51. Straight from the Heart
A Primarch and a tech-priest were squeezed uncomfortably into a small side-room branching off from Operations. A spiky, Warp-infused laptop lay open in front of them, and a traitor was plastered across the screen.
Gina sat at a simple but expensive-looking desk, her back to an enormous floor-to-ceiling window. Judging by the view, she was quite high up. A vast, high-tech metropolis stretched out behind her, and whilst it was clearly bustling with life, one could easily see the craters, burnt-out skyscrapers, and vast swathes of rubble that indicated hard times had recently befallen it.
Toji, for his part, just wished his truthsense worked when the speaker wasn't in the same room as him.
"If you're watching this," the Callidus began, "it's because a lot of people just died. A living computer called the Integrated Data Entity attacked one of our most important military outposts, the daemon-world called Bloodhaven, in preparation for a full-scale invasion by the inhabitants of five different universes. I'm not going to tell you that this attack was some sort of just, virtuous retribution, because odds are it wasn't. The Entity's just a dick like that. What I am going to tell you is why so many people have a grudge against us, and why they set something like that on us. Long story short, our gods have been lying to us, they're lying to us because they're batshit insane, and because they're batshit insane, it's in your best interests to up and leave the solar system right the fuck now."
She grinned.
"Did that get your attention? Good. Let's start at the beginning. My name's Gina. I'm a shapeshifting assassin from a government program you've probably only heard of in rumour, assigned to inflict cosmic justice on innocent people halfway across the multiverse. Don't believe me? Check this out."
There was an unpleasant organic noise, and the smiling young woman in the rather drab green jacket folded in on herself. A moment later, a masked figure in a skin-tight bodysuit gave the camera a friendly wave with the long, dull grey blade where her hand should have been. Another wet slurp and she was back to looking human again, if with differently-coloured hair this time.
"So yeah. I can do that. If you're curious, my official designation is Divine Assassin (Callidus) Seventy-Six, and the files on how the gods created me and my fellow assassins can be found at the web address at the bottom of the screen, though you'll need to input the three passwords within forty seconds or a daemon will come out of your computer and eat your face. Seriously, not kidding. If you do manage to get through, check out page seventeen – that's the one that talks about the institutionalised daemon rape. Apparently, it's supposed to be character-building."
"Does that address check out?" Toji asked.
Zhu nodded. "And the passwords, amazingly enough. Network security is getting sloppy. Guess that's what happens when you put the goddess of despair and apathy in charge of managing that shit – uhh, if you'll forgive the blasphemy. And… hoooly fucking shit on a sandwich, she wasn't kidding about page seventeen. Seriously, I need fucking mindbleach, stat."
"You're deleting it now, though, right?"
She paused slightly too long before replying. "… Yeah. Yeah, I am. Military secrets are secrets for a reason, yeah? Don't want to cause any more of a panic than we have to when some dumbshits end up stumbling across them. It's just… it's just that that stuff, what I saw of it… it's seriously fucked up. Look, I know the gods do bad shit. We all know that. It's just I was under the impression that they did it to bad people. Not our own. Not unless they have it coming."
"I suppose they had their reasons," Toji said. "They usually do. Look, I'm not happy about it either, but information-control's our job, and we're mortals, not gods. They know things the rest of us don't." At least, I hope they do.
"Had a good look?" Gina continued. "Yeah, not fun, huh? So yeah, the Divine Assassin program is real, and it's freaky as fuck. Now let's talk about what we were designed to do. At first, we were high-end law enforcement. You know, weeding out society's undesirables and stabbing them in the pancreas. Not that big a deal. The gods' laws are pretty loose, and if you break them, you really deserve what's coming to you. Anyway, we stopped a few serial killers, slaughtered a few paedophile rings, that sort of thing, but that was just the test period. What we were being prepared for was way bigger."
A series of floating projections appeared around her, showing what appeared to be a map of the local multiverse.
"Our true purpose was engage in state-sponsored terrorism against anyone the gods thought deserved it, and luckily for us, they already had some targets in mind for our first mission. Three universes had just started looking real unfriendly, and they figured a pre-emptive strike would be in order before they did something everyone would regret. Now, you're probably wondering why we had three entire universes cheesed off at us, and that's where things get interesting."
The projected image changed, now showing the instantly-recognisable beaked profile of a Chaos warship. A very famous Chaos warship.
"We all know why the gods started exploring other universes. We needed to get rid of our own little C'tan problem, and we didn't have the firepower to do it on our own. Hence, the Stiletto. Our first Warp-capable starship, armed to the teeth and crewed by our best, brightest, and most interestingly mutated. You remember the launch, right? Biggest televised event since the Impacts, broadcast all over the world. I was actually at one of the street parties, though I'm sure most of the folks there wouldn't recognise me now. And then they came back a year or two later, and… well, it was a bit quiet, wasn't it? Sure, there was some coverage, some celebration, a few big promotions here and there… but you'd expect a bit more, yeah? I mean, they went on a grand tour of the universe. What did they find out there?"
"I think I can see where this is going," Toji said. "Lisa, how much of the Stiletto's voyage got reported to the public?"
"Slightly less than what we got. So, uh, maybe two paragraphs rather than three. Don't know if you've noticed, boss, but the gods haven't been big on letting the left hand know what the right hand's doing for a while now."
Good point. "Well, let me put it this way – if half of what Admiral Rong-Arya's been bragging about is true," and it is, "I'm surprised there's only five universes out to kill us."
Zhu didn't have a reply to that.
"Well, they found a lot of stuff, obviously," Gina said, "but what they found isn't nearly as important as what they did. The Stiletto was supposed to be on a scouting mission – look, but don't touch unless they touch first. Problem is, when you outgun everything else in the universe lumped together, touching becomes mighty tempting, and as it turned out, there were certain governments out there with certain policies that our brave explorers found… distasteful. And as we all know, Chaos makes bad things happen to bad people. It's amazing when you come to think of it, isn't it? All those countries we once had, with all those fiddly, complicated legal systems to make sure the punishment fitted the crime, and then Third Impact happened, and it all boiled down to two options. If you don't break the gods' laws, nothing happens to you. If you do, everything happens to you. It made life so simple, didn't it? So easy, so straightforward, and best of all, it was the will of actual, bona-fide gods. After that, why bother with anything else? Why would anyone else need to have anything else? What I'm saying here is that the Stiletto expedition weren't rogues or lunatics acting off their own personal code. Everything they did can be traced back to the first time the gods left Japan, to when they mustered their endless legions and decided the world should do things their way. Bad people, bad countries, bad universes… it's all just a matter of scale, right? And oh, these universes had been bad."
A different set of maps appeared, this time overlaid with the symbols of various interstellar civilisations.
"The United Federation of Planets preferred to watch entire civilisations starve to death rather than interfere with their 'healthy development'. The Cardassian Union enslaved entire worlds. The Praxis was responsible for more crimes than any human has the mental capacity to comprehend. Children were dying, and if there's one thing we don't like, it's children dying. So the Stiletto did something about it. The problem is, life isn't simple like that. When an entire culture is responsible for a crime, who do you punish? The people who did it? The people who gave them their orders? The society that made it acceptable? Where do you stop? Rong-Arya and her crew had a simple answer for this – they didn't. They killed people, so we killed their people. They enslaved planets, so we enslaved their planets. The Praxis collapsed. The civilisations of the Alpha Quadrant lived in terror for an entire year. And the children kept dying."
She sighed, and smoothed back her hair.
"Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that the Stiletto folks personally stomped any babies. The whole point of this is that they weren't deviants or renegades. They were Chaos, and Chaos looks after kids. They took in children after their raids, put them in special nurseries, raised them our way. They wanted to show that the adults may have been at fault, but we weren't blaming their kids. Problem was, they were putting sticking plasters over a missing head. They destroyed worlds, and condemned those who relied on those worlds to starvation. They broke the Praxis, and let the resultant civil war rip the galaxy apart. They forced the Federation to abandon the Prime Directive or die, and so the Federation gave nukes to cavemen. This is Chaos, people – we force the world to adapt to a child's morality, and then, like children, we never clean up our fucking messes. Oh, and the dead kids? This is some of the footage taken from universes the Stiletto passed through. If you're a parent or guardian of young children, I suggest you fast-forward over this bit."
More pictures appeared. They were carefully labelled with time, place, and context. The Primarch and the tech-priest glanced at them for a moment, then did as Gina had suggested. When the assassin reappeared on-screen, she looked decidedly ill.
"Look, I'm sorry you had to see that, but it needed to be shown. And that's what Chaos does when everything's under control, when what we do is what we set out to do. That stopped happening pretty quickly – the more we expanded, the more things spiralled out of our hands."
The screen showed a massive, reddish sphere – one Toji was very intimately acquainted with.
"This is that daemon-world I mentioned, Bloodhaven. It's an artificial nexus of Warp-energy, the gods' home away from home. Creating it caused a psychic shockwave that blew a hole in reality and wreaked havoc across a dozen universes."
The planet was replaced by another universe-map, curiously distorted, parts of it seeming to flicker on and off.
"This universe is run by a god-child named Haruhi Suzumiya. The gods took it over in order to secure a manufacturing base and a route to the rest of the multiverse. The agent they picked for the job went rogue, turned out to be homicidally insane, and turned the entire universe into his private playground. By the time the natives unseated him, he'd left permanent scars on the fabric of space/time itself, and several galaxies are still deciding whether they want to exist or not."
Gina waved her hand, and the images vanished.
"I could go on, but I won't. The other universes'd had enough and were starting to form an alliance, so us Divine Assassins were sent in to break it up. So we snuck in, hid ourselves amongst the locals, and when the signal sounded and our backup arrived, that's exactly what we tried to do. And that's when things went completely haywire. Our support troops went berserk, attacking everything in sight, and the daemons who accompanied them, the extensions of the gods' will, went right on after them. To call it a massacre would be the understatement of the fucking millennium, and yeah, they went after children too. I'm not going to show you the footage, because it's not pretty, but if you really want it, it's here in this file. Just don't say I didn't warn you. What I am going to show you is what came after."
Another image appeared, showing the inside of a cell, its walls and ceiling covered in glowing runes.
"When the gods heard what happened, they went looking for someone to blame. Blaming themselves would have taken a bit more introspection than I think they're medically capable of, so that left us, the folks who were supposed to be running the operation. They sent daemons after us, used our mystic signatures to summon them right on top of us. At the time, I had a recording device in my left eye. Here's what I saw."
The video started playing. Toji and Lisa watched in silence.
One question, though – how far are the gods involved? Do they know what's stirring in their ranks?
Bits of them do, yes. Maybe more in the future. I'm impressed, Seventy-Six. Nice deductive reasoning there. Not that it changes matters, though.
"Jesus Christ," Lisa Zhu muttered. "Jesus fucking Christ."
Toji didn't call her on getting the religion wrong.
A few minutes later, the recording ended, and the view returned to Gina's office.
"I'm not asking you to fight," she said. "I just wanted you to see the truth about the beings you worship – that I once worshipped – and decide what to do for yourselves. You can fight if you want, sure, but you'll be humans against gods, and after all I've seen, I don't know what they'll do to you. If you want to run, though, we can help you. The Time-Space Administration Bureau is leading the alliance against the gods, and they've made it clear they don't hold any of us responsible for Tzintchi and company's actions. They took me in, gave me a new home, and they can take you in too if you want. Getting there won't be easy, but I guarantee that you'll be safer with the Bureau than you are on Earth right now. Again, though, it's your choice, and I wish you good luck either way. You'll need it. Frankly, I think we all will."
The screen went black. The video ended.
"There's more in the file, boss," Zhu said. "Do you want to see any of it?"
"Thanks, but no," Toji replied. "I'm heading to the conference chamber. It's past time I talked with an old friend." And maybe he'll even give me some straight answers.
Tzintchi was in his human form, and was very obviously trying to look calm, composed, and not murderously insane. Given the circumstances, he was doing quite a good job.
"Hi, Toji. I suppose this is about that little video?"
Toji leaned forward, his face expressionless. "How much of it is true?"
The god winced. "More than we'd like, I'm afraid. We're losing control. Expanding into the multiverse has stretched us to breaking point, and every so often, we slip a bit. Did Rong-Arya tell you about the true purpose of the Stargate Project, what we're really trying to accomplish there? Want to know why we told her and not you? Because she's dangerously unstable, and we needed to cook up a bunch of bullshit to prevent her from having a psychotic break when she realised nearly everything the Stiletto did was stupid and counterproductive. The only reason she's still in charge of the fleet is because we're up against enemies who've been fighting in space for millennia, and she's the closest thing to an experienced commander we've got."
"Right," Toji said flatly. "And we aren't suing for peace and offering that lunatic's head on a plate to them because…?"
"Because we don't negotiate with tyrants. Rong-Arya was right about who we were dealing with – she just went about the actual dealing in the most ass-backwards way humanly possible. Seventy-Six covered what the Federation, Cardassians, and Praxis got up to, and didn't even mention other fun folks the Stiletto met like the Cylons, Klingons, and Borg. You saw the Integrated Data Entity's handiwork just now, and as for the Bureau, let's just forget that they're the self-appointed administrators of time and space and somehow overlooked all the shit that the others I mentioned got up to, and look at some other little details instead. They've got extremely powerful telepaths. They like to take their enemies alive. Most of the enemies they take alive end up working for them. They capture a highly-trained operative of ours, and a few weeks later she's singing their praises like she's in church choir. Can you connect the dots here, or do I have to draw you a bloody diagram?"
"… You're saying they brainwashed Gi- Seventy-Six."
"Of course they fucking brainwashed her! She's a Callidus! She's designed to be brainwashed! How do you think we wiped out all those death-cults a few years ago? Why do you think the training process involves breaking their minds like that? Toji, the girl's got enough backup personalities to run a medium-sized brass band. What better way to infiltrate a group than to genuinely believe in their cause? Sure, you can question the inventional wisdom – I certainly have, ever since they cluster-bombed us with that bloody video – but she's very much working as intended. Doesn't mean the rest of us following her is on my to-do list, though."
"So surrender's out. What's our Plan B?"
"The Stargate Project. Look, I know it's hush-hush, and I'm sorry about that. It's not that I don't trust you, Toji. And I know that's always a statement that comes with a great big 'but', but it's a good 'but', I promise. See, they might not actually give you a choice. Like I said, the Bureau's got some seriously bad-ass telepaths, and we still don't have much of a handle on their maximum range. The less people know about the details, the less people they can get crib-notes from when you're chatting with them from a couple of planets away. I'm just going to say that what we're doing with your Stargate… well, it's a war-ender. You fire that baby up, and a few hostile universes are no longer a concern."
"That easy, huh?" Toji couldn't quite keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
"Of course it still needs to be completed, and you'll have to hold out until then. But we'll help you however we can, and apart from that… yes, it's that easy. I get that you're tired, frustrated, and probably more than a little freaked out. I get that we've been keeping things from you. It'll all be over soon, though, and you have my word that we'll have a nice long chat afterwards. And look, it's not like we're just forgetting about what our people did, all right? We'll get round to it eventually, and they'll get theirs. It's just that for now, not being slaughtered by an endless tide of angry neighbours is a slightly higher priority. Finish the Stargate Project, Toji. That's all we need right now."
Toji remembered the pictures he'd seen in Gina's video. He remembered Alicia's broad smile and the blood on her hands. He remembered Rong-Arya's 'education' sessions, the messages they'd intercepted from Bloodhaven's parent universe, and the way Carmine Hollow's daemons had become increasingly bloodthirsty and unpredictable. These were not the only things he remembered, though. Other images came to mind as well.
He saw the faces of the interception fleet's crew, helpless and alone as their comrades were slaughtered one by one. He saw the first squads of the Sons of Toji advancing into a half-flooded town in Bangladesh, their spotless new armour gleaming as they handed out food and hauled survivors from the ruins. He saw the shining metropolises that had sprung up after Third Impact, their citizens happy, safe, and free for the first time in two decades. Most of all, though, he saw Hikari's mangled, headless body on the plains outside Tokyo-3. He saw the gentle recesses in the hospital bedsheets where his arm and leg should have been. Shinji Ikari's first deed as a god had not been to demand worship, or to crush his enemies. Instead, he had simply brought two old friends to him, and returned everything they had lost. In that moment, he had become a Primarch, a living weapon beyond equal, and in that moment, he had known he had a worthy wielder.
He was less convinced now, of course. But 'less' still wasn't the same as 'not at all', and losing trust in one of your best and oldest friends wasn't the same as actively betraying them. Especially since he had little reason to trust the other side, either.
Toji Suzuhara smiled a very tired smile. "Then that's what you'll have, Shinji. That's what you'll have. It's just going to have to be a really long chat, is all."
And if you won't tell me the truth, I suppose I'll have to find someone who will.
The riots had begun roughly two hours after the messages appeared on the civilian net. The human law-enforcement officers had been overwhelmed in five cities, and they'd had to send in daemon reinforcements. Hikari sat alone in her office in the upper layers of the Palace of the Gods, waiting for the casualty reports to arrive. On a screen in front of her, the alliance's video repeated over and over.
She tapped a button, opening a channel to the orbital dockyards.
"Hi, Karlmann, Hikari here. It's about the backup fleet for Bloodhaven. Lady Asukhon just called, and she wants you to make a few design adjustments…"
Thundra's eyes bulged. "Wait, there were how many?"
The invasion had almost arrived. The Void's Wrath was about to lead a thousands-strong armada against a heavily-defended Chaos fortress-world, and the bridge was bustling with activity. As a result, most people had to shout or use telepathy to be heard. The Bureau admiral, on the other hand, just had to go a few decibels above his normal speaking voice.
"Approximately three thousand warships, Fleet Admiral Sagitar Thundra," Emiri Kimidori replied, her voice carrying as if against a background of total silence. "We would ordinarily be able to provide a more exact number, but our memory banks were severely damaged by the Chaos counterattack."
Until now, it had seemed impossible for a Humanoid Interface to appear as anything other than perfectly, eerily healthy. Kimidori was doing quite a good job of challenging that. Her hair was lank, her eyes bloodshot and baggy, and there was a pronounced tremor in her left hand as she leaned on the back of a bridge console.
"Standard fleet composition, right? They haven't been boosting their ranks by just mass-producing gunboats and patrol ships?"
"You are correct. Furthermore, the analysis we were able to perform on their systems showed them to be roughly fifteen years more advanced than the ships encountered by the Bureau during its skirmishes in the area designated as Wild Space, and twenty years more advanced than those that led the pre-emptive strikes against your universes. The enemy appear to be intensifying the use of their time-acceleration capabilities."
"Kaiser's blood," Thundra growled. "Let me get this straight. Chaos ships are bigger than ours, tougher than ours, and overgunned as fuck, and you're telling me that not only did they somehow rustle up three thousand of them in a couple of months, but that they've built in over a decade's worth of design improvements? How many did that trap net us, then? Ninety per cent of their fleet? Three quarters? How many do they have left over?"
Kimidori winced. "Roughly half – that is to say, there are around three thousand more defending Bloodhaven. I apologise for the inexactitude of my estimates, but the Data Integration Thought Entity is heavily overstrained at present."
"How many did you lose?" Wilson asked carefully.
"That question is meaningless to the Data Integration Thought Entity, Commander Albert Wilson. Individuality is irrelevant, for we are all parts of a greater whole – one might as well ask an injured human how many cells their injury cost them." She paused. "We have lost over forty-one thousand sentient components, and roughly two hundred thousand more have been irreparably damaged. I had collaborated on multiple occasions with a significant number of them. Their insights were valued."
"… I see," Thundra said at last. "Look, I hate to ask this, but do we have any good news here?"
"Your fleet will now face three thousand Chaos warships rather than six thousand."
It was hard, the fleet admiral had to admit, to argue with that.
"This is Primarch Toji Suzuhara to all personnel within the Bloodhaven sector. Thirty-six hours ago, a propaganda video was leaked onto our networks. It was part of a cyber-warfare attack that destroyed half our fleet and killed almost eleven thousand people. We have heard the enemy's words. We have seen their actions. Only one truth can be gleaned from both – our nation faces the greatest threat in its short history. Our enemies are legion. They are mighty. They are ruthless. Only one thing stands between them and our families, our children, and the fragile lives we have rebuilt since our world was broken twice over, and that is us. Some of you have doubts. Some of you are scared. Some of you aren't even sure we're doing the right thing. And yet we have no choice. We fight for survival, as we have a thousand times before. We fight for our lives, for our freedom, and for a world where we shall no longer have to hide in fear from the ancient evils that surround us at every turn, for this will be our last battle. The gods' weapons are ready. Victory is within our grasp. All we have to do is break our enemy, to crush them in the skies of this planet and on its red, weeping soil, and that is exactly what we will do. For our gods are with us, and who can withstand the gods?"
The heavens opened, daemons swarming from the clouds like living rain. Black-armoured soldiers took up positions alongside hulking Marines and heavily-armed combat servitors. Void shields engaged, lightning writhing across kilometre-tall pylons as an invisible, impenetrable bubble encased the fortress-city below. Far above, serrated leviathans prowled through the Warp, building-sized guns sliding out of their ports and locking into place.
"This is Bloodhaven. This is where the war ends."
Author's Notes: … And there we go. The more observant of you may have found it a bit weird that destroying three thousand gigantic warships only resulted in ten thousand deaths. Rest assured, this was intentional, and I'll be covering it in more detail soon (not because it's some enormous spoiler, but simply because this isn't quite the time and place, and I like to address these things in the actual story rather than the notes). As ever, feedback/criticism welcome.
See you next time!
