Twenty-four
Abandoned Airfield
Southern Continent
Planet Val-kyrie
26 July 2017
Shiva and Serenvee left the factory complex in the capital city soon after they became aware of the battle outside the prison. The firefight had been too close for comfort and since their presence on the planet was to remain a secret, changing locations had been the better part of valor. Serenvee also chided Shiva for being present at the press conferences Senator Bregata had held in further attempts to denounce the Queen Mother's efforts to ally the Val-kyrie with the Guardians. Although Shiva had stood in deep shadows where she would not been seen, Serenvee persisted that someone might still discover her presence.
Shiva dismissed her companion's worries and shifted her attention to the security footage of the battle. It hadn't been easy to wrangle the tapes out of the senator, but Bregata relented in the end. If she wanted to continue with the support of Serenvee's people, the senator had no choice.
"Bregata appears to be trying to undo the operation instead of furthering it," Serenvee observed. At Shiva's inquiring look, she added, "No Val-kyrie general would waste so many drones in this manner."
The pair watched in rapt fascination at the power of the Guardians even in their combat forms. Serenvee commented that the smaller form, while not in the original plan, was a surprising bonus. They were still able to name all the suits and their original operators based on the resemblances to the four meter battle forms.
"Faced with this kind of firepower, the senator's allies had better be resolute," Shiva said. "If they realize that they being duped by Bregata, and by us through her, this insurrection will come crashing down."
"We gave it only a thirty percent chance of success," Serenvee shrugged. "This situation is nowhere near like the one that developed several hundred years ago when a Queen Mother was deposed. She was a real despot who deserved to be executed. It's the first and last time a Val-kyrie has ever killed another since the Great War, by the way."
"Well, then. Bregata had better be prepared to kill Silvara. It's the only she is going to succeed," Shiva said. "Personally, I don't think she has the nerve. And in case I'm wrong in that assumption, I don't think she'll win a fight with Silvara."
"We will know for sure in the next few days," Serenvee predicted.
Senate Building
Val-kyre City
Bregata cursed the day she first thought about the plan to keep her people reclusive from galactic affairs. So far, nothing was going anywhere close to plan. Her public comments about the disappearance of Queen Mother Silvara were greeted with skepticism. The claim of the battle outside the prison being just an expensive live-fire exercise was touted by conspiracy theorists as a cover-up for a black op. Bregata gave them credit for that one, though they would never know that it was the work of the Guardians she tried so hard to pass off as nothing more than fiction. And now Commander Mardus was having doubts about securing the orbital docks because of her talk with Commander Fontaine.
The senator knew Fontaine was not bluffing. The problem lay in whether or not she, Bregata, had the courage to order the first strike. The inner system defenses were a nightmare for any invading fleet to challenge provided anything survived the outer defense array first.
Fontaine would not do anything less than her duty as she saw it. Therefore, it stood to reason that a fleet of Silvara's allies had to either be en route, or already in the system. If they were already here, then they were holding position behind the planet awaiting word to move. That meant Bregata's supporting fleet was outclassed in firepower. Six against six was even odds as to which side would prevail. The skills of the ship commanders would decide the battle. With the planetary and dock yard defense array under Fontaine's direct control, it was no contest. A space battle would end in a loss for Bregata.
Somehow, she had to turn this around. Her shadowy allies had disappeared soon after the battle outside the prison. No doubt checking out the battle footage. Bregata realized that the pair seemed more interested in the Guardian battlesuits than in her struggle to keep her people from committing suicide in an all-out war with Horde Prime. It all seemed so simple when Serenvee had first approached her with the idea to supplant Silvara as Queen Mother and keep the warrior women within their borders until the time was right to go to war.
Even General Calla was having second thoughts after that aerial rescue of her pilot. Once word of that reached her supporters in the Senate, her orchestrated insurrection would be finished. Bregata figured she had two days at most before all was lost.
Keying the com system, the renegade senator placed what would probably be the most important call of her life.
Off Grid Bunker
Western Val-kyrie City
General Hammond had to hand it to the Queen Mother, she knew how to upgrade an obsolete bunker and make it undetectable. The rovers had been transferred from the supply depot to the research base for a brief trial period. The return date for the vehicles had been left open, so when the computer system showed their return in the morning, no one would be the wiser that the vehicles had been used for anything other than some classified research.
Commander Harana ran a very smooth operation. Anyone pursuing them from the prison maintenance tunnel would lose the trail at the city limits. There were many rovers traveling about the city, so no one would notice two more on the streets.
The rovers were left in their assigned spots one level up and on the other side of the building. It was late in the evening when all the maintenance work for the day was finished. Even so, the group took care not to leave any trace of themselves behind.
The concealed secondary entrance to the bunker was so cleverly hidden that one had to know it existed in the first place before one could start a search. Even so, it was located in the massive underground repair bay in a seldom used section.
While the bunker was listed as totally unusable and removed from the active registry, there was still the possibility that Bregata could find out about it and have a little surprise waiting. As such, Adrian and the Sorceress were 'volunteered' to take point.
"Well," Adrian said with a shrug, "if ya gotta go, go in style." With that, he transformed into the fearsome CHUD creature form and shuffled off into the gloomy tunnel.
Sorceress quickly followed in Falcon's combat form. Falcon had been upgraded with a built-in motion tracker. Sorceress saw only Adrian moving away in the downward sloping tunnel. She paused when she reached the left-hand corner and stretched out with her magical senses. It took a few moments to tune out Adrian's presence when he adopted one of the creature forms because they were so different from a humanoid. Once that was done, she scanned the immediate area for hostiles.
On the heads up display, Adrian had come to a halt several meters past the corner, waiting. "All clear," Sorceress whispered, telepathically sending her words at the same time. The pair maintained the two meter spread as they continued deeper underground.
Sorceress reduced the motion tracker display and called up the map of the facility. Normally, access to an underground complex was achieved via an elevator like the ones used at the prison. This facility had been fitted with a square formation of ramps sloping downward at a thirty-degree angle similar to a stairwell found in any building.
Two pulsing dots indicated the positions of War Wing and Falcon scouting the entrance. Others strung out at the upper end, which were just starting to move downward, indicated the rest of the group.
The pair continued on down to the armored hatch located three hundred meters underground. The entire complex was sheathed in thick permacrete capable of withstanding a direct hit, or so the specs indicated. Adrian waited patiently for the Sorceress to catch up. When she arrived, Sorceress punched the security code into the panel set in the wall to the left of the door.
A hiss of gases escaping preceded the hatch sliding aside. That the bunker was equipped with its own pressurized air system was no surprise. Reverting to combat form with assault weapons active, War Wing darted through the opening and dodged right. Falcon slid through and to the left.
They got the sense of a large chamber, but the shaft of light thrown by the open hatch did nothing to give it dimension. The light did allow the starlight settings of the suits to work flawlessly; equipment using starlight functions took all available light and produced a greenish image of the surroundings.
It didn't take long for the pair to secure the area. They were just coming back up from the lower levels when the rest of the group arrived at the tunnel entrance.
"The bunker is secure," Adrian reported. "No one is home."
Guided by handheld lights, Silvara walked over to a bank of sophisticated computer systems lining the left wall. She quickly found the panel she wanted and brought the emergency system online. Through that, she powered up the bunker and sealed the open hatch.
Colonel Markson whistled softly at the sight.
The top level was one large chamber with open sections. The center was a depression with a square ring of comfortable couches and chairs with a holo-table at its center. The upper level on the left contained the bunker control systems and every other gear the Queen Mother and Senate would need to keep the government running. Level two contained the living quarters and mess hall that could house one hundred people in relative comfort. The third level housed the power plant, armory, vehicle bay and primary access point coming out at ground level over a mile away in another supply depot.
All the Guardians except Hawk walked around the upper tier the far right side and stood in a line. The suits opened up briefly to allow their operators to step out and closed up again afterward. Hawk attached the computer modules stored in the thigh compartments on each leg to her forearms and injected cable connections into the surveillance panel Silvara pointed out. Once the connections were verified, the suit opened up for Sonya to step out. The AI would sift through the volumes of collected data and report when she found something of interest. Hawk would also monitor all current activities of Senator Bregata and her allies. The coup was coming and they had to be ready to react when the signs of the final takeover appeared.
"That's the coolest thing I've ever seen," Frost said to Adrian, awestruck. "Next to their battle mode forms, of course."
"I think you friend is jealous," Sera replied.
Adrian shrugged. "We promised him his own battlesuit when he grows up."
Graza's squad manned the computer stations while everyone else gathered in the pit, as Harana called it. Food and drink was brought up from storage in the galley. Idle chat commenced while they ate. Silvara couldn't stop staring at the five suits the whole time. The project Harana had been working on to produce an armored battlesuit had finally been perfected because of these legendary weapon systems. Systems that had developed abilities no one foresaw a thousand years before when the Great War had been lost with the rise of Horde Prime.
The Sorceress couldn't wait any longer. Thoughts of what had happened to make He-man such a bitter man nagged at her ever since the mission to the penal planet Hel.
"What happened?" He-man said slowly as all conversation died away. "What do you remember when we left Primus?"
He-man was referring to the starship Eternia's attempt to return from the future to the point in time just moments after it originally left. Sorceress explained all that she knew from the opening of the time/space portal to the alarms, turbulence and indications that something was not right with the transit attempt. She ended her side of the tail with waking up in the medical bay of Earth's Alpha moon installation and being surprised at being separated from the starship's computer. She did not say a word about the disjointed visions that were blocked memories of something else happening in between. Something Kodec Ungor consistently warned the Sorceress to leave alone.
He-man picked it up from there. He had no idea how he got home to Eternia, but it didn't take long to figure out that the world he once knew no longer existed. Information in the outer village He-man found himself in was sketchy at best, but the villagers were able to tell him that it had been five years since He-man had gone into the future to help planet Primus. It amazed He-man that the villagers had no idea who they had been talking to at the time, but the news was no less devastating.
Five years had passed instead of the moments that were supposed to have gone by. The Eternia was gone. The power sword was gone. And the Sorceress had evidently gone missing. The Snake Men used the opportunity to take control of much of the planet. In just five short years, King Hiss restored the empire his warriors once had long before King Grayskull was born. The other races of the planet were of no consequence to him, thus they were left alone. Nothing could threaten Hiss' army of Snake Men, not even that old bag of bones now inhabiting Snake Mountain, King Hiss' old seat of power.
Palace Eternia was the new seat of power. Whomever controlled the palace, controlled the planet.
King Randor and Queen Marlena were forced into hiding after a siege that lasted for months. The Royal Guard fought valiantly, but it was a losing battle. Duncan died along with his entire platoon of Guardsmen when they attempted to strike at King Hiss in an effort to take him out. All the allies Randor had accumulated over the years for just this sort of war were nowhere to be found. The answer to the lack of support would be long in coming, but He-man discovered that the couriers sent out by the Eternian King had all been killed soon after leaving the palace. By the time the other races learned of what was happening, it was too late to do anything but fortify their own domains against a Snake Men assault.
Teela's marriage of convenience to Hiss was the only thing that spared the race of Men from being wiped off the face of the planet. However, when she learned that He-man had finally returned, she sought him out in an effort to start a rebellion just as She-ra had done on Etheria. Even with covert guidance from Skeletor, of all people, getting He-man involved once more proved ultimately futile.
"You can't know the depth of sorrow seeing everything that I had fought for totally destroyed," He-man said bitterly. "Roboto had been taken out like he was nothing. Duncan was killed. The planet was in chaos. It quickly became apparent that defeating King Hiss or the Horde was impossible. All you can do is survive them."
"And yet, you took up your sword once more when you found out it was in Castle Grayskull," Silvara pointed out.
"A foolish dream. We fought hard and won our first battle," He-man said. "And then Catra's fleet arrived."
General Hammond nodded. "So that's why they left Earth so abruptly. That fleet must have been the closest one."
He-man's eyes turned hard with anger. "This isn't your war. You should stay on your planet. There is no beating the Horde. You can only survive it!" She-ra placed a restraining hand on her brother's arm; her signal to calm down.
"Hey, pal," Colonel Markson snapped back. "You made it our war when you came to our world in the year nineteen-eighty-seven, our calendar. It just took thirty years for us to figure it out."
He-man shot to his feet, fists clenched and shaking. "You may have won some battles, but once you become a real threat, they will burn you planet to a cinder." He stalked off in the direction of the stairs to the lower level. She-ra went after him to do whatever she could to calm him down.
Adrian broke the long silence that had settled on the room. "So now we know, temper tantrum aside."
"He is right about one thing, though," Markson spoke up, shocking everyone by actually agreeing with He-man. "Having those battlesuits makes us a target. Once we become a big enough threat, the Horde will come back."
"We're planning for that eventuality. Our being here is part of that," General Hammond replied, looking at Silvara.
Of course, they needed allies in this war. Allies with their own internal struggles was not something Guardian Command could afford. The Queen Mother knew this also, and needed to end Bregata's insurrection before it doomed them all.
The gathering broke up at that point. It had been a trying two days and everyone needed to unplug for a while. Hawk was on the job sifting through the recorded data while monitoring the new traffic. The AI would alert her operator when she had something. Captain Graza also set up a rotating watch to monitor the equipment with Graza taking first watch.
Harana asked, "You still want to have that mock aerial engagement with War Wing when this is over?" She made no effort to hide the amusement in her voice.
"No!" Graza answered flatly, busying herself with the monitoring equipment.
Harana chuckled and went off to inspect the storehouse of vehicles and equipment on level three before getting some rack time. The commander had the feeling they were going to need whatever had been stored away down there for future use.
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