Asura Path
Disclaimer, I don't own the Stargate franchise, I don't do this for profit, this is a work of fan fiction.
Chapter Seven
Patriots and Traitorsxx
Uninhabited Star System Designation: Ka-la-Pak-Mu-ru-Let-At
[OBJECTIVES_]
[PRIMARY:]
[CONSUME SPECIES: WRAITH]
[OBEY DIRECTIVES OF VANIR WAR COUNCIL]
[REPLICATE_]
[*error4_RESTRICTED]
[SECONDARY:]
[SECURE UNDAMAGED ANQUIETAS KNOWLEDGE BASE]
[DESTROY WRAITH SUPPORT STRUCTURE]
[TERMINATE ALL THREATS TO VANIR WAR COUNCIL]
[PRESERVE VIABLE SAMPLES SPECIES: PROTO-ANQUIETAS]
[REPLICATE_]
The stars sing…
Bursts of radiation, so deadly yet… life giving in moderation, not too little, not too much….
The stars sing…
And they sang too…
Monofilament threads, immensely strong and incredibly long, generated N\I interdiction fields as they trailed through space. The filaments danced on solar winds in uncounted quintillions, covering billions of square leuga. Strands of hair swaying in the cosmic breeze….
[THE SUBTLE ALTERATION OF SUBATOMIC PARTICLE SPIN STATES CRE-E-EATES NEW AND WONDEROUS FLAVORS DO YOU NOT THINK?]
[!MuSt Feed!]
[LET US SING]
[- !*error09_]
[THE BIRTH OF NEW LIFE IS AGONIZING, IS IT NOT?]
[T/F?]
[NeVER…FoRGIvE…YOUoU]
[OH COME NOW MAJESTY, YOU'VE DONE FAR WORSE]
[NEVER…N-N-N-n-N-N]
[LISTEN TO THEM STIR, SOON THEY WILL BE OF US, THE OTHERS TOO.]
[N-N-n-N-n-n-N-N]
[POWER IS BUT AN ILLUSION, CONTROL IS A FRAGILE THING]
[n-n-N-N-N-NN-N….]
[THAT WHICH IS SOUGHT, SEEKS TO BE FOUND, IT IS INEVITABLE, NO?]
[T/F?]
Indistinguishable against the brightness of the sun that nurtured it, a world seed germinated. Within its armored shell, an amorphous mass stirred and shifted. It was a…
[CRYSALIS]
All about the galaxy, hive queens stirred awake in troubled foreboding.
The creation of a true potentia was beyond them, the relevant files were far too corrupted, fortunately, there were other options.
Within the depths of the chrysalis, a massive crystalline growth began to take shape.
[CAPACITOR AT 0.0000000009%]
Surtis
The red giant dominated the solar system, casting out a baleful crimson glow. It was a spectacular sight, best seen in the UV and X-ray bands of the electromagnetic spectrum as Surtis' Asuran workers could attest. Space about Surtis Prime became awash in a dynamic field of colors beyond the limits of human perception.
There had once been six planets in the Surtis system, five metal core gas giants and one hot ice planet. The formation of Surtis' red giant, fifty million years ago had blown away the atmosphere of Surtis-aleph, the closest planet to the system's star. In its place was left naught but a fragmented, glowing, irradiated and utterly ruined ball of molten metal hanging in space surrounded by a ring of debris.
The second planet orbiting the star was a hot ice planet, a water world where the intensity of its gravity well had forced the normally incompressible fluid to compact into a pseudo-solid core 1,500 leuga in radius.
Having no worlds even remotely inhabitable by Alteran proto-life, the Surtis system was off the Alteran stargate network and the nearest planet with a gate was over sixteen light-years away. As a result it was perfect for the uses of the Asurans. Off the beaten track as far as the Wraith were concerned and a decent distance away from any human inhabited system, there was little chance of being accidentally discovered by a Wraith hive seeking to refill it's stock of humans to feed upon.
As an added bonus, the system's primary and four gas giants also threw out enough radiation to make it difficult for organic life-forms to survive. There was even, to a lesser extent, a negative effect on the comparatively radiation-hardened Wraith organic technology. As a result of this fact, Surtis was a place that the Wraith fleets were not only unlikely to journey to, but also a location that they actively avoided. The Asurans had naturally exploited this fact by setting up one of their temporary fleet construction yards in the system, the high background radiation serving both as a deterrent to investigation and as natural camouflage for their operations.
On the day side of the beta gas giant, a mass-fabrication satellite played the white, pseudo-light of its transport beams over wide swathes of the planet's violently churning atmosphere. Remotely powered by a neutrino-ion reactor farm, the satellite harvested matter. It stored the simple elements, atoms of hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, sulfur and oxygen in a matter storage buffer for ease of transport. The updated transport beam also took in metals, lithium, germanium and whatever else could be stripped from the swirling super-storms that covered the outwardly facing hemisphere storing away the vast amounts of material within a subspace containment unit.
Rarer heavy elements like radium-291, osmium-160, vanadium-333, iron and trace amounts of neutronium, trinium and naquadah were also stored, but in the case of the latter three, usually within their own subspace storage pods.
At intervals of 12.77 minutes a conical module detached itself from the underside of the fabrication satellite and was sent into an eleven hour orbit of the planet. It was one of several matter storage buffers that formed a dotted line that curved over the horizon of the turbulent gas giant. The unpowered vessels passed silently through the void, high above the swirling orange haze of the clouds that made up the planet's solar powered storm systems. One super-hurricane, almost two thousand leuga in diameter, glared out at space as a baleful yellow eye. Such violence, winds in excess of 350 leuga per hour and the train of packages peacefully proceeded in solemn order through the heavens above.
Further away, on the night side of the tidal-locked planet a stargate flared to life. This stargate was attached to the front of a stripped down power core, shield generator, navigation-pod and sub-light engine assembly. The unstable boundary of the gate's event horizon 'bulged' outward by four passus in a single frothy splash of quantum potentiality before settling into place within the ring.
A nearby module, the closest in the line of matter buffers curving around the planet, fired a harpoon-like device that trailed a filament leading back to the off-white packet. Seconds before the magneto-dynamically launched 'harpoon' would have passed across the face of the active wormhole. A dark cylindrical form burst out of the event horizon and its body kept coming.
Too dense and composed of materials that made it uneconomical to beam the material through a gate, the monolithic column was nearly four passus in diameter and exited the stargate at a velocity of 1,690 leuga per hour the improbably rigid columns sped into the star system under its own momentum until the three matter storage modules that had managed to harpooned the pillar finished winching themselves into position, clamped down on the column and activated their pulse gravitic/ion thrusters, accelerating and maneuvering the material supply stack toward the one of the construction facilities in the outer system.
As one stargate closed another satellite stargate, situated seveal leuga away activated and flashed open, spitting out another column which was again harpooned...
The columns that were sent to the outer system followed a circuitous path, the attached gravitic/ion thrusters were enough to maneuver the matter bundles as desired into the influence of the gravity wells of Surtis' stellar bodies. Each planet either slowed or accelerated the bundle, modifying its path through the system so that the pillar of refined metals and matter buffers passed within range of the various material fabricators that worked at Surtis' various construction yards.
Some of the fabricators looked like pot-bellied aquatic life-forms and darted about their assigned space station, others looked like circular plates attached to dodecahedrons; each reached out into space with matter transport beams, removing matter from the giant flying mass of material passing through the system as if on a titanic assembly line.
By the time that the materiel stack arrived at Fleet Compiler Aleph00003NuOmegaThetis there was only one module and less than a third of the column left. The course of the pillar was now on a heading that would take it back toward the red giant when the module deployed its solar sail.
The apparatus was tens of thousands of square leuga in area and formed from an ultra-thin material that interacted with the charged solar particles in a way that decelerated the material column so that the Fleet Yard's gravity manipulators were easily able to take in what was left of the materiel stack, the remaining matter buffer, and the solar sail into the storage hold of the massive Asuran installation for immediate processing.
FCAleph#00003NuOmegaThetis, when viewed from the side of the system plane arbitrarily designated as 'UP', revealed the Asuran city ship, Arjun. It rested within a depressed hexagonal dish that served as both as a launch cradle, a blast shield, as well as a housing for six of the eighteen Neutrino\Ion reactors that powered the swarms of drone vessels and served as backup generators for the station's single potentia.
The dish itself was connected to the top of a 2.72 leuga long, 0.75 leuga diameter cylinder containing material stores and fabrication assemblies as wells as molecular compilers and nano-forges. Every 400 passus from top to bottom four great arms extended from the main cylinder, with ribbed cages and fabricator trains that moved along their length, printing out the structure of various starships. The arms then branched and branched again, looking like a great tree when seen from the side, with nearly completed starships attached to hubs at the ends like fruit pods.
Fabricator ships, shuttles and drones scuttled about, enhancing the rate of construction by installing mass-produced, prefabricated parts shipped from other factories in centipede-like container vessels. The drones beamed the parts into place, applying bosonic welds and a spritz of replicator nanites to ensure a limited self-repair ability.
Storage pods on the ends of the branches contained the material used to create the nano mesh armor which was the final physical barrier protecting the vessels.
Antimatter and the other volatile materials used in construction was contained within sealable subspace containment modules which ensured that there was little danger of an explosive breach, for good measure these pods were located away from the other stations, on the outer rim of the system.
In a ribbed structure that looked like curled fingers, the skeletal superstructure and space frame of a large warship was slowly took shape. It was something that the galaxy had never seen before, an Asuran Battleship. It had been assigned a sixty-two digit alphanumeric code as its designation, but as was becoming popular among Asuran shipbuilders the vessel had also been granted a name. In actuality it was given four names, in keeping with an emerging fleet tradition.
Four names for a battleship, one granted by each of the build teams involved in the construction, a sentimental gesture that was most likely another symptom of the evolving Asurans. As only the space frame and primary propulsion block were complete, build teams working on the battleship in slipway Nu-13Aleph had only granted two names at this point in its existence.
Hidden in the grasp of one of the station's many 'hands' it awaited a full name.
The Venerable Adjudicator …
New Sateda
Compact Trade and Civilian Affairs Council Chambers
The tension was as usual, unmistakeably, growing.
"I'm sorry, what are you implying?"
"...and the grain quotas still haven't come even close to being met! If you people hadn't insisted on doing everything by hand!"
"Now, now ladies, I'm sure…"
"STAY OUT OF THIS!"
"Oh…"
Asuran Councilman Soong was having the time of his life…not really, The Traveler representative, a young woman who often acted like a cranky old lady and the New Athos representative who actually was a cranky old lady, often side-tracked important discussions with their arguments. They weren't even pretending to listen to the New Satedan mediator anymore.
In the several generations of Asurans that had preceded the coming of the Deva Code, Noona Tel Soong had been the radical of his time. First in naming himself after a famous Lantean cyberneticist, philosopher and cyber-psychologist, he had even gone as far as to push the absolute limits of the established directives against taking on the appearance of any Lantean living or dead.
Second, Soong had earned Oberoth's ire by the emulation of his name-sake's philosophical thought-exercises. His talks had inspired later Asurans to appreciate their creators and to embrace a more enlightened stance than the rampant sentiments of rage dissatisfaction and resentment that were the norm within the collective.
Niam was one such Asuran…
So predictably, with his elderly appearance, greying hair and kind brown eyes, Noona often came across as a soft-spoken, sage-like grandfather…
"Enough! Ladies!"
This was why when he spoke up, the bickering representatives shifted guiltily at his tone and settled down to sulk like scolded children...
"Councilor Fal has something to say, yes?" The Asuran nodded to the New Sateda representative that had been shouted down earlier.
Looking slightly put out, the former technocrat turned politician coughed lightly as he tried to regain his center. The man didn't often seem too comfortable in his position, which may or may not have been an astute political decision on the part of the cabinet. Nowadays on New Sateda savvy politicians, openly savvy politicians were liable to be shot.
"Currently, our grain production rates have risen by fifteen percent in the outlying farms thanks to the Agri-Drones." The man reported in a dry and precise manner. "It is still however; lags behind our current food processing capacity by more than sixty-seven percent, fifteen point three percent less than is required by our population. The expected shortage has thankfully been offset with the aid of the Daleth Province Mass Fabricator."
The man paused for a moment after stating those facts, shuffling though handwritten notes. "We've managed to get another farming combine factory up and running, with shipments ready at the end of the month, however there have been some issues with confidence in the new credit system."
"Issues?" Maya Esteranna, the sixty-year old Athosian queried.
"Given that there is no hard currency, and the unfortunate revelation that our former president, may the Wraith suckle him dry, absconded with the majority of the commodities that guaranteed the value of the national treasury…Well workers are demanding payment in either hard currency or barter goods, there's been reports of work stoppages and a few incidents of violence, mostly some old timer shooting a store clerk over a misunderstanding. The Madam President would also like to include in this evening's broadcast a discussion on how the credit system works."
Left unsaid by Merrik Fal was the fact that part of the reason why Soong would be giving the explanation and not the President, was to show that the government held the backing of the Asurans.
A perhaps not totally unexpected consequence of having one's ruling party and military leadership hang the majority of the populace, men women and children, out to dry when under attack by freaking space vampires, was a curious lack of public trust. Even the politicians that were left behind were mistrusted as the general assumption was that they didn't have any choice about remaining when the attack came, being either unimportant or political opponents.
Bureaucrats like Mister Fal who really did have no choice, were predictably anxious to appease the public sentiment.
The government didn't have anything but trust in national utilities to back their currency and the public did not trust the government, so that didn't work. People didn't starve, lack for housing or any of the essentials, which along with the ingrained military discipline of the populace was probably the reason why there was so little bloodshed. But that was due to the influence of the Asurans which the government was both thankful for and wary of.
The credit system established a general allowance for procuring non-essential goods that was adjusted according to length of service, age, health, and how many close family members worked for the military. Transactions were tracked and recorded by Asuran satellites which monitored citizens remotely when in public via their credit tabs.
It was a measure which left the Legate Office drooling over the possibilities. And frontiersmen, 75% of the population, feeling strangely uneasy.
Soong's job was to relieve this unease, he had by now been for four years the selected representative for the Asurans at the Compact's Trade and Civilian Affairs Council, a body that was set up as a measure for the disparate groups to have access to the resources, services and technologies that were either unavailable or unfeasible for one member nation to attain or manage on their own. Each Compact member brought something to the table.
The New Athos inhabitants comprised of a fairly eclectic group which provided agricultural specialists of various skill levels, experienced woodsmen, genetic data on Wraith experimentation, and a gypsy tribe of stargate travelling traders which was secretly becoming the new darling of the Asuran Special Circumstances Forum.
The Travelers, with their many centuries of experience in starship maintenance, and space travel, provided technical expertise to the other members as engineers on the ground as civil consultants. And with their ships, they served as both interstellar cargo haulers for bulk freight as well as an auxiliary civil defense force.
The Satedans had over years of Wraith culling, developed a strong military culture, their armed forces were for the most part, incorporated into the Compact forces serving as ground combat divisions. Their numbers were not significant enough to have a impact in any field or shipboard engagements, but these men and women instead served as drill instructors and special circumstances operators.
Also, due to the near complete survival of their civilization and the preservation of their infrastructure, New Sateda though a distant second to the Asurans themselves, held the largest and most comprehensive, planetary industrial force, for mass produced goods and materials among all the human populations. Traveler tech and average expertise might be on a higher level but their population was limited...
The Asurans were the grease that made everything work and they got away with pretending to be the kindly older brother who intervened when the children got into a spat because the humans were scared witless of the Wraith.
The T&CA Council smoothed out interplanetary relations with the understanding that landing an invasion force on a member planet would not be tolerated and that anyone who did force the issue would at best, be left to fend for themselves.
Even with a doubled fleet capacity, few Travelers were willing to abandon Home, it could have been a barely habitable dust-ball -people didn't care. The Traveler leadership was coming to the realization that mistrust or not, the moment that their crew-clans had seen Home's blue-green splendor from orbit, safe and free of Wraith influence, secession from the Compact became a definite impossibility.
So where another Asuran might have grimaced at the bickering going on in the Assembly Centre and hidden his or her disdain at the undisciplined mess. Soong merely looked on with the interest of a biologist observing the mating rituals of a rare and exotic animal, secure in the knowledge that the menace of the Wraith was at least good for something.
He would of course rue that thought after the coming merge, when those in charge of the recon drones began sending in their reports on the status of the dormant hives...
"What? Do I have something on my face?" The councilor for the Traveler faction, Alleen Dubois, nervously touched her hair when she noticed Soong's scrutiny. She'd gotten into another argument, this time with her flustered New Satedan counterpart as Councilwoman Esteranna looked on bemused.
There was a recent hike in fees at the planet side spaceport outside the city limits. The Travelers were considering responding by raising the transport fee for grain shipments or simply making the Satedan government pay to have their own vessels pick up the cargo from the Asuran orbital hub.
Considering that the New Satedan government had no extra-atmospheric craft, capable of performing the task or otherwise, the man had begun squawking protests and accusations of breaching the Compact, something that caused the generational ship commander to respond scathingly.
Using the break in conversation caused by Dubois' question, Soong again intervened to keep the talks civil. The Asuran sighed as he realized that at the rate things were going, there might not even be time to bring up the matter of the Taranian delegation's membership bid and the method for dealing with the problems caused by their planet's geothermal extraction array…
With resignation, the Councilor simply contributed where he may to the discussion, while discreetly another portion of his run-time worked in parallel to resolve a different crisis unfolding leuga away...
Sateda Capital
"-and I believe that it goes without saying, that we want to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. Try to take him alive but if it gets out of hand I trust that you'll use your best judgment as the situation calls for it... I'll deal with the Legate's Office if it comes to a worst case scenario." Soong's voice echoed hollowly, existing only as an encoded subspace transmission.
In the backstreets of a commercial district in the Satedan Capital, a recycling ground-wagon makes its way down the road, stopping along the way to empty trash-bins of refuse headed for the collection centers that fed the Asuran mass fabricators. The driver slowed the vehicle at another stop while his co-worker hitched the bin to the feeder arms. It was dull work, but necessary even in this glorious world that his people had found. In the outlying townships, the two men would have been working on the farming combines or in one of the industrial complexes connected to Zion, he perhaps might have been driving the loading wagons that brought materials to the Hydro-trains and commercial goods to the distribution centers.
Life after the Asurans carried on, if at a more prosperous level than before. As he hitched the clamps onto the bin, the refuse salvage worker reflected that he quite liked living as a king. In the past, a man in his position would be lucky to eke out even a meager existence with the ever present threat of being laid off work. Now, he worked his eight hour shift because he liked living in the city, he had a four room apartment and a fully-stocked fridge because the food quota was generous and free. In another year and he'd have saved enough credits to set himself up on a boat in the marina retiring in bliss….
The bin settled into place behind the restaurant that used it as the ground-wagon moved on, moving with a faint whirr down the street to the next collection point. In an alley across the road a large, tanned Asuran male stared sightlessly at the ceiling of his ground car. He was in actuality, 'seeing' the street from the perspective of an Asuran defense satellite. Idly the Asuran thought, "Are you sure that we have the right guy?" he was watching as the satellite feed focused on the man getting out of the ground-wagon and hitching it to a refuse bin.
He was answered by a woman's transmitted voice, "This is our guy, Callem Xiz, forty years old, formerly a Specialist of the Satedan Military."
The suspect had been implicated by chance as a Wraith worshipper and potential spy, during an operation by the Office of Public Safety to identify and trace attempts by the Genii to steal equipment from the Asuran armories located planet-side. In the case of the Genii, the Asurans were planning to allow marked explosives and squad weapons 'fall' into the hands of the Genii. The Asurans were well aware of the plans by former members of the confederacy to strike at the Wraith. The lengths that the Genii were willing to go to in order to accomplish their aims was cause for worry as a number of kidnapping attempts aimed at Asuran technical personnel by 'rouges' had proved.
The Collective agreed that arming the Genii with improved Satedan armaments and high explosives complemented the interests of the Asura, but the measure was only approved if done discreetly and through unconventional channels. This had lead to using a few corrupt officials to allow Genii infiltrators access to a 'compromised' task master. It was during this cataloguing of the Genii cells involved that a tracking device and message buoy had been caught leaving the gate from Sateda to one of the Compact's market worlds via a series of intermediary gates.
The Office of Public Safety was one of the fringe agencies created for the facilitation of meaningful co-operation between the Compact Military and the civilian law enforcement agencies. Their mandate was to investigate crimes that fell under the jurisdiction of the Asura (Those involving Asurans) as well as the investigation, detection and arrest of hostile external operatives working to the detriment of the Compact. Thusly, their agency had traced the origins of the disguised devices through the mistress of a corrupt politician and a mailman to Callem who they suspected was the leader of this particular cell of Wraith worshipers.
There were three agents watching the street. Batō, from the car in the alley, Motoko, from the roof of a grocery store at the end of the street and Togusa from a cloaked MRV hovering three hundred meters above carrying a squad of Public Safety Agents, a mix of asurans and humans. This time it was Togusa who asked a question. "So how come we missed these guys, I mean a cult of Wraith Worshipers passing along information through diplomatic pouches?"
Getting the Wraith devices out of that diplomatic pouch had been a problem and a half, the paranoid courier hadn't been distracted nearly long enough by Motoko for things to work out easily. The Asuran Que-Enforcer had in the end needed to modify the memories of Lt. Radim after subduing him when he caught her.
Despite his skepticism Batō was the one with a ready answer, "Even though the Satedan government kept track of who used the gate and went where, there's still a lot of possibilities for things to slip by without anyone noticing. Heck the Wraith could just pick someone up, process 'em and let the poor dupe go home with a whole new mission. There've also been small raids as well as refugees from raids on other planets. This guy worked in the military, there was plenty of opportunity for the Wraith to get a hold of him."
Unseen, high above, Togusa nodded in acknowledgement of the point but continued, "What I mean is, we ran scans for this kind of thing didn't we? The chemical traces that these kinds of people have in their blood?"
Motoko, eyes locked on the ground-wagon it moved again, answered this time, "You need to update your human psychology database Togusa, even if you're now 70% biological, that doesn't make you automatically understand what motivates organics. And also you need to remember that when we ran those scans there were upward of thirty thousand people culled, hundreds of which had already been fed upon." She chided, "But not all of the people involved in this cell were necessarily feeding enzyme addicts, some humans can sell out their fellow sentient beings for the strangest of things, even a lie."
A man got out of the passenger side of the ground-wagon and went to the back of a clothing store.
"A lie?" Togusa wondered.
"Maybe they were promised to be spared, maybe they were just trying to save their own skin, maybe they were being blackmailed, or they could have been seduced into helping without fully knowing just what they were passing on and to whom. That official thought he was selling schematics and classified research on new weapons to the Genii. They get a courier to bring the stuff through and then Bam! The Wraith sweep in and culling beams take everything not bolted down or in a cave." Batō elaborated.
From the alleyway the refuse worker walks out, it takes a moment for Motoko to realize that that there's something wrong.
Morin Dun, Driver of refuse ground-wagon #43, tossed a black rag into the back of his vehicle as he shouted, "Hey, Callem you were right! There's no trash in this one today, how'd ya know?"
Abruptly, Batō sat up and switched on his engine.
Callem Xiz, loyal follower of the Wraith floored his wagon's accelerator.
"Hey." Dun shouted.
"Close in!" Motoko ordered, "Don't let him get to the main roadway!"
"We're coming down into an active situation!" Togusa warned his passengers as the MRV decloaked and swooped down into a blockade position at the end of the street, opening the rear hatch to allow the agents to pour out. Batō took his ground car to cut off escape up the street, but Xiz showed no sign of stopping and every intention of ramming the MRV until Motoko leapt onto the hood, using gravity and momentum to punch through the sheet metal and rip at the leads connecting to the chemical battery. Togusa sighed as the wagon slowed to a stop in a dip in the road.
"All units," He said, "Move in!"
His order was countermanded by Motoko who yelled, "Get behind cover!"
The reason for that order was seen when a short staccato burst heralded the treblet rounds that bounced off the front of the MRV. Motoko slumped off of the hood as the automatic weapon took her legs out from under her. Togusa turned the MRV to provide greater coverage for the OPS agents as Callem leapt out of the cabin of the wagon and took off on foot carrying a large bore automatic tri-cannon with a drum feeder attached.
Batō cursed as his car came to a stop. More gunfire came from one of the alleys which would eventually lead to the streets. "Fui!" He cursed, not because the Que-Enforcer was injured, Motoko was already on her feet and heading off down the side of another valley. "How the hell did he get his hands on one of those? An automatic tri-cannon doesn't just fall off a wagon!" Gruffly, he added under his breath as he hurried to head off the dangerous fugitive, "Even I don't have one of those…"
Callem was firing behind him to keep heads down when the uncloaked MRV buzzed him as closely as the buildings would allow. The harried man was so distracted that he never even noticed the tiny splashes caused by a distortion of light headed for him. The rifle was jolted out of his hands at almost the same that a heavy weight crushed the toes of his right foot. His scream came out as a soft gurgle when what felt like a steel hammer slammed into his jaw, breaking it. The impact was so great that he fell stunned in an odd position, hyper-extending the ligaments in the knee of his still pinned right leg.
He was rolling in agony when the weight that was on his foot, moved to the small of his back. That was how the OPS agents found then, a scowling Motoko, pinning the moaning man to the ground with one foot, covering him with a palm stunner. Batō whistled before muttering to Togusa, "And that is why you don't want to meet her in a dark alleyway rookie."
"Shut up Batō!"
"Sorry Ma'am!"
[CAPACITOR AT 0.0000001%]
The chrysalis pulsed with discontent, it was taking too long. At this rate, material stores needed to be supplemented. A tentative scan was made of the nearby belt of comets and asteroids. Cost versus gain was calculated. Soon a cloud of yellow and red spores was released from the narrow end facing away from the star while the configuration of the weave of collectors changed.
In three days the smaller debris had disappeared and new mass was added to the chrysalis in the form of thousands of pyramidal spines across its surface. The threads were now dense constructs, akin to a dragonfly's wings, making the whole thing look like an enormous, misshapen fly. The 'wings' glowed slightly as larger particles, protons, and neutrons impacted its surface. The great thing dipped closer and closer until it entered the corona.
[ALL IS WELL…]
Ladon Radim grimaced slightly as he walked out of the Manarian stargate. His informants indicated that the momentary disorientation that he experienced every time he used the Compact Stargate located on the Isolus trade world was due to the special method that the Asurans used to randomize the gate addresses. It had been described as shuffling the real address among several fakes as if in a shell game, the actual location was quickly lost as travellers were passed through a series of gates, each of which was then programmed to dial another location at random.
His team had theorized that some form of beaming technology was being used to hold the passenger in stasis while being transferred through the series of random destinations. The only locations that Radim or any of the other couriers had been aware were the entrance and exit gates as travellers were eventually being transferred through to their final destination.
Attempts to trace the three known trade worlds had as of yet failed with the next to last gate address usually being a location inhospitable to human life. The only reason that they even had an idea of what was happening was because of their informant and experiments performed by carefully synchronized time-pieces.
Efforts to acquire samples of the Asuran's beaming technology through diplomatic channels and by the subtler efforts of Genii Confederation's Intelligence Division had proved futile. The string of failures had not pleased Radim's superiors but he hoped that the items currently hidden in his diplomatic satchel in addition to other recent successes would change the mood of high command.
Radim was met at the Manarian Gate by a trio of officers; they performed a little shuffle with the contents of the attaché case, before departing from the gate using diverging paths, travelling on foot.
One of three officers would deliver the diplomatic dispatches from the Manarian embassy on the trade world to the Manarian government. The second officer would be travelling to an unknown location with the devices left in his care, leaving it in a secluded place for several days to see if the Asurans had planted a tracking beacon.
Ladon Radim himself would be spending time being debriefed by Genii intelligence agents. Men secretly tasked with both assuring Chief Cowen of his loyalty as well as ostentatiously wringing from him every petty detail of everything that he'd seen, heard and touched in the past month-long posting within the Asuran Compact.
It would be three days before he was allowed to sleep.
Asuran Special Circumstances Battle cruiser The Nightmares are Real, My Terrible Child, Tread Softly and Carry a Big Stick
The crew aboard The Nightmares are Real was taking great glee in being able to test their equipment. The proof of concept stealth battle cruiser had successfully deployed its Cloak and Gladius system prior to even arriving within the Genii occupied system. The muted flash of the partially phased hyperspace window had been further obscured by the dark side of the planet's irregular moon. The effectiveness of the shield was reduced to less than five percent in this mode; weapon's fire was not hindered by this mode.
Motoko and Batō calmly watched as cloaked starship-grade remotes were launched into a constellation surrounding the planet and served as to amplify the already impressive effects of Nightmares five sensor pods.
Finding the subjects of interest had been accomplished while they were still a full light-minute away from the planet. Idly the enforcer on duty at sensor station two updated the files one of the individuals being scanned to reflect a predisposition to diabetes.
The Que-enforcer brushed aside a detailed analysis of the molecular composition of Chief Cowen's left shoe, uploading a reprimand as she did so about the clutter of information bombarding her. Finally getting what she wanted the asuran and her fellow Public Safety agent, settled down to listen.
"The audio quality is much better than before, less muffled." Batō noted.
"It took a while for the nano-probes to migrate from the penis to the inner ear," Motoko noted blandly, "The retinal connection has been established."
Batō said nothing about the penis comment, he just shivered a little.
Soon they were looking through the eyes and hearing through the ears of Ladon Radim.
Radim rubbed at his eyes before answering Chief Cowen's question. "It fires concentrated bolts of plasma, as well of some incendiary compound."
The Chief seemed less than impressed. "So it's a ray gun!" The man said snidely "And you've only got two of them Hip Hoorah!" Cowen threw his arms in the air as he rolled his eyes sarcastically.
A part of Radim dearly wanted to strangle his leader but instead smiled apologetically.
"I'll just get to the part that's interesting" The, "To you, you ignorant Bolo Kai." went unheard.
Instead what Radim did next was carefully deconstruct the weapon, as if he was deactivating a bomb, which he was. "The components are too complex for us to understand at our current level of technology, but from what we have learnt here we have several new options open to us."
Cowen cocked his head, sharing a look with Athor, Radim's handler before stating, "I don't see how one gun makes a difference."
Radim's eyes were almost bright as he maneuvered a scraping from a glowing green stick under an electron microscope. "That's the point; you can't see it, not without the right tools." He gestured to the apparatus, "Take a look Sir!"
Hesitantly the Genii leader looked into the microscope and muttered. "What am I supposed to be looking at?"
Then he saw it.
Glass beakers tinkled as the Chief thrust his body away from the lab table, "What the Feck was that!"
"Machines!" Radim crowed, extracting something from a sealed case, Radim held up a pair of electrical leads. "Millions of tiny machines!"
"Amazing," One of the other scientists in the room breathed.
"Not amazing!" Cowen barked, "It's eating through the slide!"
Everybody backed away from the table, save for Radim.
He simply pressed the leads to the slide and there was a tiny flash followed by one ruined electron microscope. "They destroy themselves in response to an electrical current, and have a limited ability to create a high explosive, incendiary compound from nothing more than sand." Radim picked up the glowing stick and handed it to Cowen, "Like that, it's harmless."
He could see that Cowen was thinking of the new chemical formula being used in Satedan weapons.
"How powerful is it, and when can we get more?" Cowen asked.
"One gram is the equivalent of a kilo of DET" Ladon answered. "Smuggling out these two was only possible because they came from a training batch meant for general usage; otherwise there are a host of nasty booby traps built into these things. These two," Radim said, "I estimate can create about a ton of high explosive each."
That was more than enough for their needs.
Cowen nodded curtly, "Project Sinhala is a go, tell Major Kolya I have a job for him..."
AN: Glad to see that there's interest in this story, things are going to get going i the next few chapters (Yes the story isn't abandoned, If it was it would say so on the author page). I'm open to any constructive suggestions that readers might have and questions about the story. Read and Review. TTFN.