Chapter Two
Tick Tock
Spearing through space, two massive silver ships lined with pinstripes of lime green moved silently through the cosmic void. They had just left a Quantum gate and were hovering over an entirely insignificant blue-green planet populated by the UEF. The skies above Nibelheim were filled with the wreckage of the planetary orbital protection system, and inside one of the ships was a teleport hangar filled with ten ACU's. Inside one of the heads of the ACU's, huge metal giants, was a certain member of the Aeon Illuminate.
"Everybody have their orders?" Rhiza spoke into the headset, laid back in the chair, letting green light flow over her. She didn't like this, not one bit, but until the Princess returned or her successor appeared this was what they would have to do. It was a long time since she had last suggested cleansing a planet like this, and after what the Seraphim had done she was almost happy to accept her position underneath the UEF. It was their treatment of the Cybrans, forcing the Doctor out again that tipped her over into the revolutionary movement, and secretly she hoped that this would be over quickly.
The massive shunt she felt told her that she was about to be released from the clamps; a technician over the headset informed her that the Gate was free for entry. Pressing a button with a lithe, thin finger, Rhiza set the ACU into motion, the heavy machine whirring as the legs moved forward, the giant stepping into the shifting blue pool. A queasy feeling came over Rhiza before a familiar falling sensation wiped over her. The fear came and went, and the interior maps loaded up, analysing her surroundings. The front camera display showed the typical blackened ground, and as the dust cleared green fields around a massive city in the distance came to the fore. Firing up her sensors, Rhiza heard the distinctive beep of aggressive force detection.
Swinging the torso around, Rhiza's camera fixed onto a group of particularly unfortunate vehicles. Judging by their size, they were not particularly dangerous, and the first shot she fired, the recoil of the blast shuddering through her ACU, resulted in two piles of wreckage. Two more shots lead to three more bits of wreckage and a hopefully unalarmed planet. Delathing the wrecks with her reclamation beam, Rhiza spoke into the her headset. "Can anyone report on the stealth generators?"
"This is Command," responded Avatar Helios, the man in charge of the plan overall. "The stealth bots should be coming in now." A flash and an energy spike was followed by the arrival of a large tank, with a smooth flow of shape, like a shell, surrounding Rhiza with a shimmering field, a haze that looked no more worrying than a sign of a hot day. Perfect.
She loaded up a series of nanolathe patterns and got to work-this planet wasn't going to cleanse itself.
When most people wake from a particularly good night, their first question is 'who is the person in the bed with me?' or rather 'why am I in such pain, please God let me die.' Sarah was of a different ilk and instead ran a damage report test. The subconscious bleeping ended with a message on her HUD, as she laid naked in bed, hidden by a sheet and totally refusing to get up.
RESULT: DAMDIOG
DEHYDRATION: 21%
STOMACH CONTENTS: MINIMAL
ESTIMATED PAIN SCALE: 3.4
RECOMMENDED COURSE OF ACTION: REMOVAL OF TOXINS AND REHYDRATION.
RECOMMENDED SLEEP LEVEL: TWELVE HOURS
DAMDIOG/KILLPROCESS
"Urgh." This was probably the most sensible thing she could possibly have said at the time. The levels of darkness in the room lead her to believe that it was somewhere before sunrise, and her internal clock concurred, although she was having difficulty clearing out each process from another. They were all mixed together like a maelstrom into one very painful headache. Clearly, last night she had proved that Cybrans could, after all, get drunk-if not, there was no bloody justice since she was having a truly spectacular hangover. A clock by her bedside, an old wooden thing with an old-fashioned quartz timepiece, was being very annoying and very loud indeed, some might even say impertinent, but Sarah was not quite ready to use such big words this early in the morning.
Each tick, followed by a tock, followed in it's own turn by another tock, was like a hammer hitting Sarah through the side of her head. An exploring arm sought some way of getting rid of the noise, but the assistance of gravity sent it to the floor where the battery fell out, bringing some much-preferred silence to the room. "Close HUD." Sarah spoke her thoughts, as the deep colours vanished from her sight and the bright red lights criss-crossing the left side of her face faded out and were replaced with the simple black thin wires that held the now-gone light.
"BARK." An electronic voice came from outside the door, forced open with a protruding metal instrument. In the hallway floated a small drone, about a foot from the floor, circular with red dot-lights and a matrix of wires over a black metallic body. A small tube at the front of the circle lit red as the drone spoke again. "BARK." The monotone voice was a very poor simulation of a dog, but the small drone was always a welcome companion. Sarah rolled onto her side and opened her eyes to see the little machine in the dim light, and couldn't help but smiling. No matter how bad things could get, DOM, or 'Drone Operated (Engineering) Machine' was always there with a line of bad code or a funny series of digits.
He was a reminder of the old days, after being captured by UEF slavers. Digitally chained to a central computer controlled by an overseer, she had used instruments like DOM to rebuild tanks or to repair structures when official engineers were missing, or when a menial job that the UEF deemed as beneath them needed doing. When DOM had finally failed and crashed two years ago, only Sarah had been brave enough to attempt a repair; the program she eventually came up with was nothing like the program DOM had been created with, but he was definitely an enjoyable pet. "Come on, DOM. Onto the bed." If she was going to have a lie in there was noone she'd rather have it with.
Richard was feeling rather groggy, mostly because he had spent most of the previous night drinking very heavily and had lost most of whatever he'd eaten that day. He was already two hours awake when Sarah ordered DOM into her bed, and the lights in his small apartment had been glaring for three. He held a ballpoint pen in his hand, writing in his diary. Most people would have been using a pad for this, but he much preferred to use an old-fashioned book-his apartment was full of such old-fashioned things. A grandfather clock, wood furniture, paintings, magazines, books from centuries gone by, the progress of years leaving them unharmed thanks to his ministrations.
Last night had been fun, Richard definitely remembered that. He hadn't expected Sarah to be so much fun-and if the lights went out, they could always use her as an emergency source-watching someone lose their inhibitions and show off with a light display was one of the things he always wanted a camera for-unfortunately, nobody had thought to record it and as such it would be gone forever, or maybe just until next Friday when he intended to have the same party. Richard had always been one of those people; a party animal, a creature of fun who thrived on making others happy. At thirty, he was showing none of the signs of slowing down, and even though he could be expected to live to about two hundred he never felt he had enough time to have fun.
These dark mornings didn't help either. He had heard of some planets where the cities were roofed with artificial skies that always shone with the sun, pumping energy-inducing substances into the air to keep people working twenty-four seven. If Richard lived on one of those planets, he'd never get anything done; he'd spent all his time either drunk, post-drunk, or getting ready to be drunk. It wasn't as though he was some kind of alcoholic, far from it. Richard had seen his father drink himself into an early grave at just fifty five, and the idea that maybe all the parties were going to kill him was scary indeed.
The fact he remembered last night told Richard that he hadn't gone overboard, something of a relief. Standing up from the straw-padded chair he leant against the table, yawning, one arm raised in the air. There was a knock at the door, and he moved over, through a corridor and past the grandfather clock in the hallway to open the door, grasping the shining brass knob and pulling it open. A robot stood in the doorway, built like a square column with grey and blue colouring. It forced some envelopes out of a slot into his hand, and then trundled away on little grey tracks at the bottom of the columnar structure.
Richard closed the door, flicking through the letters. Mostly they were bills, except for one piece of junk mail that offered 'a larger girth for a smaller price than any other company'. That one went straight in the bin. Some quarters of the city had automatic mail delivery, but for some reason most of the people here didn't really like the impersonal touch of a tube delivering all of their mail. The mailbot's rounds were a sign that the day had begun, and that the rest of the business of the day could start. Wandering back into his front room, Richard sat in an old sofa with deep red, almost burgundy upholstery and flicked through the bills with the ball-point, filling in boxes and struggling to cling on to life, being bored to death by black and white text.
As he finished the last signature, he reached for the remote control and turned on the television, mounted on the wall with steel clips, into the old wallpapered brick-and-plaster wall. The first channel that came up was the official UEF news feed-a rather polite-looking woman behind a perfectly ordinary desk speaking in a completely unexciting voice. "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Nibelheim UEF. This morning, we..." She paused, and placed a hand to her ear, trying to listen to the voice in the earpiece so subtly hidden. "This is an official UEF Military Announcement. An energy spike indicating landing enemy forces has been detected outside the limits of Union City. All channels have been commandeered for military traffic only. Will all Non-UEF citizens please proceed to security centres immediately to prevent martial law enforcement. All UEF citizens please report to an evacuation station."
"Fuck."
As Richard swore, many miles away, another had the exact same sentiment. A young commander had just been informed that his duty of 'defend the sector' was now changed to 'defend the sector from Crusader Rhiza.' Dekker, from a family of Dutch explorers who colonised entire planets in the Imperial days, was a dark-haired young man with a small figure, little stature, and unimpressive airs. He sat in the ACU, watching his map of the sector as he issued orders to the engineers he had been issued. While he nanolathed factories from thin air, the engineers were constructing a veritable wall of turrets around the city, blocking the entire south-west entrance from any attacker. Whether or not his comrades would be so effective was another matter, however, as he turned the ACU around. Typing in a few commands with a spare hand, he called up the nanolathe pattern for Mass Extractor Type 3, a wire-frame model appearing on a blue screen inside the dark coffin the ACU formed around him.
This was his first combat, and he secretly hoped that it might just blow over or go around him; he had no intention of dying, and he knew full well what might happen if the Aeon captured him; he had been told in his military classes that the Aeon were fanatical monsters, purifying their prisoners with 'holy' catechisms and flagellation. Swarms of tanks moved in well-regimented blocks towards suspected Aeon locations, while Dekker requested permission to use Condition 3 nanolathe patterns. The reply came quickly and was thoroughly unrepeatable-Dekker's impression was that the officer in charge wanted the planet protected without attention to protocol.
Reports kept coming in, of one ACU spotted after another. By his count, there were over ten of the bastards flooding in, and the terrible thought at the back of his mind was that it was always possible that there were more. During the Seraphim War and the Infinite War, by all accounts there was usually only one battle on a planet, with only one or two-maybe three, at the most-Commanders on-scene. A few cases had occurred when additional Commanders had dropped in during a crisis point and frequently turned the battle, but an attack on this scale was unprecedented. Cold sweat was ruining the inside of Dekker's ACU, and his blue eyes darted from one point to another, trying to examine the immediate surroundings, nanolathe statuses, and the overall map all at the same time.
All the simulations had been far easier-they hadn't simulated the sick feeling at the bottom of his stomach he felt when a combat group failed and stopped responding, or the blind terror of hearing the frenzied communications between fellows and commanders, or the occasional leak of civilian traffic into military bands, emergency broadcasts and the instructions of leaving spacecraft filled with evacuees. Dekker's nanolathe structure shifted into Condition4 status, beams forming the wireframes of Fatboy construction vehicles. Shifting open a programming plane with his free left hand inside the cool blue cockpit, Dekker shifted decision-making processes down to his Condition3 engineers, allowing him a few more minutes to ponder the strategic situation. The crescent-shaped line of his sector was holding, with each regiment sent in making a little bulge here or there. Not bad, Jensen, not bad.
Rhiza, at the other end of the field, was less than pleased. Her attacks were being pushed away, and the UEF commander was operating a successful form of the 'Leapfrog Wall' plan-every attack gained territory, held it with constructed hardpoints, and then launched another attack. At this rate, she would have exactly fourteen minutes before she was forced to recall or be caught in the destruction of her own base. The ships overhead were busy intercepting refugee craft and capturing the occupants to do anything useful on the ground, and the two sectors to her sides were degenerating into almost trench-like battles of attrition. Ah, attrition, our old friend. Perhaps this was to be the way of things to come-yet more battles of attrition, the horror of young, fresh Acolytes sent into battle, practically boys and girls, sent to die in nuclear explosions, dead before their time by centuries.
The buzzing sound in her earpeice broke the normal silence of Aeon battle. "Crusader Rhiza, recall. We've got someone to sub in your position-you're done here." The Avatar's unerring voice was not one most would argue with.
"Avatar, I-" Rhiza was not 'most people'.
"Crusader Rhiza, recall immediately. There is no reason for you to stay here." She sighed, pulling open the security case over the bright red 'recall' button. Reluctantly, she depressed the key and felt the teleporter fire. This had better have a damn good reason.
Not again. Please, not again. Sarah was bent in a chair, hands over her heads trying to drown out the shells. While UEF transports evacuated their citizens, the rest were stuffed into poorly-lit shelters like this, waiting for whatever was outside to come crashing in. Even the guards were starting to disappear; the UEF were either in running street battles with human combat, or they were abandoning the planet altogether. The shelter was a concrete semi-cylinder, with a bench on each wall and tiny lights lining the roof of the interior. There were mostly green lights from the glowing tattoos of the Aeon, mixing into yellow where the green collided with the red lights of the Cybrans. One very unusual grouping was a married couple, no older than thirty, an Aeon and Cybran holding each other close, silent with their eyes closed. At any moment, they expected the roof to collapse and for all the world to vanish.
The steady drumming of the shells collapsing outside was a handy reminder that Sarah was, after all, still alive. There was no way that she would dream up a situation like this if she was dead-and if she was dead Sarah wouldn't be wondering where Richard was. Chances were, he was either dead or evacuated by now. The metal bulkhead door shifted and groaned, scraping the floor as it opened. In the doorway stood a small figure, not five foot in all, a child. In the dim light it was hard to tell whether it was a boy or a girl, and the lack of parents or any sort of guardian left a terrible impression on Sarah-no parent would leave their child at a time like this, and there was only one conclusion she could draw.
"Quickly, get in, close the door!" Sarah snapped, standing up and moving over to the child. Closer, she could see that it was in fact a small boy, possibly no older than five years. He flinched back at her approach, but reassuring him that she would not eat him could happen after the door between them and a military attack was closed. Wrapping her fingers around the boy's wrist, she heaved the great metal door closed, and the auto-valves hissed as gas left the hinges, vacuum-shutting the door until the next person from outside came along.
Half-dragging the child back to her place on the bench, she pushed him onto the metal plane and knelt down, looking him in the eyes. There was fear, illuminated by the red glow of Sarah's head. "You're safe here. I'll look after you."
The child petulantly spat, "I want my father." Father, wondered Sarah. What five-year old calls their father 'father'?
"Where is he?" Sarah was impatient. Children were loud, confusing, troublesome creatures, and she refused to go into teaching anything but after-school year college courses for that exact reason.
"He's out there now, killing the Aeon and the chipheads." Wonderful. Nice to see that galactic peace has such a well-trained future. Sarah looked down, trying to think of something to say that wasn't fired by the newfound rage at the term-Fletcher had used it before he was killed, and she could only associate it with the kind of racist this child would grow up to be.
"I need you to be quiet, okay? Can you do that?" Sarah didn't stick around for the answer, instead moving down the structure, pacing away the anger, a great wave brought by a single word from the mouth of a child. Her knuckles were white, fists clenched and arms crossed as she moved, the whistling gears of her leg singing a little tune every time they fell upon the ground.
It was only after she had gone down the hall completely twice, treading the cold concrete, that someone stood up and stopped her. It was a girl, left eye replaced with an optical implant, a red lens staring into her and showing a reflection, little glowing wires criss-crossing their way across the implant and the side of her face, into an uplink port just below her hairline, tied back in a neat blond ponytail. There was youth in that face, and a subtle smile that defied the situation at hand. Her other blue eye twinkled as she spoke, hands on Sarah's shoulders. "I think we would all appreciate it very much indeed if you would sit down and calm down. There's no need for you to get yourself into a rage." Sarah sighed-she was right, and as much as she wanted to punch a wall and then drop-kick the little brat down the end near the door, it wouldn't do any good.
She allowed herself to be guided down onto the bench again, and the woman sat down next to her, hand still on her shoulder. "I think I know what you need. Got an uplink lead?" Sarah searched her pockets, sure there was one somewhere. She stopped her, a hand raised. "Don't worry, we'll use mine, I'll feel safer about it. No offence, but I don't know where anyone else's has been, and getting dirt out of implants is like hell." Her voice was quiet, familiar, reassuring-like a grandmother. Sarah leant back as she removed from a pocket on her brown leather jacket a neon-pink cord, pulling it out from the case. Well, she's clearly not a teacher. Perhaps it was a sign of being dull and old that Sarah refused to use any wire that wasn't properly wire-coloured, either brown or black, or maybe just blue in an extreme case-but neon pink? Compared to the dim light and shadow of the bunker, it was a welcome change of colour. Lying back with her eyes closed, she felt a hand on her head, warm, and the small entry of the uplink cord, a protruding metal cylinder entering her skull and interfacing with her mind. "Now me." The woman plugged herself in, thin fingers slipping it in softly.
The meeting of minds was extraordinary. Exchanging data, thoughts, ideas without even thinking of it, completely giving over to another person-technically, it was still illegal under UEF law. Letting Cybrans directly interface with each other was, in their eyes, likely to encourage dangerous, revolutionary ideals, and was detrimental to the morale of the worlds in the Federation. Those 'revolutionary ideals' were certainly present in both of the minds linked together, the wave of facts coming all at once like a narcotic high. This is one of your students, Sarah reminded herself, and immediately the reply came.
I don't think you'll be arrested if that's what your worried about. Some of the things you think are positively filthy, you know that?
You aren't exactly miles away from the mental gutter either, Ykaterina.
Urgh, I hate that name. It feels like I'm being told off. The conversation flew at the speed of light, heating the wire as they learnt and felt everything in the brain of the other partner. It had been a long time since Sarah had done anything like this, and then it was only ever with her mother.
All sense of time slipped away, engrossed in Ykaterina as much as Ykaterina was engrossed with her teacher. The original inhibitions Sarah had considered about doing this with a student dropped away into a vortex of complete and total surrender. It was not pleasure, but the sensation was certainly not displeasure. Finding the words for it was impossible, and eventually Sarah gave up on it altogether, sinking backwards. She was being dominated by the young woman, being force-fed data, ones and zeroes piling into her skull and filling all of her consciousness. We need to stop, miss. Sarah was again asserting herself.
I don't want to, replied Sarah, rather childishly. She was having too much fun to even think of stopping.
No, I mean we need to. There is someone at the door. I'm pulling it out now. The sinking feeling after the high came straight away, the hole left by the removal of the uplink lead feeling like a...well, a hole in the head. There was knocking as her senses reasserted themselves, and a voice. "We can't open this door, it's locked itself good and proper. Stand back, we're going to blow it off." A panicked crowd quickly formed, retreating from the door as far as they could, pushing into Sarah and those at the back into the wall or another person, stopping only just when danger started becoming an option for those pressed against the wall; like a pair of lungs, the crowd loosened a little.
There was a flash from the end of the bunker, and the door was not blown off but rather melted altogether. A green-suited soldier stepped through, and behind him through the hole left in the door was visible the legs of an Aeon war machine. The shelling stopped and once there was a suitable silence, awe and terror mixed into one, he began speaking in a deep, hypnotic voice. "Please form an orderly queue so we can identify you." The intructions were understood, and the officer took the name from the person at the front, looked at his data pad, pressed a button on the screen and simply said "Move along to your place of residence." The queue orderly moved forward inch by inch, until Sarah and Ykaterina gave their names and stepped out. Outside, there were almost no pedestrians, just people trying to get to wherever they lived as soon as possible-floating tanks the size of pine trees in the road acted as some encouragement, and squads of infantrymen picking their way past wreckage and craters gave a clear indication as to what had happened-especially to the father of that boy.
"So, where are you living?" asked Sarah. Ykaterina looked downhearted, and pointed toward a crater across the street.
"In what used to be a hostel. Now it's more of a...stain." Sarah felt a pang of sympathy.
"Don't worry, you're alive and that's what matters. Did you lose anything valuable?"
"Not really," replied Ykaterina. "All the important things are the photos, and I keep those in my wallet." A bulge in her back pocket showed where that was-and the jeans she wore showed a total disregard for the idea of a garment being 'too tight'.
"You could stay with me. Until they nanolathe a new one, obviously," offered Sarah. Ykaterina smiled and her eye twinkled while the lens moved in and out, a little like DOM's wagging laser mechanism.
"Thanks, I'd like that. Chances are your apartment is filthy, isn't it? Don't lie, I've seen inside your head. You can't keep anything tidy!" The pair laughed as though they were the most natural friends in the world.
"Come on then. The sun's starting to set and I don't like the idea of being out here before they fix the lights." As the pair walked, Sarah couldn't help but wonder why the Aeon were being so...nice. She had become used to being stopped and searched, having her details asked of her, being pushed around and ordered about by men and women in sky-blue uniforms, but these new soldiers weren't even asking for ID.
Perhaps, thought Sarah, just perhaps they're here to stay. The Aeon wouldn't attack just one system at a time, surely? As she closed the door of her apartment behind her and Ykaterina let out an excited 'Aww' at the sight of DOM, Sarah hoped that they were.
If someone's reading, could they either give me a review or a PM? It's nice to have the encouragement.
-James