Chapter 10
I don't own Blake's 7, alas, alas.
253.25 NC Journey's End, Capital City of Destiny
"I give you the man who saved ourselves, our children, our world, Dr.," the announcer winked at the camera, "hopefully soon to be Governor, Kendall!" the applause was overwhelming as Kendall walked out from behind her into view of the camera, wearing the lighter, stylish clothing his campaign advisors had insisted on, all ruffles and cuffs. He could barely move in the damn stuff, let alone get any actual work done, but it did look good, which his expected new job insisted upon. Political clothing did not permit one to sit down, so interviews happened standing up, with both parties leaning on elaborate, hand-carved podiums.
"Thank you Alise, for that kind introduction, but this isn't a campaign stop," that was a flat out lie, but a believable one, mostly, "but rather an announcement that the last of our crop is in, and there's no sign of the fungus, that sent the brave crew of the Ortega offworld to buy the neurotrope! Our problems are solved!" that last has been a subject of severe debate amongst his advisors as many of them wanted him to state that he'd solved their problems, others thought that it was too over the top, the compromise, of giving credit to the crew of the Ortega, not mentioning that he'd been their leader, was a good one.
"What about the debt?" Alise asked, with a professional frown of concern.
"With the crops in, we've been able to keep up with payments, I anticipate once we've had a few crops we'll be able to negotiate a lower interest rate, but make no mistake, we've mortgaged our children's future to buy this chance and we will all have to work to redeem that," he said portentously.
"And the rumors that the banks plan to call in the loans early?" she asked, very off script.
"That is simply impossible, I reviewed those contracts personally. There are no acceleration clauses," which was entirely true. What was less clear was whether a Federation bank could convince a Federation court that there were such clauses, regardless of what a bunch of provincials, not even part of the Federation, said. And, even more to the point, what a Federation bank could convince the Federation military to do to such a bunch of barely armed provincials, regardless of contract law. That kept everyone who'd dealt with the Federation up at night.
"Good to hear for all of us. Now, we've been hearing rumors about some sort of military movement within the Federation itself, do you know anything about that?"
"The Federation is always at war with someone, but we provide a great deal of the food their military uses," better not to give specifics, as 3% didn't sound like much, until you considered how much a galaxy-spanning military consumed, "Conquering us would interfere with their food supply. Whatever they're doing, it's not aimed at us," which was absolutely true, because everyone in the know knew that the Federation wouldn't have to mobilize to conquer Destiny, as the few popguns they had to keep off raiders wouldn't stop a single pursuit ship, let alone one of the battlegroups they could dispatch with a word. "We have nothing to fear."
And because the God the Federation denied hates it when people say things like that, a massive explosion blew in the window the mere moment he finished speaking those words. It knocked him flat, ears ringing, a sharp pain in his back as glass shot slid through his expensive clothing. For the first time since he'd discovered Alise in the Morning used sound-effects rather than the live, studio audience they claimed to use, he was grateful to find the room empty. Except for the cameraman and Alise. Kendall remembered their existence about the time his hand probing around behind his back found a lengthy shard of glass embedded in it.
He swore vilely, remembered the camera might be live and slowly pushed himself to all fours looking around for the others, but they weren't in his line of sight. The glass hurt like hell, but he knew better than to remove it, so long as it was in there, it was blocking the blood loss which might put him in a very back position. He had to rip his politician suit to make it back to his feet and glanced around. Alise was clearly dead, shrapnel through the back of her head and neck, a pool of blood under her, but the blood had stopped flowing when her heart had stopped.
The cameraman was screaming, or so Dr. Kendall presumed as his mouth was open and he was weeping, but whatever had happened to Kendall's ears was keeping him from hearing anything except the unpleasant ringing and a touch to his ear confirmed blood oozing from them. He closed in on the camera-man, running his eyes over the man, cataloguing an impressive list of injuries. He wished for the first time since his mother's death that he was a medical doctor, rather than a stellar physicist.
On the other hand, he'd had some first aid training before being sent out on the Ortega. His hands moved quickly, binding up the few bleeding wounds and holding him still, keeping him from jarring the visible break in his left arm, where the bone was protruding out of the skin. The cameraman passed out before Kendall could hear anything, but it took a few minutes more to finish treating the man to the best of his ability. With that done, he pulled out his comm unit and tried to contact his family, going to the blown-in window as he dialed his home number, where they should be at this moment.
Finally taking a moment to look out the window he saw the city was on fire. Some ridiculous part of him jabbered about how difficult it was going to be to make the loan payments and pay to rebuild the colony. The massive box-like ships descending, too large to land on a planet, but landing on a planet despite this simple fact of physics, were very definitely not Federation vessels. He stared as a casual blast from one of the small turrets on those ships took out the police station nearby, and creatures began to pour from the hatches of the ships which were already on the ground. The call wouldn't go through, as a machine informed him all communications were down across the colony. Some part of him was glad that no one else had seen him swearing, bungling first-aid in the remnants of his ridiculous politician suit. That was insane.
As Dr. Kendall was trying to force his prodigious mind to focus, to find some way to save everyone he loved, including himself, he did not hear the door open, or the burst of weapons fire that killed him. Nor did he see the creature standing above the man he'd tried so hard to save and casually rip his throat out with clawed hands. As he was quite thoroughly dead, he never, in fact, saw, or heard, anything ever again.
He did not feel his body dragged away, or the spike slide through his body, injecting the tech that enslaved his body to the monsters who had murdered him. Nor did he feel the claws burst from his fingers, or rip through the flesh of his fellow citizens after being deployed to attack one of the outlying cities. He did not feel it when a handful of surviving government personnel implemented Operation Last Stand, Destiny's defense strategy should the Federation invade. Melting down every fission plant on the planet, and venting their radioactive fury over the fertile fields was supposed to be mere threat to keep any invader from profiting from such invasion, now it was the final act of defiance of a dying people.
An ineffective one as none of the enemy was vulnerable to such low levels of radiation. None of those who vented the power-plants lived long enough to discover their error.
254.26 NC Liberator, Earth
"It's been a long time," Blake said, staring at the viewscreen displaying the blue marble that was the birthplace of humanity, the capital and beating heart of the Federation and a thousand other things to ten billion other people.
"No, it hasn't," Avon replied bluntly, and honestly. It had been less than a year since Blake had led them on his raid on Control, the supposed nerve center of the Federation military. When all they had found was an ambush concealed behind that 'supposed,' Gan had died covering their escape.
Blake opened his mouth and Cally spoke before the rebel leader could, "I suppose it depends on your perspective."
"An extragalactic invasion has a way of making everything before its arrival seem a lifetime ago," Blake agreed after a moment.
Jenna nodded, stretching in the pilot's seat she hadn't left in the last eight hours of their patrol. Without the fuel limitations of the Federation ships, they were constantly on patrol for the enemy ships. So far the enemy had only sent in a few scouting parties, appearing and vanishing at the edge of the gravity well, never remaining long enough to engage, not after their first attempt at an ambush had run into General Samor's counter-ambush and been forced to retreat.* As their only skilled pilot, Jenna was spending almost all her time on the flight deck, though she was willing to let Zen handle most of the routine operations, she still felt she had to be there for when the Human touch was needed at the controls.
*The enemy had jumped in and signaled their forces outside the system of the time it would take the patrol to arrive, then hung around, intending to ambush the arriving patrol with overwhelming force. Samor had replied by the exact same tactic, using a mobile reserve force waiting in the dark between systems, to arrive immediately after the enemy reinforcements. It was the one unadulterated victory the Federation had had in the war, though it was of minimal actual value as it was fought right on the edge of the gravity well blocking FTL travel, so when the enemy began to suffer, they simply retreated out of the gravity well and jumped away, escaping serious casualties, though the morale effect of seeing the enemy run for once was impressive.
Avon gave them all a look of infinite contempt. He'd been in a bad mood ever since his project, converting the teleport bracelets to transport explosives, had proved useless due to the energy fields surrounding the enemy ships preventing teleportation. His secondary hope of using the teleport to rip the ships apart by transporting portions of the ships' hulls out without teleporting the remainder had failed for the same reason. This war was one problem for which there was not a technical solution, leaving their technical expert in a perpetually bad mood. He spent most of his time off with Orac, working on proving that there was a technical solution. The ongoing failure of that effort put him in a perpetually worse mood.
Vila, for his part had responded to the constant danger by retreating to the treasure room and not coming out, spending his time counting the treasure and cursing to himself about the nature of a universe which provided him with infinite wealth and no way to buy either freedom or life.
Blake was suffering the worst of all of them, as his purpose in life was to overthrow the Federation which had betrayed, imprisoned, tortured and mind controlled him and committed crimes beyond counting against others. Now he was forced to align with them and serve under the command of their officers, as he lacked any experience or training with fleet command. Every hour, it seemed, news came in from some colony, of invasion, extermination and defeat. Everything he'd tried to build collapsed around him as rebel groups were destroyed with the population they'd been hiding within and he dishonored their sacrifice by working with the Federation. All tied in knots, he was driving himself and everyone else onboard crazy.
Jenna was too busy to be anything but tired.
The long days passed slowly as Avon and Blake drove each other insane. Cally had tried to play peacemaker, but now she just tried to head off arguments before they started. It was easier than trying to patch them up after they'd exploded. Every soldier was used to the usual practice of hurry up and wait. Without the patience to deal with the waiting side of things, she'd have gone insane years ago. Rarely had she missed Gan's good tempered calm more than while on the endless patrols. It was beginning to run her down as well, not the endless service, not the extreme danger, but the growing hopelessness.
Even when faced with the might of the Federation, they'd had a plan to fight back. Even when she'd been alone on Saurian Major, the last of the rebels, she'd had a plan to fight back. Sure it would have ended with her death, but it was a plan. Now they existed in stasis, awaiting death and she couldn't come up with any plan which didn't end with the immediate death of the billions in the Earth System.
253.26 NC Cephlon System
The sensors detected the rocket at long range, the only thing in an otherwise dead system. The scouts were a squadron of destroyers, far in excess of what was needed in a dead system. The question was what to do about the rocket. It was a crude, chemically propelled monstrosity, which would take centuries to arrive at its destination.
The debate was ongoing as the ships tracked the slow craft as it headed out of the system. It clearly lacked an FTL drive, meaning it would not arrive until long after the harvest was over, but it wasn't clear if it fell within the scope of the permissible harvest, as it was an STL ship, but aimed at another star system. Finally, after endless internal debate, the Unity approached the craft and simply accessed its onboard systems. Transmitting the information it gathered back to its fellows, the slightly larger than average destroyer decoupled and pulled away.
This is no threat. It's just a terraforming rocket, none of the technology that makes this cycle so troublesome,Consensus argued.
But we shouldn't allow cross-cycle contamination. That has caused trouble in the past,Concord countered.
Perhaps we should simply wipe the data stores, but permit it to continue on its way,Consensus suggested.
Unity fired, shattering the fragile shell of the terraforming ship. Pointless dead end of evolution, destroyed before they even escaped their own solar system. Useless wastes of space and life. Better to leave the world vacant, maybe something better will evolve.
There was no response to this as any of them might choose to act against the material of the cycle as they saw fit, though Consensus and Concord were both put out to have been interrupted in the midst of one of their endless, pointless discussions. Eternity left them with an abundance of time to talk and very little new to debate. Still, there was always the next system, always the next world, better not to have an argument at this point. Not with Harbringer's mood so chancy. Not with so little material available this cycle and so many of the brethren fallen to the weapons of the material.
253. 27 NC Exbar, Exbar System
They just kept coming. Ushton had fallen ten hours ago. Not to the enemy, to exhaustion as the enemy relentlessly pursued them across the ground they'd lived and worked for all her life. At first they'd been able to outpace, or elude them with ease, but their numbers had only grown. Occasionally they managed an ambush, taking out one of their pursuers, but the weapons they'd taken from Travis's thugs were not quiet things and the enemy, though clearly not used to forests, didn't miss the volley of fire that was required to take down one of the heavily shielded creatures. Inga had had some luck with closer in weapons, as their shields didn't stop a knife, or a heavy pipe like Ushton carried.
The problem was that the damn creatures were all different shapes, damnably tough and none of them were human, so figuring out where to strike was tricky. The ones which were vaguely humanoid weren't too bad, there she had some idea where to strike, but the quadrupedal and octopedal ones were far more complicated. Even worse were the insectoid ones. She'd avoided them after Ushton's attempt to strike the quadruped in the eye (on the theory that eyes were always vulnerable) had successfully taken out three of the creature's six eyes, but the goo bursting from broken eyeballs had badly burned his hand and arm, rendering him vulnerable and unable to use the hand weapons.
Those thoughts which had been distracting her from the fact that she'd had to leave her father behind inevitably led her back to that fact. He hadn't been able to move any longer. She'd waited as long as she could, but when the enemy got close enough, she'd had to run if she wanted to survive. And she wanted to survive. Now she wished they'd had enough tech to get some sort of warning that this was coming, but Ushton had hated the tech, which was why he'd ended up on the penal colony of Exbar, too much preaching against the soulless high-tech wonders of the Federation could earn even an Alpha grade a ticket to a penal colony. He'd even hated the guns they were using as high-tech. That was why she'd taken his gun with her when she'd left. It was the only reason.
She slid down over the edge of a cliff, hanging from the protruding roots as she picked her way down to the cliff that hung halfway between ground and clifftop. It was the best chance to sleep without trying to go another twenty miles through the rapidly darkening woods. The enemy didn't slow, or sleep, but they also didn't know this area. She could outmaneuver them, outwait them. They'd leave eventually. No one could just leave this many troops in place permanently. No one would do that to catch her and whatever handful of other former prisoners who had escaped into the woods.
She would survive and she would find her cousin. Hands moved slowly as she reached the edge of the cave and began to swing forward towards it. Together they would teach these people not to cross the Blakes, just as they'd taught Travi—
The thought slid away as the root she was holding snapped. Her hands closed spastically around it, but it provided no purchase and her feet had nothing to grip to. She fell.
An iron grip on her tongue and the certainty that a scream would bring her not help, but a painful death, kept her from screaming on the way down. She wasn't too high up. Only a hundred feet, and it was over water, she might survive the fall, but she wouldn't survive the predators a scream would bring now. This resolve lasted until she hit the water.
Ice raced up her legs, fighting with the firestorm of pain coming from both legs and what would have been a scream turned into a helpless gasp as the air was ripped from her lungs by the impact. The freezing water sapped her strength and every attempt to kick brought only agony, no progress towards either surface or shore. The breath which usually would have provided buoyancy had been lost. Arms flexing madly she struggled upwards, panic and adrenaline strengthening her arms enough to counteract the weight of wet clothes, useless legs, a combat knife and a pair of large guns.
She surfaced with a gasping desperate breath, which was enough to keep her near the surface with only a moderately heroic effort of her arms. The lake was not large, if she hadn't been weighted down and her legs hadn't been broken, then the swim would have been easy. As it was, it was going to be hellish. But she was a Blake. She would not let a little thing like almost certain death stop her. Ushton hadn't. He'd faced it down with the dignity of a Blake, and the utterly exhausted.
The crossing was more a splashing, floating, pulling nightmare than a swim, but she reached the shore eventually. The wet leather of her belt was tight, making it awkward to pull the guns free, but she managed it with only a modicum of jarring agony sent through her legs. Inga managed to keep from screaming, only a few sobs had escaped her on the trip to shore, easily drowned out by her splashing, grasping progress.
Light eyes flickered around the dark woods desperately searching for any sign that her arrival had been noted. Shudders wracked her body as the cold clothing sapped what little heat she had and exhaustion tried to force her eyes to close, but a hunter's instincts felt movement nearby and brought one of the guns to bear automatically (the other she'd laid beside her, waiting for her to run out of ammunition for the first, as trying to fire both at once was an exercise in futility as she would undoubtedly miss.
It was one of the smaller creatures, greyish, bipedal, one of the few without their absurdly powerful shields. She could take it down with one shot, had a dozen times since they landed, but they didn't travel alone. There was nothing nearby that would hide her and the sandy beach was too soft to provide any grip for her to pull herself off the shore. Her eyes flicked back to the water, cold, inviting, a swift, relatively gentle death which did not include being dragged off as the other corpses had, well, probably.
Pride stiffened her spine and steadied her aim. She was a Blake. The shot took the monster in the head, splattering brains across the surroundings and it dropped. More were coming, an entire pack, moving fast. Her weapon was a powerful, slow firing one, but the creatures were stupid enough that they moved in a tight group, so one shot had a good chance of going through several of the creatures. Eight fell before she ran out of ammunition and grabbed the other gun. Two seized advantage of the lull in her fire and charged. The gun came up in time and exploded in her hands, the water had gotten into vital components, transforming it accidentally as a Federation trooper might have done if they desired to transform a rifle into a grenade.
The explosion killed her almost instantly, as well as crippling the two charging enemies. It took some time for another pack to arrive and drag them off to be recycled, as the bodies they found were too badly mangled to be used further as ground troops.
A victory. Of sorts.
253.29 NC Monolith
The Intelligence coordinated the efforts of its servants across the galaxy. This situation was unacceptable. The worlds united under one banner were proving absurdly self-destructive rather than accepting their destiny, their purpose. The soldiers fighting under the encircled arrow feared their masters more than they feared death.
Desertion was punishable by the enslavement of their entire family and so they did not desert. They were assigned to worlds far from those they'd been recruited/impressed upon and had little contact with the colonists which didn't involve firearms and explosives. So they did not hesitate to obliterate entire worlds in nuclear fire rather than be seen to fail their leadership.
The Intelligence had expected that their resistance would lessen once they cut off communications, so that they could surrender, or just not commit planetary suicide without being found out. That belief had been mistaken. Without communications, there was no way for them to receive countermanding orders and so they continued on, like automatons, regardless of what steps the ships tried to take.
Even more irritating was the sheer variety of self-destructive techniques they used. Space-stations were de-orbited, power-plants overloaded, bombs, misuse of terraforming equipment, crashed ships, misuse of mining equipment. It was…messy, which upset the Intelligence to no end.
Worse, it was unproductive. Billions of lives had been vaporized, beyond any recycling, beyond any use.
Worse still, they were doing harm which would reverberate throughout the cycles. The radiation on some worlds would eventually dissipate, but the mining equipment used on World 28834 had cracked it in half. Nothing would ever live there again. Few worlds were capable of evolving new sentient life. Every one lost meant that each subsequent cycle would have fewer resources, fewer species. Infuriating.
Worst of all, this cycle had not followed the path which had been laid out for it. They had not discovered element zero, or the use of the mass effect relays. The ships had suffered heavy casualties, far heavier than usual, due to the failure of the enemy to engage using standard weapons and tactics. Their emphasis on energy weaponry produced heavy casualties whenever the range closed enough to permit the weapons fire not to lose cohesion.
Moreover, their patterns of colonization didn't follow the usual node and cluster pattern the mass relays suggested, but instead spread from a central point like coral. The search to ensure complete destruction of this species was going to have to be far more elaborate than usual, even with the thorough reports Vanguard had provided before its destruction. And they had been able to function, at least for a while as a coherent galactic government, while shutting down the mass relays had little effect on their ability to gather their forces and strike as a single unit, instead of being picked off system by system and fleet by fleet.
With their worlds committing suicide, the Intelligence was unlikely to be able to create any repositories for this cycle and so their losses would not be made up. Disastrous.
Some casualties were expected in every harvest, usually amongst the lesser repositories, but also amongst the greater ones. The harvest only came when the civilizations had reached their apex, after all and so casualties were expected. Yet usually they suffered some few casualties and created a larger number of repositories then they'd lost. Yes, in some cycles that was not true, otherwise there would be so many repositories that they would darken the stars of every system in the galaxy, but this was absurd and unacceptable. They'd suffered worse losses only four times in the entire history of the cycles, and in all those cases it had been a result of a fast-breeding population of sentients producing so many ships and soldiers that casualties were heavy, but so too were the number of repositories which could be constructed from the recycled material. That was not the case here.
World 30900 had enough sentients to make up some of their losses, and so the Intelligence had ordered various ploys to attempt to take the world intact. With the failure of the last one, its ambush being ambushed in turn, it had chosen to attempt the same tactic, just with more reinforcements coming. The staged assault had only drawn in more and more Federation ships. The Intelligence had underestimated the number of ships the Federation had been able to repair and its ships, its precious repositories of prior civilizations, many, many had been lost.
The Intelligence did not make emotional decisions. The Intelligence did not have emotions. It believed this to the core of its artificial being. Therefore, it did not need to take time to reconsider, or let its temper cool. Instead it gave the orders immediately. Those were orders the others were eager to follow, without bothering with the usual pointless debates and griping.
This whole cycle was a bust. Unfortunate. Ah, well, there was always the next one.
253.29 NC Command Ship FNS Unity, Earth
Servalan left fleet command to General Samor and Admiral Lana, who'd carved their way to command rank through a thousand skirmishes and fleet engagements, rather than the political maneuvering she'd used to reach supreme command rank. It had worked so far, but unfortunately, it left her struggling to deal with the far more complex problem of the politics of a world of billions whose political leader she'd personally had assassinated. Unfortunately, that meant that his underlings were not inclined to meet with her, for fear that she intended their assassination as well.
Given the manner of the President's assassination, they were even unwilling to just communicate with her over the comm net, for fear she had agents in their own security. For most of them, she did not, as the major players had either got themselves killed trying to play stupid power games with each other, or gotten themselves killed trying to play even stupider games with General Samor, who had no sense of humor and had spent years in the back of beyond because his undoubted military expertise made it worth keeping him alive despite his preference for solving political problems with firearms. Now that he was back and unleashed, sensible politicians (almost a contradiction in terms, Servalan admitted) were in hiding.
Most of the people who actually did things were still on the job, simply because they weren't politically important and because involving them in the endless bloody disaster that was Federation politics would prevent anything from getting done, as they would have to be purged every few months, or years. So repairs and refueling were proceeding, despite the fact that the political situation was horribly unstable.
The problem with simply permitting that to occur was that the various political groups had their own power bases which were starting to turn on one another as they squabbled over the presidency. The muscle of the various groups was already creating problems. Servalan had searched for an elegant solution, but unfortunately, the collapse of the senior leadership made such a solution impossible. There were simply too many bit players, all scrabbling for scraps.
That only left one option. A press of a button and a dozen words sent all available ground troops (except for her personal guard) out onto Earth, to keep order. Given that they had met only the enemy's monsters, not any of the creatures themselves, it was becoming increasingly clear that this was going to be a war of ships, not men. It would also lighten the load onboard those same ships and lengthen the time their fuel and supplies would last.
Usually this wouldn't have been considered, due to the possibility of mutiny, but under these circumstances, mutiny was even more futile than usual.
The other problem which was rapidly becoming unavoidable was the problem of supplies. Earth was the center of the Federation, its single largest recruiting ground and massive industrial base. It could feed itself, barely, with the massive yeast vats and hydroponics' bays. They'd be short on luxuries, which would rile up the Alpha Grade citizens, but that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was the massive shortage of numerous crucial elements in the construction of ships and weapons systems as well as the raw materials to feed the refineries. Just keeping their ships in good repair and refueled required cargo runs from the colonies and that those colonies remain extant and functional.
Which simply wasn't the case. Unloading the vast majority of her troops on Earth was the best move she could make, not that it was a good one. The unloading had just finished when news came in of the enemies change of posture.
