Chapter 293 (1/2)
The universe will take away everything good, everything you love. It will take everything from you and laugh while it's doing it. - Terran saying
Why is it that everyone sees the primate happily playing with its toys and decides that this is who they want to run up on and club in the back of the head with a rock? - Mantid Philospher Sees Beyond the Answer to the Question
Who knows what would have happened if humans had been left to just play. There are ruins of those who came before that somehow ascended to something else, possibly pure energy, and went beyond the petty concerns of the universe. The humans have surpassed those ancient people's achievements, who knows where they might have gone. Instead, each of us, every one of us, have attacked them, and forced them to turn what could have been technology for peace and advancement into the cold tools of war. - Thoughts of Terra - Blanarkak Numekrekvian, Mulmanik Philospher
In war they are a nightmare. In peace and cooperation they are a dream. As allies they are your brother. - P'Thok, Treana'ad Hero
There is no problem that they will not attempt to assist you with. They care as deeply for those they just met as many do for their family. They will guard your ducks as fiercely as they would their own children. For that, we love them. - Rigellian diplomat
I just want left alone. - Osiris of the Warsteel Flame, after his rebirth following the assassination of the Digital Omnimessiah.
Nuts. - Terran military commander, pre-diaisporia, Second Global Conflict, Terra.
The Executor Fleet came in via hyperspace, thinking they'd be able to penetrate deeply into the Sol System and attack the planets without having to engage the out defenses which would undoubtedly be engaging the Corporate and Military Fleet.
They dropped out of hyperspace at the Resonance Zone due to a massive gravity shadow, almost as if the stellar mass was a thousand times larger than it was.
The Executor Fleet was immediately engaged in combat before they could even get their shields up or clear the sensors. Many Most Highs weren't even sure what kind of weapons were engaging them as their Task Forces and Fleet Elements were torn apart, blown out of the sky, or crumpled like a beer can against the chrome forehead of a Bongistan Cyberball Hooligan.
Still, they had their orders, and those unable to do anything but follow their orders set to carrying them out slavishly.
The Executors could see that the entire system was a nightmare of defenses, with more coming online all the time. The ninth planet had broken up but the guns were still firing even as something was happening to the planet.
The conflict was too huge for any one computer system to handle, the computers deliberately having been reduced in effectiveness to prevent enough processing power to allow Terran Digital Sentience attacks and enhanced Virtual Intelligences from scrapping the ships from the inside.
One particular fleet drove for the innermost moon surrounding one of the gas giants. It was in the middle of a strange plasma torus that surrounded the gas giant within the orbit of the satellite. The satellite itself was wreathed in electricity and magnetic fields to the point where a 'tube' of electricity connected the moon to the gas giant. It was a red, yellow, red, and green satellite that had, surprisingly to the Executor sensor technicians, over a hundred volcanoes on the surface.
It also had some of the heaviest planetary shielding in the system, coming from a small satellite that rotated quickly around the gas giant's moon, which was the fourth largest moon in the Sol System.
The strange part is that it had very few orbital defenses, just the planetary shield generator and a few armed satellites that had already been disabled.
Fifteen Task Forces descended on the planet. Half were destroyed by the plasma torus when somehow it suddenly ignited, surrounding the great gas giant in a ring of fire. Half of the remainder were destroyed when the electrical and magnetic fields suddenly reached out to rip and tear at the ships of the task force.
The planetary shield was set to even destroy landing craft.
One a single ship got through to land on the surface near the one single installation that could be seen on the surface.
In the middle of heavy combat, caught between an Executor Fleet and a Military Fleet, Legion saw the ships descending on the moon, saw them try to make landing.
Part of his brain tried to get him to order his gunners to fire on that fleet, ignore the two fleets attacking, concentrate on keeping the Lanaktallan from reaching the surface of that moon.
He pushed it aside with a snarl and went back to shredding the two fleets that dared engage him. Didn't they know who he was? Who he had walked with? Who he had served? What he had done?
He had been Vat-Grown Luke before the Betrayal. He had Fallen and become and Immortal.
Didn't these pathetic creatures get it?
He. Was. Legion.
Part of his saw that a single ship got through and landed near the sole facility on the moon that had not been covered by sulphuric lava.
He sneered at the pathetic Lanaktallan and devoted two seconds of firepower at the forces around the moon to shut up the tiny voice ordering him to stop them.
Then he went back to shredding the invaders, rending them into wreckage and ruin.
He knew what those pathetic creatures would find.
The corner of his mouth twitched in cold smile.
On the surface of the satellite the Lanaktallan saw the orbiting ships suddenly take fire from one of the massive defensive fleets and break apart. Those capable of independent thought realized that they and they alone had made it to the surface and they weren't even a troop ship.
The Executor Grand Most High of the ship allowed the troops and the crewmembers who were chomping at the bit and stomping their hooves to don their body armor and charge out onto the surface, to drive their tanks out onto the surface.
Most of the tanks just drove in circles blaring out their support for the Great Herd and promising the primates a certain doom. The ones that charged out ran toward the sole facility, made of black warsteel and set into a dead volcano, and then slowly came to a stop when they realized that shooting their plasma rifles wasn't really doing anything.
They stood out there and slowly formed ranks, just standing out in the thin atmosphere of sulphuric compounds, the electromagnetic interference making them vanish and waver, the hostile environment held off, for the time being, by their armor.
The Grand Most High stared for a long moment and sighed. Due to the heavy EM interference, nobody could radio those ranks and order them back and he knew they wouldn't respond unless they were spoken to correctly.
For a split second he thought about just leaving them out there. They'd stand in formation till they died, their brains full of nothing but conflicting memories fighting over neural tissue not designed to handle the overlays.
He rubbed his face to banish his own headache and then got into his armor.
The facility was worth heavy orbital protection but nothing on the planet beyond some kind of energy field and being made out of that damnable warsteel. That meant it was important, but he couldn't figure out for the life of him what made it important.
Part of him believed it was part of the system defense infrastructure, but something about it just seemed strange to him. He had no word for the concept he was struggling with. It was disconcerting in its lines, it was threatening in its stillness and silence, it made him feel uncertain with its coloration, and its placement on a hellish satellite of a gas giant made him want to back away from it.
A Terran would have told him it felt ominous and he was feeling dread.
But he had no concepts for those emotions. The pale shadows of those feelings that he had felt and applied those words to while under the influence of population control measures, before the neural templates had been applied were nothing compared to the feelings surging within him.
Still, he got in his armor, selected eight crewmembers who didn't respond to ”good morning” with shouted slogans about the Great Herd, and an extension of the ships half-brain dead VI, and headed out across the sulphur landscape to the facility.
There was a platform, with steps leading up to it, sunk into the sulphuric rock, made entirely of warsteel. An energy field protected it, an energy field that tingled slightly as he passed through it.
The EM distortion cleared as soon as he passed through the field.
At the far side was a massive black wall of warsteel, with a single door in the middle. There were runes all over the wall as he clattered toward it, nervously tapping his armor covered hooves as he approached.
His armor couldn't translate the runes as he stood and stared at them. They were carved into the black warsteel and inlaid with some kind of metal that burned white. The runes were strange, almost threatening.
A holographic human appeared, dressed in heavy power armor. It spoke rapidly, its voice full of authority, its face stern. The plates were thick, heavy, the armor appearing strangely ancient and formal, with a avian with spread wings on the chest, done in burning warsteel.