This was an attempt at episodic short fiction based on PlanetSide 2 developed and published by Day Break Games Company (Sony Online Entertainment at time of writing). Originally posted to PlanetSide Universe. It was never completed, and the very next chapter is still in draft where it will likely remain. The copypasta from Word is rife with formatting errors I don’t have the time or energy to correct. Read at your own risk, and if you are an actual writer you should have a stress ball handy; This will hurt your eyes.
Part I
For all its material advantages the sedentary life has left us edgy; unfulfilled. Even after four hundred generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.
Carl Sagan
Where had we come from? Why had we left? What had we set out to accomplish? Who had we left behind? When the war began we forgot these things. As it dragged on we forgot more. Who we were, our lives; we even abandoned our names for monikers like 50percentgenius, KittensAkimbo, and Hehehehe. Oh, we tried to remember in our own way. The Terrans insisted they knew what it meant to be human, and the New Conglomerate’s answer was, is, and shall always be: Freedom; and they will die, and die, and die some more, die over, and over; wake up in the morning, die before lunch, die after dinner, die before bed, and wake up the next day, and die getting dressed; dying to be free.
I would die to be free from dying.
In the meantime there is work to do, and things to remember.
The World Atlas 2637, and the San Francisco Travel Guide, both sit on my tiny desk because my great, great, great, great Grandfather refused to leave without having something to remind him of home. According to family legend he was walking down Mission Street when the word came and he ducked into a tiny shop for something, anything. And here they sit, slightly yellowed but no worse for wear after so long. Plastic truly is forever. I remember when they came to me: in a flimsy steel box dug out of the rubble of my childhood home at the Shadespire Ag Complex.
Back then the very talk of disloyalty got you in front of a firing squad, let alone harboring a traitor.That’s what we were accused of. The sentence was handed down thousands of miles away and delivered from an orbiting gun platform. I was out with the newboy—the, “traitor,”—and running back to the smoldering crater of Shadespire he blubberedsomething about his parents joining the New Conglomerate, and that he wasreally, really sorry. I understood he was sorry and felt responsible. Iunderstood that he was completely innocent, and I liked him too. But, no amountof affection and forgiveness could distract me from the haunting memories, orthe lament for those memories I don’t have.
Earth. A collection of fadingimages printed on archival polymer. Are these really humans in these pictures?They look human. They smile and they drink cocktails, and ride cable cars toand fro. They buy innocuous things, like gifts, and books, and sex. Where aretheir weapons? Why aren’t they wearing body armor? What happens when they die?
Death. It hurts, but it alsoteaches. Check those corners. Don’t waste time. Don’t sit in one place for toolong. Don’t get caught with an empty side-arm. Listen for engines. Don’t lingerunder overhangs. Be quiet. Look up. Remember your knife. The one in front ofyou takes a bullet so you can take one more step. And in a flash you’re backwhere you started to do it all over again. Repetition can teach anything. Humanson Earth must be experts at living. Auraxians are experts at dying.
The boy—then a man—couldn’treconcile himself with my obsession with Earth and its people, or the time Ispent studying radio interferometry. I spent days at a time at the Aurxicom radioobservatory, days that he felt should have been spent with him. We hadsurvived, after all, and no one in the Terran high command seemed to care. Itwas a miracle. We were star crossed lovers. I was merely obsessed with thestars, and he was obsessed with freedom. When the war finally broke out he leftme for another woman, and for the brief moment I met her she reminded me ofthose women in the travel guide: confident, self-assured, independent, andcaptivatingly beautiful. I smiled at her, bade her take care of him where Icould not, but she scowled back at me.
“Don’t you have a fucking cluewhat’s going on?” She asked, shaking her head at me as if I had never read abit of news in my life. Of course I knew. Open rebellion, but what is arevolution to the deep time of the cosmos? What is freedom worth when our truehome is out there somewhere still, waiting? She wouldn’t have it. I was anacademic and clearly out of touch. And that’s where I spent the opening salvosof this Auraxian War, now into another millennium, behind my radio telescopearray looking for home, yearning to stand in San Francisco where my ancestorwalked free and found these books.
For a while the war was all youcould find on the data nets. Conglomerate blank clashes with Republic blank,over blank, as many as blank dead. Like all things in the universe there was anorder to this conflict, and it would end when sufficient blood had been spilledin order to balance the equation. My money was on the Republic. They had allthe resources and all the logistics, but the New Conglomerate was anindomitable foe. With men and women like that man I once thought I loved, howcould they lose? They could lose through mere attrition. They were outnumbered,and every slain NC rebel was one less body to hold a gun. The TR rarely went onthe offensive in those days.
It was just after a particularlybloody battle when the Vanu played their first gambit. Rebirthing technology.The Republic was furious. Scientists from across Auraxis were arrested andcharged with treason. Those who wouldn’t cooperate were executed immediately inthe very court rooms they were sentenced. Oh, the technology wasn’t new to us,but it had been carefully obscured, and study of it forbidden by the authorities.It wasn’t so much that the Vanu cult released this technology to the entireplanet, including the Conglomerate fighters, but they had mastered it. It waslike having a cat in a bag, and opening it to discover a tiger.
The equation changed dramatically.That last and final fear holding back the oncoming conflict vanished. NewConglomerate ranks swelled with the angry, disenfranchised, and highlymotivated people who hated the Terran Republic and everything it stood for. NCguerilla tactics gave way to full on armored columns advancing on every Terranfacility on the planet. It made the Terran’s flinch, and when their response finallycame it was sheer, utter, incomprehensible panic. Their government collapsed.Every soul that could carry a cycler was given one, including every administrator,every lawyer, every judge, every magistrate, every cabinet member, advisor,teacher, firefighter, ordinary citizen, and child. The entire TRpopulation—that didn’t join the NC—became a military.
To this day their seat ofgovernment remains empty, for there is nothing left to govern that can be shotat. The capital city is a ghost town. The once common administrative messagesand requisitions have gone silent. So too have the trials and the executions.
But, the dying goes on.
When the Republic militaryfinally arrived at Auraxicom to press us all into service—their compellingpropaganda reinforced by the fact death was no longer a permanent fixture—I hadalready been contacted by Vanu leaders—backed up by the same compellingpropaganda. They had taken an interest in my research, if for nothing else thanto deny the Terrans a leading astrophysicist who spearheaded their contactdirective.
It was after I joined the Vanu thatI made my first real breakthrough. Examining a cluster of stars I discovered apulsar with a frequency that matched one on the old charts dating back to theinitial expedition. Using that pulsar as a guidepost I looked for more pulsars,and determined with absolute certainty that the wormhole dumped our beleagueredcivilization much closer to home than we had first thought. We hadn’t left theMilky Way. Earth couldn’t be further away than about a 120,000 light years, andwas statistically probably much closer than that. It meant light from Earth’ssun had already reached Auraxis. All I needed to do was look for stars in thesame spectral class. Perhaps, if I could get enough signal resolution, I couldeven catch a spectral whiff of Earth’s atmosphere.
And that was the end of mycareer.
Heresy, they call it. Those weleft behind are nothing like us, and our future is transhuman. When I protestedI was reassigned, and my work scrubbed. They are, however, partly correct.After eons of non-stop war, dying countless times, our bodies so heavilymodified by alien technology, and reborn in inexorable, infinitetransubstantiation, there is no doubt. I have nothing in common with myancestor except a few latent base pairs. But, I want to know. Vanu teaches usthat knowledge is a power unto itself, and who knows how knowing where thehomeworld is might empower our civilization? How much stronger would we be ifwe, not the Terrans, were to restore contact with Earth? I explain this to mysuperiors, but they see right through my pretense. They know me. They know Iwant this war to end. They know I want to go home.
They say this is home, and it isour divine right to conquer it.
No civilization can endure athousand years of war and not be changed by it, not even the intellectual mightof the Vanu Sovereignty, which devotes so much of its immortality to learning,but still too much to death. I cobbled together a sizeable telescope arrayusing a virus to surreptitiously hijack observatories across Auraxis, andcontinued my search in secretive solitude—when I wasn’t hosing my moreprimitive relatives with white hot plasma.
And that was ten thousand subjectiveyears ago. The planet seems to soak up our rage like maize in fertile soil.Auraxis thrives on our perpetual conflict. It gifts our bloody sacrifice withtantalizing new bits. We knew the ancient Vanu were masters of space and time,but we’re still not prepared for just how deep their mastery went. Their empiredidn’t just spread out across the galaxy, but across time. Auraxis was—is—oneof their worlds. They are still here, but the question isn’t where, it’s when?
We couldn’t have noticed itbefore, not until I started measuring those pulsars. They are all red shifted.And it’s not just the pulsars. Every nearby stellar object is red shifted atthe same rate. This phenomenon should only be observed in very distantgalaxies, but even those have the exact same red shift. In the Auraxian sky,every star, every galaxy, everything, even the other moons in the Auraxiansystem, are either moving away at the exact same speed, or something is dilatingthe light as it approaches the planet.
It is as if the planet isencased in its own time dilation sphere of several orders of magnitude. Whoknows how many years—millions even—have passed since our arrival?
The Vanu protected theircivilization by hiding behind walls of time, encasing their planets in spheresof temporal displacement, while they thrive some other time. Are they in thefuture? Or the past? That doesn’t matter. Yet. What is important is how longEarth has been beaming these signals at us, and when we can expect their shipsto arrive.
They’re probably already here,wondering why we haven’t sent anything back. Until today. I’ve calculated thenecessary blue shift to have an intelligible signal outside the temporalenvelope. My finger hovers over the transmit key, ready to squirt ten thousandyears of Auraxian history into deep space carried on half a million giga wattsof microwave radiation and fry every superconductor slaved to my program. Theatmospheric refraction itself will scramble every computer from here to Esamir.The Ten Thousand Year Auraxian War ends. Rightabout… now.
Part II
Jamylin stabbed viciously at thetransmit key while the holographic displays stared back at her. As she tried tograsp mentally what had happened—or better, what had not happened—they wentblank leaving her in stunned silence. It wasn’t until she rose from her deskreaching for water that she finally saw she was no longer alone.
A lightly armored woman stood atthe door, with her helmet tucked under one arm. She wore her jet black hair inan impossible bun that cast doubt on whether or not that helmet was ever worn,but a cursory feed from an implant revealed her rank and combat record: JuliaPritcher, call sign BuddhaBelly. One of Vanu’s best. From the looks of her shetook her career very seriously, which meant her taking the time to make herselfpresentable was a good indicator that this was a little more than a courtesycall. Before she spoke she waved her escorting pair of heavies of indeterminategender at ease, and when she did her voice was a firm contralto with a tempothat betrayed her as a classically trained orator.
“Do you know why I’m here?Doctor Alrik?”
Julia’s patronizing grated on her nerves. She nearly snapped before composing herself, a queue not lost on Julia. “Just come out with it, will you? Why insult me?”
Julia’s fixed stare was unphased, but for the subtle simper then curling the corners of her lips. She escalated the false pretense to something blatantly saccharine. “Now, Doctor, there’s no need for false bravado. Do you know why I’m here?”
It was obvious the only way forward was to play along. “No, Julia, I don’t know why you’re here. Would you care to share with us?”
Julia shrugged off Jamilyn’smocking and placed a syringe on the table as she sat down in the adjacentchair. Jamylin fixed her eyes on that needle and its clear contents. It wascertainly new, but unnecessary. “Why the hypo? Wouldn’t a bullet work? I’m sureyou could have someone waiting at the spawn tube to kill me again. And again.”
“The thought crossed my mind,”she said, the words slithering between her teeth before being bitten off. “Areyou familiar with how rebirthing technology works?”
“After eight thousand yearsoutside the classroom this is what you came for? A science lesson?”
“Humor us.”
“It starts with a naniteinfusion that takes a read on the genomic quantum state of the subject. Ittakes about an hour. The nanites bond into a secondary neural network in thesubject’s body, and that quantum state becomes entangled with the rebirth matrix,which mirrors the genomic quantum state in real time. Every time they die therebirth matrix reloads the genomic quantum state from the instant of death,creating a precise clone of the subject, memories, awareness, and continuity ofconsciousness intact. A fine mixture of quantum mechanics and geneticengineering.”
Julia smiled at the professorbefore motioning over to the syringe. “And what should happen if the processwere interrupted? Perhaps, if the artificial neural network of nanites in your bodywere disrupted in such a way that the entanglement were interfered with?”
For a full minute theimplication lingered in the air. How long had they been in possession of thistechnology? Julia continued.
“Professor Jamilyn Alrik, youhave been found guilty of high treason against the Will of Vanu,” and slidingthe page across the desk, “This is the warrant for your execution, and the hypocontains nanites designed to attack and disable those already in your body.This will effectively remove you from the rebirthing matrix. Once the processis complete they will break down in your bloodstream releasing a fatalneurotoxin. You will die. Permanently. And, dare I say it, far less painfullythan you already have. That being said, you already know the increasinglycreative alternative.” She relished the last sentence with obvious slowness.
“You expect me to commitsuicide!?”
“That is exactly what weexpect.”
“For the propaganda?”
“What else? What a story it willbe. The triumph of Vanu over the petty schemes of a disillusioned scientistturned traitor. And that’s the really good part. It will be true.”
She considered pointing out howsurely someone would notice her spawning over and over, and each time beinghauled away by guards, but it would be absurdly easy to redirect her rebirthsignal to a private location. Julia could see these conclusions ripple over herbrow and she smiled manipulatively.
“Yes, we’ve consideredeverything. Now, be a good girl and take your medicine.”
Just as Jamilyn was about torefuse, she heard the heavy footsteps and electromuscular whine of a MAX comethrough the door—Just barely. In her hyperawareness she’d never taken the timeto notice the shimmering hot air escaping from its back mounted heat sink fins,or the way its foot plates lifted and parted automatically around the ankles asthe soldier inside took each step. It was carrying a pair of Nebula cannonsthat it quickly disposed of, tossing them to the ground. Its posture changedthen, revealing the very human swagger that controlled it. It lurched menacinglyover her.
There was no warning or option.The MAX reached down with mechanically assisted swiftness and took her by theneck. When she finally registered the moment she couldn’t breathe, she alsonoted her feet were no longer touching the floor. This was something new. She’dbeen burned, blown to pieces, shot in every corner of her body, crushed indebris, smashed in the air, stabbed, but being strangled was somethingaltogether new. She wasn’t ready for it, and futile panic set in. She triedkicking at the suit—as if that would do anything—but it kept her at a fullarm’s length, and all she kicked was air. It was, of course, the same air shewas now starving for when the shakes took hold of her. As she succumbed toasphyxia she heard Julia’s contralto trailing off into the abyss.
“Just so you know … I’m … not …bluffing.”
Part III
From the observation deck Julia Pritcher could see theall too familiar tell tales of impending battle. The stray tracers andexplosive flashes occurred ever nearer, along with the occasional column ofblack smoke, each one closer than the one before. The squads allocated to her bythe Conclave were—as predicted—being forced back by elite New Conglomeratefighters of superior skill and equipment. To the untrained it would appear tobe a hopeless situation, but this was Auraxis, and this war’s ebb and flow aforce unto itself.
She knew the NC commandersthemselves saw what was coming when they arrived at the Amp Station. She knewthey could easily see their assault slowing down and being tied up in crossfire.It would grind to a halt at the shield generators, and in that instant the hammerwould fall. The script always took the same form, though with subtledeviations.
The key to victory was in thosesubtle deviations.
Scheduled reinforcementsconsisted of a Magrider squadron of six vehicles that were already enroute, andtheir arrival would be timed with that of Galaxy dropships carrying a balancedcross section of troop classes and their requisite support. The hammer wouldcome from orbit. Elite light assault shock troops and support waiting for anactive beacon behind the enemy axis of advance. The very sight of the drop podsfalling from the sky should force an NC contraction out of mere reflex. If theferocity of the counter-attack was sufficient to deny them their AMS support theyshould then rout and regroup at their lattice of origin. Combined Vanu forces—underConclave command—would then advance seizing initiative from the NewConglomerate.
Subtle deviations.
Inplanning several options were considered. The Conclave buckled under theaddition of new leadership, versus the existing command structure, with juniormembers vetting their own untested ideas to repel an attack that all threeempires had repelled in one fashion or another repeatedly for the past tenthousand years. The variables were well understood. Thus, Julia handilydismissed these options as unsuitable or otherwise inadequate based on hergenerally underappreciated experience. Plainly put, dropping in mobile lightinfantry was her proposal.
Presently she stood fuming on the observation deck, spurned by her superiors in the classic struggle of middle management. She wasn’t low enough in rank to be taken in as a privileged protégé, but not high enough to have any substantive authority. Ergo, it fell upon her to run this gristmill while a higher-ranking member of the Conclave commandeered the assault—her assault. Dealing with that astrophysicist partly made up for it. But only partly. It would depend on how many times she’d need to be killed before finally taking the injection. Inventing new ways to kill an Auraxian could become tiresome in the extreme, but it did present a new challenge wholly unlike the rigors of this perpetual war.
Subtle deviations.
Itcame to her then, those could be the key to everything: War, death, and life,all driven by subtle deviations. There was something there, she thought,something now missing from the collective Auraxian consciousness, something onthe verge of her own. If only she could reach out for it. Just then a brilliantmuzzle flash interrupted her train of thought. A Vanguard main battle tank hadcrested a nearby hill, and that meant her forces had finally—and literally—beenpushed against the wall. The battle had arrived.
“MAXes to the towers,” she could hear herself saying, her trained voice steady and just loud enough to fill the space. “Let their fire bisect the center fortification on the East wall. That’ll be the generator nearest their assault. Engineers on the North guns.” After each command there was a brief pause as her orders were confirmed. She was patient and taciturn in her battle language. No frills. “Delta squad is tasked with maintaining generator integrity. Let Bravo squad take up flanking positions along the battlement. Charley squad should stay flexible and prepared to shift classes. We want to keep their AMS off that wall. Alpha squad has point and should be the first to advance.”
She had then become the eye of a hurricane around which spun the well-practiced protocol of the Vanu command apparatus. Her command retinue of junior officers relayed her commands to the squad commanders out on the battlements and in the courtyard. In turn they relayed battle data back to her staff, who handled all command requests on her behalf. This is what ten thousand years of war had wrought, a command structure that can very much run itself. Even if she were to be called away abruptly to oversee another campaign, these officers would have everything they needed to carry out her directive with absolute certainty. She stood in martial repose, firmly planted literally and figuratively in her mission and resolve. No one questioned her. Not here. Not in battle. The other Paragons might prattle and plot. They might even steal her ideas and her glory. But here in this room she was God.
But, what of that scientist?Where was she now? Ah, yes, in stasis. It’s not possible to prevent thetransmission of a rebirth signal once the subject is dead, but the VanuSovereignty had discovered it is quite possible to intercept that signal androute it in circles for a time. But, that wasn’t good enough. She had to diefor her heresy, the very same heresy that had brought her to their attention inthe first place. The notion that Earth held the secret of Auraxian survivalwent against everything Vanu doctrine stood for, but at the time denying theRepublic a very competent scientist was more important. Perhaps just killingher outright would have been best, but she did have her uses. The centralthrust of her thesis—that the ancient Vanu was a temporal civilization—hadyielded many avenues of research, including the neural disruptor serum andrebirth signal back tracing, for both of which she was playing guinea pig.Taken altogether this one scientist had advanced the Vanu cause more than tenthousand years of constant war, and that fact was what really chapped Julia’sass. Once these technologies were weaponized it really would be the end of thewar, Earth or no Earth. Jamilyn be damned! Just who did she think she was? Whatwas there on Earth, but primitive human looking apes sharing most in commonwith these filthy New Conglomerate mongrels?
Outside the battle progressed normally. Allthe expected trappings of the innumerable battles of Auraxis were present. Thesteady staccato of flak and bursters, the constant cycling whine of plasmabased energy weapons, the occasional deep booms of exploding vehicles and C4,and the stunted chatter of Vanu battle language filling the local q-net. Shewas reaching for her carbine when that chatter reached a fever pitch.
“Gate diffuser! Gate diffuser!”Screamed a voice she recognized as Bravo squad commander, a squat but sturdyfellow who went by Pickles. From his vantage point no doubt he spotted thecharacteristic line of Sunderers bearing down on the shield gate. She calledfor an immediate scrambling of vehicles from the internal platforms, anythingreally just to block their path long enough for the diffusers to deplete theircapacitors before they reached their objective. She knew it was futile. Therewas no one at the terminals, and before she could hop down there herself shesaw the first Sunderer barrel through the gate on its way to the internalshields. It was moving fast along with two others right on its heels, their gunsablaze.
Subtle deviations.
A deafening explosion thatrattled her very bones briefly interrupted the noise of approaching engines.Mines. She had ordered both entrances to be mined, and as the lead vehicledisintegrated into shrapnel the remaining two barricaded through the flaminghulk. Before they were even through the smoldering debris the doors were openedand out scrambled a posse of grim faced blue and yellow ass kickers. Thedisorganized members of her own force that chased them through the gate werecut down with depressing ease. The next moment they were at the node and theclock was ticking.
It was only seconds before theobservation deck’s hatch was blown open and the NC commander hauled hismasculine bulk through the smoke. Her command retinue was gunned downimmediately, leaving her standing alone, arms folded defiantly over her chest.It was an extremely unflattering situation to be caught in: an Auraxianseparated from their weapon, wearing virtually no hardened body armor. Despitethe abject superiority of Vanu nanoweave, how it afforded maximum mobility andmaximum coverage, it did—by virtue of its design—cling utterly tight to theskin. It had come to be pejoratively synonymous with an ancient textile calledSpandex because it left little to the imagination.
She flung her hair clear of hereyes to get a better look at him after he took off his helmet. Each step of hisapproach was swung wide with that cocky swagger NC soldiers were known for. Hewasn’t much taller than she was, and he was obviously well built. Every maleAuraxian was, of course, but she rarely ever got to sincerely look at any humanbeing who hadn’t sworn to the Vanu aegis. Consciously she knew every Auraxianwas human, but to see this man standing here, his Mag cutter poised betweenthem, was a reminder of just how human he was. Even more startling was that shefound herself attracted to him.
“Hoss!” Another NC infantrymancalled up through the hatch. “Second platoon’s got a hornet’s nest of Magridersburnin’ everything alive. Their AMS and backups are down, and there’s a wing ofhostile Galaxies headed this way.” The fresh-faced lieutenant paused. It wasn’tgood. “And there’s a squad of purple ball busters hittin’ the ground behindus!”
“Get the mines cleaned up andreplace them with our own. Get the engies on anti-personnel turrets. Tell’em tocover the shaft leading up to the aircraft terminals. MAXes on the stairs” Hisorders understood he then turned his attention back to her.
“Vanu women are the only womenleft who care about their appearance, you know? Everybody else just thinks it’ssome purple fairy fart bullshit, but I do appreciate the way you look,BuddhaBelly. Or should I call you Julia?”
Such humiliation. Behind hereyes hatred burned white hot. Just as soon as he killed her she could respawnand demonstrate the finer qualities of that “fairy fart bullshit.” But, he wasobviously enjoying himself, and the humiliation physically hurt. She becameaware then that neither herself nor “Hoss” had looked away from each other.
“So, why do they call youBuddhaBelly, anyway?” He asked, kicking aside a dissolving body to sit at oneof the stations. Their holos had already been wiped.
“I was pregnant when we beganusing rebirthing technology. I’m a mother.”
“You don’t look pregnant to me.”
“I was, in fact, pregnant forfive hundred years before we learned how to poll the rebirthing matrix for newdata, allowing me to finally give birth. You killed my son.” She nodded to thebody he moved, now almost completely dissolved.
“Damn, I am really sorry aboutthat!” He laughed. “You Vanu are too goddamn smart for your own good, youknow?”
“I fail to see how it’s possibleto be too smart, Hoss.”
“It can be a real problem whenyou think everyone else around you is stupid. Take that sundy for example. Oneguy in it. Who the hell doesn’t expect mines at an amp station? And while we’retalking about stupidity, who exactly doesn’t expect a gate crash anymore?”
He was obviously very proud ofhis maneuver; even if he did ignore the fact the mines themselves did indicateanticipation of a gate crash. Just then a deep shadow loomed over theobservation deck. The rumble of dropship engines presaged footsteps on theroof.
“You’ve provided excellenttraining for my platoon, Commander Hoss.”
He rose from the seat and gaveher one last thorough up-and-down with his eyes, shook his head, and in onemotion plunged his Mag cutter deep into her gut. It was a familiar sensationthat she submitted to, falling into his arms, and then to the floor. When she wokeup in the spawn room she could see the Galaxies hovering overhead, and feel thebattle raging to take back the control node.
It was going to be a bloodbath.
Part IV
Every myth, every great tale, has its super soldier. The Ancients called them Spartans, Aryans, Berserkers, Fremen. It is the myth of the implacable foe; unyielding; loyal to a fault; bred to be victorious; to believe in the victory. Such tales precede the armies of civilization and prepare the minds of the conquered for their arrival. So, I say to you: be thus prepared. I’ve met them, the finest warriors in the galaxy, and they call themselves Auraxians.
From Lectures on The Auraxian Crisis, Professor Argyle Crawley, 34565 Galactic Core Standard “We’ve spent ten thousandyears with the Conglomerate knife at our throats. I can see that knife;understand it. But I can’t see this one, and that’s what has me on edge.”
“Is this a credible threat?You’ve brought us no evidence. We don’t act on speculation.”
“I don’t ask you to act on merespeculation. Trust your instincts!”
“You mean your instincts. Those same instincts that tell you the Vanu have weaponized the rebirthing technology. The same instincts that that tell you they are preparing to wipe us all out along with the New Conglomerate at the same time? Do you know how preposterous that sounds?”
“Damn you! You were my finest student. Think about the game.”
“Yes, focus on the pieces standing still and there’s your play. You taught me that. But what does chess have anything to do with the war? The Sovereignty is in full mobilization and they have been for centuries. There are no pieces notmoving.”
“And there you have it! That’sthe problem! Has the New Conglomerate mobilized its reserves? Have we? No, wehaven’t. They haven’t. Why would the Vanu fully mobilize against a stalemate?Why would they move every piece on the board? Either they are strategicallychallenged, or? Come on. Think!”
“Or…they don’t really have every piece on the board to begin with.”
“Still my finest student.”
Excerpt From Terran Republic Intelligence Logs “Addressing all points of order.There is a motion on the floor to recognize an emergency hearing from theIntelCom subcommittee on Vanu Affairs. Yays? Nays? The motion carries. TheDirectorship recognizes the IntelCom Undersecretary.”
“I shall get right to the point. Last week our forces engaged a Vanu amp station defended by the Conclave. While it’s not the first time we’ve confronted the Vanu high command directly, this engagement stands out as one of the fewer times we’ve had electronic surveillance directed at a Conclave hub for any substantive length of time—“
“I don’t comprehend theemergency, Undersecretary. We know precisely what signals go in and out of aConclave hub. The same kinds of signals that go in and out of our own. Rebirthsignals. They’re damn common.”
“Indeed, some more common thanothers.”
“An insult?”
“The truth. Yes, we have in thepast intercepted thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of rebirth signals.Certainly no great feat; if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, right? Wrong.Each signal is in fact a quantum state describing the deceased for the rebirthmatrix. Ergo, each rebirth signal is in fact utterly unique. Never to berepeated. May I therefore draw your attention to this signal log. Knowing thateach of these transmissions are unique, each one corresponding with the deathof a Vanu soldier, how could it be that we intercepted this individual signal—theexact same signal—fifty eight times?”
“Order! The Directorship will have order!”
Excerpt From New Conglomerate Congress of Directors Minutes Jamylin awoke to the familiar crackle of a spawn tube powering down. Bleary eyed, weak, and with the mother of all headaches she stumbled onto the deck. She was in a fairly large cell. Twenty some odd meters long by the looks of it, and maybe fifteen wide. The only thing she was sure about was that it wasn’t a standard spawn room. In fact, all it was was a room. No doors. No equipment terminal of any kind. One glowing bar of light in the ceiling. The walls and floor were flat and mirror smooth, the surface being a self-polishing metamaterial. Nanites. And it was cold. Unbearably cold.
It was as if she was—shit. Naked.
As her eyes adjusted she was able to confirm this fact, her naked reflection staring back at her into infinity from four walls. The reflective efficiency of the metamaterial had to have approached ninety nine percent, because she could see herself for what seemed like kilometers before the false image finally went to black. From the floor her reflection was perfect. She left no discernable foot prints, and she could see every part of herself from just about every angle. This left the ceiling an equally perfect matte finish: light diffused from it at precisely forty-five degrees. It looked like perfect Esamiri snow. It was the same kind of reflective or matte material found on the trim of some Magriders, now in the prototyping phase to replace existing spawn shields. Vanu physicists were all show offs. She knew them all by name.
“It’s not really that cold, you know.” Julia’s voice seemed to come from everywhere.
“Is this it? After all of that? Is this really it? A cold room?”
“Do you know what day it is?”
“Does time even matter in this place?”
“Always so difficult,” Julia muttered to herself. “All you had to do was keep studying the time dilation and provide us with an accurate enough coefficient. But no, you had to go rogue and listen for that… planet.”
“Earth? And wait, coefficient?” Jamylin was perplexed. She had discovered a temporal displacement encompassing the entirety of Auraxis, and used it to adjust the frequencies of incoming radio emissions. She’d discovered that Auraxis orbited just outside the radiation belt of the Jovian world holding it in its thrall, ensuring the moon was bathed in just enough energy to make life feasible. The initial expedition didn’t bother investigating it when they discovered Auraxis harbored life in the first place. So, owing to the fact the Vanu Sovereignty declared her discoveries heresy she became, in effect, Auraxis’ sole radio-astronomer.
Jamylin continued aloud.
“They wanted to make planetfallas swiftly as possible, and by then it was too late. The temporal displacementcompletely obscured those radio waves, stretching them so flat they weresquelched by the cosmic microwave background. In effect, it was invisible. Andthen the war started. No one really cared. And so, no one noticed when wereprobed by a powerful beam of radar, and no one noticed when it became awash inmodulated frequencies. Julia, Earth knows we’re here! We can go home!”
From where ever she was speakingJulia was silent. And it seemed to be getting colder. By now her fingers andtoes were beginning to hurt. Soon they’d go numb. Finally, after an hour—orfive minutes—Julia spoke again.
“It’s not that cold in here, youknow?”
“What are you talking about?It’s freezing… damnit Julia pull your head out of your ass!”
“Freezing? You think it’sfreezing? Ms. Alrik, it’s barely below thirteen degrees. It may help if Iexplain what is happening to you, since your area of expertise isn’t humanphysiology. It doesn’t require a great drop in temperature to cause your bodyto take heat saving measures. One of them being thermal induced vasoconstriction.Under normal circumstances you’d begin to go numb, and only become aware of itwhen warming back up, but I’m sure you’re feeling it by now. Intensevasoconstriction is quite painful, and for you there is no relief. We’ve takensteps to ensure every part of you stays just warm enough to feel it.
“That is—at least—what I’mordered to tell you. Duty requires degrees of indifference toward subordinateslike yourself, but for that I’ve failed. I loathe you, Doctor Jamylin Alrik.Did you know I sequenced your genome while you were in stasis? And do you knowwhat I found? You’re defective. But I didn’t need to sift through your DNA tofigure that out. Aside the fact you have two sets of chromosomes that aresuspiciously alike—your behavior says it all. Vanu will decide when and howthis war ends, not a backwater inbred defect like you!!”
Just then there was a blur, and before Jamylin’s brain could finish processing the words stalker cloak and route that information to the rest of her body, it was interrupted by a brutal uppercut to her still chattering jaw. She didn’t notice the blow leaving Julia decloaked because she was too busy handling reflexes from her throat. Yes, those were pieces of her teeth she had accidentally swallowed, and no sooner had she figured this out her legs were swept from beneath her. Hauling herself up to her feet Julia was nowhere to be seen. The only evidence of her having been there were Jamylin’s blood soaked breasts, and the dripping puddle of it beneath her.
Defect or not, a Vanu scientist isstill an Auraxian, a product of ten thousand years of non-stop war. So, whenJulia let her next blow fly she was ready for it. This time it was a levelright hook, which meant Julia’s cloak disengaged just in time for her to rollwith it. The glancing blow left Julia over extended, and provided Jamylin withan opening long enough to seize the slippery Stalker in a grapple, and bury herknee into her liver.
Auraxians do not practice any florid or precise martial arts. They share more in common with functional military self-defense strategies such as ancient special forces combatives and Old Krav Maga—just finely tuned—for ten millennia. It reflects the rapid transition from empty weapons to knives, and then to fists as close quarters combat quickly devolves into a body breaking melee. It is wholly uncommon for us to enter such combat scenarios willfully. Dispatching the enemy at range with a rifle—or from orbit—is far more preferable to the overt brutality of hand-to-hand combat. But, Auraxians don’t think like we do, and in certain situations outside their well-honed tactical efficiencies seem to intentionally seek the most brutal forms of war. Nowhere is this seeming preference for brutality more evident than a confrontation between just two Auraxian females.
From Lectures on The Auraxian Crisis, Professor Argyle Crawley, 34565 Galactic Core Standard There is no way to properlydescribe the way Julia leaned into the blow, pushing Jamylin off her feet, orhow she slammed her shoulder into Jamylin’s neck, or the repeated retaliatoryblows to the face and neck she sustained as Jamylin fought from her back. Betweenthem no rules of war or honor were recognized. Jamylin wasn’t above taking holdof a fistful of Julia’s hair and wrenching her away, and Julia wasn’t sosensitive to give in to the pain of it being torn from her scalp, or bustingher knuckles open as she missed the scientist’s face and plowed her fist intothe meta-reflective floor. Nor did pain keep Jamylin from biting at Julia’sneck with shattered teeth barely clinging to the gums. They didn’t roll very far,or maneuver much, or take much heed to self-inflicted damage. No effort atdefense was made. No protecting the face, no dodging; each move was to strikethe other.
Contrary to the precision and speed of Auraxian warfare, on display between them was complete disregard for combat efficiency. It was a personal hatred driving them to murderous thresholds of rage, and the only hope of stopping it was the introduction of another belligerent. Which is to say, on Auraxis, a personal fight between two people is almost always interrupted by something else. A shell, a sniper, another soldier behind, a soldier below, a grenade, death and respawn. But not here. Not in this place. The death of one is punctuated by the primal shriek of the other, answered by the respawning foe flying from the spawn tube in an uninterrupted orgy of pain.
While the air filled with thepungent aerosol of blood, the floor rejected it completely. It pooled indefined beads where ever it landed, splashed on the walls and snaked down withoutleaving a trace. They murdered one another faster than the nanites in theirblood streams could dissolve their corpses that littered the room, hopelesslydisfigured and mutilated beyond anything but the most abstract means ofidentification. It may be tempting to describe them as somehow less than human,perhaps, likening them to animals, but even animals recognize when the fightshould end. Make no mistake, there is no level of destruction beyond humanreckoning so long as death itself is no longer an option.
And it was that realization thatfinally broke Jamylin Alrik.
“Stop!” At least, she tried tosay stop. It came out more like, “Dhob!”
In this insensate defile ofRoman scale, anything halfway resembling coherent speech is a surprise. Itwasn’t lost on Julia. She paused across from Jamylin, backing off and stumblingover a previously living version of herself.
“What?”
“Stop… please… I’ll take it.”
It had never occurred to Juliathat lurking inside the warrior turned scientist turned gladiator was apacifist. In fact she was rather alarmed by it, and stepped forward to takeJamylin by the arm just to make sure, landing a pair of completely unmitigatedpunches squarely to her nose. The resulting brain hemorrhage filled Jamylin’seyes with a red haze before she collapsed. Ten seconds later she stepped out ofthe spawn tube and fell to her knees.
As the prototype nanite shield around the pair dissolved from the floor up, she watched through tear soaked eyes that lent such an ethereal quality to it that—for a moment—left her breathless. To the Vanu, technology is not merely might, it is a divine, beautiful, living thing to be loved and worshiped. Mentally broken at last, it was on that divinity Jamylin relied upon to process the following events. So, when I tell you she accepted from the arriving guards that vial of neural disruptor serum like a lifelong parishioner might receive the Eucharist and cradled it in her arms, lifting it high like a Holy Relic, and that her face had taken on such bliss and contentment one might find in the comfort of a mother’s embrace, you might have an inkling as to why then she smiled beatifically as she loaded it into a pneumatic hypo, put the tip to her neck, and eased her thumb upon the actuator. To onlookers she took Julia in a grateful embrace, giggled, fell to the floor mumbling like the Oracle at Delphi, and died. Permanently. And yet, as far as Jamylin could tell, the darkness and numbness of death was—disappointingly—incomplete.