ll be able to get cleared for combat in 2 months?”

“I’ve heard that the navy’s lost so many of its elite combat ships they’re signing up anything with a hull and gun.”

“And that first one is optional.”

“Hey, Perez. What does the third-best pilot in the Naraka class of 93 think of all this?” asked a black-haired recruit of Amalia from across the shuttle.

Amalia felt heat rising up inside her. She had missed commissioning on her first choice, the Avalon, by a handful of points in her final exam and resented the ship and crew she was forced to sign on with. “Monitors are sturdy, but they lack the maneuverability of a Wolf or the punch of a Brawler. We’ll probably be assigned to escort duty in a big flotilla, covering the backside of a carrier or battlecruiser.”

“No glory,” Said another crew member.

“Not dead,” Said the black-haired one.

Amalia tightened the shoulder harness of her duffle and kicked off towards the airlock. She lost track of the conversation behind her and ignored the frivolity of the crew as it faded away. The docking tube was mostly transparent and gave the best view of her new home she had seen.

The Memory was much more slender than she expected it to be. The bulbous flak cannon blisters rounded the shoulders of the ship like a boxer’s glove. They seemed almost comically large compared to the rest of the ship. The undersized engines were nearly the same size as the shuttle’s but there were two sets for what it was worth. Monitors weren’t meant to run around a combat volume, they were matched to the performance of a stock cruiser. A cruiser like the Avalon.

She pictured the Memory’s massive flak cannons popping entire squadrons of AI drones before they could hurt the Avalon. A little joy filtered back into her thoughts as she crossed the final articulation joint. On the other side of the hatch to the Memory stood XO Gibbs. He was looking sternly at a holo pad. Amalia wondered if he looked that way at his breakfast too.

Gibbs looked up, his expression unmoved by the presence of another person. “Perez. Good. Bunk A12. You’re on the first shift so get your things stowed and up to the bridge for orientation.” Amalia gave him a passing salute, which he waved off. “Bunk, bridge, get to it.”

Over the next several hours Amalia was forced to re-learn everything she had been taught at flight school. The monitor was so unresponsive that all her moves had to be planned several seconds in advance. Her job was straightforward enough though. All she ever got was a heading and velocity to match and she would nudge the ship in the appropriate ways. She could hear the XO barking shield commands to the flustered operators behind her as they fumbled with the intricate controls. Too many buttons, she thought to herself as the XO corrected the shield tech the third time on the proper timing to deploy the Monitor’s fortress shield. She idly tapped a thruster control and ship rolled to present a least aspect to their imaginary foe.

A gentle voice came from her side, “Good intuition Perez, but wait for the command. We could have been lining up a shield or firing a rocket salvo and that maneuver could spoil it.”

“Sorry, Sir,” said Amalia quickly.

Howe’s thin frame floated beside her, but with the soft click of him activating the magnetic anchors on his boots, he settled onto the deck.

“I would like to see you in the officer’s meeting room at the conclusion of this exercise,” said the Lieutenant, his gaze boring through Amalia.

“Yes, Sir,” she said just as quickly as before.

Howe’s heels clicked again and he rose imperceptibly from the floor before gliding away as if pulled by an invisible string.

Amalia grew more and more nervous as the exercise drew to a close. She signed her post over to the next shift’s pilot and made her way back to the officer’s deck. The primary crew quarters were spartan, as was the case for almost all Hegemony vessels, but the officers’ quarters were ornately decorated with real-wood inlays and brass fixtures. She wondered how many combats it would be before these corridors were replaced with the more readily available military-grade gray metal that the rest of the ship was made from.

As she approached the meeting room she heard the voices of Howe and Mosely. She couldn’t make out the exact words but Mosley was animated about something. She knocked at the door and silence filled the whole corridor like a heavy blanket. Howes’s voice squeaked, “Come in Ensign Perez.”

Amalia opened the door slowly and the amber light of false oil lamps greeted her. Seated around a massive wooden table were the two Hegemony Officers. A holo display had recently been set to conceal its contents and all that remained was a floating standby message over the middle of the table.

“Sit, please, Ensign. I believe you are familiar with our Hegemony liaison, Captain Mosley?” asked Howe perfunctorily.

“Yes, sir. The XO introduced him before we came on board,” said Amalia.

“Good,” said Howe. “The Captain is here to ensure that there is cooperation between our governments. As part of that he would like to interview the crew. I believe he had several questions for you.”

“I do indeed. First of which, is what you are doing on this ship?” Asked Mosley, pointing a thick finger at Amalia.

“I graduated third in my class from the flight school on Nachiketa. For that I was granted commission on a Hegemony Navy frigate,” Said Amalia trying to conceal the contempt she had for the posting.

Mosley scoffed. “Why is the third-ranking pilot on an escort frigate, who did you *** off at the Academy?”

Amalia shrank into her chair. “I’m not aware that I made any enemies while I studied at Nachiketa.”

“Just as well,” said Mosley. He opened a small holo pad and pulled up several files. “You’re a local, yes?”

“Yessir,” said Amalia.

Mosley made several notes on files Amalia could not see. He lifted his gaze slowly and met her eyes. “Do you feel like you belong here?”

Amalia got the impression the question was not directed at her, but she still replied. “No sir, I do not think I belong on an escort frigate.”

Mosley smiled and opened his mouth to speak.

“My escort frigate.” Howe interrupted softly, “Is the last remaining XIV frigate from the original flotilla. We dressed her up at the shipyards on Chicomoztoc to disguise her real purpose.”

Mosley snapped, “Why was I not informed?”

“Because it is the same reason we fixed this cadet’s exam scores. No one must know that this ship is intercepting a traitorous battle group,” said Howe slowly and deliberately. He pressed several buttons on a recessed panel. The holo projector burst to life displaying a scale version of the system. A series of red triangles followed a dotted path terminating on Nachiketa. A single blue triangle followed another path that intercepted the others just beyond the start of a shaded area. “Ensign Perez, I believe you will recognize the lead ship of this group.” Howe reached forward and touched one of the triangles.

The unmistakable shape of a heavy transport rotated slowly on the table in front of Amalia. “I’m sorry sir, I don’t know this ship.” She said, trying to hide surprise from her voice.

“Then maybe you would know its captain,” said Howe as the face of Nayar Perez appeared before her for the first time in years. There were several scars on her cheek that were not there in his boyhood and his eyes had a faraway look Amalia could not recall ever seeing in her brother.

Mosley screamed from across the table, “You brought his sister onto the ship that’s supposed to destroy him?”

“Yes.” Said Howe deliberately. “Because we are not going to destroy him.”

Mosley flew into a rage and hurled curses at Howe and Amalia’s brother though it could be said he was kinder to her brother. “That pirate scum should be released to the vacuum of space and left to drift for millennia.”

Howe brought both his hands above the table and folded them intricately. “Captain Mosley. I brought you into this room as an observer. This plan comes straight from the Combined War Council. There is a massive artificial intelligence task force assembling at an unknown star system just outside the range of the Hegemony’s sight. They are looking to destroy both Nachiketa and Yama in one attack. They will not fail because they are not going to capture either planet from us. They will simply bombard both planets until their surfaces are polished glass.” Howe let the words sit in the room before continuing.

“If there has been one thing we have learned in fighting these autonomous ships it is that they are single-minded in their pursuits. They lack tactics, charging endlessly into the fray, and knowing not of retreat, they are unable to appreciate a battlefield for the art it represents. Their cold logic dictates moves and motives and that can be exploited.

“We will deny them their prize by tempting them with something they cannot ignore. The pirate Nayar will masquerade as a Persean League raiding party as a previously unknown XIV battle group will appear to fight them within The Servants. To our enemies we will present an irresistible target; a wounded XIV battle group attempting to leave the system following a pitched battle.

“What kind of plan is this?” asked Mosley.

Howe looked amused and opened his palms towards Amalia. “I believe she is quite familiar with this tactic.”

Amalia wet her lips before speaking. “On my family’s farm, there was a species of modified Old Earth snake. They were engineered to hunt pests like the native mouse analogues or the virulent species of lizard that gnawed on the grain stalks, but in that engineering, they knew only to attack what was in front of them. You could lure them away from the house with a sock at the end of the stick and they would only ever strike at the sock. When we fought the invasion forces they only ever cared about the major threats. We could slip behind them or around them easily.”

“We will draw out the enemy and cut off its head before it ever has the chance to strike,” said Howe.

Mosley looked even more dismissive, “What about Nayar, do you think he’ll be satisfied acting in this farce?”

“We have already negotiated his price,” Said Howe gesturing once again towards Amalia.

Like the cornered predator, they lash out unpredictably and with unrepentant violence. Our forces stand guard against these attacks, but we worry for the safety of our colonies. I stand in vigil on the command deck of my ship ready to allay the fears of my people on the worlds below. We do not believe the High Hegemony when he says he will protect us at all costs. For in war, we are the ones who pay the costs.

Nayar rested his forehead against the diamond-laced viewport. The coolness of the material eased his worries and calmed his mind. It had been a long time since the orange glow of Naraka had kissed his face. He welcomed it and dreaded what it represented.

When he left so many years ago he had hoped to buy his way back on another freight contract. The war had changed so much before he even left the planet’s surface. There were no independent contracts. He had bounced around serving both sides of the war. He followed the command of his captain until one day he found he was the one leading. By then he amassed a following of loyal ships, truly an armada for a dust farmer’s kid.

He had contracted with the Hegemony and they had asked him to do terrible things. They had promised him redemption but at every turn they denied him. They labeled him as a brigand, a murderer, and an agent of the enemy. But they always called him back.

The clandestine agent had met him in a bar. The hushed code words exchanged in knowing whispers. The agent had mentioned his sister, Amalia. They could get her from the Academy and transfer her to his crew. All it would take was a simple job. He could dress up a few aging warships and act as bait for the enemy fleet. It wasn’t going to be easy, but it was worth seeing his sister again.

There was an unnatural glint in the distance when Nayar’s comm officer announced, “One contact, confirmed Hegemony IFF, it’s the Memory of Sideris. Should I hail them?”

“Encrypted channel, put them through to my console.” Commanded Nayar as he made his way to the secure terminal at his command chair.

There was a burst of static and slowly a picture of a thin Luddic Knight resolved from the chaos.

“Knight Howe, nice to see you again,” said Nayar in a fake pleasantry.

“Yes, Mr. Perez. It is always a pleasure. I believe we are safely masked in the dust and debris so we can begin the operation at your signal. I do have to keep the crew on this ship somewhat unaware of the exact goings on so do be prompt about it,” said the thin man.

“What about my sister?” asked Nayar pointedly.

“You will be reunited at the close of this arrangement,” oozed the thin man.

Nayar closed the channel and signaled his comms officer to begin the prepared operation. His freighter and most of the others in his flotilla carried nearly a dozen hidden cruisers and destroyers in their cargo bays. Normally they would entice an unsuspecting bounty hunter or enemy fleet to engage with the transports and then disgorge their much more lethal cargo. Nayar rarely lost these engagements. But today the ships his transports carried were derelict XIV hulls.

Most of them were combat ineffective; broken drives, destroyed weapon mounts, unreliable systems, and a litany of other issues that made them more hazardous to their crews than to any enemy. They would make for a very suggestive cover story and a tempting target for the real enemy fleet.

Nayar had rigged many of the ships up with systems that would resemble weapons fire to any sensors looking their way. The chaos of the asteroid field would mask any ability to truly see anything going on and all any outside observers would see would be a large number of warships emerging from an apparent pitched battle.

Nayar’s fleet had already been known to be a menace so the idea of the Hegemony laying a trap for him with some elite ships was not completely ridiculous. Or at least he hoped that was the case when the real enemy showed up and asked him what happened at the end of a mass driver.

The plan called for nearly a full day of engagements. Towards the end of the proposed “attack,” both of his crews on his real ships and the derelicts were beginning to feel weary. Finally, after nearly twenty straight hours of fake combat, Howe called Nayar and told him to initiate the next phase of the plan.

He had set his own ships to look wounded as they fled back towards the jump point. Howe had called the derelicts to inform them they would be falling back to the fuel depot at Nachiketa, a slight change in plans but not out of the scope of possible requests.

The first indication their ruse had been successful was the slight uptick in high-energy particles at one of the inbound jump points. It meant something big or a bunch of less big things were getting ready to jump into the system. Nayar’s sensor team nearly fell out of their command chairs when the first wave came through the jump point.

There were nearly four-dozen enemy ships in total. Everything from heavy battleships to destroyer-class carriers, all burning hard for Nachiketa. Nayar knew there was a trap to be sprung; he couldn't imagine the kind of firepower the Hegemony would need to bring to this fight. He doubted there were enough ships in the whole Navy to fight that many AI warships at once.

But none of them came.

He watched in horror as the AI warships descended on the broken ships his own crews were trying to hold together. The makeshift particle beams and mass drivers were nearly useless against the perfect shields and hulls of the enemy warships.

He watched as each ship blew apart, their reactors exploding in uncontrolled runaway states. They fell back further and further until the enemy warships pressed the last of survivors against the fuel depot.

Then there was a flash brighter than any reactor core detonation he had ever seen. His operations chief yelled from across the command deck, “They vented the whole goddamn station. The antimatter. They vented it right into the face of those AI ships.”

It took hours for the background to cool enough for the sensors to make out what was left. The heavily fortified refueling plant was mostly intact. Its exterior was superheated to several thousand degrees, but it was still intact. The entire industrial complex that had grown up around the plant was gone. Not destroyed, not blown apart, but simply gone. It was as if someone had turned the clock back to the first few months after the Domain had finished contracting the plant.

The Hegemony had dealt a decisive blow against the Tri-Tachyon and all but assured they could continue the fight if not outright win, no matter the cost.

Nayar slammed his fist against his command chair and yelled to his comms officer, “Get me Howe on an unsecured line. I want the Sector to hear what he has to say.”

A few minutes later his comms officer replied, “I’ve got Howe, or, I’ve got your sister.”

Amalia’s face appeared on the comms screen. “My name is Amalia Perez, sister to Nayar Perez, the criminal war boss. As part of a coordinated strike plan Nayar and I conspired to destroy Nachiketa’s fuel industry and all supporting infrastructure.”

Knight Howe stepped into the edge of the frame, “The Hegemony Navy, in a desperate act to save the inhabitants on Yama and the important fuel industry on Nachiketa, tactically purged the antimatter containment storage on Nachiketa. The resulting explosion has claimed many lives at the hands of the traitors in the Perez family. The Hegemony Navy will respond to this threat and work to protect its citizens from the threats we face daily.”

“What the *** did we just watch?” exclaimed one of Nayar’s officers.

“We’ve been set up,” said Nayar in a flat tone. “We’re going to take the fall for this and the Hegemony will come knocking on our door the next time they need a bad guy in a jar.” Nayar gave the order to burn all ships hard toward the jump point. He still knew of a couple of places a pirate captain-turned-genocidal maniac could hide. His operations officer was the first to notice the Hegemony cruiser powered down beyond the jump point.

The Avalon, being a ship designed for long-duration hyperspace flight, had many systems in place to enable a rapid startup procedure in the event they were surprised while in transit to a new sector. Those systems were now being used to spring the final trap on Nayar’s weary fleet.

The beam weapons on the cruiser made short work of his lighter transports before they could even turn around to change direction. Their hulls still glowed from the heat of the beams as they drifted lifelessly past the cruiser. Nayar’s flagship was massive and it took several barrages from the cruiser’s Heavy Maulers before the reactor core gave up.

Nayar was loose from his command chair, the final impact of the high explosive rounds had shaken the ship violently. He was sure the ship was split in half. He had no control over his motion but he drifted slowly towards the diamond-laced view port. His hands gently caught his fall towards the window and he pressed his forehead against the cool material.

The Avalon was equipped with a pair of torpedo launchers, intended as finishers they would make short work of heavily armored capital ships whose shield systems had overloaded. Against the mixed debris of a civilian-grade cargo hauler, they were a cleaning tool. What remained of the ships would exist as a slowly cooling bay of gas for the next few hundred cycles before each molecule was scattered across the vastness of interstellar space.

We commit this body to the holy vacuum, dust to dust, stars to stars, that the Creator may renew us in the cycle of eternal life.

Amalia stirred in the corner of the containment cell. There was more commotion in the prison complex than normal. A priest’s voice carried the last rites of another prisoner from somewhere down the hall. She only barely lifted her eyes as the funeral parade shuffled by. She did not know the other prisoners and they did not know her.

She had lost track of time. The guard delivered her food randomly to make sure she would have no reference for the passage of time. There were no windows and only the dimmest of artificial lighting.

The priest was not so cruel. He would show up just as Amalia was beginning to fade and he would sit and pray with her. His voice calmed her and she found herself lost in his words.

He talked about the sacred path of Ludd. He told her about the redemption that could be found in following the Creator’s guidance. He told her of the evils of the machine, how artificiality was the decay at the heart of human suffering. There was belonging in his words. In them, she began to find redemption.

During the attack, she had done something terrible. Something she could not atone for in her own words. The words of the priest offered solace and understanding. She could be forgiven.

It had been Howe that had betrayed her family, not her. He had been the one to orchestrate the false attack and the plant to lure the artificial fleet from its hiding spot. She had been piloting the Memory of Sideris when they made contact with Nayar’s fleet. She had seen her brother through the comm buffer but had been unable to contact him directly.

She watched the operation until her next duty cycle and even while piloting the ship kept a close eye on the engagement. Howe had given the order to withdraw and then commanded the false task force to fall back to Nachiketa. Then Amalia watched in horror as dozens of sleek warships poured into the system.

They crashed like a wave against the defenseless face fleet and pushed them further and further towards the fueling station. She had called out to Howe and pleaded with him to provide assistance. He had flatly refused saying that the Church had a Holy Armada on their way and should be able to make short work of the artificial fleet.

Amalia had a horrible idea flash across her mind. She had looked up the capacity of the refueling station and performed some very quick math on her terminal. There would be more than enough in the antimatter fuel reserves to damage or destroy most of the enemy ships.

The station was hardened against accidental containment breaches so it would be able to withstand the blast. She had gone to Howe with the plan. A smile that, at the time, had seemed happy grew on Howe’s face. He gave Amalia the command codes necessary to vent the station’s fuel. She had been the one to push the button.

The flash was orders of magnitude larger than she had expected or calculated. She looked back over the status and saw Howe had intervened and instead of a controlled release he had triggered every last container of antimatter to release its contents. Amalia looked back at Howe and realized his rictus grin had been filled with malice, not happiness.

The other crew in the command center turned toward Amalia and asked what she had done. Howe had appeared at her side faster than she could comprehend and his firm grasp lifted her from her chair. He had pulled her past several of the ship’s security detail insisting he needed to bring her to Captain Mosley. Instead, he had threatened to seize her family’s farm and lock them all in a Luddic gulag. There had been one offer of amnesty: she would have to confess to conspiring with her brother to destroy the facility on Nachiketa.

She had watched from the brig when a guard showed her a video feed of the Avalon tearing Nayar’s fleet apart. The guard had said her traitorous brother deserved a worse fate than to die in combat. The guard had said he should be locked away forever like she was going to be.

So she had.

Now as the priest left her to her thoughts once again she latched on to something he had said in the last few moments of prayer. The wretched corporation and its automated servants were the greatest threat to humanity ever known. Only those that followed in the Path of Ludd could stand against them.

She cried out and unsteadily ran to the cell door, her legs aching from such a long period of disuse. She called out to the priest and he turned back to meet her. She began to weep and tell the priest of her past life. At the end of her story, he placed a soft hand on hers and whispered, “Walk in peace, my child. When I next visit you we shall speak of what you can do to honor the Creator. May his light forever grace you as you follow in the footsteps of Ludd.”

The priest visited her more frequently now. He spoke of ways to destroy the machines that had enslaved mankind. She knew that she had to find a way to end the threat of the artificial machine no matter the cost.

The machine had destroyed her home. The machine had killed her family. The machine had brought her brother so near and then taken him away again. The machine was evil and it had to be stopped. She had taken the last of her wet food and used it to write a single line above the door to her containment cell. “I walk in the Path of Ludd. All who stray from it must be destroyed.” Amalia Perez had died in prison for her crimes and a new Child of the Path had been born to replace her.

Knight Howe lowered the hood of the priest robes and opened a small holo pad. “This one is especially receptive. I recommend her for the situation in Zagan.” He paused while another figure that only he could hear spoke. “I understand. The League will pay for siding with the servants of Moloch. Ludd’s will be praised, may he walk forever in the light.”
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Samoja

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Re: Stories from the Sector - A fan fiction collection
« Reply #13 on: January 18, 2024, 11:40:17 PM »


This is the second (and final) part of a slice-of-life story set during the first AI war in the Naraka System. Brace yourself for the thrilling conclusion to... Bum Bum... Taking Stock... Bum bum...

Content Warning (for both parts):
PG action, claustrophobia

Taking Stock part 2
I picked up my first weapon when the soldier commanded me to run. Its sleek polycarbonate shell hid a vicious claw that lashed out at the advancing forces. Its violence tore at my shoulder and staggered the monstrosity long enough for a rocket to remove it from existence. It was one of thousands that clawed and scraped their way across our world only to find their doom. That day the defenses held. The corporation and its automated servants underestimated the fortitude of human spirit.

This was new pain to Amalia. Her ribs stung where the stun stick had hit her but her head ached as if someone were squeezing it with a vice. She was vaguely aware of muffled sounds and a wet warmth around her cheek but all around her was a deep blackness that pressed in on every sense. She littered herself uneasily onto one arm and tried to blink the darkness from her eyes, but there was no light to be seen.

There was a source of heat somewhere behind her, but it did not produce any visible evidence. The air around her stuck to her and made each breath feel like an effort. There was a sweet metallic taste to it that reminded her of a faulty auto-combine. Amalia probed the darkness and her hands found nothing but empty air. She decided to crawl away from the source of the heat, slowly inching along the slick surface.

After what felt like kilometers her hands found something soft. As she explored the slow realization of a human form came to her. As she felt the familiar shape of the hand restraints she let out a small gasp. This was the body of the large guard who had tried to escort her out of the city.

It was still warm to the touch, but there were no signs of life. His corpse was wet with the same substance she had been crawling through but she was able to locate a pocket with a data pad. She raised the terminal and the Hegemony seal popped into existence. It filled the space with a warm orange glow though very quickly Amalia wished for the darkness. A grizzly scene was revealed at the edges of the lit area.

The guard’s body was unnaturally bent and crumpled; blood pooled around him from unseen wounds. The same blood covered Amalia and at once she realized what the sensation along her face had been. She retched but recovered as she refocused her mind.

Amalia had no idea where she was, but she knew she had to leave. Jump seats were arrayed along the ceiling and floor and tangles of equipment hung from ajar compartments. She held the data pad up to see if any of it was usable. Most of it seemed to be for emergency response: chemical fire suppression canisters, auto-medics, trauma kits, and several lockers containing riot gear.

She found the end of the chamber and recognized the shape of the rear hatch to the armored vehicle that had been at the end of the street. There was seemingly no power to the control panel but just below the hatch, she found the emergency releases. She twisted one and the pressure seals gasped as air rushed out of the chamber. With the retaining latches retracted she gave the whole thing a strong kick and the hatch fell out onto the street.

Blinding daylight dazzled her for a few moments before the overwhelming odor of burnt metal and ash made her cough violently. Amalia stepped through the open hatchway and onto a scorched street. The armored vehicle she had been in was several dozen meters back from the checkpoint. Rough gouges in the road surface traced the route the vehicle had tumbled back toward an apocalyptic scene. Thick clouds of smoke rose from masses of barely recognizable human remains; fire clung to the edges of the buildings and vehicles. Something in the air burned her throat and made her eyes water.

Amalia reached back into the transport and pulled a breathing mask from the riot gear storage. The filters did not completely remove the metallic taste to the air but she found she could take deep breaths without coughing. She picked her way through the tangled barricades and makeshift canopies. From somewhere far away she could make out the thrum of the transports as they took off to respond to the disaster in front of her. There would be no need to search for survivors amongst the refugees. An exo-suit-clad guard might have been able to survive whatever did this, but anyone outside of a sealed compartment would have had no chance.

The heat of the blast had burned off a large amount of the lingering fog over the edge of the housing district. Amalia could see the first few rows of houses leaning at odd angles; glass from their shattered windows glittered on the street below and their walls cracked and unstable. These structures were not built to the same standard as her family’s home, but even those old sturdy walls had sundered when the drop ship fell.

Amalia was about to turn back to the city when the first shimmer of movement on the edge of the fog caught her eye. An automated turret somewhere further along the wall saw it at the same time and a glowing stream of projectiles buzzed through the air. Sparks erupted from the ground and Amalia saw the familiar shape of an AI spider-mech momentarily revealed. It now occurred to her just how badly damaged the one on their farm had been. The general shape was the same, but where there had been the single manipulator there were now at least six, with each carrying its own weapon.

Another wall-mounted turret let out a gout of projectiles and this time Amalia could see the beast staggered by the hit. The cannon targeting systems had moved their aim points up and the projectiles hit the main body. More and more cannons were now starting to fire into the edge of the fog. The spiders were not alone however and a more human form was moving up below them. Enemy soldiers moved from cover to cover advancing up the roadways. Amalia decided to not be there when the forces arrived at what was left of the checkpoint.

She crossed back along the debris as the sounds of battle intensified behind her. A military hover transport gilded around a corner and shot down the street toward her. A set of twin autocannons flashed and projectiles whizzed a meter above her head. The craft spun and came to a stop behind the armored vehicle Amalia had crawled out from. The front of the transport opened and it settled onto a set of support struts. A dozen armored soldiers neatly ran out and assumed defensive positions on the street.

A golden phoenix was printed on each of their shoulders under an embossed bronze “XIV”. One of the soldiers stepped out from behind cover and planted the base to a massive recoilless rifle. The soldier sighted it on something behind Amalia and a moment later a fireball flashed behind the soldier and a projectile rushed to meet an enemy target. Amalia heard the explosion of the round and then another sound she recognized that filled her with terror.

The wail of a spider-mech dared Amalia to look over her shoulder. When she did she saw the looming presence of the thing mere meters behind her. It had fallen slightly to one side; part of its leg had been destroyed by the soldiers. She saw the unmistakable glow of the thing’s energy weapon followed by a lightning crack as it fired. Behind her metal screamed as it was superheated and rapidly cooled. The soldier and his weapon had been replaced by an expanding cloud and scorch marks. Amalia screamed and tried to run.

She made it several meters before a pair of strong arms grabbed her by the waist and hauled her behind a wall. The space where she had been was ripped apart by a hail of high-velocity rounds. Amalia screamed again. A set of gauntleted fingers dug into her shoulder and a commanding voice bellowed, “Are you hit?”

Still, mostly in shock, Amalia managed to stammer, “N…no…the blood’s not mine.”

“Good,” said the voice. “Now stay back or that thing will kill you.” The soldier the voice came from stood up and moved closer to the corner. She made a circling hand motion and a group of soldiers at the opposite side of the street moved in unison. One of them carried a similar-looking weapon to the now-vaporized soldier.

“You have to take out its arms,” yelled Amalia to the soldier.

The soldier turned to face her, “You fight these before?”

Amalia shook her head in affirmative, “Under the body, all its weapons are there.”

The soldier nodded their own affirmative and said something that Amalia could not hear. The others on the far side of the road changed their positions and attached something to the ends of their weapons. They rounded a corner simultaneously at different heights. The sounds of their weapons firing overlapped and Amalia could hear the groans of the creature as it reeled under the weight of the assault. The soldier in front of Amalia rounded her corner and her gun produced a loud thud as a heavy projectile launched from it. There was a tremor from the round hitting the target and the second one when the spider-mech toppled. Amalia heard cheers from the soldiers and she, too, shouted a war cry.

The soldier in front of Amalia turned back to her, “Who are you?”

“Amalia Perez, ma’am.”

“Well Amalia, Where’d you come from?” Asked the soldier.

Amalia didn’t respond for a beat, unsure if a truthful response would get her thrown back out of the city. These soldiers were clearly not from Tharus and they would hopefully not have the same compulsions as the guards. “I’m from a mid-lat farm, my family had to leave when one of those spiders attacked. We…killed it, but it got a bunch of our farmhands.”

“Impressive,” Said the soldier. “I’m Sergeant Lasalle, of the 182nd Marine Detachment. We’ve got a cruiser in orbit ready to rain hell on these soulless bastards. Just need to push them back from the city.”

Amalia’s surprise showed on her face. “We won the space battle?”

“For now,” Said Lasalle as she pointed up toward the sky. "Still a lot of fighting up there."

"A lot of fighting down here," said Amalia deadpan.

The lieutenant laughed, "Damn straight, and we better be getting back to it." She said something into her comms and the hover transport rose off the ground, its autocannon swinging into a firing position. It belched flame and shockwaves roiled dust on the street. Amalia ducked further behind the corner to shield herself from the heat of the autocannon and the loudness of the battle.

The alley she had been pulled into went for a few dozen meters before hooking around a side of the building she was huddled against. Amalia poked her head out and saw the marines engaged in a pitched battle; Lasalle had moved out to the middle of the street and was confidently firing at some unseen foe. The other end of the alley was a little dirty but relatively peaceful by comparison. As much as she admired the coordination and power the soldiers exhibited she didn't really want to hang out near the battle for much longer.

Amalia wound her way through the maze of interconnected alleyways looking for a familiar landmark. She had not been in the city long but she had come to know several of the neighborhoods near the shield wall. If she could find her way into one of the secondary access points she could slip through the wall and maybe find her parents on the other side.

The familiar power conduit access markings were painted above a moveable metal grate. Unfortunately, she didn't have her usual equipment; her cutting torch would make short work of the corrugated sheet. Tucked in a storefront she did find a recycling bin that she estimated was heavy enough to bash her way through. She hefted the bin above her head and brought it down and into one of the security bolts. The head of the bolt sheared off on her first attempt. After a few successive blows, the panel fell open with a rattling crash.

The corridor beyond was tighter than she expected and several newer cables had been routed through the passage constricting it further. She was determined to squeeze through if there was even the most remote chance of finding her parents again. Amalia took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She just barely fit through the first constriction but on the other side the cables slackened a bit and she was able to move quickly if a bit awkwardly.

After a few meters, the corridor began to rise at a sharp angle. Amalia steadied herself on the high-voltage cables hoping their insulation was still adequate after cycles of neglect. She climbed higher and higher until she was sure she was nearly level with the top of the wall. The corridor had steadily widened as several of the cables turned into their destinations or terminated in junction boxes. Amalia now stood balanced on a particularly thick data cable with her arms reaching up to hold onto the last pair of power cables.

She could see where the corridor leveled off and she inched her way up the transition. When her head rose above it she peered into the next chamber. In it sat one of the massive shield projectors for the wall. It hummed softly and the blue glow of Cherenkov radiation swirled around the top. Amalia stared at it unsure if it was safe to approach it while it was active. Will had never given her training on the actual shield projectors.

A control panel to the side of the chamber chimed and a series of yellow warnings flashed on its display. Amalia couldn't make them out from here, but she figured if there was a control panel it was perfectly fine to stand in the chamber. She hoisted herself over the edge of the corridor and rolled into the chamber. Her elbows came to rest in the second strangely warm fluid of the day. This time she knew what it was. Dielectric fluid soaked the floor and Amalia could see several large capacitor banks with obvious damage.

She stood up and walked over to the terminal fairly sure she knew what the fault was. The screen was in the process of auto-scrolling through the myriad of fault codes and alerts when Amalia cleared them and opened a login screen. Will hadn't bothered to give her a personal login and she doubted he ever changed his password. His credentials were accepted and the system welcomed "Technician William F. Sorrel" to an old DomainOS interface.

Amalia prodded the system's built-in keyboard trying to find a schematic of the local area. The terminal was woefully disconnected from any of the other systems in the shield wall and contained very few details on the chamber, projector, or even the terminal’s own functions. It followed the classic Domain principles of compartmentalized knowledge and infrastructure which was very good at keeping intruders—like Amalia—from accessing sensitive information.

Minutes ticked by and she was no closer to finding anything of use in the terminal. She closed the command interface and opened the stored maintenance logs. The last entry was nearly a cycle prior: a technician had reported a failure in this projector’s power feeds, and a subsequent repair order was filed but never completed. Interestingly and most likely a gross violation of standard protocols, the technician that filed the repair order included the security access codes for one of the exterior access panels. Amalia couldn’t be sure exactly which panel the codes were for, but if it was Will who filed them then it was going to be the closest to the projection chamber.

Amalia walked the perimeter of the chamber until she found a small alcove with a security pad. She typed the access codes and a small success chime followed by the sounds of relays releasing the door locks let her know she had found a way out.

She was higher on the wall than she had thought. The projector sat at the very top of an armored blister. Below her, she could see the scattered debris from the massive explosion she had been unconscious for. Large humanoid shapes moved in and around the debris—exo-suit-equipped soldiers jockeying for position. Every few moments one of the suits would flash as their arm-mounted weapons fired. The reports overlapped with their own echoes and became a muddled thunder.

A new sound startled Amalia. It was the high-pitched whine of a cargo skiff under heavy load as it tried to crest the shield wall. Amalia snuck around the access walkway and spotted the little craft carrying a fixed gun that would have looked more at home on a small cruiser. The skiff was close and she could make out the insignia on the pilot’s shoulder—the same XIV over a phoenix that had been on the marines’.

She stood and waved her arms over her head hoping to attract the attention of the skiff’s pilot. He was struggling to keep control of the overloaded craft and was focusing on the controls. Amalia jumped and made even larger motions with her hands. As her excitement began to fade into fatigue she slumped against the railing.

The skiff was gaining altitude meter-by-meter but at its current rate, it would collide with the top of the shield wall. The pilot was startled and even Amalia could see the flashing proximity alarm; he looked up and realized how close to the shield wall he was. In that moment he also noticed the slight girl watching him. He looked back down and fumbled with something far down on the controls. Soon a squelch tone blared out of the skiff’s loudspeaker. The pilot fumbled with another control and the squelch was replaced by the static of a live mic. Finally, a voice came from the skiff, "Do you require aid?"

Amalia wanted to ask the pilot the same question, but she pointed toward a large access dock a few meters below her. She made a landing motion with her hands, the pilot nodded. The ladder that led down to the platform was oddly dusty. Few things on this side of the shield wall ever accumulated enough dust to notice. It made the descent a little more tricky than Amalia had planned.

The pilot, too, was trying desperately to control his descent to the platform. The skiff hovered a few centimeters above the surface of the decking and the pilot was frantically adjusting the little craft's thrusters to keep it from toppling. Amalia walked over to the skiff, careful to shield her eyes and mouth from the swirling cloud of dust and ash. She reached out with one hand and pulled down with all her weight.

The skiff hit the ground with a ringing thud and the landing gear groaned under the excessive weight. Amalia shouted to the pilot, "You're on the ground now, you can turn off the thrusters." The pilot's eyes widened and he pushed the throttle closed. The whining of the engines slowed to a low growl and the pilot opened the hatch.

He didn't take off his helmet but Amalia could see the square jaw she had seen on many dock workers from Jangala. "Lasalle radioed a local girl was running around. I'm Ensign Hansen," The pilot said, extending his gloved hand. "The LT was impressed by you and told us to keep an eye out."

Amalia took the pilot’s hand and gave him a firm handshake. "I'm trying to get out to the districts," said Amalia with an air of authority she didn't know she had.

"I'd give you a ride but this thing's a little touchy. Probably shouldn't have put the whole heavy mortar on it." The pilot looked over the massive gun emplacement.

"You've got a class two skiff, it should be able to lift that, what's your VCS setting?" Amalia pushed past the pilot and checked the control console. "Oh, no wonder, you've got this thing on manual control." She flipped several switches on a small panel by the hatch. "There you go. This thing is designed to be remotely piloted with as much as a 2-second input delay." The pilot looked confused. "It's got a full-auto flight control system designed to take the flight duties off the pilot, all you really need to do is set the waypoints in the nav console or if you want to be a cowboy just point the nose by pushing the floor pedals and adjust the direction of travel with the yoke."

"Do you want to fly this?" asked Hansen. He pointed to the gun, "I can control that monster."

"Where are we going?" Asked Amalia.

"I was going to set this down on the top of the shield wall and fire off some close support,” said Hansen mock-firing the big gun. "But if you can actually fly this thing I've got a request to drop some shells on enemy movements to the East of the city."

Amalia tried to remember the layout of the district as they walked in. She might be able to make it to the cargo transport if they landed close enough. Her parents had kept hand-held radios that used the transport as a relay. If they were still alive she could use the transport to find them. "Deal." She said and without a pause hopped into the pilot seat. Hansen had barely made it onto the skiff when Amalia hot-started the engines and the skiff bucked into the air.

The pilot tapped on the rear viewport and pointed to a comms panel. He signaled a frequency and Amalia switched over to it. "This is a completely different ride," He said, his voice now vibrating the entire cockpit.

Amalia quickly turned the volume down, "What's the grid reference for setting this thing down?" Hansen gave her a long string of numbers and letters and Amalia plotted it on the skiff's navigation interface. As soon as the craft had cleared the rim of the shield wall Amalia pointed the nose down and they plummeted in a death-dive. She pulled the ship into a graceful turn and bled the vertical speed into horizontal, skimming meters above the debris on the streets. They passed over the remnants of a residential building and Amalia flinched when she came under her first enemy fire.

Red tracers flew out of the ruins. Their arcs closed like a web over her and she tried to pitch the skiff into a hard turn. The extra momentum of the gun made the craft unwieldy and she caught one of the landing struts on a shattered wall. The momentum that caused the crash also carried her through it. The skiff buffeted and she knew the strut was torn to shreds but they were still in the air. The impact had also damaged a thruster and she felt the skiff starting to lean.

The landing point was only a few hundred meters away and she had plenty of speed. Amalia feathered in more throttle to keep the craft stable. It took even more agility out of craft's capabilities but it would get her there. She knew the shape before her eyes had even fully realized what she saw.

A spider-mech's torso smoothly rose above a rubble pile. Its manipulators were busy lifting a heavy weapon when its attention snapped to the skiff. In an impossibly fast motion, it turned and the heavy weapon tracked their motion. Amalia was about to try another hard maneuver when an explosion rocketed the craft dozens of meters.

At first, Amalia thought the craft had been hit, but she was still flying. A fading pair of vapor trails drew her eye across the landscape. Where the spider-mech had been was a smoldering crater. "Hoo-Rah! Now that's some firepower!" shouted Hansen over the channel.

Hansen's enthusiasm was infectious and Amalia found herself shouting back, "Looks like we're clear to land." She keyed the skiff over to a manual mode and wrestled the limping vessel into a landing configuration. The ship bucked as Amalia used each thruster pack to its maximum. Landing procedures would normally only involve ten to twenty percent of the control thrusters but Amalia doubted the original engineers ever imagined their design would be equipped with a stripped-down heavy mortar.

Amalia's target was the burned-out remains of a district office. The main facade was built out of tougher stuff than the rest of the district; the roof was stable and most importantly free of debris. It offered a commanding vantage of the area that would give their massive uptick in firepower ample opportunities to turn the battle around them. Deep inside the building, something acrid was still burning and the smoke billowed out in thick black clouds onto the streets below. The downdraft of the skiff created vortices and fanned it into two sinuous arms radiating out from the building.

Amalia registered an unnatural shift in the smoke. She yelled out to Hansen but he could not hear her over the sound of the skiff’s engines. Bright streaks of light snapped inches behind Amalia’s head and stitched along the hull of the skiff. Thin wisps of smoke marked the death of the small engines and the skiff became eerily quiet. In the stillness, Amalia could now hear the pilot curse vigorously. The craft remained aloft for a few more moments as the last gasps of power in the systems faded and it began to sink.

Another burst of projectiles passed over her head with a sharp crack, but they had been aimed high and the rounds passed by harmlessly. Then, as if a rope had been cut, the skiff dropped. It hit the ground with a shriek of yielding metal as a cloud of dust obscured it from view. Amalia saw stars and unbuckled her harness to help the pilot but when she got out of the crumpled heap she found Hansen already gone.

“Get down!” yelled the familiar voice of Hansen. She obeyed and hit the ground without thinking. More silvery projectiles cracked through the remains of the craft. Amalia crawled towards the source of the voice and soon found the pilot sprawled low against the side of a stormwater gutter. He motioned for her to join him and he produced a small sidearm. Hansen whispered, “Do you know how to shoot?”

Amalia looked over the weapon. It was much more compact than the semi-auto carbines her family used to get rid of the larger pests. “I’ve shot at grain lizards.”

“Good enough. Safety’s on the right side. Fifteen rounds of armor-piercing flechettes. Not a lot of kick but it should be enough to flatten anyone not in an exo-suit.” Hansen paused as Amalia looked over the pistol. She reached out and took it. The pistol felt too light in her hand for the weight of what it could do. “One shot per trigger pull…” Hansen was interrupted by the sound of heavy footfalls. Seemingly out of nowhere, he produced a large weapon like the marines had used earlier. He nosed it over the edge of the building. He trained it back and forth across the rubble of the city block. He twitched and then froze his eyes, the only thing that dared to move on his body.

His off hand lowered slowly and he made a hand signal that Amalia was not familiar with. She moved her head slowly from side to side hoping the pilot would see it in his peripheral vision.

Hansen’s jaw slackened slightly and he made a low growl, “One enemy, stay down.” He made the hand signal again and said the words that corresponded to each movement.

Amalia nodded slowly. She pressed her body hard against the edge and raised the pistol to her chest. She could feel her heart beating in her ears. She willed herself to move slightly but Hansen hissed a no at her. Almost imperceptibly Hansen's weapon moved to line up a shot. His offhand braced the bottom of the weapon and his finger curled around the trigger.

In stark contrast to the stillness that had preceded it Hansen's gun let out a fiery bark and a controlled burst of three armor-piercing rounds sailed down to meet their target. Hansen adjusted for the recoil and his target's movement and let another three rounds out to find their mark. Four more times Hansen fired at their assailant until he said in the same unmoving growl, “Target down."

Amalia peered over the edge of the building and she saw the remains of a yellow and blue exo-suit in tatters amongst the rubble. Hansen whispered, "You keep watch, I'm going to check over our ride. Gun's got a built-in power supply that should still be intact."

Amalia nodded and dutifully scanned the edges of the district administration square. Nothing moved and the smoke was starting to obscure her vision. The smell of it burned her eyes and she had to blink away tears. It soon forced her back from the edge and she called out to Hansen, "I can't see through the smoke, do you have a scanner on that thing?"

Hansen poked his head out of the cupola, "Yep, give me a second to get it online." He disappeared into the vastness of the gun emplacement and a few moments later a whirring noise filled the air. Hydraulics protested as the entire emplacement rose nearly a meter before stabilizing legs extended and leveled the entire assembly. The final structure dwarfed the remains of the skiff, now crushed from the descent and the gun's stabling legs. Hansen's head popped out again, "Got her up and running." He smiled broadly." I've already got fire-support calls coming in so I think you should hop in here and give me a hand with the targeting." Hansen brought a hand out and pointed to an access hatch. "I'll open that up for you."

Amalia slipped the pistol into her waistband and climbed up the side of the gun. The hatch swung open just as she got to it and Hansen's face beamed out at her. "Looks cozy," she said.

"The real ones on the Avalon are much more spacious," said Hansen.

"Is the Avalon your ship?" asked Amalia excitement creeping into the edges of her voice. She squeezed into the side compartment and sat on the edge of the hatch opening.

"Yep. I've been a gunnery expert on her for 12 cycles. Cap sent me down with the marines to give them a hand with stuff like this," said Hansen as he gestured above his head. "I'm going to be in fire control, you sit up there in the commander's seat. It's a pretty standard setup, if you could pilot that skiff you can handle this." He showed her the various command interfaces and how to receive, prioritize, and send the target information to his station. "Now just because you're up here in command doesn't mean you outrank me." He winked. "One last thing." Hansen switched the side display to a waterfall readout. "This is the comms system. Normally we'd have a comms officer here to do the actual relaying of information, and I'm going to have my hands full getting this girl on target and doing the firing calculations. Stick to readbacks and callout 'fire for effect' and no one will ever know you weren't a comms officer."

Amalia nodded and set to work. The commander's position was well shielded and she barely heard the reports of the mortar. She could still feel them though. Each shot shook her teeth and she hoped that the skiff's crash didn't do too much damage to the roof's structure.

She hadn't realized how intense the fighting was until she saw it playing out on the information screen in front of her. Small blue dots representing the friendly forces jostled slowly with pink and red dots. The pink ones were estimated enemy positions and the red ones were actively tracked. By her count, there were thousands of each, scattered across the entirety of the city's districts. Hansen and here were resented by a small yellow dot to the north of the main gate into the city. A dotted yellow outline showed their effective engagement range and anytime a red dot appeared in it she would forward the target's information to Hansen.

He would swing the big guns to bear and if everything went well the red dot would disappear. For hours she tracked and he eliminated red dots in their little circle. A small cloud of blue dots moved close to them and Amalia heard a familiar voice.

"This is platoon echo-five to mobile artillery hotel-lima-two. We are moving to support your position. What is your status?" Said a heavily distorted voice that Amalia could still recognize as Lasalle.

"This is hotel-lima-two, status is good," said Amalia searching for the right technical term.

"Tell them we're no longer 'mobile' artillery," came Hansen's voice from below.

"This is hotel-lima-two, we're actually...um...fixed artillery. The transport skiff was destroyed but the mortar is fully functional." Said Amalia over the radio.

"Copy that hotel." There was a moment of dead air as the Lieutenant held the channel open. "Is this the civy girl who knew about the spiders?”

"Yes ma'am." Said, Amalia. "Ensign Hansen gave me control of comms."

“Ensign Hansen should consider joining the commissioning office if he gets tired of plotting shot trajectories,” Said Lasalle. A red light blinked on, indicating the Lieutenant had switched the connection to private, “Why don’t you hop out of that thing and join us down here and we’ll send up one of our techs.”

“Yes ma’am,” said Amalia. “Hey Hansen,” she yelled down to the gunnery position, “I’m getting out to talk with the Lieutenant, she’s sending up an actual comm-tech.”

“It’s been fun,”  There was a long pause while the Ensign thought. “If we meet again in a less hostile setting the first round’s on me.”

“I’ll take you up on that,” said Amalia as she twisted open the side access hatch. She clambered down the ladder built into the side of the turret and picked her way down to the ground through the remains of the administration building. Marines had already begun fortifying the ground floor. They placed several pintle-mounted heavy weapons behind sloped piles of rubble. Several of the soldiers gave her formal salutes as she passed and they directed her towards Lasalle’s command center.

The walls of the building were scarred by fire but nestled in the middle of the building were a set of massive metal doors. A laser stencil “FOB-HL2” had been haphazardly applied to one of them. As she got nearer to the door a marine in a partially damaged exo-suit moved from the shadows. Their arm-mounted weapon was extended menacingly and the dull glow of an infrared illuminator swept over Amalia.

“Civilian Amalia to see Lieutenant Lasalle,” barked an augmented voice from the exo-suit.

“Enter,” came the Lieutenant’s voice from the same loudspeaker. The metal doors unlatched and swung open revealing a cavernous meeting room. The original ceiling lamps were burnt out but the room was still brightly lit by dozens of holo projectors. Amalia immediately recognized several of the screens as zoomed-in versions of the mapping system she had been using. Others displayed long lists of callsigns and status indicators and even more had an inscrutable series of live camera feeds mixed with scouting reports and annotated still images. The sheer amount of information on display made Amalia slightly dizzy.

Lieutenant Lasalle stood at one end of the room holding yet another holo device, but this one had a security lock that prevented Amalia from seeing its contents. Lasalle spoke without looking up, “Sorry to pull you from your new job, but you said your last name was Perez, correct?”

“Yes ma’am,” Said Amalia, slightly confused.

Lasalle looked up from the display and squarely met Amalia’s eyes, “I think we found your parents.”

Amalia nearly jumped in surprise, “What? Where are they? Are they hurt?”

Lasalle raised a hand to temper Amalia’s barrage of questions. “One of my scouts found a damaged civilian transport and reported two feisty non-combatants nearby. The transport’s toast but the two people were uninjured. Looks like they tried to get out of town but got hit by an enemy strike team.”

“Can I get to them?” Asked Amalia, nearly pleading.

Lasalle turned the security screen off and handed the display to Amalia. “I’ve got a strike team ready to secure that region.” The display showed a series of small blue triangles with a collective callsign “O34” and a dashed red circle outlining an area about 3 kilometers away. “Your artillery work has cleared most of the heavy elements in that zone but we still suspect a couple of teams of infantry are still holed up.” Lasalle gestured and the map panned and zoomed to the extent of the dashed circle. She pointed to an intersection at the bottom of the circle. “That’s where we think your parents are. If you can get to them we can radio in an air transport and get you all to the Avalon.”

“When do we go?” Asked Amalia.

“The team’s suiting up now. For liability reasons, I can’t officially give you a gun or armor.” Amalia reflexively felt the sidearm tucked into her waistband and Lasalle smirked. “That one doesn’t count, I didn’t give it to you.”

“Yes ma’am,” said Amalia.

“Your team leader is Sergeant Campion, and he should be heading out in an APV by the top of the hour. Amalia gave the Lieutenant a crisp salute like the ones she had seen the other soldiers give her and Lasalle responded in kind. “Dismissed.”

Amalia didn’t have any equipment to inspect or pack so she headed straight to meet with her new team. She found the strike team packing the last of several large ammunition crates into the back of the APV. The four-wheeled vehicle looked like a slightly more rugged version of her family’s transport, but where the flatbed had been there was a massive armored box. She spotted the Sergeant talking with another soldier dressed in a red jumpsuit.

“I can’t take this thing up that route, there’s too much damage to the roads and buildings,” said the man in red.

“We need to get up there, and I don’t want to take the scenic route,” said the Sergeant.

“Excuse me, sir. I’m supposed to join your team,” Interrupted Amalia.

The Sergeant looked over to Amalia and glanced back to the man in red. “Get me and my team up there, end of discussion.” Then to Amalia, he said, “Right, Perez. LT told me I can’t outfit you, but you’re more than welcome on the team. Most of the marines call me Camp.” He extended a gauntleted hand and Amalia shook it firmly. Campion showed her how to strap into the APV and went over the basics of their team movements. Amalia’s job was to locate her parents and call in the transport when the area had been secured. Campion explained that it wasn’t a true combat operation and that his team was expecting only a handful of enemy contacts left in the area.

The APV moved abruptly and each bump lifted Amalia several centimeters out of her chair. It was extremely unpleasant, but after a few minutes, she heard the order to prepare to disembark. Amalia was the last out of the transport and no sooner than her feet had cleared the exit hatch the transport roared away in a cloud of dust. The strike team moved with precision from corner to corner.

She could hear the occasional cough of a mortar or rapid snap of smaller caliber weapons echoing in the distance but their area remained quiet. The Sergeant signaled to Amalia to move up next to him. He pointed to an intersection a dozen meters up the road. Embedded into the former side of a building was her family transport. It was scorched in several places and the back tires had seemingly been blown off by an explosion. The crew compartment looked mostly intact and no battle wounds perforated its structure. “That’s where the scout encountered the two folks,” said Campion to Amalia. He made two more hand gestures and four members of the team jumped up and ran forward. “Let’s go get your parents.” With that Sergeant Campion also stood up and began running along the edge of the street.

Amalia tried to keep up with the strike team but their augmented armor gave them much more powerful strides. They were nearly at the intersection when an explosion cracked over their heads like thunder. Bits of white-hot shrapnel hit Amalia in the arm and she cried out in pain. Other yells filled the air and the sounds of gunfire soon masked them. The entire team had taken up firing positions and were aiming down the remains of a side street.

Occasional orange streaks from tracer rounds shot out of the street back at the team. One soldier collapsed as an invisible fist punched through his shoulder and splattered the wall behind him in a crimson spray. A new sound came up over the din of battle. The whine of a high-speed electric motor rose up and then exploded with a deep rumble that Amalia could feel in her chest. The cover in front of several of the soldiers disappeared in a wave of immense force. When the dust began to clear the soldiers too had vanished.

Amalia felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around to see her father’s face covered in dirt and soot. She gave him a powerful hug as his own strong arms pulled her closer. He beckoned her to retreat into a collapsed storefront, but as she stood up rounds cracked all around their hiding spot. Unable to move they watched as a massive blue exo-suit emerged from the opposite street. Slung low at its hip was an equally massive rotary cannon.

The barrels of the cannon were a blur as they spun in their carriage. The suit’s controller fired disciplined bursts from the barrels at the strike team’s positions as it relentlessly advanced. Amalia saw the Sergeant lean around a corner and fire from his weapon. The rounds were inaudible in the continuous roar of the blue suit’s weapon but they found their mark. Sparks flew from the carriage and the sound of yielding metal replaced the cannon’s report.

The blue suit examined the damage to its weapon and then dropped it. More sparks flicked along the edges of the suit as the marines retaliated, but the suit continued to walk forward, its built-in weapon system deploying along the right arm. It leveled the arm at the marines and a new wave of projectiles slammed into their positions.

Amalia heard the Sergeant yell a retreat and the marines began to fall back along the street. Amalia’s father grabbed her shoulder again and pointed behind the stricken transport. If her father hadn’t pointed she never would have seen the human form tucked amongst the rubble. Her mother was now trapped between the retreating marines and the slowly advancing exo-suit.

Amalia acted before she had even thought of the plan. With startling quickness, she sprinted to the fallen marine and grabbed his heavy rifle. She fumbled with the controls on the side and tucked it tight to her shoulder. The suit’s controller seemed to notice her and the torso twisted to face her.

The under-slung grenade launcher thumped and the rifle recoiled into Amalia’s shoulder. A high-explosive grenade arced on a trail of smoke and impacted the chest of the suit. It disappeared behind a cloud of smoke and fire and Amalia examined the rifle again. She switched it to another fire mode and pointed at the place the suit had been. The suit advanced again as smoke continued to pour out of a jagged wound in its armor. Electronics sparked in the cavity and the left arm hung limp at its side, but it still shuffled forward.

Amalia squeezed again and this time the rifle let out an automatic cascade of armor-piercing rounds. She lacked the reinforced structure of the marine's armor to keep the heavy weapon pointed straight and the round pinged wildly over the surface of the exo-suit. The impacts slowed it and each hit seemed to take a small amount of life from the hulking mass.

The scream of a rocket motor came from somewhere out of her vision and in an instant, the exo-suit was again engulfed in fire. Another scream and blast followed by another and another until the suit collapsed into a smoldering pile.

Amalia hadn’t noticed she had stopped breathing. The first breath she took burned and she felt her stomach start to turn. She dropped the rifle to her side and just stared at the remains of the suit. A marine found her and shouted to someone outside of Amalia’s awareness, “Hey Camp, I found her, she’s been hit in the arm.”

The Sergeant’s face appeared at the edge of Amalia’s vision. “Hey, stay with me,” Campion said.

Amalia felt a sharp poke in her left arm and suddenly the world flooded back into her consciousness. She shook the disorientation from her head. “Are my parents OK?”

“We’re fine Amalia, thanks to you,” said her father as she felt his firm hands grasp hers. Her father was kneeling by her side and standing just behind him was her mother.

“I’m going to call in the evac shuttle, I’ve got five wounded marines and you should get that arm looked at,” said Campion. “They’ll take your parents too.” He nodded to them. “You raised one hell of a fighter.”

Another marine came over carrying a large container. “Camp, here’s the flag.”

The Sergeant nodded to the marine and pointed to a spot next to Amalia. “Would you do us the honor of setting up this flag?”

Amalia looked confused as Campion gestured towards the flat black box. “How?”

“It’s a high-power holo lamp. We’ve already configured it so all you need to do is activate it with this key,” said Campion holding out a small key chip.

Amalia agreed and sat up. Her shoulder ached but she was able to insert the small key into the control panel. The familiar Hegemony fanfare played on the same cheap speakers that her brother’s holo experiences used. Relays inside the case clicked and a holo lamp hummed as it warmed up. A hegemony crest slowly materialized in the space above them. Cheers erupted from the marines around Amalia as the phoenix rose from the ashes of the city into the sky.

It has been three years since the bombs fell and in that time we have torn and burned and gnawed and survived. Every battle is hard-fought and we know that every ship we lose brings us all one step closer to annihilation. The XIV is nearly exhausted in this war but the Hegemony is as vast as it is mighty and our allies in the Church remain vigilant in their commitment to our aid. We took vows to end the AI threat and serve until our jobs were done. We were born to the stars on the wings of starships. We fought against the other in the endless vastness of space where magnetically accelerated projectiles danced in the vacuum against a backdrop of energy beams and missile trails. The enemy now knows what it is like to feel fear and we look to rout them from our home.

Amalia’s uniform was freshly pressed and her dark hair was pulled tight against the back of her head. Her toes hooked under the railing of the corridor kept her from drifting as she awaited the final docking process. Twenty-seven other recruits, all fresh from their commissioning, anchored in silence. Of those twenty-seven nearly all of them were from Naraka and had joined the Hegemony after the failed attempt at invasion of Yama. Thousands of soldiers had died at the actions of the AI-led fleet and tens of thousands of civilians had been murdered in their atrocities.

It had been the mutual spark that ignited the recruits’ fire for revenge. They had been put through the rigors of basic combat training and then on to flight school. Most applicants ended up in the auxiliary as technicians or assigned to other support vessels. Amalia’s cadre had instead been commissioned by the Memory of Sideris, a monitor-class hull so fresh off the production lines the paint was still drying.

Their shuttle ride from the military academy on Nachiketa was blessedly short. In three years the news from the front lines had done nothing if not fan the flames of revenge hotter and brighter. Every newly commissioned officer on the shuttle would have given their life to take down the corporation. They were all eager to take the fight to the enemy.

A muster tone came over the shuttle’s loudspeaker and they dutifully pulled themselves into attention. There was a final bump as the ships joined together and the automated callouts announced a proper airlock seal and positive pressure on both sides of the main hatch. Amalia could hear the mag-booted footfalls and the sharp click of soldiers moving to attention.

The shuttle’s hatch hissed and slid neatly out of the way of the Sideris’ commanding officer. A thin man in a Luddic Church uniform kicked off the threshold and spun gracefully to the center of the group. A nimble hand practiced at maneuvering in low gravity caught the edge of a railing and pulled the thin man into an upside-down orientation to the rest of the crew. He spoke with a booming voice that belied his thin frame, “Welcome to the crew of the Memory of Sideris, I am Knight Dudley Howe of the Church of Galactic Redemption.” His dark eyes surveyed the assembly below him. “I know you’re all eager and bloodthirsty to take the fight straight to Artemisia Sun, but we have important work to do getting this ship combat certified. You all will be instrumental in her formal shakedown cruise. We will join up with a small reserve combat fleet currently escorting a trade convoy en route from the outer jump point to Yama. We should meet them as they start to pass through The Servants. The inbound asteroids and other debris should make good target practice and excellent tests of our target tracking systems. From there we are scheduled to depart the system with the trade convoy and escort them to Aztlan. A Hegemony task force is assembling there to take on one of the largest remaining Persean League armadas raiding Hegemony colonies. With any luck, we’ll be fully certified and able to join the task group in about 2 months’ time. Now.” He released himself from the gantry and pushed off towards the airlock. “Let’s get to work.” He passed through the hatch and out of sight down the docking tube.

Two thicker men rounded the corner from where Howe had vanished and barked orders to the new crew. “I’m XO Gibbs and this is Naval Oversight Officer Mosley. We’re the ones that will be running all of the drills to make sure both you and this ship are up to the task of serving in the combined Church-Hegemony Navy.” Both men surveyed the fresh crew in a more severe way than the Lieutenant had. “Report to your berths and be ready for your duty stations in 30 minutes. Dismissed!”

Amalia broke from her stance and pushed off towards her storage locker. On her way, she overheard several of the other crew:

“Hell of a posting.”

“I know, right? Brand new ship. Serving under a Luddite. We might as well sign our commissioning bonus away right now.”

“Yeah, do you think we’ll be able to get cleared for combat in 2 months?”

“I’ve heard that the navy’s lost so many of its elite combat ships they’re signing up anything with a hull and gun.”

“And that first one is optional.”

“Hey, Perez. What does the third-best pilot in the Naraka class of 93 think of all this?” asked a black-haired recruit of Amalia from across the shuttle.

Amalia felt heat rising up inside her. She had missed commissioning on her first choice, the Avalon, by a handful of points in her final exam and resented the ship and crew she was forced to sign on with. “Monitors are sturdy, but they lack the maneuverability of a Wolf or the punch of a Brawler. We’ll probably be assigned to escort duty in a big flotilla, covering the backside of a carrier or battlecruiser.”

“No glory,” Said another crew member.

“Not dead,” Said the black-haired one.

Amalia tightened the shoulder harness of her duffle and kicked off towards the airlock. She lost track of the conversation behind her and ignored the frivolity of the crew as it faded away. The docking tube was mostly transparent and gave the best view of her new home she had seen.

The Memory was much more slender than she expected it to be. The bulbous flak cannon blisters rounded the shoulders of the ship like a boxer’s glove. They seemed almost comically large compared to the rest of the ship. The undersized engines were nearly the same size as the shuttle’s but there were two sets for what it was worth. Monitors weren’t meant to run around a combat volume, they were matched to the performance of a stock cruiser. A cruiser like the Avalon.

She pictured the Memory’s massive flak cannons popping entire squadrons of AI drones before they could hurt the Avalon. A little joy filtered back into her thoughts as she crossed the final articulation joint. On the other side of the hatch to the Memory stood XO Gibbs. He was looking sternly at a holo pad. Amalia wondered if he looked that way at his breakfast too.

Gibbs looked up, his expression unmoved by the presence of another person. “Perez. Good. Bunk A12. You’re on the first shift so get your things stowed and up to the bridge for orientation.” Amalia gave him a passing salute, which he waved off. “Bunk, bridge, get to it.”

Over the next several hours Amalia was forced to re-learn everything she had been taught at flight school. The monitor was so unresponsive that all her moves had to be planned several seconds in advance. Her job was straightforward enough though. All she ever got was a heading and velocity to match and she would nudge the ship in the appropriate ways. She could hear the XO barking shield commands to the flustered operators behind her as they fumbled with the intricate controls. Too many buttons, she thought to herself as the XO corrected the shield tech the third time on the proper timing to deploy the Monitor’s fortress shield. She idly tapped a thruster control and ship rolled to present a least aspect to their imaginary foe.

A gentle voice came from her side, “Good intuition Perez, but wait for the command. We could have been lining up a shield or firing a rocket salvo and that maneuver could spoil it.”

“Sorry, Sir,” said Amalia quickly.

Howe’s thin frame floated beside her, but with the soft click of him activating the magnetic anchors on his boots, he settled onto the deck.

“I would like to see you in the officer’s meeting room at the conclusion of this exercise,” said the Lieutenant, his gaze boring through Amalia.

“Yes, Sir,” she said just as quickly as before.

Howe’s heels clicked again and he rose imperceptibly from the floor before gliding away as if pulled by an invisible string.

Amalia grew more and more nervous as the exercise drew to a close. She signed her post over to the next shift’s pilot and made her way back to the officer’s deck. The primary crew quarters were spartan, as was the case for almost all Hegemony vessels, but the officers’ quarters were ornately decorated with real-wood inlays and brass fixtures. She wondered how many combats it would be before these corridors were replaced with the more readily available military-grade gray metal that the rest of the ship was made from.

As she approached the meeting room she heard the voices of Howe and Mosely. She couldn’t make out the exact words but Mosley was animated about something. She knocked at the door and silence filled the whole corridor like a heavy blanket. Howes’s voice squeaked, “Come in Ensign Perez.”

Amalia opened the door slowly and the amber light of false oil lamps greeted her. Seated around a massive wooden table were the two Hegemony Officers. A holo display had recently been set to conceal its contents and all that remained was a floating standby message over the middle of the table.

“Sit, please, Ensign. I believe you are familiar with our Hegemony liaison, Captain Mosley?” asked Howe perfunctorily.

“Yes, sir. The XO introduced him before we came on board,” said Amalia.

“Good,” said Howe. “The Captain is here to ensure that there is cooperation between our governments. As part of that he would like to interview the crew. I believe he had several questions for you.”

“I do indeed. First of which, is what you are doing on this ship?” Asked Mosley, pointing a thick finger at Amalia.

“I graduated third in my class from the flight school on Nachiketa. For that I was granted commission on a Hegemony Navy frigate,” Said Amalia trying to conceal the contempt she had for the posting.

Mosley scoffed. “Why is the third-ranking pilot on an escort frigate, who did you *** off at the Academy?”

Amalia shrank into her chair. “I’m not aware that I made any enemies while I studied at Nachiketa.”

“Just as well,” said Mosley. He opened a small holo pad and pulled up several files. “You’re a local, yes?”

“Yessir,” said Amalia.

Mosley made several notes on files Amalia could not see. He lifted his gaze slowly and met her eyes. “Do you feel like you belong here?”

Amalia got the impression the question was not directed at her, but she still replied. “No sir, I do not think I belong on an escort frigate.”

Mosley smiled and opened his mouth to speak.

“My escort frigate.” Howe interrupted softly, “Is the last remaining XIV frigate from the original flotilla. We dressed her up at the shipyards on Chicomoztoc to disguise her real purpose.”

Mosley snapped, “Why was I not informed?”

“Because it is the same reason we fixed this cadet’s exam scores. No one must know that this ship is intercepting a traitorous battle group,” said Howe slowly and deliberately. He pressed several buttons on a recessed panel. The holo projector burst to life displaying a scale version of the system. A series of red triangles followed a dotted path terminating on Nachiketa. A single blue triangle followed another path that intercepted the others just beyond the start of a shaded area. “Ensign Perez, I believe you will recognize the lead ship of this group.” Howe reached forward and touched one of the triangles.

The unmistakable shape of a heavy transport rotated slowly on the table in front of Amalia. “I’m sorry sir, I don’t know this ship.” She said, trying to hide surprise from her voice.

“Then maybe you would know its captain,” said Howe as the face of Nayar Perez appeared before her for the first time in years. There were several scars on her cheek that were not there in his boyhood and his eyes had a faraway look Amalia could not recall ever seeing in her brother.

Mosley screamed from across the table, “You brought his sister onto the ship that’s supposed to destroy him?”

“Yes.” Said Howe deliberately. “Because we are not going to destroy him.”

Mosley flew into a rage and hurled curses at Howe and Amalia’s brother though it could be said he was kinder to her brother. “That pirate scum should be released to the vacuum of space and left to drift for millennia.”

Howe brought both his hands above the table and folded them intricately. “Captain Mosley. I brought you into this room as an observer. This plan comes straight from the Combined War Council. There is a massive artificial intelligence task force assembling at an unknown star system just outside the range of the Hegemony’s sight. They are looking to destroy both Nachiketa and Yama in one attack. They will not fail because they are not going to capture either planet from us. They will simply bombard both planets until their surfaces are polished glass.” Howe let the words sit in the room before continuing.

“If there has been one thing we have learned in fighting these autonomous ships it is that they are single-minded in their pursuits. They lack tactics, charging endlessly into the fray, and knowing not of retreat, they are unable to appreciate a battlefield for the art it represents. Their cold logic dictates moves and motives and that can be exploited.

“We will deny them their prize by tempting them with something they cannot ignore. The pirate Nayar will masquerade as a Persean League raiding party as a previously unknown XIV battle group will appear to fight them within The Servants. To our enemies we will present an irresistible target; a wounded XIV battle group attempting to leave the system following a pitched battle.

“What kind of plan is this?” asked Mosley.

Howe looked amused and opened his palms towards Amalia. “I believe she is quite familiar with this tactic.”

Amalia wet her lips before speaking. “On my family’s farm, there was a species of modified Old Earth snake. They were engineered to hunt pests like the native mouse analogues or the virulent species of lizard that gnawed on the grain stalks, but in that engineering, they knew only to attack what was in front of them. You could lure them away from the house with a sock at the end of the stick and they would only ever strike at the sock. When we fought the invasion forces they only ever cared about the major threats. We could slip behind them or around them easily.”

“We will draw out the enemy and cut off its head before it ever has the chance to strike,” said Howe.

Mosley looked even more dismissive, “What about Nayar, do you think he’ll be satisfied acting in this farce?”

“We have already negotiated his price,” Said Howe gesturing once again towards Amalia.

Like the cornered predator, they lash out unpredictably and with unrepentant violence. Our forces stand guard against these attacks, but we worry for the safety of our colonies. I stand in vigil on the command deck of my ship ready to allay the fears of my people on the worlds below. We do not believe the High Hegemony when he says he will protect us at all costs. For in war, we are the ones who pay the costs.

Nayar rested his forehead against the diamond-laced viewport. The coolness of the material eased his worries and calmed his mind. It had been a long time since the orange glow of Naraka had kissed his face. He welcomed it and dreaded what it represented.

When he left so many years ago he had hoped to buy his way back on another freight contract. The war had changed so much before he even left the planet’s surface. There were no independent contracts. He had bounced around serving both sides of the war. He followed the command of his captain until one day he found he was the one leading. By then he amassed a following of loyal ships, truly an armada for a dust farmer’s kid.

He had contracted with the Hegemony and they had asked him to do terrible things. They had promised him redemption but at every turn they denied him. They labeled him as a brigand, a murderer, and an agent of the enemy. But they always called him back.

The clandestine agent had met him in a bar. The hushed code words exchanged in knowing whispers. The agent had mentioned his sister, Amalia. They could get her from the Academy and transfer her to his crew. All it would take was a simple job. He could dress up a few aging warships and act as bait for the enemy fleet. It wasn’t going to be easy, but it was worth seeing his sister again.

There was an unnatural glint in the distance when Nayar’s comm officer announced, “One contact, confirmed Hegemony IFF, it’s the Memory of Sideris. Should I hail them?”

“Encrypted channel, put them through to my console.” Commanded Nayar as he made his way to the secure terminal at his command chair.

There was a burst of static and slowly a picture of a thin Luddic Knight resolved from the chaos.

“Knight Howe, nice to see you again,” said Nayar in a fake pleasantry.

“Yes, Mr. Perez. It is always a pleasure. I believe we are safely masked in the dust and debris so we can begin the operation at your signal. I do have to keep the crew on this ship somewhat unaware of the exact goings on so do be prompt about it,” said the thin man.

“What about my sister?” asked Nayar pointedly.

“You will be reunited at the close of this arrangement,” oozed the thin man.

Nayar closed the channel and signaled his comms officer to begin the prepared operation. His freighter and most of the others in his flotilla carried nearly a dozen hidden cruisers and destroyers in their cargo bays. Normally they would entice an unsuspecting bounty hunter or enemy fleet to engage with the transports and then disgorge their much more lethal cargo. Nayar rarely lost these engagements. But today the ships his transports carried were derelict XIV hulls.

Most of them were combat ineffective; broken drives, destroyed weapon mounts, unreliable systems, and a litany of other issues that made them more hazardous to their crews than to any enemy. They would make for a very suggestive cover story and a tempting target for the real enemy fleet.

Nayar had rigged many of the ships up with systems that would resemble weapons fire to any sensors looking their way. The chaos of the asteroid field would mask any ability to truly see anything going on and all any outside observers would see would be a large number of warships emerging from an apparent pitched battle.

Nayar’s fleet had already been known to be a menace so the idea of the Hegemony laying a trap for him with some elite ships was not completely ridiculous. Or at least he hoped that was the case when the real enemy showed up and asked him what happened at the end of a mass driver.

The plan called for nearly a full day of engagements. Towards the end of the proposed “attack,” both of his crews on his real ships and the derelicts were beginning to feel weary. Finally, after nearly twenty straight hours of fake combat, Howe called Nayar and told him to initiate the next phase of the plan.

He had set his own ships to look wounded as they fled back towards the jump point. Howe had called the derelicts to inform them they would be falling back to the fuel depot at Nachiketa, a slight change in plans but not out of the scope of possible requests.

The first indication their ruse had been successful was the slight uptick in high-energy particles at one of the inbound jump points. It meant something big or a bunch of less big things were getting ready to jump into the system. Nayar’s sensor team nearly fell out of their command chairs when the first wave came through the jump point.

There were nearly four-dozen enemy ships in total. Everything from heavy battleships to destroyer-class carriers, all burning hard for Nachiketa. Nayar knew there was a trap to be sprung; he couldn't imagine the kind of firepower the Hegemony would need to bring to this fight. He doubted there were enough ships in the whole Navy to fight that many AI warships at once.

But none of them came.

He watched in horror as the AI warships descended on the broken ships his own crews were trying to hold together. The makeshift particle beams and mass drivers were nearly useless against the perfect shields and hulls of the enemy warships.

He watched as each ship blew apart, their reactors exploding in uncontrolled runaway states. They fell back further and further until the enemy warships pressed the last of survivors against the fuel depot.

Then there was a flash brighter than any reactor core detonation he had ever seen. His operations chief yelled from across the command deck, “They vented the whole goddamn station. The antimatter. They vented it right into the face of those AI ships.”

It took hours for the background to cool enough for the sensors to make out what was left. The heavily fortified refueling plant was mostly intact. Its exterior was superheated to several thousand degrees, but it was still intact. The entire industrial complex that had grown up around the plant was gone. Not destroyed, not blown apart, but simply gone. It was as if someone had turned the clock back to the first few months after the Domain had finished contracting the plant.

The Hegemony had dealt a decisive blow against the Tri-Tachyon and all but assured they could continue the fight if not outright win, no matter the cost.

Nayar slammed his fist against his command chair and yelled to his comms officer, “Get me Howe on an unsecured line. I want the Sector to hear what he has to say.”

A few minutes later his comms officer replied, “I’ve got Howe, or, I’ve got your sister.”

Amalia’s face appeared on the comms screen. “My name is Amalia Perez, sister to Nayar Perez, the criminal war boss. As part of a coordinated strike plan Nayar and I conspired to destroy Nachiketa’s fuel industry and all supporting infrastructure.”

Knight Howe stepped into the edge of the frame, “The Hegemony Navy, in a desperate act to save the inhabitants on Yama and the important fuel industry on Nachiketa, tactically purged the antimatter containment storage on Nachiketa. The resulting explosion has claimed many lives at the hands of the traitors in the Perez family. The Hegemony Navy will respond to this threat and work to protect its citizens from the threats we face daily.”

“What the *** did we just watch?” exclaimed one of Nayar’s officers.

“We’ve been set up,” said Nayar in a flat tone. “We’re going to take the fall for this and the Hegemony will come knocking on our door the next time they need a bad guy in a jar.” Nayar gave the order to burn all ships hard toward the jump point. He still knew of a couple of places a pirate captain-turned-genocidal maniac could hide. His operations officer was the first to notice the Hegemony cruiser powered down beyond the jump point.

The Avalon, being a ship designed for long-duration hyperspace flight, had many systems in place to enable a rapid startup procedure in the event they were surprised while in transit to a new sector. Those systems were now being used to spring the final trap on Nayar’s weary fleet.

The beam weapons on the cruiser made short work of his lighter transports before they could even turn around to change direction. Their hulls still glowed from the heat of the beams as they drifted lifelessly past the cruiser. Nayar’s flagship was massive and it took several barrages from the cruiser’s Heavy Maulers before the reactor core gave up.

Nayar was loose from his command chair, the final impact of the high explosive rounds had shaken the ship violently. He was sure the ship was split in half. He had no control over his motion but he drifted slowly towards the diamond-laced view port. His hands gently caught his fall towards the window and he pressed his forehead against the cool material.

The Avalon was equipped with a pair of torpedo launchers, intended as finishers they would make short work of heavily armored capital ships whose shield systems had overloaded. Against the mixed debris of a civilian-grade cargo hauler, they were a cleaning tool. What remained of the ships would exist as a slowly cooling bay of gas for the next few hundred cycles before each molecule was scattered across the vastness of interstellar space.

We commit this body to the holy vacuum, dust to dust, stars to stars, that the Creator may renew us in the cycle of eternal life.

Amalia stirred in the corner of the containment cell. There was more commotion in the prison complex than normal. A priest’s voice carried the last rites of another prisoner from somewhere down the hall. She only barely lifted her eyes as the funeral parade shuffled by. She did not know the other prisoners and they did not know her.

She had lost track of time. The guard delivered her food randomly to make sure she would have no reference for the passage of time. There were no windows and only the dimmest of artificial lighting.

The priest was not so cruel. He would show up just as Amalia was beginning to fade and he would sit and pray with her. His voice calmed her and she found herself lost in his words.

He talked about the sacred path of Ludd. He told her about the redemption that could be found in following the Creator’s guidance. He told her of the evils of the machine, how artificiality was the decay at the heart of human suffering. There was belonging in his words. In them, she began to find redemption.

During the attack, she had done something terrible. Something she could not atone for in her own words. The words of the priest offered solace and understanding. She could be forgiven.

It had been Howe that had betrayed her family, not her. He had been the one to orchestrate the false attack and the plant to lure the artificial fleet from its hiding spot. She had been piloting the Memory of Sideris when they made contact with Nayar’s fleet. She had seen her brother through the comm buffer but had been unable to contact him directly.

She watched the operation until her next duty cycle and even while piloting the ship kept a close eye on the engagement. Howe had given the order to withdraw and then commanded the false task force to fall back to Nachiketa. Then Amalia watched in horror as dozens of sleek warships poured into the system.

They crashed like a wave against the defenseless face fleet and pushed them further and further towards the fueling station. She had called out to Howe and pleaded with him to provide assistance. He had flatly refused saying that the Church had a Holy Armada on their way and should be able to make short work of the artificial fleet.

Amalia had a horrible idea flash across her mind. She had looked up the capacity of the refueling station and performed some very quick math on her terminal. There would be more than enough in the antimatter fuel reserves to damage or destroy most of the enemy ships.

The station was hardened against accidental containment breaches so it would be able to withstand the blast. She had gone to Howe with the plan. A smile that, at the time, had seemed happy grew on Howe’s face. He gave Amalia the command codes necessary to vent the station’s fuel. She had been the one to push the button.

The flash was orders of magnitude larger than she had expected or calculated. She looked back over the status and saw Howe had intervened and instead of a controlled release he had triggered every last container of antimatter to release its contents. Amalia looked back at Howe and realized his rictus grin had been filled with malice, not happiness.

The other crew in the command center turned toward Amalia and asked what she had done. Howe had appeared at her side faster than she could comprehend and his firm grasp lifted her from her chair. He had pulled her past several of the ship’s security detail insisting he needed to bring her to Captain Mosley. Instead, he had threatened to seize her family’s farm and lock them all in a Luddic gulag. There had been one offer of amnesty: she would have to confess to conspiring with her brother to destroy the facility on Nachiketa.

She had watched from the brig when a guard showed her a video feed of the Avalon tearing Nayar’s fleet apart. The guard had said her traitorous brother deserved a worse fate than to die in combat. The guard had said he should be locked away forever like she was going to be.

So she had.

Now as the priest left her to her thoughts once again she latched on to something he had said in the last few moments of prayer. The wretched corporation and its automated servants were the greatest threat to humanity ever known. Only those that followed in the Path of Ludd could stand against them.

She cried out and unsteadily ran to the cell door, her legs aching from such a long period of disuse. She called out to the priest and he turned back to meet her. She began to weep and tell the priest of her past life. At the end of her story, he placed a soft hand on hers and whispered, “Walk in peace, my child. When I next visit you we shall speak of what you can do to honor the Creator. May his light forever grace you as you follow in the footsteps of Ludd.”

The priest visited her more frequently now. He spoke of ways to destroy the machines that had enslaved mankind. She knew that she had to find a way to end the threat of the artificial machine no matter the cost.

The machine had destroyed her home. The machine had killed her family. The machine had brought her brother so near and then taken him away again. The machine was evil and it had to be stopped. She had taken the last of her wet food and used it to write a single line above the door to her containment cell. “I walk in the Path of Ludd. All who stray from it must be destroyed.” Amalia Perez had died in prison for her crimes and a new Child of the Path had been born to replace her.

Knight Howe lowered the hood of the priest robes and opened a small holo pad. “This one is especially receptive. I recommend her for the situation in Zagan.” He paused while another figure that only he could hear spoke. “I understand. The League will pay for siding with the servants of Moloch. Ludd’s will be praised, may he walk forever in the light.”
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Pretty good, tho i have to admit i kinda lost interest after the first half. Once the people in the city left all those refugees to die i was no longer invested in what happened to them.
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