Date Point: 14y4d AV
High Mountain Fortress, the northern plains, Planet Gao
Champion Goruu of Clan Firefang
Aspiring to one day be a Champion was one of those things that separate the exceptional from the ordinary. A Male without ambition was barely a Male at all according to some schools of thought.
Of course, the problem with ambition was that the ambitious largely knew nothing about the reality of their goal. Aspiration, it seemed, was partly a function of ignorance.
Goruu certainly hadn’t fully appreciated the full weight of what being a Champion meant. If he had, he wouldn’t have wanted the job at all. There were so many…secrets to it. Not just the Clan’s official secrets, but the nuance and subtleties of the role that he’d never been groomed to learn. Champions seemed to play a game of their own, with its own rules and moves and Goruu had been sat down at the table without a rulebook or a mentor immediately after the board was flipped over and the game practically abandoned.
He was focusing on the official secrets. Those at least were relatively straightforward.
Clan Firefang was thought of by the uninitiated as the Clan of fighter pilots, but Gao really didn’t need that many fighter pilots. The last major internecine war had been generations ago and the Dominion, thanks to its monolithic clumsiness, had largely failed at dragging the Gao into their interstellar war.
Firefang provided pilots of all kinds, plus astronauts, propulsion engineers, small-craft crews and anybody whose job touched the sky, the ground, and the slim haze of gas in between. Passenger flights, cargo flights, satellite deployment and maintenance…High-tech, high-skilled jobs, jobs for which the Clan’s augmentation culture had seemed perfectly sensible and practical.
Goruu’s refusal to participate had made him…not a pariah or an outcast, but it had certainly kept some of the Clan’s innermost circles closed to him. Kept him from knowing about some of Firefang’s more sensitive projects.
All of them, of course, were now firmly under enemy control. Which meant that his first act as Champion was to prioritize the order in which Great Father Daar should violently dismantle everything that Clan Firefang had ever built.
No wonder Halti had balked—Having his throat torn out would have been less painful, not to mention quicker than what Goruu was having to endure.
“The hangars at Shem Yu?” he asked, tapping a claw at the next of the long list of items he was reviewing.
HIs aide, Brother Sando, had the relevant information on a tablet. “Three remotely operated weather planes,” he read. “Two were in the air at the time of the Takeover and their pilots were implanted. They’re equipped with sophisticated atmospheric monitors and can stay up for years, but they’re subsonic, unarmed and not equipped for stealth or high-altitude flight.”
“…Seven,” Goruu decided. He was using a sim ple threat rating system—Ten was a completely harmless asset, one that would have no impact on the war effort at all, nine was only mostly harmless, and so on. So far, the highest rating he’d given to anything was the gunship squadron stationed four hundred kilometers south-east of Lavmuy. He’d called it a three, and the Human fleet had promptly dropped a swarm of RFGs on it—All that now remained of a once-proud Firefang air base was a field of shallow, rubble-strewn craters.
“…The workhouse in Wen Kay?”
“Ground support assets and workers at a hydraulic fluid manufacturer. Only a few Clan were there, no contact with them since the Takeover.”
“Hmm. Who were the Clan?”
“Brothers… Roki, Yengiil and Taaruk. Logistics. Not augmented. And Father Menyu, the talent scout. He had a memory array.”
“Hmm…Nine. Next is…”
Goruu turned over a page and frowned at the next entry while his ears swivelled sideways in confusion. “…Laboratory at Dark Eye? What is this?”
Sando tapped on his tablet, blinked, and then handed it to Goruu. “It…needs your biometrics, Champion.”
At least the Clan had adapted quickly, there. Firefang’s Champion was expected to lead from the front like any Champion, which meant he was a pilot himself. They had contingencies in place for the Champion’s sudden death, and it had taken only minutes for Great Father Daar’s proclamation of Goruu as the new Champion to translate into a full transfer of access codes and authorizations.
Goruu pressed his thumb to the tablet’s sensor and read.
He didn’t need to read for very long before placing the tablet on the table with a shaking paw and a dry mouth.
“…Champion?” Sando prompted after a silent moment. Goruu blinked at him, and then remembered what words were.
“…One,” he said.
Date Point: 14y4d AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Armstrong Station, Orbiting Cimbrean-5, The Far Reaches
Xiù Chang
Dear Miss Chang,
I’m pleased to report that an infant female cub by that name is among the refugees evacuated from Wi Kao. I have checked her DNA markers against our local copy of the Clan of Females breeding records and it seems that little Shoo’s parents are Regaari of Clan Whitecrest and Ayma of the Wi Kao commune.
I was sorry to hear that you cannot visit as I am sure your appearance would be a huge morale boost to the displaced Females, but if things change then little Shoo is currently being cared for at the Starmind convent. I cannot yet say how permanent this arrangement is likely to be.
Kindest regards,
A. Golemis, Cimbrean Colonial Security
Xiù must have let out a huge sigh of relief, because Allison retreated back out of the ceiling access hatch where she was maintaining the power bus to *Misfit*’s forward engines.
“Good news, babe?”
Xiù nodded. “Regaari and Ayma’s cub is alive. She’s on Cimbrean.”
“That’s good! Hey, hand me the ET scanner?”
She waved a hand at her toolbox. The ET scanner was alientech, an import from the Vzk’tk Domain that was a jump or five ahead of anything humanity had yet invented. Though it fit awkwardly in the hand it could pick up all sorts of things that Allison would have needed a whole arsenal of other tools to diagnose, and she vanished back into the crawlspace with a grin as soon as Xiù handed it to her. Moments later, there was a blue glow.
“All good?” Xiù asked.
“Our baby’s perfect as always!” Allison wriggled back out of the hatch, dropped to the deck and closed it. “Any other good news?”
“Just an email from that reporter,” Xiù swiped down to recall it. “She says she understands our mission comes first and she’d still appreciate an interview whenever is convenient for us.”
“I guess that’s fair.” Allison slotted her tools back into place and closed the box. “Isn’t she the one who wrote that ‘humble hero’ piece on you?”
“The interview with Myun? Yeah. That was her.”
“Wow. Y’know, we might actually owe her our jobs.” Allison lifted the toolbox and slotted it back into its storage space.
“I guess…That was the last thing, right?”
“Yup!” Allison beamed. “Misfit is in perfect order! Unless somehow Clara shows up out here with some new upgrades, we’re ready to go. Guess we’d better suit up…You okay?”
Xiù slid her tablet into the pocket on her T-shirt’s back. “Not really,” she confessed. “I keep thinking about Gao, and…”
Allison took her hand. “I get it. I know it’s small comfort but they’re already doing better than the Guvnurag.”
“Yeah…” A guilty thought struck Xiù in the back of the head. “…We never wrote to Vedreg.”
“What would we say? ‘Hey, glad you’re alive, we’re alive too, sorry to hear a third of your species is dead’?” Allison led her gently toward the suit lockers.
“It’s better than nothing isn’t it?”
“I dunno. I’ve never been a thoughts-and-prayers kinda gal,” Allison said, opening her locker. “Besides, it’s not just one third, is it? What was the Guvnurag implant rate, something like fifty percent? Imagine if cellphones could do what implants can, how fucked would humanity be? And then there’s Kirk’s people, and the Corti, the Locayl…”
She stripped out of her T-shirt and pants and grabbed an undersuit. “And now that the cat’s outta the bag…”
Xiù sighed again, and started to suit up as well. “…When you put it like that, you almost make the Gao sound lucky.”
“Nah. We’re the lucky ones. They’re more like that, uh, that guy who got his arm stuck under a boulder and cut it off. Shitty luck, but at least the fuckin’ thing didn’t kill him outright, you know? I’d rather lose an arm than die.”
“…I guess.” Xiù bounced a few times to pull her undersuit up her legs. “I just hope Ayma and Regaari are okay. If anything happened to either of them them, I…”
She trailed off, until Allison turned and gave her a hug. “Whatever happens, we’ll face it together,” she promised.
“I know.” They shared a comforting moment forehead-to-forehead, kissed, and got back to work.
Allison zipped her undersuit up for her. “Better?”
“…A little. Gao’s in good hands,” Xiù decided, and turned to return the favor. “Let’s focus on the people who need us.”
“Attagirl.”
Returning to the cockpit did feel good, once Xiù was settled in all suited up and ready. Misfit fit her like a glove, and she’d run the preflight sequence with Allison so many times now that they could probably both have done it asleep.
She watched Allison go through the final step by firing off a message to the Byron Group via Chiune Station, light-minutes away on Cimbrean itself. “Departure checklist complete, mission status updated,” she declared. “Take us out, babe.”
“Okay…” Xiù switched channels. “Armstrong ground, Byron Echo-Victor-Zero-One-One in bay three, taxi for launch and we’re IFR to out-system jump…”
She got an entirely routine clearance and instructions. In theory, *Misfit*’s jump field was so tightly constrained that they could have safely jumped right out of the hangar, but safety regulations were absolutely clear—no jump drive activations within ten thousand meters of any inhabited structure. There was probably a rationale behind that rule, but Xiù hadn’t bothered to learn it.
Besides, ten thousand meters was nothing as far as Misfit was concerned. At a sedate 1G that was only a forty-five second trip, and Misfit could comfortably accelerate at six times that rate.
She eased out at a polite two Gs, gave it a couple thousand meters, then pushed up to four. Thanks to the ship’s compensation systems, they didn’t feel a hint of it.
Seconds later, she got the confirmation she’d been awaiting.
“Byron Echo-Victor-Zero-One-One, no-jump zone cleared. Bon Voyage.”
“Thank you Armstrong.”
On the internal line, Allison sighed. “Finally. Jump’s ready whenever you are, babe.”
Xiù raised a gloved hand and gave her a thumbs-up in the camera. She selected the Akyawentuo beacon code on the screen to her right, reflecting as she did so that it didn’t feel like only four days had elapsed since they’d jumped back here.
Part of her wished she was jumping to Gao instead. It had been her home, and her Sisters were there. Not rushing back there now felt like a betrayal…But Gao was in good hands. It had to be.
She jumped to Akyawentuo.
Date Point: 14y4d AV
Camp Farthrow, Lavmuy, Gao
Specialist Michael Murphy, 1-325 INF (Airborne), 82nd Airborne Division
It had taken three days, but the entire division was finally through the Array, acclimated to the Frontline and the slightly lower gravity. Three tense-ass, worried days where they’d been able to watch the smoke over the city and listen to the occasional burst of fighting but finally, finally the wait was over .
The only thing between them and finally bein’ let off the leash to get some was the inevitable speech. There was always a speech, and they always went the same way: Something pompous and self-important, filled with “you’re all so brave” and all that horseshit politicians like to spout. Or maybe this one would be given by some Gaoian equivalent of a general, one filled to the brim with mild platitudes and useless encouragement from someone who had never seen real battle.
After all, Gaoians weren’t generally all that impressive if Michael was honest. They were mostly small, sorta thin and lanky and had clearly never seen a gym or done a long field march with a hundred pounds of gear. They had quick voices with sometimes high-pitched yips and clicky sounds and their ears never stopped moving, but that restless energy always looked nervous rather than alert.
To be fair they did have claws…but still. They looked a lot like raccoons, sounded breakable, would cringe and avoid Michael and any of his battle buddies whenever they got near…not exactly confidence-inspiring. Even technologically advanced alien civilizations could be hella fuckin’ third-world in all the wrong ways, apparently.
They weren’t all bad. The dudes with the bitchin’ mohawks were perfectly friendly and actually a little scary, in that quiet intense way…but they were the exception. Most Gaoians just didn’t have what it took to grab Michael’s respect, which was why he and his buddies filed into the hangar expecting some boring and time-wasting platitudes.
Instead they met Daar, Great Father of the Gao.
Michael had heard it was a very ancient title which hadn’t been used for a thousand years and meant something like…emperor, maybe? The last guy to wear the title was more or less their Genghis Khan and General Marshall all at once. That seemed like an awful lot to put on someone…but times were hard, the Gaoians needed a dictator, and goddammit somehow Michael knew the title fit the big guy. Daar moved like real authority, like the kind of seasoned, scarred Sergeant Major who’d waded through an ocean of Hell in his life just so he could kick big-league ass when he got to the end.
He didn’t look or act anything like the other Gaoians that Michael had met. For one he was huge. Michael wasn’t exactly little but Daar towered over him, with the general build of a feral bear and muscles rippling like a goddamned pit bull. He leapt up silently and prowled onto the stage like a big cat, no swagger, all danger.
Jesus.
The Great Father’s arrival alone was enough to subdue the buzz of conversation in the hangar, but his real presence only made itself known when he spoke.
“A billion of my fellow Gaoians are already dead,” he began, in absolutely perfect English. His voice was like a general should sound—Steely, clear, deep and riveting. That one phrase shut the entire hangar up just with the power of his voice, which rolled over the top of them like a wave and rang off the back wall. The room settled down instantly.
Daar’s gaze swept over the division, but that wasn’t the bit Michael noticed. What he noticed were the claws—even from fifty goddamn yards, Daar had claws like a collection of knives. He flexed them in the moment of silence before he spoke again, showing off a set of sharpened rippers resembling a fistful of heavy-duty tent pegs, then put them back in again quietly at his side, hidden but known.
“Dead. All of ‘em,” he repeated. “All in the span of about fifteen seconds from what my staff tells me. My people’s entire augmented population, switched off in a genocide that took generations to engineer and hardly a heartbeat to implement. They’re biodrones now, and there ain’t a Keeda-damned thing we can do about it but put ‘em outta their misery.”
He let the full weight of that settle on his audience, who eventually remembered to breathe. Michael was transfixed.
“Which means,” Daar told them once they’d had time to properly absorb his words, “there’s a slaughter ahead of us the likes of which eclipses any war ever fought on Gao or on Earth. It’s gonna be long and awful and until it’s done the Gao can’t rebuild.”
That was…direct. Direct and to the point like Michael had never heard from any officer. He didn’t beat around the bush, he just nut up and said what had to be said.
Michael could admire that. But Christ, the scale of what Daar was proposing…
“We’ve already made key progress. Lavmuy has been cleared out and Stoneback has an initial perimeter in place. From there, we can expand our clawhold, build out our safe infrastructure, and isolate, control and burn these parasites.
“But. We have a problem. Gaoian military resources are effectively at their limit between doing that and raiding for Females to bring back to safety. This is where you come in. I must rely on Human forces to do this. The problem is too big and we need to clean this up ourselves as much as we can…but our military is small and effectively destroyed.
“I have just under seven hundred and fifty full Brothers of the Rites under my command. I would trust the Fangs of Stoneback to win any other war, in any any other place and time. But here and now, they’re outnumbered more’n a million to one. My Brothers would call that a fair fight.” Daar paused and shared in the ballsy grin that swept the room. “I say I ain’t interested in fightin’ fair.”
Definitely not, and an attitude like that certainly lived up to the hype he’d heard tossed around the barracks. Stoneback had supposedly put on a show a while back in a combined training exercise that had sent some shockwaves around all the allied militaries. There had even been retraining and a funding surge in response.
Or so the rumors said.
Daar owned the stage while the room settled down before continuing. “We need an army,” he said. “There’s a billion Keeda-burned drones out there an’ I’ve got barely one battalion worth of shock troops to fight ‘em. Our other martial Clans are in far worse shape—Whitecrest has been virtually destroyed, our fleets, our pilots and most of our first responders are gone, our cities are in flames and the surviving population is goin’ feral as they starve. If we’re gonna build any kind of order outta this mess then we need an army the likes of which neither of our people have ever seen.”
Well…shit. That put a damper on things.
“We must train them, equip them, lead them, and we must do this quickly before the enemy has any chance to regain the initiative!” Daar announced. “…And there, I gotta ask for your help. The Clanless’re near and dear to my heart. They’re hard-working, know teamwork like second nature, they’re quick-learning and they’re aggressive like all Gaoian males…But they’re completely untrained, and un-led. Worse, our people had only brief experience with large-scale military formations and even less with full combined arms doctrine. Only my Clan maintains the relevant skills…and there ain’t enough of us to do this at the personal level of one-on-one training that’s gonna be needed.”
Daar paused, then grinned ferally. “But I notice this hangar is full to bursting with the finest airborne infantry the galaxy has ever seen. I’d be awful stupid to ignore that…and I’m a lotta things, but stupid ain’t one of ‘em. So ‘yer not just gonna be playin’ army. ‘Yer also gonna be the example to the Clanless of how it’s done. If we are to do this, then you will be the rocks on which this army is built, and the pins holding it together! You must teach them, an’ you must lead them.”
Well…shit.
As engrossed as Michael was, he still shared glances with his buddies. They’d been expecting to come here, drop onto some strategic targets, take and hold them. That’s what they’d trained for, after all, and it was what the brief had sounded like when they were woken up in the middle of the night to get their asses ready for an interstellar deployment.
Training and supporting a whole army was…Very different.
Daar, however, seemed to read his mind. “Why you?” he asked. “If the numbers alone weren’t enough, there is one simple, vital reason: You’re the best.”
He stepped to the front of the stage. “In my time as Champion, Warfather and leader of the Gao’s most ancient Clan, I’ve inspected militaries from across the galaxy. I’ve seen the Dominion army in its war against the Alliance, I’ve seen Chehnash troops, Allebenellin war-frames, Qinisi drone swarms and Guvnurag Battle Herds. And you wanna know what they all are? Useless.”
He snarled the word and prowled the stage, practically growling at the whole galaxy. “They’re cowardly, weak, and stupid. Whether that’s the enemy’s doing or not it don’t matter, ‘cause you couldn’t find worse allies anywhere but Hollywood!”
That actually got a chuckle rolling around the hangar. Daar became still again.
“But you, you’re something special. You’re the only military out there who can match our own skill, and unlike us you have the mass, experience and logistics to do something useful with that capability. But most importantly?”
He paused, surveyed, them, then again bared his teeth in a grin. “…You’re Deathworlders,” he reminded them. “Not just that, you’re the Deathworlders, the ones that define what that word really means.
“I’ve lived with the Ten’Gewek and they’re very impressive. Physically superior to either of our kind, courageous an’ clever an’ strong…but when it comes to mindset and attitude, even they don’t compare to a properly motivated Human. I’ve wrassled Julian Etsicitty, I’ve hunted deer in the Kentucky woods with arguably the most dangerous man in the galaxy. I am proud to call the HEAT my Brothers. And all of that? It’s alive, in each of you.”
Reverent stillness reigned the hangar. Michael’s heart was thumping hard in his chest.
“…I think mine is the only species in the Galaxy who truly appreciates you for who and what you are,” Daar said, and it felt like he was speaking directly to Michael. “We know what being a deathworlder means—it means bein’ more alive! It means wherever you go, the world knows you’re there! It means there is nothing that can stand in your way, because you have already conquered the worst the galaxy could make!”
The silence was bottomless. Not even a falling girder would have broken the spell.
Daar had raised his paws along with his voice. Now, he settled back down. “I know what you are,” he told them all. “You are Protectors, and Providers. You’re the sheepdogs, keepin’ the wolves away from the flock. You’re the strong, doin’ what the truly strong do by protectin’ the weak. And now, the Gao need your aid. You and I, we’re not fighting over land or Females or some stupid material thing. We’re fighting for the right to exist against an evil so old, it was active before our ancestors started thinkin’. And we will not allow it to win!”
As one, the entire room yelled out a lusty HOOAH! It was natural, heartfelt, and it hadn’t even been prompted.
Daar nodded, and shifted tone.
“Damn right. Now, I won’t bore you with the details. That’s what ‘yer chain of command is for. But the outline is this: each of your infantry battalions will have a Claw from Stoneback attached to your command. It’s not much, but you’ll get all their equipment and I think you’ll find they’re more than up to the task. They know the land, know the people, and will largely take point as much as possible. Your commanders are already briefed on the rules of engagement.”
Daar flashed a toothy, terrifying grin, complete with the most feral growl Michael had ever heard from anything. “For you though, it’s gonna be easy. If they’re male, and they ain’t immediately surrendered? You kill with prejudice. You’ll each be given scanners to check for implants, we’ve got nanofactories crankin’ em’ out by the thousands now. No Gaoian you meet goes without a check. If there’s anything in their skull at all, you kill them, right then and there. We ain’t got time for anything else.”
Jesus.
Nothing quite drove home the scope of the disaster than an RoE like that. They weren’t just occupying territory. They weren’t merely training an army from first principles. They were…shit. They were there to exterminate a goddamned robozombie infestation.
Fuck.
“Now listen up, this bit’s important. Why are you helping us train an army? Well…for those that don’t know, the Gaoian race has many more males than females. Quirk of our genetics. Normally that ratio is around six to one but now…” here his voice cracked a little, and the hangar was stone silent as he paused for a moment.
Then he rallied, and his voice was so utterly suffused with rage, Michael found himself taking a small step backwards.
“…Now, it’s going to be a lot worse. How much worse depends on our speed, but we are expecting a very severe fertility bottleneck in our future. Most of us will never have a legacy. We are a people who have been damn near destroyed and we have nothing left to lose. And we are angry. The…things that did this to us must be utterly destroyed, and now we will forge a military billions strong to make that happen. And you, my friends, will be the men and women who build it.”
That…that was a lot of anger. That was a fuck of a lot of anger, and while Daar looked like the kinda guy who had a damn near unlimited capacity for rage, it made Michael think again about what he’d seen of Gaoians so far. After all, those Whitecrest guys had been…
Shit, what did a whole species look like when it got that kind of mad?
“Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna clean Gao. We’re gonna rebuild. We’re gonna train. Then we’re gonna mobilize, and we’re gonna do all that quick.”
Murphy found himself nodding along.
“My people have had everything taken from them. The Hierarchy has been meddling with us for thousands of years. We will never know the extent of that they did, or what we would have been if they hadn’t been molding us into their…Janissaries.” Daar spat the word with so much venom behind it that Michael got mad just hearing it.
“They took our past from us. They took our history, our culture, our religion. But they never got our spirit, and they will not get our future!”
The mood in the room was changing. Thousands of men, an entire division’s worth of airborne infantry, were chewing at the bit under the building energy of the moment. This was their purpose in life, and Michael knew it more certainly than he had ever known anything. They were going to save a people and destroy a true evil.
Daar knew that, too.
“This is where the war turns! This is where the future of a whole galaxy is written! This is what we train for!” Daar lifted his voice into a roar, their roar. “All the way!”
The whole division answered with a spirit Michael had rarely felt before. “ALL THE WAY!!”
“Good.” The Great Father nodded approvingly, then fell to all fours and leapt from the platform as quiet and lethal as a tiger. He’d been scary enough before but seeing that finally drove home for Michael just how wrong he’d been about what Gaoians were, and could be. The crowd parted to let Daar through and he stalked toward the hangar doors.
When he got there, he turned around and snarled. “Let’s go kill us some drones.”