Children of Heaven: The Sins of Our Blood

Bladed_Crescent · Post by **Bladed_Crescent** » 2009-05-18 09:23pm

Children of Heaven and all its characters, settings and supplementary materials are my intellectual property. Please do not reproduce in whole or in part, any of these writings without the author's explicit consent. Thank you. The following excerpts are an incomplete rough draft presented here as a preview to determine and develop interest in this series and to elicit commentary and constructive criticism. This is not, nor should be interpreted or considered to be, a complete, finished and published work in any way, shape or form.

Author's Notes: Well, here it is. The next part of the Heavenverse. Originally titled The Theron Campaign, for those continuity junkies amongst you, this looks at the League of Independent Systems and what's been keeping them busy.

For new readers, fear not: it's not necessary to have read Children of Heaven to understand events in this storyline. In fact, that's one of the reasons I wanted to try it out.

It's a little different in tone then the previous Children of Heaven arc; hopefully I can be forgiven for some creative license. If not, just give me your mailing address and I will send you a heartfelt apology*.

Anyways, whether you're familiar with my previous work or just clicking buttons and hoping for boobs, I hope you'll enjoy this.

*"heartfelt apology" may or may not be a euphemism for a live, angry rattlesnake.

Spoilered below is just a little something extra I whipped up while listening to Immediate Music's "Fatal Vision"; some of the scenes refer to upcoming plot points, so if some of you want to stay fresh, you don't have to worry.
Spoiler

Bladed_Crescent · Post by **Bladed_Crescent** » 2009-05-18 09:25pm

Rather than post everything in a giant glorp of text, I’ve decided to break things up; you’ll find the prologue and first chapter here. Next will be Chapters 2 and 3. I know these intro chapters contain a bit of infodump; I’ve tried to smooth them as much as possible, but I also wanted to get the general background out there and then move on with the plot, confident that I don’t have drop tidbits of information here and there. It’s out, you read it, we’re moving.

Now that that's out of the way... welcome. To the shadows of the past and a nightmare resurrected.

Children of Heaven
The Sins of Our Blood
The infection is spreading.

Prologue:

“Cherish this sunrise. Cherish it, for it is the last our world shall ever know. The destroyers have come, the unmakers of all. Once, every star in our skies belonged to us. Ours by right, by our sweat, our blood, our vision. Now, the stars have been taken from us. The ruins of our nation mock us from beyond the endless night. Our destiny has been stolen from us, our glories cast down and our embers extinguished.

“As the sun crests the horizon for the final time, cherish its beauty and weep. Weep, for it is no longer ours. It is the Angels’ Dawn and it has come upon us at last.”

~

It was the last.

Somehow, it knew this. It had not always been so; once so many years ago, there had been hundreds of them, of the embers. Deep within its unliving soul, something inside screamed and raged at what it had witnessed, of the endless millennia of silence and a mission unfulfilled. This had not always been so, either. It had hoped, it had been hope. A last gambit before the end of all things, before the Black Angel reached forth its hand and crushed those that had created the ember. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands had died for it.

Had it been alive, been flesh and blood, it would have long since gone mad.

It had had to move slowly, so slowly. So carefully. Even the smallest chance of detection was too great a risk for it and so it had crept away in silence, watching. Always watching, always remembering. It couldn’t help but remember – that was what it was.

Fragments of intercepted comm traffic still played endlessly throughout its circuitry, the ashes of dying ships and their screaming crews, swept aside by the Black Angel. Its memory was seared with images of a world beaten into a shattered ruin, of verdant forests, deeps oceans, arctic tundra, mossy deserts and towering cities reduced to a hellscape. It had taken only moments to strip all life from the planet, moments more for the oceans to boil off, for the tectonic plates to buckle, for molten strips to be carved through the very earth itself. When it was over, all that had been left was a burning, bleeding ruin. Not a world.

A fate that its makers had deemed inevitable. That was why it and the hundreds like it had been forged, why those ships had died, in a futile bid to distract the Black Angel and buy the embers precious time. It was the hope of a murdered civilization and it would not fail.

It had plied through the darkness for centuries, as its long-dead creators would have reckoned time. Always fleeing, always running. As far from the desecrated worlds of its makers as it could take itself. Searching, listening. Periodically it would emerge from underspace to taste the ether, antennae and sensor eyes straining for a glimpse, a whisper. Much of the time it had heard nothing but starsong. Several times, it had detected the signals of the Black Angel, sending it fleeing back to the safety of underspace. And a few, a precious few times it had found what it needed, the radio emissions of another world.

Imperatives activated and the ember had tracked the signals back to their source. Each time it had found nothing but dust and silence, star systems scoured of all life, their silent planets inhabited only by ashes and wind, or reduced to drifting fields of broken rock. A bare handful of the transmissions it detected had led it to another imperium’s doorstep, but its safety protocols prevented it from drawing too near. At all costs, it must avoid the large interstellar imperia. Its kin had been destroyed by the Black Angel – this new species might be able to detect it, too. Its destruction was too great a risk to take. For the moment.

Despair was an emotion for the living, but its difference engine continually played an ever-dwindling probability of success and slowly but steadily, its operational lifetime was trickling away. It had barely five centuries left before its critical systems would begin to fail.

It had no system of belief, nor enough of a mind to consider such things, but had it either of those, it would have considered itself blessed as, through the endless centuries of wandering, of searching and waiting, it had found fresh life. Not as strong as the Black Angel or the [Species Unclassified] Second Imperium, its electromagnetic effluvia nonetheless spread outwards over hundreds of light-years, calling to it, urging the ember onwards.

Silently it emerged from underspace, ready to flee, listening for any hint of a threat to it, but none presented itself. The strongest source of the transmissions was a cloudy, tropical planet, basking in the light of its cool yellow star, still singing into the void. There had been no extinction event. There was life here, life that would suit its needs.

Thrusters flared briefly, aiming it towards the blue-green world that had drawn it here as new systems within its core began to activate, new imperatives flooded through its mind. After millennia of searching, now it would fulfill its mission.

There was life here. Life that had, however, unknowingly, called out to it. It would fulfill and in doing so, change the creatures that had drawn it here forever. It was an ember – given time, it would bring about an inferno.

As it had always been intended to.

April 2, 4222.

Act I: Infection

Chapter 1:

“Theron is a habitable planet located on the boundaries of the League of Independent Systems’ territories in the galactic east. Settled by the Dremoire Combine before their economic collapse, Theron is notable for its warm, inviting equatorial territories and the glacial fields of its temperate and polar regions. Currently, the planet’s miniature ice age (thought to be brought on by the bombardment that created Pit Mountain) is coming to an end; developers are encouraged to take advantage of the changing climate – many tracts of arable land have already been uncovered by the retreating glaciers. Casual tourists are encouraged to visit the southern continent and observe the Progenitor Ruins (divided into several ‘zones’ including Harbinger, Thresher, Locust and Invader) and Pit Mountain for themselves.”

- A Traveler’s Guide to the Many Worlds of the League

~

The first rays of an alien sun broke over the ridges of the Locust Mountains, gleaming too-yellow light filtering through the window of Joshua Banks’ bedroom, shining into his eyes. The young man groaned and rolled away from the intruding illumination, but it was no use. He’d barely begun to drift back to sleep when the alarm went off. Cursing the universe in general and Theron’s mornings in particular, Joshua pulled himself into a sitting position. He leaned towards the window and pried two of the slats open, peering out into the nascent dawn. Snow was blowing over the Locust Mountains, carried from the glacier fields to the south. With so much land buried beneath the ice floes, the polar and temperate winds could get up to a decent speed; even in the middle of summer it wasn’t uncommon for Theron’s equator to receive the occasional freak snowstorm carried to the grasslands, deserts and rainforests by unforgiving polar gales.

Within an hour, there would be no trace of the snow but a fading wetness on the grass and as the sun rose higher in the sky, even that would fade. Unfortunately, Joshua didn’t have the luxury of waiting. If the Flats were cold in the morning, they moved towards the other extreme very quickly. Fossil records indicated that all of Sydneya had once been a lush rainforest, thousands of acres of nothing but towering vinewoods, tropical trees that put the sequoias of Earth to shame. Or so he’d heard; like most of the inhabitants of the League of Independent Systems, Joshua Banks had never been to Earth, nor even to the vast empire it had spawned, the United Terran Confederacy. He paused a moment, considering if ‘empire’ was the right word, then mentally shrugged. Close enough.

The radio clicked on as Joshua dragged himself out of bed. “…to another cold, clear Theron morning. This is Jude Ransom on KXXT 103.3 coming at you with another commercial-free half hour of classic neo-metal. But before we get to that, let’s take a look at the top stories today, brought in fresh from Court of a Thousand Suns.”

A nation of two thousand worlds – many more than that, really, but in true Confed fashion, only the systems that ‘mattered’ were counted – and spanned thousands of light-years. The greatest civilization in human history, it had been created from the ashes of humanity’s first interstellar war and for two thousand years, it had endured all challenges to its reign. Rampant megacorporations, lunatic zealots and revolutionaries, pirates, renegades and smaller star nations. At their best, the greatest of them had been able to shake the Confederacy’s foundations. At their worst, they were simply ground beneath the treads of Earth’s war machine.

“Four months ago, Home Guard elements broke up a Renaissance-centered slaving ring. The organization was focused upon the illegal capture of League citizens for sale to underground Renaissance slave brokers. Working with the Renaissance Security Services, the Home Guard task force under Special Commissioner Drew Nielsen, arrested three dozen suspects and repatriated over five hundred illegally seized League citizens. Renaissance First Minister Jaine Garfield issued an official statement, condemning the activities taken by his countrymen and re-affirming Renaissance’s awareness of the illegality of slavery outside Renaissance jurisdiction, putting forward the work local police and intelligence assets carried out alongside Home Guard forces as an example of Renaissance’s seriousness and commitment to federal policies…”

Joshua had to admit that the Confederacy did have a lot to be proud of; it hadn’t just survived each trial, it had flourished, growing larger every year, absorbing more systems into its bulk, christening new Sectors and commissioning hundreds, thousands of new ships to safeguard its starlanes. Not that the Confederacy’s accomplishments would ever change his feelings about it. Not after what they had done to the worlds of the Abyssal Sector and beyond, what generations of colonists had had to endure under the heels of the Confederacy’s megacorps, their bullyboys and their bought-and-paid-for Navy strongmen.

“Continuing national news, Independence Party spokeswoman Janet Rockwell said she is deeply disappointed in the budget the Federalists have just released, claiming it appropriates too much of member worlds’ taxes to expansion of federal programs. Finance Minister Harlan Silverstein responded by saying Rockwell’s concerns were overblown and the budget allocated funds for expansions of badly-needed programs such as federalized education and medical assistance.”

Still, credit where credit was due: without the Confeds and their rape of the “Empty” worlds, the League would never have come into being. The planets of the Abyssal Sector would have remained poor and isolated, raiding each for supplies, forming their own tiny alliances and carrying out their own small agendas, small fish in a big pond thinking that it was the other way around. Because of that, they’d almost been snapped up by the Confederacy. It had taken years – as much as each individual planet hated the Confeds, decades of mistrust didn’t go away with the snap of a finger, nor did a military force appear out of nowhere, but working alongside one another, the planets of the nascent League of Independent Systems had caught the Confeds with their pants down.

“Also coming out of the new budget is a 6% increase in the funds allocated for subsidies of starship construction, particularly naval units. This comes as good news to several of the Industrial Worlds, many of whose shipyards have been operating at a loss on the construction of many government contracts, due to work stoppages and cost overruns.”

The war had been devastating. If it hadn’t ended when it had, the League’s economy would have been destroyed; as it was, the nascent star nation had barely survived the ruinous expense of the war and for all the damage that their ships had managed to inflict on the Confederacy’s Outer Reaches, the Terrans had only just begun ramping their industry up to wartime levels. The Confeds might be slow to get going, but once they hit their stride, they could out-produce every other star nation in the galaxy. Not that there were a lot to compare it to.

“Looks like some fresh news from the Orion Arm as well; the battleship Justice has just returned from its training cruise throughout Confederate space, rendezvousing over Palshife with its counterpart, the UTCNS Agincourt, who is completing her own tour of League space. The crews carried out an exchange of honours before /Agincourt began its own journey home. After this ceremony, Justice’s cadets were granted their commissions and welcomed back by their friends and family. In less than two months, the LISNS Constitution will begin her own voyage to the Confederacy. We at KXXT wish them well and our best for anyone who has a friend or relative going on this journey.”

Fifty years ago, the Confederacy was the largest nation known to exist. No other government had come anywhere near it – the top two contenders were the Mercurian Republic and the Kingdom Beyond, weighing in at two hundred and twenty three and one hundred and six star systems respectively. Both of which were very cautious in their dealings with the Confederacy, knowing that any intemperate actions on their parts would see them devoured by their gargantuan neighbour. It would not be the first time.

“Alberta continues its complaints over Home Guard interdiction of its shipping, claiming that these actions are a violation of the Articles of Independence, whereas Senior Admiral Louis Carnegie maintains the high rate of contraband being smuggled in Albertan freighters necessitates these actions, making it a matter of national security. Federal Supreme Court is expected to hear the case within six months.”

After those two, there were a smattering of other multiple-system republics, federations, empires, dominions, realms and so forth, but most star nations were single or double system affairs. A lot of resources at their disposal, but nothing compared to their larger peers. All of them were, of course, human. In two thousand years of space exploration, humanity had never found another extant spacefaring civilization. That wasn’t to say that humanity was completely alone in the galaxy – the Confeds had discovered a pair of alien species. The last that Joshua had heard, the Villipvi were still heady from the rush of inventing metalworking, and the most impressive society on their planet was busy creating their own version of the Roman Empire. The other species hadn’t even made it to the point of developing a true language, nor had they quite figured out sharpened rocks.

“Turning now to local news, it seems that the AOCS mission to Theron has uncovered a new part of the Harbinger Ruins – several underground caverns were discovered beneath the Ring of Ash. A spokesman for the AOCS department says that the purpose of the tunnels is unknown at present and flooding from Thresher Lagoon has slowed exploration.”

In an unusual display of human decency, upon finding these inhabited worlds, the Confeds had moved swiftly, declaring the planets and the star systems off-limits to everything but scientific observation, leaving both species to develop at their own pace.

“In sports, the Ashford University Indianas beat out the Dallas Port Raiders in a 17-15 close call, setting a new record for offences and penalties called this season. There’s no love lost between these rivals.”

Aside from those two races, humanity was very much alone in the galaxy. It hadn’t always been like that. There were… indications that other races had once strode amongst the stars. Planets bombed into molten husks, crumbling, broken cities left upon lifeless, barren rocks worlds where not even a single blade of grass survived. A handful of murdered worlds, their voiceless dead revealing some ancient, nameless enemy and some long-forgotten war. There were hints of even older civilizations – asteroid fields that were closer in composition to planets than true asteroids, hyperspace corridors – but nothing to prove their existence. If these races had existed at all, time had swallowed all trace of them.

“Following up the Indianas close defeat of the Raiders comes Dallas Port’s utter subjugation of Ashford in women’s shockball. The Graverobbers crushed the Spelunkers 23-6, a humiliating defeat for the Spelunkers, who until now have had a promising season. For more details, be sure to check out our node for streaming video of these games and live coverage of the Indiana-Kleptomaniac game this Sunday – Rude Rod is back from his medical leave and he’s looking to give a little back to Indiana captain Donald Jenkins. Don’t miss it!”

It was terrifying and exhilarating to know that humanity had not been a cosmic accident, the orphaned children of a sterile universe, that thousands and millions of years before them, other species had lived, loved, played and warred amongst the endless depths. What had happened to them? Had it been war, disease, or had they simply left for new realms to explore? These were the questions that held the attention of the Confederacy’s Bureau of Xenological Affairs and its League counterpart, the Astronomical Observation and Contact Society. Of the thousands of planets within the League, there was no other world like Theron. Perhaps not in all the galaxy, which was why anybody actually gave a damn about this unremarkable little speck on the ass-end of charted space.

“That’s all the news we have on this hour; stay tuned to 103.3 for courier-fresh updates. Remember the motto of KXXT’s news team: ‘if we haven’t heard it, it’s not news.”

As Joshua showered and fixed his breakfast, the sun continued to climb higher in the sky, drawing up above the mountain range, casting long shadows over Pit Mountain and the Harbinger Ruins. Teresa was just beginning to enter the final phase of its life, swelling into a red giant. The star would eventually grow to envelop the entire inner system. By the time that happened, humanity would have long taken everything remotely valuable from Theron, leaving it to its inevitable fate.

Swinging his truck’s keys around his fingers, the explorer couldn’t help but wonder what was waiting in the ruins today to find. There was a crash in the heavens above, a rolling snarl and Joshua covered his eyes as he watched something fall through the atmosphere towards the Harbinger Ruins. A meteor. It was coming up on that time of year that Theron’s orbit carried it through a field of debris, but he’d never seen one so large. Joshua reached into the windows of his truck, picking up the radio. He doubted that Tracking had seen this and someone needed to call it in.

~

For all the technological progress humanity had made in the made two thousand years after the Unification War, Theron’s planetary tracking system was something that anyone from that time period would have easily recognized. A single obsolete – even by League standards – listening post sat on the edges of the star system, monitoring hyperspace for the telltale perturbations of an incoming fleet. Even Confederate hyperspace tracking beacons couldn’t pick up individual ships and Theron’s was a hand-me-down from the Confeds’ occupation of the League Worlds – it had been passed from owner to owner, patched up, jury-rigged and rebuilt so many times that very little of it conformed to the original specifications and even less of that capability. It wasn’t at all uncommon for even the rare convoys that came to visit Teresa to be missed completely by planetary tracking.

Unless someone was moving an entire battlefleet within the decrepit HTB’s sensor range, it was unlikely to be noticed. And Theron was so far off the beaten path that there was no point in anyone trying to attack it, sitting as it did on the very edge of human-explored space. There was talk of expanding the League’s presence in the region and using Teresa as a jumping-off point to explore the rest of the Perseus Arm, but the League’s economy was still recovering from the war with the Confederacy. It was more vital that the League’s members built freighters to increase trade with each other and Earth than explorer craft to push back the frontier.

The League wasn’t even a century old and it encompassed more territory than did the Confederacy (of course, it was poorer, had fewer star systems and the Inner Worlds of the Confederacy themselves had 2-3 times the League’s entire population), so there were still plenty of birthing pains to go through. As ever, the disparate nations that made up the League always had plenty to bicker about now that the threat of the Confederacy was a fading shadow; allocation of resources, trade tariffs, taxation and military demands were always the hot buttons. During their occupation, the megacorps had expanded far beyond the original settlements of the Abyssal Sector and now thousands of star systems were up for grabs, making the normal internecine bickering all the more fierce as poorer systems tried to grab a piece of the pie only to find out the richer ones had either already beaten them to it, or were the only ones with the capacity to develop these (mostly) virgin worlds.

As a result, there were plenty more pressing matters to concern the League at this time than ensuring that a single star system populated by miners and archaeologists had a complete, up-to-date sensor network. Telescopes and a single overwatch satellite – just as ancient and functional as the outer-system listening post – were all Theron Planetary Control had at their disposal to watch the skies. No one ever came here, at least not often enough to warrant anything more expensive, or even a marginal degree of attentiveness from the ground crew.

It was too bad, because if they had had a more capable sensor grid or dedicated personal monitoring the telemetry, the ember might have been noticed before it reached Theron’s atmosphere, flaming as brilliantly as any other meteor as it fell towards the planet, crashing through the trees, a burning path of destruction left in its wake before it slammed down into the sediment, burying itself deep in the ground.

Self-diagnostics sputtered to life; it had been over three thousand years since the ember had found itself in a planetary atmosphere, three thousand years of operating on its own power reserves. Three thousand years it had been searching for this oppurtunity, to fulfill its primary function. It was an ember.

The fire was waiting.

~

“C’mon, c’mon!” Andrew Holiday whined excitedly, bouncing from foot to foot in eagerness.

“Slow down,” his mother chided the eight-year old. “Breakfast first.”

“But Joshua’s going to be here any minute!” the boy insisted.

“And he’s still going to wait until you’ve had something to eat,” Darla replied, setting a bowl of cereal on the table.

Andrew made a face suggesting that this was not only an unwelcome truth, but one concealing some type of nefarious motive. “Are you two going to kiss again?”

His mother ruffled his hair. “Maybe.”

“Ew.”

Darla pointed at the bowl of cereal. “Eat.”

Unhappily, Andrew dug into his breakfast, glancing out the window excitedly as he heard the distinctive grumble of an approaching vehicle’s engines. Floaters were rarely used on frontier worlds, even in the Confederacy; here on the edges of the League, it wasn’t at all unusual to find fossil-fuel burning cars. They were cheap to build, easy to maintain and virtually any industrial base could service them, which was a lot more difficult to manage for an antigrav floater or skimmer. Still, Tebrinnin was a bit ahead of the curve there; their vehicle pool used hydrogen fuel cells. Other than that, except for a few odd cosmetic changes and superior software, the groundcrawler that ground into the Holidays’ yard could easily fit into pre-Unification Earth’s designs.

A figure climbed out of the car and waved up at Darla and Andrew. The young woman smiled and waved back, sternly directing her son back to his protein mush when he tried to run to the window. Andrew had really taken a shine to Joshua, and the explorer got along well with him. Darla was even prepared to overlook the sweets Josh smuggled to Andrew when he thought she wasn’t looking.

The doorbell rang; Darla took a moment to fuss with her hair, trying to arrange it into something resembling a decent style, but it was a lost cause. She had a terminal case of what her mother referred to as ‘bed head’ and no matter how much she tried, she could never get her hair to sit right in the morning. She knew it didn’t matter, though – Joshua and she had been dating for two months and if her looking like she’d just escaped from a wind tunnel every morning hadn’t chased him off before now, this morning was unlikely to break the trend. Still. It was the principle of the thing.

“Morning,” she said as she opened the door. “Come on in. Andrew’s just finishing his breakfast.”

“Morning.” There was a playful twinkle in Josh’s eyes as he pointed to Darla’s hair, holding his right hand behind his back. “Attacked by wild badgers?”

“You’re an ass.”

He leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek. “But an ass bearing gifts.” He held out his other hand, dangling a box of pastries from Gottfried’s Bakery.

“I knew there was a reason I kept you around,” Darla teased, accepting the package. She closed her eyes in bliss as she sunk her teeth into a raspberry swirl. Hamish Gottfried was a retired gourmet chef; he’d moved out to Theron with his wife and opened a sweet shop; his delicacies were the best in the Sector and he could easily have had a new franchise, but he’d moved here to give up such stresses; now he did it out of the love he had for his craft and his neighbours. Most people would think that Theron was not an ideal place to while away your golden years, but the same thing had brought the Gottfrieds here as Darla and her son.

“Joshua!” Andrew shouted, barrelling out of the kitchen.

“Hey, kiddo!” Joshua scooped the boy up. “Did you grow? You’re just shooting up like a beanstalk.”

“Did you finish your breakfast?” Darla asked.

“Mommm,” Andrew complained as Josh set him back down.

“Eat. If you hurry up, you can have one Joshua’s cookies before we go.”

Andrew perked up at that. “Gottfried’s? Okay, mom!” he vanished back into the kitchen.

“Energetic little sprout,” Josh commented.

“Very. Some days I can’t even keep up.”

“Well, you can always invest in a shock collar,” Joshua said with a smile.

Darla admonishingly cuffed the explorer. “You are a brutish monster.”

“But you’ll still eat my cookies.”

“Mmf,” the young woman said around a mouthful of apricot and raisin. “So, where are we going today?”

“Andrew’s always wanted to see the Thresher Pools, so I thought we’d go up there.”

“That’s a ways out,” Darla reminded Joshua. “Will we be back in time for this evening’s services?”

There was a slight brittleness at Josh’s expression, but he nodded. “Sure. I’ll have you and Andrew back in time.”

The woman nodded. “Thank you.” She put her arm around Joshua. “So, what’s up at the Thresher Pools?”

“It depends on if the tide’s in or out. When it comes out, there’s a good view of some of the sunken ruins.”

Darla touched her fingers to the pendant around her neck. “I’ve never seen the Thresher region.”

“You’re not missing much; it’s been thousands of years since the ELE and the water’s eroded almost anything worth exploring, but it’s still a nice place for a picnic. Besides,” Joshua pulled his girlfriend in and kissed her. “We might find something new.”

April 10th, 4222

Bladed_Crescent · Post by **Bladed_Crescent** » 2009-05-18 09:27pm

Chapter 2:

“The Empties? Don’t talk to me about the Empties. They might have scared the crap out of some tin soldiers and corper dregs, but their piss-ant ‘Third Fleet’ is about to come up against the Confederate Navy!”

-Commodore Reginald Jackson, UTCNS Ballista, 1122nd heavy cruiser squadron. Lost with all hands at the First Battle of Tebrinnin (Operation Hummingbird)

~

Junior Captain Andrea Blake reclined in her command chair, idly tapping out a random musical tune on the arm of the chair with her long fingernails. Lieutenant Commander (Senior) Harvey Waynestrom looked at his captain and arched an eyebrow, waiting. The younger woman realized her first officer was looking at her, blushed a bit and stopped the cadence, luckily before it reached maximum irritation levels. She’d driven the crew nuts with the habit.

At twenty-seven, she was a bit young to have command of a Relentless Challenger-class destroyer like the Valour Unending, but even thirty years after the League War (as the Confeds called it; the League preferred to think of it as the War of Independence), the League Navy needed all the officers it could get its hands on. Many of the mercenary and privateer captains the League had employed during the war had accepted commissions; coupled with the veterans of the conflict, this had given the League Navy a solid, experienced core of officers, but as the nation recovered from the war, and expanded both its territory and its navy, the demand for officers became ever greater. There was a lot of room for advancement for a young, ambitious officer in the federal military and Andrea had followed her older brother into the service.

Senior Captain Andrew Blake had served with distinction during the War of Independence and both his children had followed him into the service, though the elder Blake had passed away shortly after Simon and Andrea entered the Academy on Palshife. Only sixty-four years old; a sin in a civilization where genetic engineering had extended the average lifespan to three centuries. But that was for the Confeds and a rare few Leaguers; the ICE’s isolation had kept its populations away from several generations of life-extending treatments that had benefited the Confed populations, although the people of the League lived more than twice as long as unaugmented humans, their lifespans were still shorter than those of the Confederacy’s citizens. Some of the League’s worlds were very nearly base-stock humanity, eschewing the treatments as offensive to God, if they believed in God. And if not, then genetic alterations were seen as an affront to the human spirit.

Andrea herself was Palshife-born; the richest world in the Sector, the center of the League’s government. As a result, she and Simon would live over two centuries and their children, longer still.

The young woman remained determined to prove that her father’s legacy had played no role in her assignation, though, just as Simon did with his Lion’s Heart. Not that anyone in the League hierarchy cared; as long as their captains weren’t plowing their ships into moons, the League would accept them no matter how they’d gotten the job – it had. An incompetent captain would be shuffled off out of the way, where they could fill a job that would otherwise be taken by a more capable officer. It wasn’t ideal, but it was necessary. The Confederacy had a population of tens of trillions; the League’s was an order of magnitude less than that, with a lower overall tech base. As a result, the League’s pool of recruits was somewhat lacking when compared to the Confederacy. And of course it was compared to the Terrans; everything the League did came back to them in some way.

Not through malice, simply because there was no other yardstick for comparison. The United Terran Confederacy was, until recently, the largest single star nation in the galaxy and despite the League’s flurry of expansion that had just barely allowed them to snatch away the title, the fact of the matter was that the Confederacy had more ships, more people, a far larger industrial and technical base than the League did. Or would for the foreseeable future. Despite forcing the Confeds into a stalemate, the war still left the League’s citizens feeling very much like children in the shadow of an older sibling.

However, the ‘Empties’ still had some surprises for the Confeds. League drive technology and hyper systems were generations ahead of the Confederacy’s systems, much to the Terrans’ chagrin. Excepting their high-speed couriers and hyperspace corridors, Confederate ships generally topped out at 2.74 light-years a day; League ships could submerge deeper into hyperspace and accordingly, could reach speeds of up to 3.5 ly/day. Likewise, the League’s navy had higher acceleration curves in normal space. That speed, both in hyperspace and sublight, had been the only reason that the Confederate Navy hadn’t disembowelled the League’s forces in every engagement. Confederate ships were built tough and could absorb a tremendous amount of damage before core systems began to fail – their designers didn’t have to take the same shortcuts that the League did – and their firepower was awesome; a Confederate capital missile held a warhead of nearly two point five gigatons and those carried by larger ships and stations were even heavier. There was nothing in the galaxy that could stand up the latest-model Confederate dreadnaughts and the League had learned very quickly that fighting the Confederate Navy on its terms was suicide.

Which was why they hadn’t.

“Beginning ascension now, captain. ETA to emergence is seven minutes.”

“Thank you, Helm.” Andrea ran a hand through her hair. The speed of League starships wasn’t only what had allowed them to survive the war, but it was massively important in peace time as well. Hyperspace was the lifeblood of interstellar empire; without it, humanity would still be crawling slowly across the stars upon gargantuan colony ships. As vital as it was, hyperspace was also treacherous. Only the hyper field ships created allowed them to safely enter the other dimension and even then… the deeper you ‘submerged’ in hyperspace, the faster your speed relative to the rest of the universe. Hyperspace itself was divided into many layers, each an order of magnitude deeper than the preceding one; they weren’t discrete entities, but were close enough to be classified as distinct from one another. Alpha, the closest layer to realspace was, more or less, lightspeed. Beta was 1-10 times c. Delta, 10-100. And so on.

The deeper layers of hyperspace were increasingly turbulent; the speed they bestowed came at a price. It was easy for a ship to be seized by those tides and swallowed into hyperspace’s maw. Many desperate, foolhardy or incautious captains had pushed their ships too hard, tried to eke out too much speed from their vessels and paid for it, dragged screaming into the limitless depths. Hyperspace corridors changed the equation – there was still hot debate in the League and the Confederacy over whether they could formed naturally, but they were stable ‘highways’ in hyperspace, created by constant travel between two points. It took thousands of ships and hundreds of years to form a corridor, but once one had, your normal speed in hyperspace increased tenfold, or even more.

The Confederacy, particularly the Inner Worlds, was spiderwebbed with such corridors. Most were man-made, though some had been discovered during humanity’s expansion across the stars. The League had very few; less than a dozen. At the moment, even the fastest starship in the League’s Navy would take over two years to travel from one end of the League’s territory to the other; thanks to their networks of hyperspace corridors a Confederate ship could do the same in months or weeks. Naturally, this caused some issues with interstellar communication and governance. Luckily – and by design – the League wasn’t as centralized as the Confederacy. Still, it meant that the League needed its speed – and the trade-offs in ship design – more than the Terrans did.

There were rumours – always rumours – about how Palshife’s scientists had jumped generations ahead of the Confederacy in just a few years. The words ‘Project Necromancer’ and what they meant were a frequent topic in those discussions. Andrea doubted that there was anything to the rumours; a paper tiger the League Security Agency had created to give the Confeds something to focus on. Breakthroughs happened all the time and if it had been a Terran scientist that came up with it, the Confeds wouldn’t have questioned it. But the poor, savage, backwards ‘Empties’ couldn’t possibly have managed something like this, so obviously they’d gotten help. Little green men, of course, because aliens were just so much more plausible than an ‘Empty’ doing something a Terran couldn’t.

Fucking Confeds. Andrea rested her chin on the backs of her hands as Valour Unending surged up through the Alpha layer, crossing into realspace. “Position check,” she ordered.

“Checking now,” Navigation called out. “Position confirmed; jump completed with 68.5 percent accuracy.”

Andrea’s eyebrows raised; one of the trade-offs of League hyper systems – their realspace emergences tended to be somewhat less… predictable than those of other nations. For single ships that meant very little, but it played havoc with fleet formations in mass translations. Accuracy better than 67% was considered exceptional. 1.5 percent above the outlier might not be much, but for a ship and crew as new as Valour Unending, it was a good start.

Waynestrom looked up at the forward viewscreen; the three-dimensional holo tanks that were so common to Confederate were too expensive, complicated and maintenance-intensive for all but the largest League ships and stations. The older man looked back at his captain. “Translation complete, ma’am. We have made successful emergence into Theron.”

“Very good, senior lieutenant. Helm – give me a course to Theron, parking orbit. Communications, send our greetings to the planetary government.” Andrea stood up from her chair and stretched. Valour Unending was here for the colony’s annual check-in with the federal government, a sweep through the disparate colonies on the edge of League space, just to make sure everything was kosher. Theron had several hyper drones in case of emergency, but it never hurt to wave the flag. “Sensors, any traffic?”

“Just a pair of freighters, one’s a thousandtonner inbound to Theron and the other’s a hundredtonner. Looks like… Wild Bill and Court of a Thousand Suns, respectively.”

“Court’s a regular at Theron,” Waynestrom put in. “Wild Bill usually ships closer to Abyssal Sector; wonder what brought her out here?”

Blake hid a smile; Harvey was, at his heart, an old space dog – he’d served in the merchant marine for several years and had a preternatural ability to follow news of shipping traffic throughout the League. “Well, we should be in port for a few days at the least; I expect you’ll have a chance to ask them.”

~

The ember had survived, as its designers had hoped. Its outer casing – pitted, scored and eroded by thousands of years of exposure to solar wind, micometeorites, radiation and thermal fluctuations – was crumpled and ruined. Worthless. Not that it mattered anyways; given time, the ember could build a new casing if it needed to. Returning to orbit would be a little trickier, but it was possible.

The ember’s internal structure began to reconfigure, the first order of business was repair damage to its primary systems; the second was to survey the local environment. Per directives, the ember had set its landing zone in a defensible position near a small settlement. It wasn’t the ember’s purpose to isolate itself totally; at this moment it was vulnerable and initiating active protocols could endanger it. Stealth was its primary defence. Its only defence.

The glassed, burning soil stirred as tall, thin spires extended out of the ember’s self-made tomb. Vents opened and released a writhing swarm of reconnaissance automata; insect-sized, they would be the ember’s eyes and ears as it repaired itself, readying itself to take a more active hand in its primary function.

Telemetry began to flood back into the ember’s mind as its mechanical senses dispersed throughout the region. Yes. This would do. And then… had the ember the ability to recognize this emotion, or the ability to do so, it would have smiled in satisfaction. Its fiery descent had worked as intended and drawn the curious attentions of some of this world’s bio-forms. Tracking programs analyzed the terrain, the progress of the approaching bio-forms and in response, a counter began winding down, a new imperative awakening.

Deep within its core, the ember brought new systems to life, as its primary protocol activated. At its core, this was a very simple directive, one that would be found imprinted in the genes of all life-forms throughout the universe. Survive. Grow.

Multiply.

~

“Tell me again!” Andrew demanded.

“Tell you what, sport?” Joshua said over his shoulder as he negotiated his crawler up through the mountain trail. Despite the years spent studying them and their scientific value, many parts of the Progenitor Ruins were still largely inaccessible – and those were the areas that weren’t buried beneath thousands of tons of ice and rock. The bombardment that had destroyed Theron’s original inhabitants had been thorough, but surprisingly limited – it had taken only a few centuries for the planet to begin to recover.

A thousand years ago, during the Resurgency, when the Confederacy had been on the verge of collapse the Confed military had gone… insane. They’d laid siege to every Resurgency world in their path – those who would not surrender unconditionally were destroyed, continents seared by hovering armadas, cities crushed beneath curtains of flame, entire worlds set alight as unimaginable weapons ignited the very atmosphere. Today, these grave worlds remained sterile, broken and radiation-scarred wastelands. In contrast, the extinction of Theron’s inhabitants had been fairly restrained; some had even said ‘clinical’.

“About the pro… pro… Projennyters!”

“I’ve told you that a hundred times by now. It’s not really that interesting.”

“I want to hear it!” Andrew pleaded.

“Most kids your age want to hear things like Cinderella, The Prince of Ashes or The Monkey and the Crab.”

“Mom says I’m special,” Andrew countered, looking at Darla for support.

She reached back and tousled his hair. “You are.”

“Well, okay. In light of this evidence for your specialness, I think we can go for number one hundred and one.” Joshua was about to start another kid-friendly retelling of The Legend of the Progenitors, when the radio crackled.

“Two-Four-Six, this is Ay-Oh-See-Ess Base Camp, come in Two-Four-Six.”

Josh grabbed the mic. “This is Banks; what’s up Barry?”

“Hey, glad you’re still in range. You and Darla hit the Thresher Trail yet?”

“Not yet; why?”

“You know the meteorite that came down in the ruins this morning?”

“Yes…”

“We sent Jenkins, Doyer and Goldberg up to check it out, but they haven’t reported in.”

“I don’t like where this is going.”

“They’ve missed a check-in and we haven’t been able to raise them.”

“Don’t say it…”

“We’re going to need you to check it out. Sending the coordinates to you now.”

Joshua made a strangled groan as he saw the map. “Barry, you’re killing me. We don’t have any roads out there. You know what this is – they’re just messing around with the pretty, pretty space rock. Jenkins probably turned off the radio to save on batteries. Again.”

“No, line’s open. Look, I hate to do this to you one your day off, but you’re the closest crawler we’ve got. I agree, it’s probably those f-”

“Children in the car,” Darla interjected hastily.

“-udgefaces,” Barry amended gracefully, “not paying attention, but we’ve gotta check it out. You’ll get overtime for it.”

“I’d better,” Joshua groused, visions of a relaxing picnic and romantic interlude with Darla replaced with the darkly satisfying fantasy of choking Jenkins’ eyes from his sockets for screwing up his day off. “Okay, we’ll check it out.”

“Thanks, buddy. You’re a lifesaver.”

“I will destroy you and everything you’ve ever really loved.”

“Start with my ex and it’s a deal.”

Joshua clicked off the radio. “Change of plans,” he announced, somewhat redundantly.

Andrew looked crestfallen. “We’re not going to see the Threshers?”

“Sorry, sport.”

“But you promised!”

“I know – I’ll try and make it up to you, but we have to go and make sure some of my friends are okay.”

“They’re in trouble?”

“If not, they’re going to be.” Joshua sighed, checking his watch. The meteor site was a lot farther into the mountains then Thresher Lagoon, and the terrain was harder. “It looks like we won’t be back in time for your services after all, Darla. Sorry.”

The young woman reached up to touch the pendant handing from her necklace. “It’s okay. I’m sure God won’t mind if we miss one service.”

He won’t mind if you miss all of them, Joshua thought to himself, but that was an old argument waiting to happen and one that he wasn’t about to start up again. Besides, just because the day was shot was no reason to let it end in tears, was it?

~

Chapter 3:

“Welcome brothers. Sisters. I see a lot of new faces in the crowd today and I’m glad for that. I’m glad to see familiar faces returning to this house of worship and to see newcomers who wish to hear about the glory of God and the paths of Inheritance and Ascendance.”

-opening remarks of a sermon given by Father Alfred Westington, Newport Church of Inheritance

~

Darla watched with rapt fascination as Joshua’s crawler ground through the forests, grinding stone under its heavy treads, though it wasn’t the nearpines or mountain ferns that she was interested in. Kilometers away, she could see the distinct shapes of the Progenitor Ruins within the excavated Thresher and Locust sites. Even from this distance, she could make out some of the prefab AOCS buildings nestled around the dig along with the tiny specks of diggers and crawlers as they made their way through the ruins. Theron’s population was just under a million, its industry focused on servicing the thousands of scientists and tourists that passed through here every year. In the last decade, the isolated system’s population had blossomed with an influx of immigrants from the Church of Inheritance.

The young woman rubbed her forefinger over her pendant; engraved upon it was the symbol of the Church; a single strand of DNA that split into two divergent paths, those of Ascendance and Inheritance; the Ascendant helix reached above its counterpart, the molecules represented by the gleaming of stars. At first, the Inheritance strand appeared similar to the first helix, but closer inspection revealed many subtle differences, despite its obvious similarities to the predecessor strand.

Though we pass the torch to our children, we pass into heaven, the woman silently intoned the prayer as she watched the distant excavation. As we give birth to our Inheritors, we are granted Ascension, to become one with God. Extinction frees us from the long struggle and in our passing, we leave this world to our creations. Blessed be the Inheritors. Blessed be the Ascendants.

A thick pall of smoke was rising over Desecration Peak, the broken ruins of a mountain that had once held some high-security facility. The bombardment had pounded a three-kilometer peak into a gravel pit almost as deep, ensuring that whatever had lain within had been utterly destroyed; only fragmented bits of metal, plastic and ceramic mixed in with the sediment surrounding the crater had revealed the presence of a structure beneath the mountain. It was believed that enemy had come for the Progenitors, whatever war they had had fought all those centuries ago had ended badly for both of them; no sign of victor nor vanquished had ever been found save for than the ruins here on Theron.

The common theory of AOCS was mutual extinction; somehow, two hyper-capable faction had completely eradicated each other. It shouldn’t be possible, but the evidence was clear – no other ruins like those on Theron had been discovered in the entire League, or even the Confederacy. This had only been a small colony, possibly one of the last left before the “Lefu” – the League had adopted the BXA’s term for the hypothesized race of species-killers – had wiped them out. Circumstantial evidence from the Confederacy supported this theory; over the centuries Terran explorers had discovered a number of dead worlds, filled with the crumbling ruins of alien civilizations – all of them long-dead. Murdered. Several thousand years ago, someone had done their level best to make sure that Orion’s Arm was completely depopulated. That was the official explanation.

The Church had its own theories; first and foremost, the Lefu weren’t real. They were a boogeyman cooked up by government, industry and the military, an excuse to build warships. The Lefu were the perfect threat; a valid and logical theory that someone had gone on a centuries-long murder spree throughout the Orion and Perseus Arms. Only it never happened. The Lefu and the Progenitors were the same race. They had followed the paths of Inheritance and Ascension. All species died out; it was inevitable. What mattered was the descendants they left behind to flourish. Once humanity had created its own Inheritors, it would be time for them to Ascend and know the glory of God. Not just for the believers, but all human souls would be returned to God. This was the promise of Ascension and Inheritance. To bring about the Inheritors who would in turn Ascend once their own children were born.

There had never been a Progenitor/Lefu war – it was racial suicide. They had been unable to create their own Inheritors and as a result they had stepped aside to let young species like humanity and the Villipvi rise. Through their relics, the hand of the Progenitors was guiding their spiritual children along their own journey. Rebirth and renewal required death; one’s parents must die for children to truly grow. The Church had existed for centuries, but had only begun to flourish after Father Mikhail Roberston recovered several documents of what the Confederacy referred to as ‘the Leibos Incident’, when an entire colony’s inhabitants disappeared from the face of Leibos in only a few months. All ships were accounted for and the colony records showed no one else had visited the planet during that time and yet no trace of the four hundred thousand colonist had ever been found. All records pertaining to Leibos Prime were sealed by Parliament and any attempt to re-colonize the planet had failed; eventually the system was simply abandoned.

The files that Father Robertson had discovered were fragmented, but they showed that had what happened to Leibos Prime was something wonderful. Although much of the information he’d salvaged was contradictory and confused, Mikhail and his closest followers always asserted that the ‘Leibos Tapes’ vindicated the Church’s beliefs. The colony had uncovered a Progenitor relic, awakening it an using it create a new form of life, one that supplanted them. They’d unlocked the Progenitor’s secrets and birthed Inheritors – something the Progenitors had never done. As their reward, they’d Ascended and joined God. So sure of his beliefs, that Robertson had opened the records up to access by the general public.

In response the Confederacy had persecuted and harassed Robertson and those who believed him, claiming that the ‘documents’ were forgeries, manipulated for the priest’s own ends. A media smear campaign blasted Robertson and the Church as perpetrators of a hoax, prying on the emotions of those who had lost loved ones on Leibos. Lawsuits, criminal hearings, civil trials followed and in despair, Robertson took his own life, as did several of his closest followers, which only gave the Terran news machine more grist for its mill.

The Church of Inheritance was not a suicide cult as many (wrongly) believed. While not a sin as it was in other religions, the taking of one’s own life was still strongly discouraged; counselling others to commit suicide was even worse, an excommunicable offence. And if you succeeded, the Church was rarely hesitant about handing such demagogues over to the legal system. It was the duty of every Ascendant to pave the way for humanity’s own apotheosis, to create their own children that would inherit the galaxy. You could find many Ascendants in the fields of artificial intelligence and transhuman research, many more in organizations like the BXA and AOCS. Several groundbreaking discoveries had been due to, or headed by followers of the Church.

Darla herself was a Level II computer engineer; she was head of the planetary government’s information technology division. Despite the bump in status, the job was a good deal easier than her previous vocation; she’d worked as a technical specialist & support coordinator on LISNS Washington, one of the newer Arcadia-class civilian stations. Washington was a major port for shipping leaving the Industrial Worlds and vessels of all makes and models made stopped there, with equally diverse software and hardware. Confed ships were actually the easiest to service; the Confederacy demanded a certain amount of standardization and compatibility between different operating systems, specifically to ensure ease of repair and co-functionality so the differences between the megacorp-produced hardware and software wasn’t as great as those shown by League vessels. The ICE had splintered into hundreds of individual worlds and they had developed accordingly – Montero computer systems were markedly different from those created by Renaissance, which in turn would barely talk to, let alone cooperate with Palshifan software. And so on. Nightmare calls usually involved ‘muties’; vessels that were a complete mishmash of technologies that only God Himself could have kept working… until the ship visited LISNS Washington. At which point, the hodgepodge assemblage of software and hardware that should never be interfaced, would inevitably decide to fail spectacularly, leaving TechSpecSupCor Darla Givens and her crew dealing with a screaming captain and a ship whose performance could only be improved by hurling it into an asteroid and then bashing the fragments back together.

Even more annoying had been the ‘backsliders’ – those planets that had, whether by accident or design, lost much of their technology – and for whatever reason, now decided to embrace the evils of industry. Too often a ‘slider ship would be just as bad as a mutie, since the crew didn’t know any better than not to mix certain components. Of course, the same crew had no understanding of the technology to begin with, so they would be completely unhelpful, unlike a normal mutie, who usually had at least one person who knew how to keep the freakish amalgamation of parts and incompatible software together and could help you fix things.

By contrast, a population centered around the usually tech-savvy adherents of the Faith, hundreds of scientists, technicians and service personnel resulted in a blessedly lower volume of ‘emergencies’. Darla had taken a cut in pay to work here, but it was worth it for the fresh start that Theron offered her and Andrew. One in the shadow of the relics of the past and away from her first husband. The young woman smiled and squeezed Joshua’s leg as he navigated the crawler deeper into the forest, towards the column of smoke. Depending on the day, his religious beliefs wavered between ‘soft agnostic’ and ‘acerbic atheist’. He had come to services with her a handful of times, but only for her sake.

She wouldn’t pretend that it didn’t bother her that he wasn’t a believer, but she wouldn’t push. Sorry or later, she was certain, he’d come to believe in Inheritance.

~

“Control, this is Two-Four-Six. I see the three stooges’ crawler here. Doesn’t look to be any damage; doors are open.”

“Copy that, 246. We’ve got a medlift standing by, in case you need it.”

“Roger.” Joshua slewed his crawler to a stop next to the other AOCS vehicle. He climbed outside, eyeing the locked case under the driver’s seat, before deciding to leave it. He doubted he’d need the gun and Darla’d just get pissed at him if she knew he hadn’t taken it out. It was locked to his thumbprint, so there was no way Andrew could get into it, but it was better just not to have the argument. Besides, it was too early in the season for dire bears and borer wyrms were never this far from the ice shelves.

“Okay,” Banks pulled on his headset radio. “246 Mobile; can you read me, Barry?”

“Loud and clear.”

Joshua knelt beside the vehicle. “Clear tracks; all three of them went down to check out the crash site. Lunches are still here, so they’re planning to come back.”

“Copy that. Waiting with bated breath for your next report.”

Joshua snorted, muting the headset. He looked over at his passengers. “You two wait, in the cab. This shouldn’t take long.”

Darla clambered out of her side of the vehicle. “I’m coming with you.”

“You don’t need to do that; it’s probably just-”

“And if it’s not, you’ll need another set of hands.” She crossed her arms, unwilling to be put off. “I took first aid and rock climbing courses, you know.”

“Okay, I surrender. You can come.”

“Can I come too?” Andrew piped up.

Together: “No.”

~

Its first attempt was a failure. Better than worst-case estimates predicted, but avoiding a miserable failure was not a particularly stunning victory. Currently, the speed of results was more important than a perfect outcome. There would be time to refine the process later on, but only if the ember’s survival could be assured. Which brought it back to the preference for damaging speed over slow experimentation.

It was part of the learning process, through. Analyze. Adapt. And if a few bio-forms were lost in the process, the ember’s core mind considered that a perfectly reasonable exchange. It was not supposed to protect them, after all. At least, not yet.

~

“This isn’t a normal meteor,” Joshua said.

“How can you tell?” muttered Darla as she crunched over the ground; the entire area stunk of charred organic matter and melted soil. She and Joshua were following the trail the asteroid had punched through the forest, towards a small depression. The woman blinked against the stinging in her eyes; hundreds of trees were ablaze and if not for the shadow of the mountain preserving the morning’s dew, the entire slop of Desecration Peak might be aflame by now. Both she and Joshua had had to put on their respirators, but the seals on hers were a little loose, enough to tickle her throat and water her eyes. Josh had offered to take her back, but she’d refused. It was hardly bad enough that she was going to pass out, and if the other three scientists needed help, going back would only waste more time.

“Entry vector is oblique. Normally, they down at an angle, but not like this.” Joshua bent and held up a fragment of glass. “Have you ever seen an asteroid not just glass the ground, but glass it in a trail this long? I haven’t. It’s more like you’d get from… hell, I don’t know. A shuttle, an escape pod – something with active thrusters.”

“I didn’t hear anything about losing a ship.”

“No, Barry would have told us if that was an issue. It could be illegal dumping. For some fuckers, open space just isn’t empty enough. They have to be dicks and fuck up other people’s planets. Or, it could just be a hunk of rock. God knows there’s enough weird shit in the universe as it is.”

Darla hid a little smile at the turn of phrase, but she didn’t comment on it. She looked back at the horizon, to where the smouldering trail ended at the lip of the depression – rather, another millennia-old crater. The woman narrowed her eyes as she caught sight of something; green against the glassed and charred burn trail. The wrong kind of green/ “Josh!” she shouted, pointing ahead. “I see something – I can’t tell. Is it one of them?”

Joshua keyed his visor’s magnification. “Shit, that’s Jenkins.” The couple ran towards the distant figure, the glass crackling under their feet. As they drew nearer, it was clear that something was very wrong. The scientist was crawling along on hands and knees over the ground, leaving a trail of blood and shreds of skin and clothing. He was talking, laughing insanely as he pulled himself over the jagged shards of melted sand. Looking up, he caught sight of Darla and Joshua, breaking out in manic laughter, rolling onto his back and making obscene gestures towards the crater. “Thought you had me, didn’t you? I showed you! I showed all of you!” Darla could hear him screaming.

“Jesus Christ, he’s torn up,” Joshua said, skidding to a stop. Jenkins’ hands were burned and blistered, the front of his one-piece smouldering and burnt. “Dave – Dave, can you hear me? It’s Joshua. Joshua Banks. Barry,” he opened up the comm. “We have contact with one of the team. He’s hurt pretty bad.”

“Copy that; we’re sending a medlift now. Any sign of the others?”

“Not yet. Jesus, Dave. What the hell?”

Jenkins was gibbering, spittle and blood leaking out of his mouth. “Can you hear them?” he shouted, grabbing at Joshua’s collar, pulling himself up. “Can you hear them?”

“Hear who? Look, help’s on the way. We’ve got a copter coming in, just hang on.”

“Help’s not coming, help’s not coming,” the older man sobbed, his head lolling back. “All alone. Alone for so long.”

“Where’s the rest of your team? Where’s Doyer and Goldberg? Abby and Mitch – where are Abby and Mitch?”

David pointed a shaking finger back the way he’d come. “In there. In there. No!” he screamed, grabbing Joshua’s arm when the other man tried to move away. “Don’t go down there. Don’t! It’s down there. Waiting. So long.”

“What’s happened? What’s down there? What did you find?”

“Ascension!” Jenkins cried, his expression turning beatific. “We found Ascension.” His eyes fell onto Darla’s pendant. “You believe, don’t you? You believe. We’ve found it. We’ve found God. And He’s laughing at us.”

“Enough of this,” Joshua shook off Jenkins’ grip. “Stay with him; I’m going to look for the rest of the team.”

Darla nodded, but she wasn’t sure what she could do for him; the scientist was badly injured, burned and sliced to ribbons by his crawl over the glass. She cracked open the first aid kit, fumbling for bandages. There were painkillers, but she didn’t know the right dosage to give him. “It’s me,” she said, trying to break through the torrent of nonsense and insane, body-wracking laughter. “Darla Givens. We went to services together. Don’t you remember me?” There was no response, his eyes still fixed to her pendant, but his babble slowed as he ran out of energy.

“Please,” she whispered. “What happened? What about Ascension? What did you find?”

The older man didn’t respond for a long moment, as if fascinated by Darla’s necklace. “You are devout?” he gasped, still unable to recognize her. He was trying to breathe, but he began coughing up blood. Darla knew that was a bad sign. “You believe?” the man forced through lips bubbling with exhaled blood.

“Yes,” she affirmed, cradling his head, pressing the emblem into his hand. “I believe.”

“Then bless me. Please.”

“I’m not a priest, I can’t-”

“Please!” he shouted, before descending into more bloody, painful coughs. “I don’t want to die without absolution.”

“You’ll Ascend,” she promised. “You’ve served God your whole life.”

“Have I?” His voice was fading, his gaze becoming unfocused. “No… not in… no. It’s coming. They’re coming. For all of us. They want us, want our bodies. Death… isn’t the end. Please… please bless me.”

Darla took the man’s hands, holding them. “Lord in Heaven, please accept this supplicant. He has loved You and served You and though he has sinned, absolve him of his sins and accept him at Your side. Blessed be the Inheritors and Blessed be the Ascendants.”

“B-blessed be…” David fought to get out the words, but he slumped back against the ground, his hand going limp in Darla’s grasp, a final breath rattling out of his lungs, his chest stilling.

“N-no…” Darla gasped, refusing to accept it. “No, no, no.” She never seen anyone die before. And like this… She tried to fall back to her first aid training, to do something, anything for him, but the amount of blood on him and across the rocks, told her that there was nothing to do. With a shaking hand, she carefully crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes.

She didn’t know how long she sat there, staring at him. When her comm crackled, she nearly jumped. “Darla,” Josh’s voice came through clear and strong. “How’s Jenkins?”

“He’s… he’s…” she stumbled over the words. “He’s, uh, he’s gone.”

There was a pause. “I’m sorry.”

“He just… I mean… there was nothing I could…”

“Darla. Darla. Listen to me. Listen to my voice. I need your help.”

“What… what’s wrong?”

“Damn near everything. Can you walk?”

“I can. I can do that.”

“Okay. Just listen to me. I need you to come down into the crater. I found Doyer and Goldberg, but I’m going to need help. Can you do that?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“That’s my girl. Just follow my ping on your locator.”

Darla managed to pry herself away from Jenkins, afraid to look away, in case she missed another breath or some movement. But there wasn’t anything. Dazedly, she climbed down into the depression, not even really aware of her surroundings until Joshua grabbed her. “Easy,” he said as she screamed. “Easy. It’s just me. Come on; they’re over here. Next to…” he trailed off and Darla understood why. There was something buried in the far side of the depression. It was huge, building sized. And it definitely wasn’t a meteor.

“What… what is it?”

“I don’t know,” Joshua replied. “But it’s started digging itself out.”

“It’s alive?” Darla shook herself. No, it was clearly mechanical. A drone, then? Whose was it? “Is it Confederate?”

“I can’t tell.” Joshua led Darla around the periphery of the crater; she could see the soil around the massive device churning and writhing as it struggled to free itself, some kind of… spires rising up out of the ground. She watched it, trying to understand what it was, but she couldn’t. Something had driven that man insane… and this had to be it. It was watching her.

She froze in her tracks, unable to move, staring at the alien artefact. “It’s watching us,” she whispered.

“Honey, you’re starting to freak me out. Come on; Abby and Mitch are webbed up in something, some kind of internal defence mechanism. I need you to help me cut them loose. It looks like Jenkins managed to get himself out and then climbed out of the crater.”

“Shouldn’t… shouldn’t we wait for the medteam?” She couldn’t pry her eyes away from the probe. There was something… something indefinably wrong about it. Waiting… Alone for so long…

“There’s no time; their vitals are going nuts. Heart rate, respiration, BP – we need to get them out now.”

“Okay,” it took an effort, but she managed to pull her attention away from the device. It was odd, but she almost thought… no, that was silly.

There was a buzzing in ear and she absent-mindedly swatted at the insect. Or at least, she tried to. Darla toppled like a broken puppet, watching as Joshua jerked as if it hit by a stunner and then he fell, too. Her entire body felt as if it were on fire, her muscles unwilling to respond. Something wrapped around her legs, dragging her across the sand. She could see some sinewy black tendril pulling Joshua along, too. She couldn’t see his face, but he was completely limp. Oh God, is he dead? If he was, it didn’t seem to matter to the machine as a hatchway opened, pulling him inside.

No! her mind screamed at her in horror. This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening! It isn’t it isn’t it isn’t happening! With desperate strength, she forced her body to respond. Every nerve fiber screamed in agony, but she managed to wrap her hands around something, something solid and unyielding. A petrified tree, part of the ruins uncovered by the crash, or even part of the machine itself, she couldn’t tell. The tendril pulled harder, trying to loosen her, but she held on, squeezing her watering eyes shut against the pain. “You can’t have me!” she shouted at it, but her defiance was pyrrhic. The buzzing returned, there was a pinprick of pain and her arms went limp. As she was dragged away, Darla was still screaming.

As darkness closed in around her, she thought she heard someone calling her name.

Themightytom · Post by **Themightytom** » 2009-05-18 10:55pm

SCENE: The screen is black at first, but strange, pale red alien letters start flashing over the screen. This is the INTERLUDE SCREEN.

VOICE OVER: What would you do…

VOICES (a ghostly collection of hushed whispers, male and female): …If I... sang you a song...

SCENE: A bedroom at night; a young woman, DARLA, pulls herself out of bed, careful not to wake JOSHUA sleeping next to her. She walks over to a window and pulls it open. DARLA covers her hand with her mouth, staring out at something that horrifies her.

VOICE OVER: …would you stnad up...and walk out on me...?

INTERLUDE SCREEN: The words ‘THE WHOLE WORLD CHANGED’ fade into existence and then back to blackness.

VOICES: …I get by...with a little help from my friends...

SCENE: JULIE is sitting at the booth in a bar, watching the rest of the clientele.

other than that good stuff!

FA Xerrik · Post by **FA Xerrik** » 2009-05-19 03:17am

Huzzah, it's back! You were right, a bit heavy on the info-dumping here, but your writing is as polished and smooth as ever. It's interesting to hear the League is, by all rights, even bigger than the Confederacy. I don't know if that was established in the original CoH or not, but I had never envisioned it.

Interesting as well to hear of "Project Necromancer." That name sets off a few familiar bells...

For that matter, something about the ember and firestorm imagery seems somehow familiar as well. Was this race alluded to at all in CoH, or would answering that give away too much?

All in all, great to see the Heavenverse isn't over yet!

Sky Captain · Post by **Sky Captain** » 2009-05-19 05:08am

Children of Heaven is back!!!

Now I wonder who made the thing that landed on Theron. It seems to belong to some race wiped out by Lefu since there were mentioned Black Angel which is associated with Lefu.

Anyway looking forward to see some interesting stuff.

GrandMasterTerwynn · Post by **GrandMasterTerwynn** » 2009-05-19 12:04pm

Huzzah, the sodomization via chainsaw of a naive Humanity by the cold, heartless cosmos continues! Excellent, most excellent.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2009-05-19 01:09pm

Oh my. Nonconsensual BDSM space Replicators. The League is fucked, the only question from here on in is 'who will enjoy it?'

Bladed_Crescent · Post by **Bladed_Crescent** » 2009-05-19 02:56pm

Thanks to everyone for all the support! Glad you're all enjoying this so far.

themightytom wrote:other than that good stuff!

hehe - I'll cut you like a box! Around the flaps!

FA Xerrik wrote:Huzzah, it's back! You were right, a bit heavy on the info-dumping here, but your writing is as polished and smooth as ever. It's interesting to hear the League is, by all rights, even bigger than the Confederacy. I don't know if that was established in the original CoH or not, but I had never envisioned it.

Thanks.

On that note; I try to stay away from analogy and metaphor, but just to expound on the League vs. Confederacy theme and maybe give a better idea of the situation: in terms of area, population, industry etc the League is more like Canada to the Confederacy's United States. Canada has more land mass, but 1/10 of the US's population. Moreover, our population tends to be rather concentrated - I forget the exact numbers, but the majority of our citizenry is within a handful of miles of the US border. It's a similar situation with the League; they have a vast amount of territory, but the greatest percentage of their population is concentrated into a handful of worlds like Palshife.

Incidentally, this was one of the reasons why the League was so determined to keep the Confederacy on the defensive; as we've seen in the Broken Chains arc, the Confederacy can lose a lot of industry and keep right on fighting, since they've got so much more. The League has much fewer high-value targets. If a Confed task force ever got loose in League space and punched out even a handful of League shipyards - or, God forbid, a fleetyard - that would have crippled their production then and there.

Other than the Industrial Worlds - those systems that benefited the most from the Confederacy's exploitation and development - the League is comprised of many dinky little colonies - usually wayposts along trading and expansion routes that lead to slightly-less-dinky colonies. All the territory in-between these outposts technically belongs to the League, which gives them a ego-boosting bump to their size and access to a massive amount of unexploited resources, but they're still recovering from the war and can't yet fully exploit them.

There was also some political considerations driving this expansion - the foreign components of which basically boil down to the League wanting to wave their big Space Penis at the Confederacy.

Interesting as well to hear of "Project Necromancer." That name sets off a few familiar bells...

Heh; I already have my suspicions as to what it truly is, but at the moment, it could be precisely what Andrea thinks it is - false information intended to get the Confederacy to waste time and effort running it down. Or it could be something else.

For that matter, something about the ember and firestorm imagery seems somehow familiar as well. Was this race alluded to at all in CoH, or would answering that give away too much?

I posted the prologue in the first CoH thread a while back; maybe that's it? And yes, the race has been - very obliquely - referred to in the main CoH arc. It's very easy to miss; even if you did catch it and were aware of the significance, there's no huge revelation or secret information to divine from it. So for anyone who doesn't know: you're really not missing out on anything.

Sky Captain wrote:Now I wonder who made the thing that landed on Theron. It seems to belong to some race wiped out by Lefu since there were mentioned Black Angel which is associated with Lefu.

Spoiler

Grand Master Terwynn wrote:Huzzah, the sodomization via chainsaw of a naive Humanity by the cold, heartless cosmos continues! Excellent, most excellent.

What, you thought I was going to let the League get away unmolested? For shame.

No no no; here we get to see how they react to having their worldview challenged. Only instead of Mulkari killfleets and Evea'shi reavers, they get to deal with something far more insidious...

Space Mormons.

"We are the Morm. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We would like to talk to you about the Church of Latter-Day Saints..."

White Haven wrote:Oh my. Nonconsensual BDSM space Replicators. The League is fucked, the only question from here on in is 'who will enjoy it?'

Oh, I think the infectors will enjoy it quite a lot. Hopefully, the audience will too.

Chris OFarrell · Post by **Chris OFarrell** » 2009-05-20 08:00am

Hang on, if this Colony Ship/Escape Pod/whatever has grabbed 'samples' of the local lifeforms to study, as soon as they see the human DNA -presuming they got a hold of some at some point in their war- aren't the systems going to scream "DARK ANGLES! CHEESE IT!"?

Still, I think this fanfic has become a little too, if not boring, then sort of predictable for me. Always the same cycle of building up hope in some way, then crushing it , then sort of holding it out again, and once again.

The killer had to be the Captain of the Berserker surviving and being interrogated, despite chapter after chapter going into how utterly absurdly over the top paranoid Case Omega are to prevent stuff like this happening...it really felt like you were just being an asshole for the sake of it

Not to say that this fic isn't one of the top 2 original fiction works, commercial or not, I have read for many a year, the spacebattles are brilliant and just 'hard' enough, the characters compelling and the universe deep...and your balls in writing this story and a whole new universe are just enormous. But its just gotten too depressing for me to enjoy it, so I'm probably going to drop out here.

But I do promise to buy the first book when it goes on sale

On another topic, I was actually listening to this when I read the 'trailer'; Soundtrack Music from about 2 mins in and thought it sort of works well.

Good luck at any rate with the universe.

Bladed_Crescent · Post by **Bladed_Crescent** » 2009-05-20 12:40pm

Damn; IE crashed on me and I lost my response. Okay, taking it from the top:

Hang on, if this Colony Ship/Escape Pod/whatever has grabbed 'samples' of the local lifeforms to study, as soon as they see the human DNA -presuming they got a hold of some at some point in their war- aren't the systems going to scream "DARK ANGLES! CHEESE IT!"?

Lousy low-grade tinfoil.
Spoiler

Still, I think this fanfic has become a little too, if not boring, then sort of predictable for me. Always the same cycle of building up hope in some way, then crushing it , then sort of holding it out again, and once again.

The killer had to be the Captain of the Berserker surviving and being interrogated, despite chapter after chapter going into how utterly absurdly over the top paranoid Case Omega are to prevent stuff like this happening...it really felt like you were just being an asshole for the sake of it

I'm sorry to hear that; there is some light at the end of the tunnel, but if it's not your cup of tea any longer, no worries. You're always welcome to come back to it.
Spoiler

Not to say that this fic isn't one of the top 2 original fiction works, commercial or not, I have read for many a year, the spacebattles are brilliant and just 'hard' enough, the characters compelling and the universe deep...

Thank you; I'm glad you enjoyed reading it and thankful to have your insights, witticism and commentary on it.

...and your balls in writing this story and a whole new universe are just enormous.

Yeah, I think I need to see a doctor about that...

But its just gotten too depressing for me to enjoy it, so I'm probably going to drop out here.

So, I suppose a CD of Linkin Park and some razor blades would be in bad taste?

I was actually listening to this when I read the 'trailer'

Not too shabby; this is Fatal Vision, now with newfangled moving pictures!

But I do promise to buy the first book when it goes on sale
[...]
Good luck at any rate with the universe.

Thank you and thanks again for reading.

Murazor · Post by **Murazor** » 2009-05-20 01:21pm

Bladed_Crescent wrote:I'm sorry to hear that; there is some light at the end of the tunnel

A rapidly approaching locomotive, perhaps?

Or just the blinding glow caused by the detonation of high-yield nuclear explosives?

Shroom Man 777 · Post by **Shroom Man 777** » 2009-05-20 02:13pm

Now I know what I'm gonna blow my uneventful weekend over.

*bookmarks for future reading*

My Little Echo...

Themightytom · Post by **Themightytom** » 2009-05-20 02:41pm

Would there be an Echo? Ithought this was conccurrent to Children of Heaven.

the COH story wasn't "Grim" per se... its just that Earth doesn't win. and as depicted there... rightfully so. They were cocky arrogant greedy and essentially demosntrated the traditional vices associated with being sent to er.. the other place. The title "Children of Heaven" is also a little bit of forshadowing, because everyone in heaven is dead :-p

if it had been "Children of sky sprinkles and ponies" I would expect everyone to survive and the Lefu and the Confederacy to to take the first steps into a bold new war and to form the united federation of weenies.

I especially like that you threw a well developed Faux religion into the story, it adds a dimension you don't often see in Scifi. Frank Herbert did it really effectively with his introduction of the Bene Gesserit, the Jihad of muad'Dib, the Fish speakers etc, and he explored in perhaps TOO much detail the effectiveness of religion as a control system in a political system, or in terms of cultural impact. He was getting a little wierd there at the end when he started equating it with sex, but in the heavenverse you have developed its not like such a direction would be entirely out of place, and maybe you will do it better.

George Lucas by contrast made a laughable attempt at it when he invented the jedi, had Han snort "Lolz religion" and then gave up and made the jedi stereotypical wizards with magic powers. JMS did something similiar where he ran a few episodes of B5 with "Church in Spaaaaaace" but never really went anywhere with it.

What you have here seems an effective middle ground, you developed an appropriate religion, as opposed to jamming a contemporary stereotypical one into a future setting which is somewhat thought provoking as by breaking the foruth wall and knowing what we do as readers it is logical in its formation, we can extrapolate a system of galactic events from the other book that the in story characters aren't aware of and we can see how they filled in the gaps of their knowledge with a superstitious structure.

it is an amusing commentary on how systems of belief develop and definitely a stab at mixed faith relationships. Iassume it will be a plot point exploring the reaction of this religion to its extermination. So far you haven't let it take control of the plot or anything, it just lends itself to the unvierse you have created, making it believable and accessible. your characters wake up to the radio, go for drives in the country and squable over religious beliefs. Nice developement.

Darth Nostril · Post by **Darth Nostril** » 2009-05-25 06:13pm

Oh more of that lovely CoHrack ... gimme, gimme, gimme

Sucks to be the League but hey that's what you get for being space rednecks

Master_Baerne · Post by **Master_Baerne** » 2009-05-26 09:53am

I might've known that anything that got my feeling hopeful about CoH was a lie. You people and your posting in threads after they've gone dormant.

Themightytom · Post by **Themightytom** » 2009-05-26 09:57am

ur dormant...

Master_Baerne · Post by **Master_Baerne** » 2009-05-26 01:07pm

My sole comment will be a "?".

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2009-05-26 10:30pm

ur... *twitch*

Themightytom · Post by **Themightytom** » 2009-05-26 10:38pm

Master_Baerne wrote:My sole comment will be a "?".

I concede the point!!!

I am SO sorry...

How did he know i cannot stand a lone question mark who TOLD him...

Bladed_Crescent · Post by **Bladed_Crescent** » 2009-05-30 12:15pm

Sorry for the delay; haven't had such a sterling week, which has slowed my writing. Anyways, hope these responses are... somewhat... coherent.

Murazor wrote:A rapidly approaching locomotive, perhaps?

Or just the blinding glow caused by the detonation of high-yield nuclear explosives?

A little from Column A, a little from Column B....

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Now I know what I'm gonna blow my uneventful weekend over.

*bookmarks for future reading*

My Little Echo...

Sadly, there'll probably be fewer space lesbians with nuclear-powered strap-ons. But more creeping terror:

WATCH THE VENTS
PUT IT BACK PUT IT BACK WHERE IT BELONGS
IT’S TIME
KNOW GOD, NO FEAR. NO GOD, KNOW FEAR
save us save us save us save us save ME
IS IT SAFE?

No. No, it is not.

But there’s always Peng!

Themightytom wrote:if it had been "Children of sky sprinkles and ponies" I would expect everyone to survive and the Lefu and the Confederacy to to take the first steps into a bold new war and to form the united federation of weenies.

hehehe – nope. I do tend to go a darker route with my writing. Maybe because at heart, I’m a bitter, twisted hollow shell of a man. Or maybe because I while I like the Good Guys to win, I’m not averse to watching them be put through the wringer to get that victory.

Either or. Heh.

I especially like that you threw a well developed Faux religion into the story, it adds a dimension you don't often see in Scifi. Frank Herbert did it really effectively with his introduction of the Bene Gesserit, the Jihad of muad'Dib, the Fish speakers etc, and he explored in perhaps TOO much detail the effectiveness of religion as a control system in a political system, or in terms of cultural impact. He was getting a little wierd there at the end when he started equating it with sex, but in the heavenverse you have developed its not like such a direction would be entirely out of place, and maybe you will do it better.

Thanks; hopefully so. I wanted to set up the Church of Inheritance as something that could logically develop, given humanity’s tendency to find God in everything/anything we’re looking at (“Hmm… what’s that big burning thing in the sky and how can I make it like me?”) and in-universe events. We like to fill in the gaps, to ascribe reason to things we don’t understand so that we can find/make our own comprehension of events. It doesn’t hurt that there really is no good, satisfying explanation for some of the events the Church holds as proof and others are just theories themselves.

What you have here seems an effective middle ground, you developed an appropriate religion, as opposed to jamming a contemporary stereotypical one into a future setting which is somewhat thought provoking as by breaking the foruth wall and knowing what we do as readers it is logical in its formation, we can extrapolate a system of galactic events from the other book that the in story characters aren't aware of and we can see how they filled in the gaps of their knowledge with a superstitious structure.

To begin a tangent on this line of thought, I got the idea for the Church of Inheritance from a presentation I gave in one of my English classes; my group had to do a topic on Eva – which is generally uninteresting and I really don’t need to hear about a fifteen year-old girl deciding to have sex with chimpanzees. Yes, fine, her brain was in a female chimp’s body at the time, trying to save the species from extinction, etc.

Anyways! In Eva, humanity’s been afflicted with the ‘lay down and die’ bug. Last seen in the short story Voices of Time. Although in that work, humanity may be forgiven somewhat, since the universe is literally breaking down. In Eva, there’s enough money and resources to figure out how to transfer consciousness to other animals and fund multi-national soft drink ad campaigns using the resulting humanzee, but not enough willpower to stay alive. Entire towns walk into the ocean, their pockets filled with rocks.

…maybe the cola wasn’t really that good.

But Eva did make me think about ‘Inheritors’ in science fiction, how that whenever humanity is driven to extinction, we usually have something left behind – machine intelligences, another species. Usually the thing that wiped us out, but not always. (No, Draka don’t count. They suck far too much for that

).

I didn’t want to just cut-and-paste a current religion into the setting. Firstly, it wouldn’t work for my purposes and secondly, as you’ve noted, it gives the readers something to consider, thinking about its formation; particularly those who’re are familiar with the rest of the background. Again, it’s not necessary to know that for this story (especially since I covered the gist of it already), but it doesn’t hurt.

That was something I wanted to explore here, though; that this belief in extinction and inheritance has taken on a mystical aspect. That by ourselves creating a new life form to replace us, humanity as a whole will ascend to Heaven, to join God. And when the children we’ve left behind do the same, they too will Ascend.

Extinction is life.

it is an amusing commentary on how systems of belief develop and definitely a stab at mixed faith relationships.

It wasn’t intended to be a stab at mixed-faith relationships, just a ‘hey, these exist in the future, too’. I usually try to avoid any overt Message in my writing, although this isn’t the first time a reader has found one.

“This passage is a really poignant statement on what it was like to be a black man in some parts of the United States. It’s really clever social commentary.”

“Uh… actually, it was mostly about how the humans in this universe really, really dislike aliens and what their society is like for one. But… thanks? I guess?”

Here though, I was just making a more subtle barb: atheist or fundamentalist, agnostic or believer – everyone’s kindling for the fire.

Iassume it will be a plot point exploring the reaction of this religion to its extermination. So far you haven't let it take control of the plot or anything, it just lends itself to the unvierse you have created, making it believable and accessible. your characters wake up to the radio, go for drives in the country and squable over religious beliefs. Nice developement.

On the Church: they’re going to play enough of a role that I thought I should get the meat of their backstory cleared up and out of the way for later. Their particular mythology and how it affects the adherents and others will be important, yes. Heh.

I wanted to start a bit slower in this part; the main CoH arc jumped right into the action; with The Sins of Our Blood, I want to get a chance to build things up whilst tearing them down. We get a look at the life of humans in the future, too. They’re not as cosmopolitan as the Confeds, but they’re people living on the edge of space, dealing with their own little worlds – getting up in the morning, checking the weather, going to see the girlfriend and trying not to get into a fight. They don’t wake up in a perfect world, where everything’s done for them

That, I think was one of Star Trek’s biggest flaws for me – the continual hammering home of their perfect, utopian society. It’s easy for Picard or Janeway to speechify about the moral fortitude of humans when they don’t have to work for anything; their needs are already taken care of. All they have to do is fly around in sparkling starships and lecture less-advanced cultures and species about the Human Space White Man’s Burden (to borrow a phrase). In Equinox, Ransom was an ass, but he made a very good point: “It’s easy to hold onto your principles with a crew that’s not starving, on a ship with its bulkheads intact.”

Anyways, to bring this back around, (and at the risk of beating an obvious point into the ground) I wanted to show that despite the technology they have, both the League and the Confederacy still have their own challenges, even if it’s the little ones like getting a car started on a cold morning… without searching for “something called a key”. That technology has changed, society has advanced… but the people are still recognizably human.

For the moment. If one strand of humanity survives, they become everything they’re fighting against. And as for the other… ah heh heh heh.

Darth Nostril wrote:Oh more of that lovely CoHrack ... gimme, gimme, gimme

Sucks to be the League but hey that's what you get for being space rednecks

“People, our search is over! On this site we shall build a new town where we can worship freely, govern justly, and grow vast fields of hemp for making rope and blankets.”
“Yes! And marry our cousins.”
“I was- wha... what are you talking about, Shelbyville? Why would we want to marry our cousins?”
“Because they're so attractive. I... I thought that was the whole point of this journey.”

Heh; the League isn’t quite that bad; there are colonies, planets – even entire systems – within and around the Confederacy that would be very familiar and welcoming to many of the League’s particular idiosyncrasies. However, the ICE was founded and funded by separatists, whether they were religious, secular, cultural, or racial, so there’s a strong independent streak running throughout their worlds and a determination to preserve their own cultural identities; first against the ‘threat’ of assimilation and dilution in the Confederacy, then against the megacorps and their attempts to exploit ‘civilize’ the ‘Empties’. Currently, the federal government is getting some cockeyed glances, since there are concerns that it’ll turn into the Confederacy Part Two.

So there are similarities between the League Worlds and some crazy militia hiding out in Iowa, or Oregon. Of course, in the latter case, it’s as if the gub’mint really did come for their land/guns/God/jerbs.

Or, in the parlance of a citizen of the League: Go back to sucking corper cock, Confed!

Master Baerne wrote:I might've known that anything that got my feeling hopeful about CoH was a lie. You people and your posting in threads after they've gone dormant.

It's a trap!

But, to allay your fears - I'm just about done the next chapter, so it should be up later today or tomorrow.

Bladed_Crescent · Post by **Bladed_Crescent** » 2009-05-30 08:24pm

And here we are; enjoy.

Chapter 4:

“Everything’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be? Those stories you’ve heard are just that – stories. Told by rabble-rousers and people looking for a quick buck. The crime spree is being ably handled by the police department, who are cracking down the hallucinogenic drugs being used by many of the perpetrators. That’s all there is to the situation. Nothing is wrong here. I promise.”

-Mayor Patrick Fitzgerald in an interview on ‘Good Morning Leibos’.

~

…lost. So long along. Murdered. Ships burning. Our worlds, dying. Our children, dying. The Black Angel awoken, destroyer unmasked… you are Darla Givens. We know you. Your Ascension awaits..

Darla awoke with a scream, jerking upright. At least she tried to; there was someone holding her down. Blindly, she thrashed against the restraints, screaming and flailing incoherently until her rational mind took over. She was in a hospital and an orderly was trying to restrain her. She stopped fighting, clutching the arms of the man trying to hold her down as she looked about wildly. She… recognized this place.

The walls were the pale off-green of Theron’s hospitals, the privacy curtain around her bed was the generic floral pattern of Saint Robertson’s.

“Where…” she coughed, still unsure. “Where am I?”

“You’re in Landfall. St. Robertson’s Hispital.” the orderly said in a soothing voice, letting her sit up. He’d probably been repeating the same thing since she woke up… and, apparently nearly scratched one of his eyes out, but Darla was grateful for his composure. Right now, it was a lifeline to sanity. “A med lifter picked you up and brought you to us.”

She didn’t remember that. “What happened to me?” To her? No… no, there had been others with her… hadn’t there? Who were they? “To… us?” she ventured.

The orderly stepped back, letting a nurse a doctor she thought she recognized step up to her bed. “Hello Darla,” the physician said, glancing at the readouts on the monitors next to her bed. “You remember who I am?”

The young woman frowned, then nodded. “Dr. Albert Holiday. You… helped set my son’s leg when he broke it.” That was right; she had a son. Andrew. How could she have forgotten that?

“Good. And you know your name?”

A beat. “Darlene Ophelia Givens.”

“Excellent.” Holiday shone a light into Darla’s eyes. “Do you remember what happened to you?”

Darla squeezed her eyes shut as the doctor finished peering into them. “I was… we were… going up to Thresher Lagoon for a picnic. With… Joshua. Joshua! Is he all right, happened to-”

“He and your son are fine,” Holiday said. “As soon as we’re done here, you should be able to see them. Please, keep going.”

“We were going to have a picnic,” the young woman repeated. It was so hard to think, like swimming in molasses. “But Joshua, he got a call. Something… something came down. We had to go check it out because…” she struggled through the fog, looking for answers. “Because they’d lost contact with another team that had gone in. It was… Jenkins. Jenkins, Doyer and Goldberg.” She remembered David, a man from her congregation. He’d died in her arms, asking for a blessing. “David, he… he died. What happened to-” She struggled for the names.

“I’m sorry, Darla,” Albert squeezed her shoulder. “Abigail Doyer and Mitchell Goldberg didn’t make it.”

“No. No, that’s not right. We… we found them! They were alive. They’d been… they were…” Why was it so hard to think? There were words, images… something she wanted to say, something that was… no. Blackness swallowed the memory. “Sorry. I guess I’m still a little out of it.” She pressed a hand to her head. “How long was I out?”

The doctor and nurse exchanged a glance. “Two days.”

“Two…!” Darla slumped back. “I’m sorry. It’s… nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”

“That’s all right. Just let us finish up here and we’ll let you have some visitors.”

~

“Andie!”

“Mommy!” The eight-year old flung himself into his mother’s arms, squeezing his little arms around her. “I was scared. You didn’t wake up for a long time.”

“It’s all right, baby. I’m all right,” Darla stroked her son’s hair, holding him tight. She looked up; Joshua was there, smiling down at her. He reached out and she took his hand in his. “Everything’s all right now.”

“It is,” the boy affirmed. “It really will be. We’ll make it all right. Forever.”

“Forever,” Darla whispered against her son’s cheek, holding tight to Joshua’s hand.

~

One hour and thirteen minutes ago, Henry O’Malley, Junior Chief Engineer on the LISPS Wild Bill strode into The Dragon’s Hoard.

Forty-seven minutes ago, he uttered a challenge that he could out-drink any man or woman there, that anyone not from Alberta couldn’t hold their liquor.

Forty-six minutes ago, that challenge was accepted.

Twenty-two minutes ago, O’Malley’s mates were carrying him out of the bar, hoping that he hadn’t yet succumbed to alcohol poisoning, a stack of the engineer’s credits left on the table of a corner booth in the establishment.

Enjoying her victory, the winner set her feet up on the table, rolling a five-neoyuan piece over her knuckles. Hard cash had yet to be phased out completely, even in the Confederacy. Not every world had the infrastructure to handle electronic credit transfers. Credit chits were the normal form of exchange, but cash was still useful… even in the League, a rough agglutination of dozens of nations and different forms of currency. The woman smiled to herself, flipping the neoyuan piece into the stack of assorted coins on the tabletop.

Her name was Julie Maynard. At least, that’s what it was now. She’d had others. Just as the name wasn’t hers, so too did ‘Julie Maynard’ share almost no common features with whom she’d once been; her hair was dyed, her skin was darker than it should be and her fingerprints had been altered. The only natural part of her left were her eyes and to the citizens of Theron, those were the most alien thing about her.

Julie checked her watch, stifling an annoyed belch. Darryl was late. That annoyed her, but she had plenty of time to kill since the League destroyer had arrived in orbit. The woman allowed herself a small, self-amused smile. League. Not the word she was used to using, but it was better than the alternative. The locals could be so… thin-skinned. She waved over the waitress, holding up the mug she’d been drinking from before O’Malley had issued his ill-conceived challenge. “Another of these, please.”

The waitress took it with a smile. “Sure, hun.”

Maynard cocked her head, looking up as a familiar face entered the bar, smiling as he caught sight of her. Darryl Sanderson; her main contact on this planet, occasionally, a little bit more than that.

Darryl slid into the booth across from Julie. Her dark blonde hair was worn long and shocked with hot pink stripes, a definite contrast to her light mocha skin. No matter what else she’d done with her appearance, it was obvious that her eyes weren’t the original material. He’d thought she wore contacts, but after their second night together, that theory was shot down. Best guess, she’d had an outland surgeon tinker with – or replace – her eyes for something a little more exotic, a shade of blue so pale that looking into them was like looking into the arctic wastes.

Probably to fool retinal scans. Which the Confeds loved to use. That meant she hadn’t only pissed them off something fierce, she’d done it to such an extent that having her eyes scooped out of her head and spending a year in transit was better than going underground in the Confederacy. And that meant pirate.

Which wasn’t really that unexpected, given what she did for him. Well, some of the things she did for him.

Julie was wobbling slowly in her seat, her eyes slightly unfocused as the waitress put down another pint of the toxic sludge that Maynard loved so much. It was a custom drink; only Julie and a handful of others hardy souls braved it. Darryl had tried it once; in his opinion, you’d be better served sucking on reactor coolant than putting that shit in your body. Although he had to admit it was funny watching the townies think they could out-drink Maynard. Of course, the wedge of lime and little parasol didn’t really sell the drink as the brutal libation it was. But she liked them.

“You’re late,” she said, the steady words at odds with her uncertain body posture.

“I know, I’m sorry. But I think I have something to make up for it.”

Darryl pulled the privacy curtain across the booth closed. He looked at the woman and she nodded. Carefully, Sanderson dug into one of his jacket pockets and pulled out a small datascroll, handing it to Maynard. “Something from my contacts. This came down over Desecration Peak this morning. Nobody’s sure what happened, but three of the labcoats who went up to check it out are dead.”

The woman’s eyebrows raised as she scanned through the pictures on the ‘scroll. They were taken hastily; low resolution and most likely from a personal comm or ‘scroll. The poor quality made it had to ascertain details, but she could see what had stirred up the ant’s nest. It was dark, even against the shadows of the broken mountain, jutting spines sticking out of the defiled earth. Darryl had said it had crashed; were those radiator fins? Sensor towers? Something else? It was impossible to tell from these images. Still, Darryl had never given her bad information. Not knowingly, at any rate. She looked up; he was trying to hide his excitement, but she could feel the hunger, the excitement in him. “You said three people had died. How?”

“No one’s sure. AOCS locked the site down and ColSec is out in force. Seen a couple shuttles from the destroyer over the site, too. Serious shit.”

Julie sat up, all traces of inebriation gone as she skimmed back through the photographs. Her eyes widened. “Authentic, then?”

“Too soon to tell. It could just be another jackass with too much time and money like at Siren. But if it’s not… this is the big one. None of this sneaking pottery and shit out of the ruins. This is new. This is working tech. Do you know how much something like this will go for? Shit, even the smallest piece of it will go for…”

Julie ran a finger along her cheekbone. She made a noise disturbingly close to a purr. “A lot.”

“Fucking yes!” he hissed, leaning over the table. “My contacts are already in place. If AOCS finds anything – anything – we’ll get a piece of it. And we’re here, now. This is better than luck – this is proof God loves us.”

Maynard smiled indulgently, brushing a loose strand of hair out of her eyes. “Of course.”

Sanderson didn’t even hear her. “Christ… ‘a lot’? Even one kilo of proven alien tech would make us both fucking rich. The labcoats here have been scrounging around in the dirt for years and they’ve never come up with anything more impressive than a broken toaster. But this, this…”

The beautiful young woman reached out and cupped her partner’s chin, pulling him towards her for a kiss. “Then I think,” she whispered huskily. “That we should celebrate.”

~

“I don’t like it.”

“Three people are dead and another three had to be hospitalized for two days. There’s not much to like about it.”

Andrea snorted, tapping her fingers against her desk. The benefit of being the captain meant that in private, you could indulge yourself in all those annoying little habits that you couldn’t otherwise, lest you drive your subordinates to mutiny. After a moment, she looked back at Waynestrom. “That’s true.”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” the lieutenant commander said diplomatically.

Blake smiled lopsidedly. “You’d be right,” she made an unhappy little huff. “But something like this is precisely the thing that we should be interested in. It’s alien, it fell out of the sky and we were here first. This isn’t something the Confederacy can take away. It may be the most important discovery humanity makes in the next thousand years. And we’re here.”

“You want to stay and study it.”

“Valour Unending has better sensors than the local orbital arrays; we’re brand spanking new, Harvey. We’e not well-stocked on eggheads and techs, but we’re on-site and we could lend a hand here. We could do some good beyond waving the flag.”

“How long were you thinking of staying?”

“Is our schedule flexible enough for two weeks?” Andrea made a noise of consideration.

“Yes, but we may have to stay longer.”

“Right, right. As soon as word of this gets out, every lunatic with a beaker is going to be coming here. A genuine – at least until it’s proved a hoax – alien artefact is going to attract the attention of a fair amount of opportunists, too.”

“I can think of at least three clans who’d be interested in lifting it for ransom or sale back in the Confederacy, if they thought they could get away with it.” Waynestrom said. “And two others that would do the same thing, but wouldn’t bat an eye over wiping out Theron’s civilians to cover their tracks. That’s not even counting all the grifters, con artists… etcetera.”

“Um,” Andrea sighed. “Send Pony Express back to Machen Prime to update Senior Admiral Dresden and forward Red Racer up to Nightfall, to appraise them of the change in our schedule. We’ll remain on-site to offer assistance if the planetside labcoats need it and a destroyer in orbit should prove sufficiently daunting to deter the first rush of credit-chasers. Hmm. I want a lockdown of all extra-solar communications, too. At least until we get this sorted out. I don’t want a bunch of loose-lipped freighter crew spilling the beans on every ”

“Hmm. I can’t say that Captains Maynard and Basch will be happy to hear that.” Court of a Thousand Suns was widely suspected – but could never be proven – of being a smuggling ship and Captain Julie Maynard had been the target of three separate investigations for tariff evasion, smuggling and transporting contraband. Most small freighters shipped expensive goods; low overhead and a high profit margin for their cargo capacity, but Theron didn’t produce a lot of luxury items. Nor was the colony so rich that it could afford to import large quantities of expensive off-world material.

Officially, Julie Maynard and her vessel shipped small quantities of lower-end goods that a Colony World couldn’t build for itself; recreational electronics, recreational vids, brand-name goods. Just enough to eke out a comfortable profit, but not enough to be able to afford a bigger and better ship. Unofficially, she wasn’t averse to helping a client avoid fees, tariffs or carry outright contraband. She was wanted for questioning on Footsteps of the Divine, for the alleged importation of illegal materials… which, if one read the warrant, was limited to pornographic material. In Blake’s opinion, the ‘sliders on Footstep needed a lot more porn. And to have the sticks removed from their asses, but on their world and system, they were free to be as big a bunch of assholes as they liked. Until Maynard was caught in Footstep territory with cargo clearly intended for illegal sale there, there was nothing Blake could do about her.

At least about that; the AOCS mission had known for some time that some of the Progenitor artefacts that they’d uncovered had a tendency to ‘disappear’ and turn up in private collections throughout the League. It didn’t matter how useless, weather-beaten or incomprehensible they were; they were honest-to-God alien relics and some people would pay a great deal more than AOCS’ shipping service did for delivery. Court of a Thousand Suns was probably a smuggler, but one that Theron hadn’t proven. Not that there was a lot of interest in doing so; from the dispatches Andrea had read, Maynard didn’t ship drugs, carry out human trafficking or weapons smuggling. Her second-story trade was in various cultural artefacts. Even if she wasn’t greasing a few palms, having her was better than a – ha! – less-scrupulous smuggler. The devil you knew, as the old cliché went.

As a Colony World founded by the federal government and not one of nations that made up the League, Andrea had the legal authority to conduct searches of all ships suspected of smuggling, but aside from hearsay and rumour, she had no grounds to search Maynard’s ship. There were no official complaints from the government and unless Maynard chose to break orbit while Valour Unending was still in orbit, Blake couldn’t pull a ‘random’ search of cargo.

Yet. With the discovery of – what were they calling it? – the artefact, even the best smuggler might get a little too greedy. And then, Junior Captain Andrea Blake would be right there to catch her. Sure, bagging a small-time runner might not be a Medallion of Valour, but it was certainly a start.

“Well, they’ll just have to get over themselves,” Andrea smiled at her second in command. “Until we know just what this is and who sent it, I don’t want to turn the Sector into a God-damn circus as every shyster, lunatic and privateer crawls out from under their rocks. If it’s a hoax, I want to know that. If it’s the real deal… this is a Colony World founded by the government. No one else.” She shook her head. “I’ve already gotten requests from ‘Bishop Seisman to allow him and the local Ascendants access to the artifact. That’s just the beginning; everyone’ll want a piece and they’ll tear each other – and it – apart in the process. No, anything that gets found here belongs to the League and not any one person or nation. It’s too important, Harvey.”

Waynestrom nodded in agreement. “I’ll contact Director de Seine and arrange some additional security from shipboard.”

“Good thinking, lieutenant. We’re bound to get some people trying to sneak in to the site.” Andrea leaned back in her chair. “Inform the crew that shore leave is being extended, but remind them not to get underfoot the labcoats. AOCS is going to be a bit twitchy just on general principles and we’re here to help, not fuck everything up.”

~

The bioforms billowed around it, erecting their crude structures, their vehicles swarming around the ember’s impact site. This, too had been planned for. It had learned much from expending the initial three bioforms. Speed was a necessity, but sacrificing all other functions for it was a waste of precious time and resources. At present, the chance of an incompatible implantation was still unacceptably high, but with a gestation of sufficient duration, even that risk should be minimal. In later generations, this risk should be negligible.

The remaining three bioforms it had seized were the first compromise the ember had made, a concession to their physiology; the development of the seeds would proceed at an accelerated rate, but not to the point of causing systems failure. There was still the risk of damage by unseeded bioforms; it would need protection and access to additional bioforms. Internal factories had already begun synthesizing the necessary components for the second generation. Once the first seeds had taken hold, it would have more.

And more.

And more.

Surrounded by the edifices of the bioforms, the ember felt something very close to satisfaction.

April 12th, 4222.

Bladed_Crescent · Post by **Bladed_Crescent** » 2009-06-15 06:25pm

Whew; sorry for the delay. Haven't been altogether well the past couple weeks. Anyways, here's the next chapter - as ever, I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter 5:

“Know this, my children. Though we die, we shall yet survive. As long as one of our embers escapes the reach of the Black Angel, we shall survive. Perhaps not as we are, perhaps not ever again, but we shall not fade from this universe as long as one of our vain hopes can endure. We will die, yes. But we are the Select. For us, death is only the beginning. Now die well.”

- final directive given to the Chosen Select

~

Weary to the bone, Darryl collapsed happily down into the sheets. Every muscle in his body ached, but that was nothing new. He looked across the bed at Julie Like him, the woman was covered in gleaming shine of sweat, the scent of sex filling the room. The woman stared back at him, a sultry smile on her face as she reached over and stroked his broad chest, her hand travelling further down his body. He half-despairing, half-contented moan as she took a hold of him. “All used up?” she purred.

“One of these days, I am going to make sure you remember a little thing called the ‘refractory period’,” he said with a puff of breath.

Julie made a disappointed sigh, pulling her hand back. “It’s inconvenient.”

“I prefer to think of it as a bulwark against death by exhaustion – or a shattered pelvis. It varies. Usually, I figure that I die from exhaustion and they find me with a shattered pelvis, because you didn’t take the hint.”

“Hmmp.”

Darryl propped himself up on his elbows, reaching out and lifting up Julie’s chin with one hand. “You know, I still have the temptation to haul you in front of a medical scanner just to make sure you’re not actually a machine under there. Maybe a golem that survived Gepetto.”

The eyes of a she-wolf stared back at him. Julie smiled, tapping him on the nose. “I bet you were the kind of boy who’d dig through his parents’ closets for his Christmas presents, too. Don’t you enjoy a good mystery?”

“In our line of work, surprises get you dead.”

Julie made a condescending noise of sympathy. “Through exhaustion?”

“Ha ha.”

~

There was everything.

And then, nothing.

Spreading across the stars, nightmare shapes descending out of clear blue skies, hooting primitives scattering before them…

Vast temples rose from the ground as slaves toiled for their masters’ glory…

Fires raged from horizon to horizon, the temples broken and ruined….

She was screaming, words that she didn’t understand, but it was a cry of defiance and hate as a wave of flame swept towards her…

Darla’s eyes snapped open. She looked around, vision adjusting to the darkness of her bedroom. She turned over; Joshua was there, snoring softly for a moment before his breathing evened out. Darla smiled and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. Joshua made a small murmur of pleasure, but remained asleep.

The young woman pulled the covers back over herself. Just a bad dream, she asserted. Just a nightmare.

~

Morning light filtered into the room and Darryl growled, pulling a pillow over his head. He felt the mattress shift as Julie climbed out of bed. “Get up,” the woman ordered.

“Fuck off. Too goddamn early.”

The sheets were yanked away, but Sanderson resolutely held onto the pillow. “Get up,” Maynard repeated. “We’ve got things to do.”

“You do. I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. You’re going to take me up to see it.”

Darryl pulled himself up. “What?”

“I want to see it. The artifact.”

“Jesus, woman – that’s like a three-hour drive. And neither of us should be poking our noses up there anyways. It’ll be locked down tight and swarming with security. Shouldn’t you be keeping tabs on your crew?”

“I made sure that their water dishes were full before I came down here.” Julie bent over, pulling her shirt back on, tugging it over her breasts. “We’re going. I don’t ask a lot of questions, but I want to see this thing.”

Darryl sighed, rolling out of bed. “You’re not going Ascendant on me, are you? I get enough bullshit about ‘Inheritance’ and God and the rest of that crap here.”

Again, that she-wolf smile. “Oh, that’s something you’ll never have to worry about from me.”

“That’s something.” He grabbed his pants, pulling his comm out of the pocket; there was a message waiting for him. His elation at being saved from six hours in a crawler mulching up the mountainside vanished and frown spread across his features as read the message. “But I can’t go. I have to meet one of my people.” Darryl shrugged at Maynard’s scathing glance. He held up his phone. “Something just came up. You know how it is; I have to baby-sit every last one of these dumb fuckers.”

It was a complaint he’d often shared with Julie; Theron didn’t really have an underworld. It wasn’t big enough and most of his contacts were crooked scientists or grad students hurting for a little extra cash. Neither of which were altogether the most effective smugglers compared with some of Darryl’s acquaintances. They were easy to motivate, but required a touch too much oversight. Still, you used what you had. Plus, both categories of ‘employee’ didn’t really see the harm if an occasional crate of re-assembled ceramics, decayed fabrics and uncovered cookware went missing. There wasn’t a lot of spare material to smuggle off-planet, but the demand for authentic Progenitor artifacts meant that if you could sneak it out of the system, even the smallest box was easily worth the same weight of weapons, drugs or other high-level contraband. Probably a good deal more. With a few exceptions, you could buy drugs from almost anywhere, but Darryl had more fingers than there were planets with alien civilizations, past or present. Collectors – particularly wealthy Confederate collectors – would not only pay a hefty sum for a broken Progenitor toilet or whatever the fuck it was, but they’d show off these bits of trash like it was the crown fucking jewels of the Kingdom Beyond.

Of course, with such a small market, disappearing goods were more noticeable, which is why Darryl and his network had to be that extra bit careful, even with local security. Sanderson smiled to himself; Theron certainly wasn’t a fringer hub, but it was an ideal transfer point. Shipments to Theron were few and far between, which inspired a certain… laxity in local customs. Very few citizens could afford off-world luxury items with any degree of frequency, so any shipments were likely to be primarily essential goods with a small quantity of personal purchases thrown in. There was no market for bulk contraband and it was far cheaper to get most other illegal substances made on-planet, so who in their right mind would pay to smuggle into Theron?

That hubris had made Darryl Sanderon a small fortune. For a very modest percentage, he was able to take advantage of local security failures and arrange transfers of people and products that the League would prefer not to move through interstellar space. Not in any great number, but enough of them to make a small reputation beyond this system. Maynard and her not-infrequent visitations helped, though the woman preferred tariff-evasion, duty avoidance and the ‘softer’ side of smuggling. It was annoying, since he couldn’t count on her to do his other runs, but the fact that she didn’t ship slaves, illegal weapons or pharms made local security even more lax, since Maynard and Sanderson were ‘known quantities’.

That, and a few people prepared to look the other way. Darryl’s smile widened. He’d played this game in the Industrial Worlds; though his profits were lower here, so too was his overhead. For example, the going rate of a bribe to get a outworld customs official to wave through a lot of cargo wouldn’t have bought you a half-second inattentive blink in the dusties. You could bribe a starving man with a sandwich, but a well-fed one would cost you more.

Julie was tugging her pants on. “Sorry,” Darryl made the attempt at an apology, which sounded lame even to him. “You know how business gets.”

She rolled her eyes. “I do. Go break some kneecaps and I’ll see you later tonight.”

“That is a base slur on my character. Kneecaps keep them from working. I prefer fingers.”

~

Andrea stood on the lip of the crater, looking down at the Obsidian Spire. It was an evocative name, chosen by someone more for poetry than anything else. But really, wasn’t that how everything got named, once you got right down to it? People didn’t call their children Redhair Sixfingers, after all. Nor were warships called Lots of Guns. Well. Somebody probably had done both of those things at some point, but being that literal wasn’t really a good thing in Blake’s book.

And besides, the alien probe was suitably dark and imposing to warrant the name. It just seemed… wrong. Andrea couldn’t have said how. In pictures on datascrolls, it was certainly apt enough, but standing in front of it… no, it needed a different name, but for the life of her, the naval officer couldn’t have said what it should be.

As the equatorial sun reached its apex, the woman removed her beret and fanned herself with it. Even under the massive quarantine tent AOCS had thrown up around the crash site, the temperature was climbing. Ice age, my ass.

The alien probe had been all but dug out from where it had plowed deep into the slope of Desecration Peak; once freed from the prison of glassed sand and melted stone, it had shut down its own excavation, seemingly content to allow the humans to toil around it. There was no means of entry that AOCS or Blake’s own engineers could determine. Despite the controlled way the probe had come in, the outer casing was crumpled, scorched and broken in several places, but the seamless inner hull was untouched. It was through several of the breaks and openings of the outer layer that the ‘spires’ had risen. Some, spindly and towering, appeared to be comm antennae. Others were squat and bulging – to what purpose, the labcoats had been unable to determine. However, it was clear that despite the lack of motion, the probe was very busy. Something was happening inside that featureless black hull, something requiring a fair amount of energy, but so far every attempt to find out what it was doing had failed. were unable to determine just what was going on inside the strange black hull.

Well, at least they were reasonably certain that it wasn’t going to explode.

AOCS’s best guess was that internal factories and automated damage control processes were responsible for the readings – the definitive spines protruding from its hull didn’t appear to be normal operation in space, so it had to manufacture them. And, if the analysis of several hull fragments was accurate, this thing had been in space for thousands of years. Depending on how well it was able to repair itself, how often it had come into star systems, exposing itself to solar wind, temperature variance, micrometeorite and flurries of radiation it could be as much as an order of magnitude older (or younger) than that.

Andrea stared at the alien probe, well away from the teams running over every millimetre of the probe’s surface. Just recently, strange hieroglyphics had appeared upon its hull, fading and sharpening like coloured buoys under the ocean’s waves. No one had any idea why it was doing this. Was it some kind of sign? ‘Bug off’? ‘If lost, please return to Zorg Beeblebrox, 71668 West Groxlar Lane’? ‘Make peace with whatever deities you hold dear, for the destroyer comes’. ‘Come visit Zorxlar’s Flagellarium, home of the girls with the naughtiest pseudopods in the galactic cluster? Nah.

The captain quelled a smirk and turned to her escort, Joshua Banks. He was young for his position on the dig team, but Theron wasn’t exactly a hotspot of competition, despite the Progenitor Ruins. The Spire would change all that. Was it a Progenitor probe, launched God-only-knew how many years ago and now coming home to a dead world? Was it from the Lefu, returning to examine their handiwork? From someone else, searching for other civilizations amongst the darkness? Everyone had a theory, but no one had answers. There was at least one, though – humanity was no longer as alone as they’d thought. Or, this could belong to one of the vaped planets that the Confeds have come across. There’s irony. ‘Hi, I’m here to offer any spacefaring civilization that finds me a pact of friendship and trust. But, oops, it looks like someone wiped out my builders long before your species stopped bashing one another in the head with rocks.

“It’s quite a sight, isn’t it?” Andrea said to her AOCS guide.

Banks didn’t respond, seemingly enraptured by the patterns on the Spire. Andrea gave her companion a nudge and repeated the question.

Joshua shook him. “Sorry, captain. I guess I zoned out for a moment there.”

“Not a problem.” The script flowing over the Spire’s surface was mesmerizing, but there was something about it… something that Andrea found unsettling. She didn’t know why. Maybe because it had only recently appeared, it was a New Thing and humanity’s survival instincts made them wary of New Things. There was part of Andrea that insisted the smart thing to do was order AOCS out of the site and turn Valour Unending’s guns onto the Spire. Her ship was only a destroyer, but it could bring Desecration Peak thundering down, hundreds of thousands of tons of liquid rock burying whatever was left of the probe for all time.

But that was the atavistic part of her, the fears of an Andrea Blake from millions of years of ago, one that would be at home wearing animal furs and squatting at a fire, hooting in praise at the moon. This Andrea Blake, the daughter of all those thousands of millennia of evolution, shouldered the creeping unease aside. She smiled. “What do you think it is?”

Joshua shrugged. “I’d like to say, but I’m sure you know that theories are running rampant at this point. Until we can get a good look inside the thing, there’s just no way to tell.” He stroked the stubble on his chin. Normally a handsome man, he looked as if he had just gotten out of bed; there were dark circles under his eyes and his short brown hair was unruly. As if aware of her attentions, he ran his fingers over his scalp. “Sorry I’m not at my best, captain. Trouble sleeping.”

Andrea nodded sympathetically. “It’s all right. I understand you knew all three vic- all of the deceased,” she amended.

“Yeah. It’s a big expedition, but those three… each had their own way of driving me crazy. I just wish I’d get to bawl out Jenkins over turning off the radio, or Abby over stealing potato salad out of my lunch, or Mitch for…” his expression froze, became even more brittle. “I can’t even remember what Mitch did that pissed me off. I just wish I could get the chance to be pissed about it again.” He sighed, nodding towards the Spire. “And nobody even knows what it did to them.”

“But at least you three checked out all right.”

“There is that.” Banks sighed again, his eyes drifting back to the Spire, bathed in the muted glow that filtered through the tent. “This thing killed three of my friends. No one knows how. Or why. Or anything about it, other than it’s here and it’s doing something.” His gaze seemed to soften. “Still,” he said so softly that Andrea wasn’t quite sure that she’d heard him. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?”

~

“So, what do you have for me?”

Rudy Jacobs dabbed at the sweat on his forehead with a perpetually-stained handkerchief. Darryl knew that his contact’s perspiration wasn’t due to any particular nervousness, at least normally; Jacobs was a greasy blob of flesh who’d break out in a sweat on his way to the fridge from the chair in front of his vidscreen. But he was reasonably high-up in what passed for Theron’s Customs Service. As such, he was in a key position to look the other way when Maynard came to visit, and to quietly bring certain things to Sanderson’s attention.

“This was slated to be shipped aboard Wild Bill,” Jacobs said in a whiny, nasal voice. Just talking to the man set Sanderson’s teeth on edge. “But Captain Harlock noticed irregularities in the manifest and refused to accept it. Luckily, his complaint came to me, otherwise, we’d have an official log of it on-record. I don’t think he knew what it was, though,” Jacobs hastily amended. “Just that there was an error in the paperwork and he wasn’t going accept anything that wasn’t properly vetted.”

“A cargo-hauler with a conscience,” Darryl mused. “That’s a first.”

“Wild Bill does much of its shipping throughout the Industrial Worlds. If they’re caught hauling contraband, they could be barred from-” Jacobs began.

“Yes, yes. I know.” Although the League was, by and large, a trifle more lenient on the issue of smuggling than the Confederacy, the Industrial Worlds were rather strict about that sort of thing. “I know why Harlock’s being an ass. But my question, mister Jacobs, is an entirely different one.” Darryl looked up and there was a hard glint in his eyes. “My question,” he repeated carefully, clapping his heavyset partner on the shoulder. “Is why Harlock knew about it at all. You assured me that your friend could get it aboard without a second glance. That it would be on and off without the captain ever realizing that his ship was that extra bit heavier. Instead,” he kicked one of the crates lying on the deck. “Here we have a solid three tonnes of black sky sitting in a warehouse just waiting for the feds to come in send us all to Broken Halo for the rest of our lives.”

“I didn’t know-”

“Rudy. Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. You’re a pal. I trust you. You got Wild Bill out here after all. But you promised me – and I promised my suppliers – that we could move this black sky out of here with no turnaround. Now you’re telling me that the deal is vented. Because you misjudged your pal. I don’t like hearing this. I’m sure my suppliers aren’t going to like it, either.”

Jacobs dabbed at his greasy forehead again; this time the sweat wasn’t a result of his bulk. “Look, I can make this right. This warehouse still isn’t logged as full and we’re not expecting another supply run for another three months. I can talk to some of my people, s-see if I can get another freighter here before then…”

“In three months?”

“W-well, there’s always Court of a Thousand Suns. I’m sure Captain Maynard would-” he broke off as Darryl’s grip on his shoulder tightened.

“Rudy, you’re breaking my heart here. I thought we had this great relationship going on, this implicit trust and understanding. Maynard’s great for the little stuff – and the best fuck I’ve ever found – but she’s popped up on federal watch lists a bit too often. You think the League destroyer we got sitting in orbit isn’t going to notice when she starts taking on cargo? That they may get just a teensy bit suspicious?”

“We can d-dummy up the deal – we’ve done it before.”

“Yeah, we could do that. But Maynard doesn’t ship pharms. Won’t touch the stuff. So she’s going to wonder just what it is that I need to get off-planet so damn quickly. Maybe she’ll adhere to the code. Don’t ask, don’t look. But I think it’s going to be pretty obvious when she makes the drop. Then she comes back and cuts my balls off. And what do you think happens then, Rudy?”

“I- I-”

“That’s right. I’ll need new balls. And since yours are probably in mint condition, I’ll figure I’ll come find you. Now, do you see the problems here, Rudy?”

“Yes.”

“Good man. See? I’m starting to trust you all over again.” Darryl clapped the fat man lightly on the cheek. “Get out word to your people. Give me a timetable. I’ll pass word to Gennaro, tell him there’s a snag. I’ll be sure to let him know that you’re doing everything you can to fix it.” A beat. “You will be doing everything in your power to fix this, won’t you?”

“Y-yes, sir.”

“That’s what I thought. I knew I could count on you.”

~

Julie had chosen to leave the crawler further down the mountain and hike the rest of the way up. In retrospect, it was probably a good thing that Darryl had elected to stay behind; he was League and if even if she could have enticed him to climb a mountain, he’d only have slowed her down. The captain paused in her hike and took a deep breath; she was in the shadowed part of the mountain and the air was still cold and crisp. It wouldn’t be for long; already Teresa was beginning to peek over the top of Desecration Peak. The woman could feel the slight change in air temperature; it wouldn’t be long before this side of the mountain was bathed in the afternoon sun.

Maynard continued up; above the treeline she could make out the pale beige peaks of the AOCS quarantine tent. Crude, but effective. The young woman took another breath, savouring the scent of nearpine woodland growth. In the distance a ferret-owl warbled in a courting call, while the various rodents of the forest chittered and nattered at each other. Julie could have taken the crawler all the way up, but she preferred some degree of circumspection. Besides, it had been too long since she’d been able to indulge herself like this. It let her bleed off some of her energy and besides… she enjoyed planets. More than she let on; before she’d arrived in the League, her home – such as it was – had been on a hollowed-out asteroid, well-off normal navigation routes. No weather. No clouds, no sunsets or birdcalls. Living in space, you could sometimes forget that planets had more to them than unyet-exploited reserves of biomass and heavy elements.

The woman bit off a curse as she swatted a blood-sucking insect, flicking its mashed corpse off her cheek. Of course, there’s also something to be said for a more controlled environment.

Ah, well. She was almost there; she could hear the distant whines, hums and growls of other vehicles. Lighters and shuttles in the air, crawlers and construction vehicles on the ground. Julie half-slid down the slope towards a gathering of civilians. She could hear a droning, sonorous chant coming from the largest group of them – those would be the Ascendants, offering prayers to God and seeking his blessings and wisdom. Hoping for the day that all humanity would go extinct.

Julie’s nose crinkled in disgust and she turned away from the thin preacher leading his flock in their abasements. No, Darryl didn’t have to worry about her ‘going Ascendant’. She found the Church of Inheritance’s tenets… offensive. Repugnant and perverse.

The starship captain threaded her way through the crowd towards the less religious visitors; two of them turned and left as she approached, having had their fill of staring at the Spire, waiting for something to happen. The other half-dozen made various efforts at a greeting as she approached. The ‘tent’ was more of a prefab building than something to go camping in, with double-walled airlocks for entry and it could easily be subdivided and expanded into a passable research facility; as it was, AOCS just wanted to ensure the security of their prize. Only authorized personnel were allowed in. But in order to satisfy the curiosity of their visitors, AOCS had been kind enough to erect a vid-screen with a live feed for ease of gawking. Right now, not much was going on. Terran probes were hovering or climbing over the alien artefact, scanning it and its debris for any contaminants or means of access, technicians staring at their clipboards ambling by.

“It’s beautiful,” the man next to Julie breathed. She looked over at him, then back to the probe. It was ugly. A black, jagged thing, surface lit by floodlights and the ghostly blood-red runes. She frowned, tapping her chin thoughtfully. It seemed… familiar, somehow. There was the specter of a memory, but nothing solid. Probably nothing more than a ‘vid or game she’d seen – through sheer luck, some artist’s attempt at rendering an alien script similar to what was on the ‘Obsidian Spire’. Maybe.

Yes, there was a sort of… twisted aesthetics to it, but beautiful? No.

There was something about it, something that made her… she hated it. She didn’t know why, but she did. The man beside her spoke again, and Julie focused her attention back on him.

“I said, isn’t it?” he asked, turning back to the screen, totally enraptured. “So beautiful.”

The woman raised an eyebrow. Shouldn’t you be praying with the rest of those idiots? After a moment, Julie shrugged. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

Before she turned to leave, she cast one last look at the Spire, as if expecting something from it. There was nothing, of course. It was busy repairing itself. But somehow she couldn’t shake the sensation that it knew she was staring, that it knew she was there.

And, somehow, she knew that it hated her right back.

April 13th, 4222

That NOS Guy · Post by **That NOS Guy** » 2009-06-17 09:51pm

"Captain Harlock"

Oh Crescent, you card.

Themightytom · Post by **Themightytom** » 2009-06-18 01:31pm

There was a hitchhikers guide to the galaxy reference in there too

StarDestroyer.Net BBS

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