Supreme Commander
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United Military
Prologue
X-Day: The Black Sun is fired by the UEF. However, due to a last-minute piece of tactical genius, a Cybran Commander orders all troops to fire upwards. This causes, by a ridiculously unlikely chance, the destruction of the Quantum Gate near Earth. Defied, the UEF can only watch as both Aeon and Cybran forces recall. Almost immediately after, a Quantum Rift opens up on Earth, and the entire planet is subjected to bombing from an unknown source. Death toll is estimated at 100%. QAI is lost, under the control of what is assumed to be the same force that destroyed Earth.
X-Day +11: The now-confirmed Seraphim invaders have crippled the Quantum Gate network, and Evaluator Kael has seized control of the Aeon Illuminate, renaming it the Order of the Illuminate, abandoning previous principles in favour of an alliance with the Seraphim. Isolated, Human worlds rush to defend themselves as the Seraphim begin annihilating Homo Sapiens. Over the next month, the Cybrans are decimated, and Dr. Brackman retreats into the darkest reaches of space.
X-Day +3 Months: Three months after the invasion and the UEF forces have suffered heavy losses. Commander William Hall takes command of the surviving force. The UEF and Cybran, both pushed to the edge, ally and form the Colonial Defence Coalition. Both militaries share a unified command structure. Eventually, Rhiza and the Aeon loyalists join the coalition.
X-Day+1 Year (A): The coalition launches its first offensive, suffering heavy causalities but gaining the first victory against the Seraphim.
C-Day: Over two years after the invasion, the UEF begins construction on Fort Clarke, a new base of operations located on the planet Griffin IV.
C-Day +6 Months: The Seraphim are defeated, and at a great cost. Three of the Coalition's best commanders have been lost to the war; Clarke, Dostya and Fletcher are all dead. Worse still, the Princess has been lost, presumed dead. However, it is not all negative; only a few Seraphim remain in the galaxy to threaten the Coalition, and some broken elements of the Order. Hall, after the Coalition has achieved what is officially labelled as a victory, signs a treaty with certain conditions to ensure that the Infinite War can never happen again.
Cybran, Aeon, and UEF space is amalgamated and all barriers removed: all Cybrans in the UEF are released from the loyalty program, and The Way becomes an officially accepted religion, taught in all schools across the Coalition. However, despite this great unification, racism still abounds and the UEF, having gone from a position of dominance to losing their Cybran slaves and having their children exposed to the UEF, is a source of great loathing of the so-called 'corrupting' other citizens of the Coalition, and this occasionally manifests itself in the form of a racist planetary mayor...
Chapter One
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Westock
"So, to summarise, by using a lens in the barrel of a laser, we can amplify the damage at the expense of beam width. Tomorrow, I shall discuss how to do this in the real world." She exhaled-after so long having everything she did be the result of her programming, it was a joy even to breathe of her own free will. Susan looked at the wooden desk, on a platform raised ten feet above the rest of the hemispherical room, again furnished with wood, seats with desks in front of them, all crafted with delicate care, by hand. The students had listened intently throughout the lecture, the only sounds being her voice and the scratching of pencils, except for the occasional question. As the students, all intelligent individuals, aged from eighteen to twenty one, finished scribbling down some details, she saw herself in the finely polished pine desk, in the oak veneer. Susan had a fresh face, like so many of those in front of her-not having to think had kept her young, although every moment had been torture. Her dark brown hair hung about her face, framing her oval-shaped head like a gold trim to a pearl or a ring. However, it was not as low as normal-she had, today, for no particular reason, decided to wear it in a ponytail, so that only occasional strands fell about her blue-eyed face.
Those light blue eyes, like a tropical ocean or some such thing, stared back at her in the veneer. But most striking were the red, hair-thin lines along the right side of her face, running along the side of it until a level equal with her right eye, stopping abruptly in a vertical line that crossed her eye, although the thin red lines curved around her eye, not actually intersecting it. The only other physically obvious detail distinguishing her as a Cybran was a Dostya-like interface port on her left temple, although it was hidden underneath hair. When Susan had heard of Dostya's death at the hands of Hex5, she had become very distressed, and had wept for her- in the brief period of freedom she had experienced before Dostya's death, she had become very attached to her, despite only ever reading about her or seeing her on news reports. Indeed, she had cried for several days about the event, and was insistent to the Dean that she would take a day off to go to the state funeral for the Elite Commander. It was taking place here, in Westock, along with the funeral of Fletcher. Although the bodies were destroyed, placeholders could be used-In Dostya's case, it would be the records of her conversations and what Symbiont equipment she had replaced over her lifetime-a few AI chips, and some other sundry gear.
She did not care what was going to be in place of Samantha Clarke or Fletcher's body, because she loathed them, as she did all members of the UEF. While she knew it was stereotyping the United Earth Federation's citizens, she simply could not find it within her to forgive the citizens of the UEF for what they had done, both to her and to her Cybran comrades. After being forced to work to the will of her oppressors for so long, Susan simply could not bear to see them as decent people. It was the most she could do to acknowledge their equality. Dangerously close to starting brooding over the UEF (curiously, Susan felt no such hate for the Aeon), she was approached by one of her students.
He was a nineteen year old, and unusually tall-approximately six foot seven, towering over his comparatively diminutive professor-Susan stood at five foot seven, average height for a woman of her age (something she was loathe to disclose), but was dwarfed by this student. He, too, was a Cybran, the only one in the class. He had blond hair, cut to show his brow, although he did have a very short fringe. His eyes were a chestnut brown, and down the left and right sides of his face were the red wires, more square than those of Susan, but reaching to the same length on both sides of his face (so that they were level with his eyes vertically) and his interface port was on his right temple, unhidden by hair. His voice was fitting of somebody so youthful, with what once was known as a German accent. He was lucky as a Cybran to not have been enslaved by the UEF. "Professor Thatch, that essay you asked for..." He extended his right hand, in which was a folder containing what looked like hastily stuffed papers inside. Susan had to crane her neck to look at the student's face while taking the folder. Looking hastily at a few pages, she replied to him, in a similarly youthful voice, seemingly a trait common to Cybrans.
"Yes...it all seems fine, Miroslav. It does look a little rushed though."
"Well, I'm not a late kind of person."
"It doesn't need to be in for two weeks." Miroslav scratched behind his right ear before continuing.
"Well, it's something to keep me occupied." Miroslav smiled weakly.
"Well, ß, here's something else to keep you occupied-revise plasma weapons. You always have had a blind spot for that."
"Yes, Professor. I'll see you on Thursday." It was Tuesday, and the funerals for the dead commanders were on the following day.
"Oh? Are you not attending tomorrow?" Susan raised an eyebrow.
"I'm going to Commander Dostya's funeral. She was...sort of a hero of mine, so...it's only respectful to say goodbye to her. Without her, we'd probably both be plugged into machines doing maths for someone else." Miroslav avoided saying 'UEF' because he did not resent them, despite everything they had done in the Infinite War. To him, the Coalition represented a chance to leave the past in the past-but not to forget.
During his life before entering the University, Miroslav had been an experiment by the UEF to see how much more effective their Cybran slaves could be if given a first-class education, and so was taken from a group of Cybran civilians captured due to a calculation error, shacked up with some UEF agents with cosmetic treatment to look like Cybrans, and sent through the school system. Although teased constantly by his fellow students and discriminated against by his tutors, he came out of the final school at the end of the Infinite War, and used the liberty leant to him by Hall's policy of unity to join a college, and learnt all he needed to get a degree in Weapons Science at the Fletcher University. He wanted eventually to pioneer the transition of technologies from military to public use, but he still had two years at the Fletcher University before he could even think about that.
Susan replied to her student solemnly. "I'm going to the funeral myself. We both owe a lot to people like Dostya, and Crusader Rhiza. Not to say anything about those who finally gave up fighting each other and started fighting those aliens..." Without them, the war would still be going on-or perhaps the Seraphim would be ruling the galaxy, and man would be extinct. Miroslav realized that the situation was dangerously close to becoming a miserable tar pit, he said goodbye and left, catching up with his select group of friends.
Susan, however, checked her watch. It was a silver-edged digital one, linked to Susan's Cybran implants, but she preferred seeing it for true rather than calling it up with a thought and it appearing briefly in her field of vision. Thirty past two-fifteen minutes until the end of her working day. She sunk into the leather chair behind her desk, opened the laptop built into the desk, disguised by the veneer. As the machine woke up, she opened one of the brass-knobbed drawers, pulled out a thick white wire. At one end, a small needle-like point, which she plugged into the laptop while she logged on the Fletcher network, and then examined the other end of the wire-a round, rather large, short cylinder which became thinner as it joined with the wire. Wiping some hair away with her right hand, Susan exposed the interface on her temple and lightly plugged the wire into her head. She closed her eyes, and red jagged lines on a darker red background filled her vision briefly, as her brain linked with the machine.
Opening her eyes, she exhaled and looked at the screen, opening folders purely by thought. "Thank you, Dr. Brackman." It made organizing things incredibly easy, and due to the modular nature of the wire, she could change the end so that she could access any piece of technology with data storage in this manner. She flicked through her messages, sent either by students (essays or questions in digital form) or other professors-nothing of note, although there was one notice. After work, some of the younger tutors were going to a bar in the Cosmopolitan Zone (the centre of Westock) and everyone was invited. Well, that was her plan for the night solved. She glanced over some student essays, all done to a high calibre, although those submitted by members of the Aeon Illuminate tended to have slightly flowery language. Perhaps, after oration and teaching by Princess Burke, that was only to be expected.
In any case, she did not worry about it. Perhaps at the start of the next lecture, she would say something, although she would have to be politically correct about it. It was probably the only negative thing about the end of the Infinite War; attitudes were still such that criticism was construed as racism. In any case, she wasn't bothered-Susan's students were intelligent, and knew that their professor was not a racist. As long as none of them knew she loathed the UEF, it would be fine. She placed a hand to her temple, grasped the link, and mentally prepared herself to be severed from what was like a sixth sense-disconnecting was always a traumatic experience. She closed her eyes, and that red kaleidoscope-like sight that always was present when she blocked out everything else darkened while she twisted out the plug.
Opening her eyes, everything was normal. She stood, walked over to the coat stand on the other side of the platform, and took her suit jacket from the stand, placed in on over her cream, slightly frilly, shirt. Also, Susan was wearing a pair of black trousers that went with the suit and a pair of two-inch heels. As she did one of the buttons up, one above the bottom of the jacket, there was a banging sound. Turning around, she saw one of the other tutors. Although Susan did not like it, he was seven years her junior, aged twenty nine. He was starting to show the ravages of time, but his green eyes were still in perfect working order.
He was an Aeon, and as such had an Illuminate name; Tyram, although officially he was named Daniel Ether, and occasionally he went by that name. However, he preferred to be known by the name granted to him by the Illuminate. During the Infinite War, he was spiritual advisor to Crusader Rhiza herself. At the end of the Seraphim war, he had taken his chance and began to teach The Way at the Fletcher University. He was a short man, at only five foot eight, but still was taller than Susan. He had light green hair, seemingly a trademark of the Aeon, as Susan knew of no Aeon without the green hair. He was wearing a leather jacket, and green t-shirt and jeans (dyed green by his own hand; the modifications were sort of a hobby of his). Tyram was a devout follower of The Way, and nobody could name a single person he disliked. Indeed, he would help anybody in need, but as Susan approached, he had other things on his mind, which he vocalized. "Susan, are you coming down to the bar with us?"
"Yes, of course. Tomorrow's going to be a hard day, and I need to relax." With that, she walked alongside him, joined with a group of other tutors. The Cosmopolitan Zone was the centre of Westock, and all the buildings were protected under shield generators hidden by hollow sculptures, and they were all very finely built and finished. After an hour or so, Susan left the bar, having enjoyed herself while staying sober. Outside of the Cosmopolitan Zone, however, was nowhere near as good a neighbourhood.
All of the residential structures were large flats each holding about a hundred people. They were all built to a standard UEF pattern, but were still comfortable, built by the unpopular mayor Dr. Paulius Jazcksyz-unpopular amongst all those with a fair sentimentality, because of one policy. Apartheid. He had ordered that after eight o clock, all Cybrans and Aeon stayed within their district, outside of the Cosmopolitan Zone, while UEF citizens had free reign-and the constables had no choice but to enforce the law.
It was this law that restricted Westock, choked its life. And it could not last forever.