Chronicles of the Aeons War, page 99
part #3 of The Omniverse Series
Seven Hundred and fifty million ship’s Instances – five thousand Combat Instances of each ship in the El-Ahur Starfleet eventually gathered, their ranks bolstered by slaved drone ships, autonomous attack and decoy ships, single-instance weapons platforms and missile-ships provided by Bloom’s Point. Assembling the fleet, even with Fibonacci multiplication Sequencing took most of another year; Combat Instance Five Thousand was fresh from the Proving Grounds – and the last to arrive. Combat Instance Four Thousand, Nine Hundred and Ninety-Nine and back to CI-0001 had already been through their sorties into the war against the Zohor Decision Engines and were transmitting telemetry forwards through the rest of the fleet. After leaving for the Proving Grounds they had gone straight into the millennial endgame against the Zohor. The veterans had already renamed it The Long Battle, and the ships of CI-0001 were ancient, battle-hardened, seasoned and weary for it all to be over.
“All Commands, all Instances, Caliburn CI-0001, Grandmaster Yeung Acshah reporting, and as you all know and recall, for the last time, from the Last Instance of the Last Battle. It is a unique opportunity for me to address not just my past selves, but the past selves of all the men and women who have fought alongside me, from CI-5000 to now. We’ve fought this one through and through; thousands of times, from back-to-front to take full advantage of combat-observation instance and experience. We know the nightmares you’ve faced and are facing; we know the terrors you have yet to face, because we faced them when we were you. We have been where you are. We know you will persevere…we know you will endure…we know you will stand where we stand now, because we stand here now. We know the loss, the grief, the pain and fear ahead and behind each of you. I can’t begin to contemplate the number of horrors I’ve personally witnessed, let alone survived. I can’t bear to count the number of men and women who have died, though their number and names will be remembered by all when this, Last Battle is over.
“I can tell you that we prevail. I can promise you victory, and everyone who’s served from Combat Instance-5001 to Combat Instance-0002 knows this as fact. We dread what we face; the long labour ahead, still not finished. The long centuries; the millennia. But it does end. With this battle Prophecy itself will be fulfilled! With this battle, we ultimately and utterly defeat and destroy the Zohor! We’ve already seen their defeat thousands of times. We know the Decision Engines fall! We must each go to war now to make what we know to be true remain true. Now we will do what must be done to complete our victory and end one hundred million years of Zohor genocide.” She finished speaking and returned to the Conning Station of her Bridge.
“All Commands, all Instances,” she said again, “This is Caliburn, CI-0001, Grandmaster Yeung Acshah. Stand by for Q-Field jump to Fleet and Combat-Instance-assigned coordinates. The El-Ahur Prevail.”
As her Helmsman counted down to the jump, Yeung reflected that she’d heard those words so many Queen-forgotten times over the last five millennia. She thought that when the time finally came for her to actually say them herself, that it would be mere rote; but it wasn’t. She remembered one instance; CI-4375, she thought, where everyone on the Bridge recited the speech as it was broadcast over Ship wide Comm. She’d been crying from laughing so hard as they did it. And despite the hell that had followed that particular Combat Instance, most of her Bridge snickered the next two or three times they heard the speech from Yeung Acshah of Combat Instance-001. But, Acshah felt the conviction of every word choking itself from her as she said them. They bore the weight of the pain of the many long centuries of her life spent fighting this war. She’d seen every Decision Engine fall a thousand times each. The first time, back in CI-5000 when she watched it happen she’d been ecstatic, knowing their victory was ensured. But then in CI-4999 she realized how much more lay ahead before that single victory could be truly claimed. Yeung Acshah could honestly no longer guess her age; she’d been through so much…lived so many lifetimes while dedicated to this single goal that she could scarcely remember life before.
Their bodies may have adapted to live for thousands of years, but their minds hadn’t quite caught up. Her oldest memories had the quality of half-remembered dreams. Though she’d kept images of her Life Before, Kalden’s face was nearly the face of a stranger to her. She remembered that long, long ago, during those years at the Proving Grounds and before, that Nima Kalden had been her Sworn Reason to go to war. In the long-ago Time Before the Zohor he’d been her dearest friend, her favourite lover. She remembered, vaguely, their last breakfast together before she left for Terra Nova. She remembered even more vaguely their last conversation, in her old bedroom in her old family home, his face an image in her lens and his voice coming from a bud in her ear. But she no longer felt loss, pain, regret…she no longer even missed him. She couldn’t remember his smell or the feel of him with her or inside of her. She didn’t even remember the names of the people who’d shared her residence, friends, lovers…nor the names of all the sisters, brothers, cousins nieces and nephews she’d lost during the Zohor strike on Midian; they had been gathered for a funeral…her father’s, she remembered. But the only thing that truly remained from so long ago was her hate of the Zohor. Yeung realized not for the first time that the smallest, briefest fragment of her life was the time before the Aeons War came to Midian. She wasn’t even the same person anymore, except for that hatred of the Zohor. Yeung could barely remember the innocent child she’d been during the time before the Zohor strike; she hadn’t even known she was El-Ahur. Now she measured her age by millennia, as did all the veterans of the Last Battle.
If she continued to live, Yeung Acshah pondered as the flare of light brought them for the last time into the field of combat, she wondered if one day this, fighting the Zohor, would also fade into the distant past; if one day her hate of the Zohor would become a remembered abstract, the way her love for Nima Kalden had. Then there was no more time for reflection; they were already in the thick of battle.
♦♦♦
From the Bridge of the Ouroboros, CI-0001, Gabrielle accelerated Her consciousness as the Commodore ordered the Helm to begin countdown to Q-field Jump so that She could properly reflect on all that had come before. Ten seconds of counting stretched on eternally and She Remembered.
“Ten…”
The Early Instances had suffered the worst casualties; inexperienced and unprepared even with the detailed combat telemetry, vectors, preprogrammed targeting and all the other advantages of fighting the battle from end to beginning, those had been their first forays into the nightmare of attacking a Decision Engine. Even with the data provided by their future selves, the battle had been clumsy, violent and deadly. Casualties had been high, the aftermath a horror, a nightmare that was long in ending only to begin again with CI-4999.
The Five Thousand Instances of the Starfleet had been divided into five Meta Fleets, each of which would attack a different Decision Engine. They had carefully synchronized the jumps of each Instance of each ship of each Meta-Fleet; the attacks had to be simultaneous or else they would fail. And so taking down the first Decision Engine, though they were all taken down within hours of each other in realtime, had taken the most out of the El-Ahur.
They scanned and analyzed their enemy even as they were attacked: each Decision Engine was massive; a uniform size roughly equal to the dimensions of Bloom’s Point, itself. They were astonishing machines of computational ability. Yet they were no more self-aware than the Zohor they controlled; they remained unreasoning killers without conscience or consciousness. The Decision Engines were, as Voyager Benedict Jack concisely said when they first analyzed scans of one, little more than massive, sophisticated chess-playing computers.
“…nine…”
Swarms of billions of Zohor ships defended the Decision Engines and again it became necessary to deploy fighters, corvettes and cruisers to even the odds. And Benedict Jack, being Benedict Jack, took command of all fighter squadrons from the theatre of war itself. He led their every successful campaign during that first battle with Decision Engine One. Even still casualties were high. Damage to the larger ships was severe and as each ship reached its damage limit and flashed out, there were no replacements; the Meta-Fleet was all they had. When a ship was lost it was lost without replacement; No subsequent instance would jump in; every instance of every ship had already jumped in, at once, as one. When each Combat Instance left the field of war, there were no others to take its place.
“…eight…”
The Decision Engine’s resources were superior; layer upon layer of defensive and tactical systems including fleets of billions of Zohor. The fight was punishing; lethal. But its conclusion was inevitable. The El-Ahur had weapons from the minds of nightmare at their disposal for this push against the Decision Engines: anti-matter missiles, nova-scale explosive devices, gluon-shattering bombs…An arsenal of destruction godlike and abominable, the greatest of all being the Hope, Herself. She learned early in the campaign that She could Conjoin with every instance of Herself in the theatre of combat. Her ability to see through time both linearly and laterally only enhanced that connection, only deepened Her Strength. When at last She channelled a thousand instances of Her Will through the energy weapons projection arrays of a thousand instances of the Ouroboros they shattered the Decision Engine in a violent, uncontrolled eruption.
“…seven…”
The second and third Decision Engines didn’t fall quite as easily, though the battles were less punishing. What made it difficult for Meta-Fleets Two and Three were the conditions of their theatres of war.
The Second Meta-Fleet fell upon their target near a supernova remnant, creating a “dirty” war zone of high radiation, plasma, nebular gas, stellar debris, and gravitational disruptions to spacetime caused by the dead star’s remains. The battle was a mad scramble, and much of the damage suffered by the Meta-Fleet was the result of collisions with stellar remnants that breached their kinetic shielding.
They were also unable to detect a massive Zohor defensive attack that came at their flanks until the enemy was almost atop them. The Meta-Fleet’s ranks broke and the combat fell into chaos not predicted by the tactical time-travel combat telemetry they’d relied on from their previous Combat Instances. The Zohor had changed the playing field by destroying the star; an event that only happened because Meta Fleet Two jumped in seventeen minutes later than planned, relative to their recorded Combat-Instance telemetry. The Zohor had destroyed the star in order to create obstacles that would allow the Decision Engine the opportunity to escape along a new warp vector, evading the attackers signalled by its four Companion Engines. But before the Decision Engine could escape the Meta-Fleet was upon them, trapping the Zohor brain in a debris field of its own making.
By destroying the star, the Zohor exacted a devastating toll, crippling and severely damaging hundreds of ships outright. Caught between attacking and defending, the Grandmaster Yeung Acshah ordered the Hope to use the stellar remnant against the Decision Engine.
Gabrielle complied; Her Grandmaster was right in the strategy. Gabrielle entwined Her Mind with the Minds of Her other Instances and then threw themselves at the super-dense, super-heated broken core of the dead star, turning their Will into a deadly mass driver even as Grandmaster Yeung Acshah was shouting escape vector orders to the rest of the Meta-Fleet.
“…six...”
Decision Engine Three was attacked by a weakened and demoralized Meta Fleet Three. Between the combats they’d lost over two thousand ships that needed to be completely rebuilt; tens of millions were dead. So many friends and loved ones had died during the attack on Decision Engine Two. Even though their ships had been repaired or replaced, and new crew and ships were rotated into the fleet, what they had been was now forever broken. And with the third Decision Engine they had to contend with something they’d not expected: it was itself deeply hidden in a stellar nursery: a thick nebula of dense matter and heavy gasses gradually collapsing in upon themselves to become stars.
If Decision Engine Two had been hard to reach and defended by millions of natural barriers, the third Zohor Decision Engine was completely fortified. The billions of Zohor needle-ships, death-orbs and mass drivers defending the gargantuan artificial brain were hidden throughout the cluttered nebula. There was no clear-cut solution for them; no nearby stellar fragment to hurl and so many different paths of active attack to defend against that Gabrielle couldn’t spare the mental resources necessary to attack the Decision Engine Herself.
So the Third Meta-Fleet fought a very long campaign of bloody siege, taking a relentless beating from wave after wave of Zohor. Shields similar to the ones protecting the Twin Systems were deployed to protect the Meta-Fleet from the worst of the onslaught but even so they scored heavy losses before ultimately destroying the third Decision Engine by combined brute force and exploitation of Jibrail-captured enemy ordinance. They suffered fewer casualties than at Decision Engine Two, but the longer campaign saw even more ships destroyed or decommissioned. The stellar nursery had proven itself a nearly-impregnable fortress.
“…five…”
They were halfway through the countdown to the Q-Field jump to Combat Instance One, now; the five thousandth Combat Instance, the final instance of the El-Ahur Meta-Fleet; Gabrielle had witnessed the fall of the fifth Decision Engine almost a thousand times already. Each time She noticed several minor differences between what She experienced and what She remembered; time was becoming increasingly unstable with each new Combat Instance of the Meta Fleet. She dreaded what was to come. For though it was now almost nearly over She knew that this last Combat Instance was the one that would, inevitably, see them suffer the heaviest losses. The Fifth and final Decision Engine was defending itself with unyielding brutality.
Such had been the case when they’d attacked the Fourth Decision Engine: as Meta-Fleet Four, regrouped and ready after long years of Respite, repair, refit, training and retraining, came out of Q-Field on attack vectors against Decision Engine Four it suddenly fired on them with a barrage from an uncountable multitude of particle beam and pulse weapons, along with multiple volleys from mass drivers and attacks from Zohor swarms deployed throughout the theatre of combat.
Again, luck had invalidated the Meta-Information they’d relied on from the back-to front Instance Combat: their telemetry was no longer valid and they took losses that caused minor and major temporal cascades through their fleet. Whole ships exploded spontaneously around them; people vanished from the decks of other ships to be replaced with completely different people, and as always they had to struggle with the maddening overlap of multiple conflicting memories.
The Meta-fleet broke apart and reformed, scrambling away from the Zohor while trying to remain within range of an attack on the Decision Engine. But even as they fled the swarm and the close-range defences, the Decision Engine fired a powerful burst of energy in all directions; the Zohor were unharmed but the Meta-Fleet was crippled and thrown cascading away, with the Zohor closing to finish the kill. This was a random luck event: a weapon evolved during the desperate struggle fired for the first time, literally changing the history of the battle. The Combat Instances of the Ouroboros were the first to recover from the blast. They organized themselves into a sub fleet as other ships began recovering and rallying. But they were just a thousand ships against so many. And it was CI-4000 that Gabrielle most remembered: the first Combat Instance against Decision Engine Four. The Combat Instance where everything changed.
“…four…”
When the blast wave came from the Decision Engine it had been completely unexpected; nothing in the telemetry from CI-3999 accounted for it. That meant that the Meta-Fleet had made the timeline so unstable that there was a change in reality. The Zohor strike rendered everything remembered by every surviving ship of every instance completely invalid. Overlapping memory trauma was the best they could hope for, if they survived. Immediately CI-3999 of the Ouroboros began reverse-streaming new telemetry; they were the next most senior Combat Instance and therefore had the most experience in this now ever-changing time-fractured field of war.
When the energy wave from the Zohor struck the Ouroboros CI-4000 it killed all power; every system was shorted out. Safety protocol had always been that in such a situation the auto repair systems would first restore main power, then gravity. On the Command Deck the lights came on just in time for the Bridge crew to see themselves start to fall into the safety netting a half second before the Bridge itself fell onto them.
The Pit bosses in the Crew Pits below automatically assumed executive duties as Gabrielle crawled out from under the broken Bridge Platform. She admired the calm efficiency with which they the Pit Bosses had taken over when the Command Crew was incapacitated. Beneath their practiced, efficient coordination was one emotion: Terror. Citrusy and bitter, that terror was barely held in check by so many unending centuries at combat against the Zohor. They coordinated the restart of all ship’s systems, routing power and data supply through secondary and tertiary channels as the navigation and tactical pits coordinated escape manoeuvres.
