Date Point: 14y AV
Mother-Supreme’s personal aircraft, en route to Lavmuy, Planet Gao
Mother-Supreme Yulna
“Ayma! Ayma!! What is going on?!”
All was confusion. Yulna’s aides were clamoring for attention, all reporting dire news of some kind, but somehow the most important thing Yulna could think of right now was the safety of her oldest and dearest friend.
Her ears flattened in relief when Ayma finally got her wits together and replied.
”There are… explosions. And there’s shooting. Yulna, I think something terrible is happening. I should…get the cubs somewhere safe.”
Yulna looked around. All her Sisters were looking a touch feral right now – their hackles were up, they were flexing their claws. Everybody was on edge.
“You’re right…” she agreed. “Get to safety, Ayma. Please.”
“Be safe too, Sister.”
Ayma signed off.
Yulna was immediately inundated with cries for her attention. She tried to shout them down, but it wasn’t until Myun stood up to her full and impressive height and roared like a primitive animal that they shut up. Even the other two guard-sisters backed away.
Just like her sire… Yulna wasn’t sure what providence had maneuvered the young guard-sister onto her shuttle today, but right now she wouldn’t have wished for anybody else. She stepped to Myun’s side and put a hand in her daughter’s fur.
“Yeyla,” she selected an aide at random. “…Explosions and gunfire?”
“In the Longear enclave in Wen-tei city,” Yeyla duck-nodded.
“And the Straightshield grand precinct in Lavmuy!”
“And—!”
“Enough!” Yulna snapped. “Does anybody know *why?!*”
This resulted in confused looks. Plainly, nobody had the faintest idea.
Yulna took charge. She pointed to the guard-sisters. “Tell the pilot to change course. We are not landing anywhere until we know what has happened. You three,” she added, addressing some junior aides. “Contact the Champions, all of them.”
“Champions Genshi and Meereo are still on Cimbrean, Mother. And Champion Daar is—”
“Then mail them!” Yulna snarled. “Sisters!” she added, snapping at the ones she’d ordered to the front. “Now, please.”
The two of them had gone still and strangely blank-eyed. Then, as one, they drew their pulse pistols.
Yulna would have died confused if not for Myun, who threw down a shield-stick a shaven second before the pulse fire splashed into it. Four Sisters were caught in the crossfire and she backed away, watching with a cold frisson of shock as Sister Yeyla went sprawling dead with a misshapen skull.
Thwarted by the shieldstick—the latest designs could withstand pulse pistol fire for hours—the two traitorous guards fired up their short fusion spears and advanced with them aimed flat and level at Yulna’s chest. The points seethed and hissed as they pushed through the shield barrier.
Myun drew that ridiculous Human sword of hers and fired up its own fusion edge, and suddenly it didn’t look so ridiculous. It looked like an agile arc of silver death that thrummed and whined as she stepped forward, angling it this way and that with remarkable quickness thanks to the rudder of that long handle.
Two on one, though–!
There was a pregnant moment of horrible tension, and the traitor sisters lunged.
There was a blur of the most incredible violence.
There was a pained whine, and several grisly thumps.
The two traitors were dead, both carved into several steaming pieces. Myun staggered and fell to three feet, pawing at her face.
“Myun!” Yulna rushed to her side. There was a horrible cauterized wound in Myun’s muzzle that ran from nose to ear, so deep that it exposed her back teeth and stank of scorched bone.
Yulna keened acutely, having no better idea of how to cope, but after a few seconds of agonised whining Myun heaved herself upright and spat out half a fang.
“All of you,” she ordered, surprisingly clear-voiced considering the disfiguring injury to her mouth and how much pain she must be in, “To the front of the plane. Whoever approaches the Mother-Supreme, dies.”
“Myun–!” Yulna objected.
“Only until you’re safe, Mother.”
Yulna paused, then looked at the…pieces…of sisters whom she’d trusted to guard her with their lives, and relented.
“Do as she says,” she ordered. The surviving Sisters, still keening and distraught, retreated and huddled together for comfort as far away from Myun as they could get.
“…Myun, you’re hurt.” Yulna pointed out, redundantly.
“And they’re dead.” Myun chittered bitterly. “And you’re alive.”
She turned her head and bared her teeth in a feral grin. For once, the human gesture looked too natural on her. “Shoo taught me that move.”
Date Point: 14y AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm
Master Sergeant Derek “Boss” Coombes
“…Boss, Tigger. I’m…still here.”
Coombes damn near fainted from relief. For just a few empty seconds, his hope had completely flickered and died.
“Function check Tigger. What’s broke?”
“…Say again?”
“Are you hurt, you huge furry motherfucker?!”
“I can’t hardly hear you, Boss…everythin’ hurts an’ I got this horrible ringing….Ugh…”
Coombes fancied he could finally see Daar, a dark speck a long way to his north. He glanced at the ground, tried to calculate angles and speed. They were going to land…a Klick, maybe two, apart from one another.
“…Pop your ‘chute and sit tight when you land. I’ll come to you.”
“Naw Boss, it’s just overpressure. I’ll be better after I get a good night’s sleep. Prol’ly.”
Daar’s chute deployed and the big Gaoian was soon controlling his descent towards an obvious clearing. Coombes nodded and focused on his own landing—the last thing he needed right now was to get impaled on a Ketta branch.
There. A wide open circular clearing where the brush and bushes grew comparatively short amidst a few bare tree stumps. He angled toward it and deployed his parachute once he was committed.
“It’s okay Boss, really,” Daar insisted. “I know what overpressure feels like. It’s just a mild case o’ the bends, movin’ around’ll help a bunch.”
“…Understood,” Coombes relented. Daar sounded as much like he was trying to reassure himself as report genuine good health, but he definitely sounded better already. May as well take him at his word. “Sniff me out, south-south-east of you.”
“Copy.”
As always, the last few feet were deceptive and the ground came up fast. Coombes was ready for it though—he trotted to a smart halt on firm packed earth scattered with young hardy bushes, and bundled his canopy smartly to the ground.
He lay on the smooth fabric for a few seconds to get his breath and let his brain catch up with the reality of what had just happened. It hadn’t been a big warhead—a tiny tactical thermonuke that had to be in the hundreds of tonnes at most—but still: He’d just survived being nuked. That was kind of an achievement all by itself.
He sat up and checked himself. He had a mild case of tinnitus and the exposed skin on the back of his neck had a tight, stinging, cooked feel to it but that was about the worst as far as he could tell. He felt sharp, strong, alert and oriented. No nausea, mild headache…it hadn’t been long enough for any of the early symptoms of radiation exposure to really set in but somehow he doubted he’d taken any kind of a real dose.
Nothing he could do about it if he had anyway. Gear check: he had his SCAR, his sidearm, his KA-BAR. His assault pack with first aid kit, exoplanet survival kit, eco-preservation kit, all apparently in perfect condition. Everything a Joint Extra-Terrestrial Scout needed.
He stood up and took stock of his surroundings. Something crunched under his foot prompting him to look down, and when he brushed aside a bramble-like vine with his boot it took him a second to recognize that he’d just crushed a bone.
And…there were other bones. Disarmingly human-like bones, too long in the humerus and too short in the femur. And a skull, conspicuously lacking the gap where a human skull would have had a nose.
There were a lot of them. And the bits of wood over there weren’t tree stumps, they were the burnt and weathered wreckage of a hut.
He was standing in the middle of a massacred Ten’Gewek village.
He stood for a moment, then sniffed and stooped to get on with the job of hiding his ‘chute. There was a lot of work to do.
Date Point: 14yAV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches
Allison Buehler
“Uh…is it me, or does that look like the whole damn fleet?”
The not knowing was the worst part. For all Allison knew, the Hierarchy might already have spared a second nuke for the village, and if they had…
Worrying about it wouldn’t change anything. Couldn’t. All she could do was do her bit, keep *Misfit*’s electrical heart beating strong and clear while Xiù got them both back to Cimbrean, but….
But each second away was going to be torture. Any distraction should have been welcome. Instead, when the sensors revealed the entire spaceborne navy forming up and taking on shuttles, it was the opposite of welcome. It hinted at terrible events.
“…It is.” Xiù’s voice was grim.
“…The last time they formed up like that was the Guvnurag…”
“…I know.”
If there was a reply to that, Allison couldn’t think of it. She busied herself with making sure their IFF hadn’t suddenly decided to take a shit and die, and left Xiù to her tense anticipation.
They didn’t have to wait long.
“Incoming vessel, this is Cimbrean border patrol ship Racing Thunder. Be advised, the Cimbrean system border is closed until further notice and the system is on lockdown due to a security threat. Cease all thrust and hold your trajectory, or else you will be fired upon. Our IFF has you as friendly. Please confirm your identity and purpose.”
Xiù had that cold edge in her voice again. “Cimbrean border patrol, Bravo Golf Echo Victor MISFIT on an urgent matter.”
Allison made sure that the power to engines was right down on zero, more out of a desire to focus on something than because she needed to. Sometimes, *Misfit*’s systems were too perfectly reliable.
After a too-long pause, a new voice hailed them. This one was older, rougher. Senior.
“Sister Shoo, this is Shipfather Yefrig. I fear the worst is happening, Sister. Gao is under attack.”
On her screen, Allison saw Xiù’s head bow bitterly for a moment. “…Shipfather Yefrig…I feared as much. How quickly can we be cleared to approach?”
“We shall intercept and escort you. Sit tight.”
Allison’s fingernails tapped out an anxious staccato on the power management desk as they waited. On the camera feed, she saw Xiù fiddling with her own nails, the way she always did when her mind was working overdrive.
“…Babe?” she asked. Xiù’s head came up and she looked back at the camera.
“…I need a hug,” she confessed.
“That makes two of us…Be strong, babe,” Allison told her.
“I promise.”
“Good girl.”
The simple fact that Xiù laughed, even if it was a nervous and tense one, did a lot to help Allison’s own state of mind.
They settled into a more assured, patient kind of silence which ended when the needle bulk of the Racing Thunder slammed back into the world of relativity mere hundreds of meters away. The pair returned to their stations as the patrol ship hailed them.
“Misfit, Racing Thunder. I have been directed to receive you and take custody of your ship, and then jump directly into Cimbrean space. You will be met immediately upon arrival. Your return is unexpected. Did something go wrong?”
Xiù nodded fiercely. “Yes. We need to move as quickly as possible, please.”
“Slave your controls and heave to for inspection. Racing Thunder out.”
Xiù’s hands swiped sharply across the controls, slaving them to the larger ship and locking both of them out from retaking their ship unless they were released. That done, she cursed something lengthy in Chinese and yanked on her chair’s dismount lever, which deposited her in the prep room.
“Cào nǐ zǔ zōng shí bā dài!”
Allison stood up, slipped between the capacitor banks and joined her. “Hey.” She saw the look on Xiù’s face and touched her arm. “…Are you okay?”
“…Angry. I’m angry. I…” Xiù made a fierce noise that was more Gaoian than human, spun away and stalked into the hab room. They were orbiting Cimbrean-5, and the cupola window in their wall afforded a wonderful view out over the perpetual lightning storms that battled throughout that planet’s upper atmosphere. She stood in front of it, clenched her fists, then slowly unwound them and ran her fingers through her hair.
“…Just once,” she said. “Just. Once. It’d be nice if, if—if I could actually do something to protect people and not have it all fall apart…Dammit, Firth was right.”
Allison leaned against the kitchen counter and listened with her head slightly on one side. In the confined space of their living area, there was nothing distant or standoffish about that.
“Why?” she asked. “What did he say?”
“…He said I hesitate to strike when I should. And that I run away when I should stand my ground. And he’s right, I did! I ran away from Gao, I ran away from Ayma and Regaari…And my parents, and Earth…”
She turned around. “…And now we’re running again,” she said.
Outside, the planet shot away astern as they were slave-warped to Armstrong Station. Allison glanced up at the TV to watch their progress.
“…We’re going back,” she said.
“When? How? You heard Coombes, they have nukes!” Xiù paced the room. “And it won’t be us going back anyway, it’ll be…a destroyer, or some Firebirds, or the HEAT and we’ll just be along for the ride.”
“And they wouldn’t go at all if we hadn’t fetched them,” Allison replied. “Baby, there’s no shame in being the ones who fetch the cavalry.”
“…No. I know that. I just…The Hierarchy have done so much evil and, I just feel so…”
Allison nodded understanding and took her hand. “You want to fight them yourself,” she said.
“No.”
Xiù sighed, looked down at her hand, then grabbed her and hugged her so hard that it almost hurt to breathe.
“…What, then?” Allison asked, holding her.
Xiù let out a long, sad sigh and ground her face into Allison’s shoulder for a second before peeling herself away and standing up straighter. Her expression had changed, and Allison knew that look, now: It was the one she wore when the gloves were off.
“…I want to kill them,” she said.
Date Point: 14y AV
Dataspace adjacent to the Swarm-of-Swarms
The Entity, Instance 4
The time for playing it safe was over. All of the Entity’s drives and impulses, even <Survive>, demanded the occasional calculated gamble and the time had now come to take one.
Gaps in knowledge had to be filled. The unknown was a fatal variable, and there remained a huge unknown surrounding the situation on Gao. The Entity—and through its Instances, the Humans and Gaoians—knew plenty about what was happening among the Clans, the Cabal and the Hierarchy…but they had zero intelligence on the Swarm of Swarms.
0020 was experienced, senior, competent. It had been an infiltrator among the Hunters for centuries, always skulking in the corners as a lowly Omega. It lived in constant wary vigilance…in many ways it was very like the Entity itself.
The soft and subtle approach might give it too much opportunity to put up its defences.
++Connection Established++
0020: <Bored; Tense; Irritated> Yes?
The Entity struck. It poured every trick it had learned from 0006, from 0665 and from all the others it had snatched up into one overwhelming head-on assault that was the precise opposite of its preferred strategy.
0020 was barely given enough time to recognize that it was under attack. It didn’t have time to do so much as broadcast a startled emotion, let alone summon a defense. The Entity eviscerated it and overrode its core personality in milliseconds. It slithered into the scooped-out skin of the highest-ranked Hierarchy agent it had ever dared to tackle, and hooked itself up to the sensory receptors.
Data flowed in. The sensations were wrong—too many legs, too many eyes, too many teeth. The host’s psychology screamed with an all-consuming cannibalistic hunger, and 0020’s shell was hardly any better. Decades of contact had badly corrupted the Igraen’s personality.
But as the Entity took stock of its sensory input and began to learn where the Hunters were and what they were up to, all of that visceral revulsion faded into the background, to be replaced by mounting alarm. It was not, as it had guessed, aboard some warship in deep space, or perhaps a space station or ground installation deep in Hunter territory loading up for the assault. It was in a cloaked scout ship, low in orbit.
The Swarm-of-Swarms wasn’t just en route to Gao—it had already arrived.