Chronicles of the Aeons War, page 35
part #3 of The Omniverse Series
“We can’t risk the Nimbus being aboard those ships,” Handmaid Yeung said.
“It should be noted that until now we have neither encountered nor seen evidence of the Nimbus in the explored cosmos.” One of the Councillors objected, “They may in fact still remain locked on the Old Earth”
“The question remains the same:” Fleetmistress Kaplan said, “Who are they? What are their intentions? One way or another, brothers and sisters, we are about to find out.”
“Give Heihachi command of the field,” Baxter spoke up, “Second only to me, he’s the best commander in the fleet, aboard the best ship in the fleet.”
“Your vote of confidence is noted, Commodore,” Kaplan said, “But we cannot risk putting all our faith in one man.”
“Why not?” Benedict interjected, “That’s what you’re doing with me. It’s what you did with Her.”
“Ouroboros, Command Olympus:” Baxter said finally, “Maintain blockade, evaluate the situation, and take whatever actions you deem necessary to the defence of Midian. You have full authority over the fleet.”
A moment later, Heihachi replied: “As you say, Commodore.”
♦♦♦
There were sixty-three ships in the fleet under Heihachi’s command. Most of them were mid-range battle cruisers, a few among them the first of the ships to have been built and launched from Sinai. He knew if it came to a fight they were dead; outgunned thousands of times over. He deployed his small fleet in as wide formation as he dared, with mines and fighters casting an extended, if less effective net.
The unknown ships slowed from superluminal and held station-keeping five kilometres from the Ouroboros’ blockade fleet. The unknowns fanned their numbers out in two hundred and seventy degrees of horizontal and vertical deployment, casting a vast net of their own.
“Who are they?” Heihachi murmured, “What are they doing? Comm, advise Olympus of the situation.”
The two fleets hung facing each other, motionless across a continent-wide expanse. It was a rare encounter within visual range; Heihachi marvelled that they were so close that from an observation alcove he could make them out with his naked eye against the unmagnified sky, like twinkling stars and ghostly shadows as they reflected Heket’s light back at it. And just as he could see them, they could see the Ouroboros’ fleet, as well.
The two fleets hung facing each other for eighty-three minutes; event counters had been running from the moment Heihachi brought his fleet from superluminal, marked again the moment they first made visual contact of the other fleet. Heihachi had tried signalling the other fleet, using the communications systems provided the El-Ahur by the Bloom’s Point Sentinel; there was no response. They advised Olympus Command, who ordered them to remain on alert at station keeping; whatever they were facing, if it had meant to attack them, it would have, by now.
As their event timer counted the first second after the eighty-third minute of the encounter, a small craft dropped from one of the largest ships in the unknown fleet. Its silver and rust-red hull glistened as it caught light from Heruba behind the El-Ahur ships. It accelerated away from its fleet. As alerts pinged across the bridges of every ship standing with the Ouroboros, Heihachi’s tactician delivered a constant update of the oncoming’s journey. The rest of the other fleet stayed at station-keeping. The launch was slowing and sensors confirmed that it came to a halt at a point exactly midway between the two fleets.
Heihachi looked at the ship from the other fleet as it was projected as a solid, movable display before him. It, like its counterparts was a ridged, jagged-edged teardrop, bristling with what could only be weapons nacelles. Yet it showed no overtly aggressive posture. Beside him, existing only on the lenses over his eyes was a projection of the Commodore, as he linked to Heihachi from the bunker in Olympus.
“It’s done nothing but sit there for the last twenty minutes,” Heihachi said. He sat in an alcove off the bridge, its darkened interior shielding him from the eyes and ears of his subordinates.
“We can’t find anything like it in our database,” Baxter said, “The life signs are what’s throwing it the most; the technology seems to be adapted from the Zohor, yet it doesn’t match any previously known or recorded Zohor configuration.”
“At the rate those bastards evolve, that wouldn’t surprise me. I agree with you that while the design may scream ‘Zohor’ the life signs just don’t make sense.”
“And now it’s just sitting there.”
“Sensor, Conn.” Another voice called through the implant in Heihachi’s ear.
“Enter conversation.”
Nadir Ingrid, a Sensor Systems operator appeared in both men’s fields of view.
“Conn, Sensor: the smaller ship has begun emitting a narrow-beam energy pulse,” she said, “It’s being directed towards the Ouroboros.”
“Weapons trace?” Heihachi asked.
“Possible,” Baxter said, “But I don’t think so; they’ve had ample time to strike.”
“Run it through optics and determine if it’s a signal of some kind,” Heihachi ordered, “And have them set up the means to respond to them in kind, if it is.”
“As you say,” Nadir gave a short bow and vanished from the visual.
“Tactical,” Baxter’s image called. Tactical Chief Hartman appeared.
“All ships are to remain at combat-ready,” Heihachi said, “We’re going to try and communicate with that thing, but let’s not take any chances. We may have to shoot our way out of it before we’re done.”
Hartman’s image nodded and vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
Heihachi faced the image of Baxter Vincent in his lens. “Now we’ll see what happens next.”
♦♦♦
Baxter ended the conversation and turned back to the Council, sitting around the War Room’s command station. They had watched the conversation play out on their own lenses, as well as on the tabletop holographic display before them. The walls of the war room reflected the telemetry from the Ouroboros’ blockade, along with tactical notes and updating data from each of their ships. The work pit below the war room was a hive of activity, as information was relayed from the ships in space and the defence outposts on Midian, deployment and logistics being charted and corrected every second as new data came in.
Benedict had adapted quickly to the three-dimensional displays, and their abilities to display multiple layers of information simultaneously. Fighter control systems back on Earth used tactical Heads Up Displays in three dimensions long before the Australian Conflict began; those instincts to watch multiple lines of information at once allowed him to see the application better than he could have hoped.
“This shows the laser’s signal, right?” he asked, already knowing it was, “There’s a definite pattern to the pulses; run it against every known code, starting with Shiplanguage.”
“Shiplanguage?” Baxter stammered, “Do you mean Eouwlf, or League Universal Four-Hundred and Twenty-Six?”
“Just run it through all of them; there’s a pattern and I doubt it’s that highly encoded.” Benedict insisted.
“What makes you say that?” Fleetmistress Kaplan asked.
“I was there when they decoded the locks on the Old Ship, back on what you call The Old Earth.” Benedict said, “That message was directed at anyone on the Planet, and it was meant as a test. That ship out there is signalling us directly; well, the Ouroboros. They’re signalling the flagship. I may be from the Air Force, but I’ve hitched rides with the Navy; I know goddamn well that if you want to contact the other side’s Flagship you don’t do it using a secret code, especially when you outnumber and outgun their fleet.”
“Sound reasoning,” Fleetmistress Kaplan concurred, “Send to Ouroboros: stand by for laser signal translation and means of response.”
“We’ve found it!” one of the pit crew called, “The pulse is in Eouwlf five-point numeric base and message language is confirmed using LU-426; According to the language archives it’s a compressed audiovisual signal; we can translate directly into Laesh Common.”
“Do it,” Kaplan said.
“Capturing message’s repeating cycle and translating now,”
“Display.”
There was no doubt that the beings before them were Human-descended; no doubt that they were indeed El-Ahur, as well. But these El-Ahur were no longer solely Human. From their silver eyes to the membranous meeting of flesh and machine, their hybrid nature was unmistakable.
“We greet you, Brothers and sisters of the El-Ahur,” the being’s image said, “We are the Followers of the Hope: the Jibrail El-Ahur. We have come to take possession of the Hope, and of the Voyager. We request that you send both of them to us immediately. We will give you two Midian-standard hours to comply.”
In the face of mass extinction, in the presence of a threat to the very survival of a species, it is the ability to unite for the common good that determines their potential to survive. In the face of mass extinction, it is likewise a species’ ability to turn upon itself and one another that leads to its ruin.
THIRTEEN
THE SECOND SCHISM
Grandmaster Benedict looked down from the Queen’s Walk, at the cleanup and demolition efforts in the valley below. The crater was still a smouldering, angry red. Allison McQuire stood beside him, answering an age-old question of his by nodding.
“I used to come out here, both before and after I sealed Myself in the Keep. It was a few months before I actually entered into the Stillness and waited, gathering power to Myself. It was My one comfort: the knowledge that we had survived, that Humanity would continue.”
The Grandmaster nodded. “You’re looking for the Old City you remember; the city that was destroyed,” he said, “And I’m looking for the beginnings of the New City, the one that I remember.”
“Past and future met, to save the present from the Enemy,” She said, quoting from the Rai’Ha’s Prophecy Cycle, “Poetic words to march us both to our dooms.”
“There’s always a choice,”
“I was never given any, Grandmaster; I doubt you were given many.”
Benedict nodded. “I wasn’t. But then I learned that it was up to me to make my own choices, whatever the goddamned Prophecy foretells.”
Allison smiled. “You’re one step closer to enlightenment, Jack Benedict.”
“Is there even such a thing?” he smirked, “All I’ve ever seen, for as long as I can remember is madness.” The Grandmaster looked down on the devastation, the ongoing cleanup and wondered how long before the Jewel of Terra Nova would shine on this world as he could always remember it shining? He had never seen the Old City of Landing, the Pre-Zohor metropolis of Humanity’s first incursion onto a truly alien world. The scale of the devastation below was nevertheless worse than he’d seen even during the Australian Conflict, when Lassiter’s forces had nuked Semarang, Indonesia. He’d flown escort for military delegates from the World Council touring the devastation. They flew over the city as mostly futile rescue operations went underway. The scale of ruin caused by the Zohor mass driver was something he’d dreaded seeing for many years, now. He knew what would rise, phoenix-like from the ashes of Landing, but he was horrified at the number of lives lost on Midian as in Landing. He was looking at the aftermath of the event that would inevitably lead to the extinction of Homo Sapiens in favour of the New Blood and True Blood; ultimately, he was witnessing the process by which Humankind would evolve into the El-Ahur.
They made their way from the Queen’s Walk and back down into the city built into the side of the mountain.
The renovation and resettlement of Olympus was into its sixth week; Grandmaster Benedict looked down on a hillside city being brought back to life one pane of glass, one brick, one stone and one building at a time; painstaking efforts to restore nearly a thousand years of natural entropy. The work was all being done by the Keepers, as they were known colloquially in the Grandmaster’s past timeline, the Gesheol El-Ahur; ordered by the Queen to remain in Olympus Keep Her City.
Four hundred and fifty thousand survivors and refugees had been brought to Olympus from across the Terra Nova, with more being found each day. There was no rebuilding Acoma City; it was too remote and the land around it too damaged by the firestorm that followed the shockwave west. People were migrating from the west into the east, coming to help build their new homes in Landing or find their place in Olympus. Meanwhile, El-Ahur from Bloom’s Point station would resettle here and in the city in the valley below.
The Northwestern Shore had fared better than inland. But some of the shoreline towns and villages had been struck by tsunamis; flooded, washed out to sea. Other places were just far enough down the coast to escape the waves, and sheltered below the hills of Blackleaf Woods to escape the worst of the blast. What the Queen of Light and Sorrow had done to the sky had likewise rescued them from the fallout. Farther to the east in the valley below, the Temple Wall and the Shrine of Stone were nearly rid of the scaffolding, stonemasons and engineers working to rebuild them.
“The dedication of the new wall and shrine will happen in five days,” She said, “The reconstruction team thinks they need another seven, but they’ll be ahead of schedule. The dedication will be moved forward. You’ll be there with Me.”
The Grandmaster nodded; he knew She wasn’t making a request or issuing orders; his past experience with Her future self made him understand that She was speaking of the future.
“There will be an attack,” She said, the regret, pain audible in Her voice, “And despite the best efforts of the El-Ahur and your own forces, there will be deaths.”
“Can’t you do anything about it?”
She shook Her head, “I’m still too weak to reshape the future. I could have done it, perhaps, had it not taken Me all this time to gather to Myself the necessary forces to hide the Twin Systems.”
“Who’s attacking? Can you see that much? Is it the Zohor?”
“Worse than the Zohor,” She said, “We will be attacking ourselves: Our brothers and sisters from the Sinai and what’s left of the Southlands will lead the raid.”
“Fighting people’s a lot easier than fighting the Zohor,” Benedict said, “Trust me, I remember that much from the Old Earth. A Human being, even an El-Ahur, is much easier to take down.”
“That’s what makes it so much worse: that we kill ourselves instead of them, and we do it with so much more ease.”
Grandmaster Benedict felt the sorrow of Her words as if it were his own. “We can put the Suphia on every route and shipping lane between here and the South; we have enough eyes in the sky to take out any strike team before it even reaches the Temple!”
Allison shook her head, “The operatives are already in Olympus or down in Landing.”
“Give us their locations and we’ll send the best of the Suphia after them!”
“They’re all too well protected, entrenched in dense civilian areas in the refugee camps. There would be far more casualties because of what would happen there, than at the Temple.”
“Then kill them with your mind!” he insisted, “You’ve done it before!”
“No!” she answered severely, recalling the nurse, Theresa White, whose brain she’d unwillingly destroyed by an uncontrolled psychic onslaught aboard the Old Ship, “I did that once and swore I’d never do it again. Not to Human Minds; not to any conjoined with My Mind.”
Benedict bowed his head, resigned. “As you say, then; my people will do their best,” he swore, “We’ll keep casualties to a minimum.”
The Queen nodded. “I know; and you will.”
Benedict wasn’t about to let this one go. The Queen, Herself had given him foreknowledge of the attack; and She knew as he did that he would stop at nothing to keep it from happening. Allison McQuire, felt sad for Benedict, because She knew that all his efforts, all the pain he was going to put himself and his people through would still not stop the attack.
