Chapter 379 (1/2)
Slatmurt was burning. An entire planet was burning.
Dawn of the Second Day was a burning thing. The sun rose and shone its burning face upon a sky that was already consumed by fire. The clouds were bloody and bruised looking, the ash getting thicker as it rained down upon us.
We had filled five of the fourteen ammunition lockers with civilians, all of whom begged us to let them go, to free them, as terrified of us as they were of the Precursors. Their fear blinding them to the furniture, the food processors, the bedding, the recreational material, and the atmospheric generators. Blinding them to the fact that I was not imprisoning them behind a door that had the Terran words for ”ALIVE INSIDE” written on the door under the glyphs of the Great Herd.
I hardened my heart as I closed the door on their weeping pleas.
As dawn arrived I gathered with my men, my loyal soldiers, in the armored fuel bay. I gave the orders for them to eat, drink, and try to rest.
The ground rumbled beneath our feet as the city took another kinetic kill hit from orbit.
We slept with our helmets on to spare our minds.
Even then, the nightmares were terrible. Full of pain, death, destruction, and torture. Always at the cold metal claws of the Precursors, who whispered in gleeful code bursts that there was only enough for one, and how I would not be that one.
It was nearly dark when we awoke, took care of biological imperatives, and left our little fortress.
The city was burning.
Great clouds of black smoke were climbing to the sky, the bottom of the clouds flickering and painted red by the fires consuming a city where only a day before millions of sentient beings went through their daily routine. As I watched a sky raker tilted slightly, then collapsed, the upper floors slamming onto the lower floors, compacting the building as it dropped.
Nearly three seconds after it began to fall we heard it start its death scream.
I wrung my four hands together with anxiety as I stared at the burning city. I could hear people screaming, a constant hellish wail that carried all the way to the military base. I could see the suburbs burning, see the great hab-complexes on fire or collapsing.
”I cannot order you to accompany me into such hell,” I told them.
”You are our Most High, Ha'almo'or,” Feelmeenta told me, wringing her hands on her prybar as she stared at the burning city. ”Where you lead, we shall follow.”
”We are the only ones who can do thus, so we must,” Mal-Kar said softly, his eyes wide as a hab complex slowly began to collapse. My implant told me that we had cleared that one and I felt relief that we had done what we could. ”No matter our fear, no matter how badly I want to go home, I will not leave them, or you, behind me when the current turns and threatens to become an undertow.”
”The Digital Omnimessiah does not demand fearlessness, merely encourages mastering one's fear to do what must be done if a being is the only one who is capable of doing it,” Julkrex told me, adjusting his helmet.
Most Lanaktallan would have been aghast at the mention of the Terran religious superstition. An Executor would have summarily executed him right on the spot.
But most Lanaktallan weren't staring at a city slowly being consumed.
”Then pray to your electronic deity for all our sake, Julkrex,” I stated. I checked the charge in my plasma rifle. ”We go back in.”
My men put on their protective masks and we did preventive maintenance checks and services on our two battered vehicles. The armored heavy equipment recovery combat utility lifting extraction system vehicle, who's number two fan howled and vibrated and stunk inside of fear and desperation. The hoverbus, riding low with the addition of hastily welded armor, but able to carry hundreds at a time.
As I drove my upper torso and head were outside the armor, standing up in the driver's position, one hand resting on the dual barreled plasma machinegun, the other on my helmet, and my lower two hands steering. On the bus I could see Mal-Kar driving, the macroplas missing in front of him after a piece of debris had shattered it.
We followed out path into the city, the hoverfans roaring as it allowed us to traverse the heavily damaged streets.
We cleared two habs in twice as many hours, shutting them into the shelters despite their urgent pleas to free them, to not lock them away and imprison them.
It hurt, in some strange way, that they didn't understand I was trying to save them rather than ladle additional cruelty onto their lives. It hurt me that they did not trust me, not because of anything I had done before, but because of what my people had done to them.
Their small apartments, so bare of simple luxuries like colored paint on the walls, the cracked and crumbling plascrete of their housing, their food dispensers that were more restricted and bare bones than the ones I had used during military training. Many of them were eating unflavored nutripaste, the paste so thin it was like watery gruel, when we marched them from their apartments at gunpoint.
A part of me was ashamed, but I pushed that aside, and marched them down, out of their homes, and onto the bus at gunpoint.
I let them think I was an Executor or worse.
What they thought of me did not matter as long as I tried my best to save their lives.
My men knew why I was doing what I did. They understood, as they stood next to me, armed, faceless and featureless in their protective masks.
It was at the third hab of the night, just a handful of minutes before midnight, that we ran into opposition for the first time.
We came around the corner of the massive hab complex, which held two thousand families, only to see that there were four Executor vehicles blocking the street halfway down, with about three dozen armed and armored Executors guarding the primary access point of the hab while a handful of engineers welded a duralloy sheet over the door.
We slowed down and I moved my hand from where it rested on the plasma machinegun to the controller down inside the hull.
One Executor, red piping down his armor, held up one hand as he trotted toward us.
”What are you doing in the city?” he demanded more than asked.
”Rescue operations,” I replied.
”I have no rescue operations listed for this area of operation,” he said.
”I apologize for any misunderstanding. My orders were verbally delivered from my Most High,” I lied. I had prepared my story in case of running afoul of any Sec Service the night prior.
The Executor officer stared at me through his clear face shield and I could see the lights on his datalink flashing.
He suddenly jerked, looking at me, and I knew, somehow, that his computer systems had managed to identify me as a known criminal with a harsh sentence.
”Shut down the vehicles and exit them with all due haste!” he ordered. Behind him his men charged their neural rifles and leveled them at us. ”You are under arrest. You will comply and submit to us. We will take you into custody and you will be remanded to military justice authorities.”
I looked past him, at the building, at all of the neo-sapients staring out their windows at what was going on. I knew they felt hopeless, felt bottomless despair, being welded into their habs as supposed 'shelter' from the Precursors.
We Lanaktallan were supposed to be the stewards of over two dozen neo-sapient races, near civilized species, and civilized species.
This was no stewardship, what the Executors were doing.
My thumb found the safety switch on the handle I was holding.
”Submit to my authority, lowly one,” the Executor stated, his hand moving to charge his neural rifle.
”I am sorry, Executor, but there is a simple problem with your assumptions,” I told him.
He frowned, confusion filling him as I made no move to shut down the armored beast nor to leave the vehicle.
”What problem?” he asked.
”A simple mistake in your logic chain,” I told him.
He was unaware of what was happening off to the side of the recovery vehicle, focused entirely on me.
”What mistake?” he demanded.
My thumb hit the firing stud on the remote gunnery station and the dual barreled plasma machinegun roared, the barrels spinning to allow one to cool for a split second as the other one spit purplish-white darts of burning hot protomatter.
The Executor exploded into rags of tissue and Executor armor as I shifted the gun and raked the Executors gathered by the vehicles.
The other two guns on the recovery vehicle opened fire as Julkrex added his skills to the firefight.
Feelmeenta raked the ones at the door with her own rifle, set on the fast pulse setting.
Within seconds it was over. The Executor vehicles burning, adding their smoke to the haze of the murdered city. The dead were scattered around, none of them having gotten off a single shot as the situation changed too rapidly for them to process.
”Your mistaken belief I will come along quietly,” I told the smoking half-corpse, my finger still keeping the barrels rotating to cool them down. I threw the recovery vehicle in gear, moving down the street.
The plenum chamber scraped the road, reducing the charred body of the Executor Most High into a smear on the pavement.
It took less time than usual to load up the hab inhabitants. We gathered up the weapons, storing them in the recovery vehicle.
It wouldn't do for a child to find them.