Chapter 587: Stock Car Race (1/2)
”The humans arriving was like a bomb going off. Locked in war for thousands of years, with entire species being wiped out by all sides, the arrival of the humans was at first looked at as just another pack of interlopers that would be enslaved or destroyed quickly. The humans established a single colony and, to our eyes, simply set about ensuring population diversity and expansion with agriculture and minor industry. Within ten standard galactic years they reached out to all of us in hopes of friendship.
”Then they were, like everyone else, attacked despite their desire for friendship and cooperation.
”It was the last mistake the Wapricoth Empire ever made.”
- Excerpt from Atomic Sunrise, Professor Zingat Ulugawa, New Cretalia Press, 22,845 Galactic Standard Date
Mortan stood at the window of his office, staring down at the city below. It was shrouded in darkness, the lights of the urban center trying, and failing, to push back the night. There were not as many vehicles on the street as there had been two years ago, less than a tenth of the windows were lit compared to a year ago, and the city felt, to Mortan, dead and still.
He sipped at the snifter of alcohol in his hand as he looked over the luxury apartment skyraker only ten miles away, noting that the windows were all dark. The skyraker had been the home to two million beings.
Now it was a carnal house that had barely been cleaned up.
Mortan reached up and slicked back the fur on the top of his head, able to faintly see his reflection in the smart glass, then tapped the side of the crystal snifter with one fingernail, the slightly curved black claw making the crystal ring.
From the great height of his office, nine hundred stories up, he could see the grav-strikers slowly patrolling the suburb of Genshooza, lights searching the streets and open spaces.
Mortan knew that the grav-strikers were full of heavily armored troops, armed with heavy weapons, with air support on call and reinforcements in the slowly moving specks in the sky.
At least the bulk of the fighting is over, he thought to himself. He took another sip, this one longer, and then shook his head as he swallowed the fifty year old whiskey. One minute, everything was fine, the next, the Grand Unity was on fire and a tenth of the citizens were dead.
What happened? he asked the night.
It didn't answer, and after a moment he turned away, moving over to his desk and sitting down.
He knew it was late, that he should return home to his wives, return home to his four infants, but instead he opened up his terminal and brought up the relevant files again.
Seeing it in cold clear numbers chilled his soul.
Hundreds of billions of dead bodies. Hundreds of millions of enraged psychopaths rampaging through peaceful areas. Sixty-two planets devoid of life. Nineteen planets just... gone as someone living on the surface had planet-cracked it. Eleven stellar systems now nothing more than a memory after being nova-sparked by the inhabitants of the system.
One hundreds and twenty-two L-Gates, warp gates, and wormhole gates, gone. Of the sixteen left, twenty were mined and waiting to blow. Two were randomly opening onto now-dead planets, the atmosphere sucked away by insane people. Those two were still heavily defended by the remaining crew and were under heavy attack by what was left of the Unity's naval forces before they opened the gate onto another inhabited planet.
The Grand Unity's military forces were gutted. Half of them dying between one step and the next.
Then the other half rabidly attacking the rest of the military.
The military was, for all intents and purposes, gone.
One minute everything had been fine.
He looked at the numbers.
At the exact same time as 99.975% of the initial casualties died, 99.9994% of the remaining had gone stark raving mad.
Mortan shuddered at the memory of his one close call.
How the crazed being had ripped the door off of his armored limo with one hand. How Mortan had flinched away and the being had missed, grabbing the bottom of the seat and ripping it out of the limo in one yank. The being, who Mortan had known for thirty years, had been screaming the entire time, bleeding from his eyes, nose, ears, and mouth.
The being had killed all of Mortan's security detail. The last one, scooped up into those powerful arms and crushed in a 'bear hug', the security detail had shoved his short barreled submachinegun into the being's mouth and clamped down on the firing stud, decapitating the being.
A being that Mortan had sat down to dinner with less than a day before.
A being of wisdom, statesmanship, kindness, and thoughtfullness.
A being that Mortan would have sworn before the High Court was incapable of violence toward anything, living or not.
A being devoted to statesmanship and maintaining our five thousand years of peace tore apart my armored limousine like it was paper, Mortan thought to himself. How horrible it must of been for those who were forced to face off against the beings of that species who had done nothing but gobble down steroids, pump iron, cram their bodies full of combat cyber and bioware mods, and punch each other in the face for fun.
Even the passage of a year still left him in enough distress that he reached for the whiskey and took a long drink straight from the bottle before refilling his snifter. He knew that it was normally used for such things as cognac, but the whiskey was as smooth as gear lubricant.
Mortan could still remember the way his secbeing's armor had crumpled when the statesman had been decapitated. How the death nerve reflex had tightened the statesman's arms with incredible strength, to the point that the armor had collapsed, kinetic gel had sprayed from rents in the armor like blood.
How the secbeing's intestines were forced out of his screaming mouth by the pressure.
Mortan took another long drink.
Five thousand years of peace, gone.
The complex interweb of stellar gates destroyed.
The Grand Unity in disarray.
A year had gone by and the danger still wasn't past. Every day reports came in that the maddened beings had begun to cluster up in groups, indulging in body paint, body disfiguring, body piercing. Committing acts of senseless violence before vanishing again.
Worse, as a high ranking government official, Mortan knew that beyond the borders of the Grand Unity were the Shattered Systems, which had only been held back by the night of the Unity Armed Forces.
It wouldn't take long for the Shattered Systems to realize that the peaceful bubble formerly protected by the hypersteel fist of the Unity military was now helpless and ripe for the picking.
He sighed and closed the files. Staring at the numbers would be no help. They would only change for the worse. He logged out and shut down his system, standing up and moving toward the door.
His wives were probably asleep, but he still looked forward to seeing them.
If I hadn't flinched back, he thought to himself as the door closed.
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”Put it onscreen,” Captain Yvwerklim ordered.
”Aye, sir,” Ensign Hreggleti answered.
Yvwerklim stared at the massive 2.5D screen at the front of the bridge as it flickered and changed focus to what the scanning arrays were getting a close look at.
A massive ultramax battlewagon sitting dead, cold, dark, and silent only a half light-second off the Guardian's Shield's port side.
Relative to the nearby stars it was slowly moving toward Kfrelt-119 at a little over .25C and would be there in roughly sixteen years.
From Yvwerklim's point of view, it was sitting dead in the water.
He glanced at the data popping up.
No power sources detected. No life signs. Heavy damage to the hull. No response to communications.
The massive warship was identified as The Stoic Grasp of Duty, a warship weighing in the thousands of gigatons, capable of cracking a planet's continental plates. Crew of sixteen thousand, not counting four thousand shipboard combat forces capable of making orbital drops.
Registered out of New Mars, the Sol-2 System.
It was less than thirty years old.
”Where was its last location?” Captain Yvwerklim asked.
”Sintre-Nine,” Commander Rlguet said, not looking up from his console. ”It performed orbital bombardment on the primary cities, made directed energy weapon hits on the major oceans, destroyed the system defense forces, then vanished.”