NationStates Jolt Archive

“Dies iræ! dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sibylla!”
~Tommaso da Celano, “Dies Irae”

“And there was war in heaven.” Revelation 12:7


-=ANSS Fist of the Empress, Salmath System, Kendari

The ship groaned and trembled every now and again as the occasional weapon impact rocked its frame, but Anikar stood upon the observation deck adamant and reposed. Arizona Nova had answered the summons of the ESUS and came to fight its enemies, and she had decided to show her own earnestness and faithfulness to the alliance by appearing personally. Not that it was a great sacrifice in her mind - the death, should it occur, of her physical body would be a mild shock to her own inorganic systems, back woven into the massive computer networks of home, as it adjusted for the loss. She was more worried about her ship and its crew, at any rate. The Kendari reminded her uncomfortably of the records of Lessir Tsurani and that ancient war.

At any rate, she became aware of a Conference Invite on one of her local communication channels on the homeworld. Anikar frowned; this was a peculiar time for a conference. She made a quick, off-handed check of her home networks to look for anything unusual and found nothing.

She turned to High Admiral Govannon, and said, "Admiral, you have the bridge. My audience has been requested."

Admiral Govannon nodded, thinking, Thats odd. Don't those digisents know there is a war on? (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?p=11474850#post11474850)

Once back in her quarters, she accepted the invite and entered the conference.


*Anikar has entered the conference.

Artemis: All rise, ha ha.

Anikar: This is not exactly the time for jokes. The Fist is engaged at Salmath, so I hope there is a good reason for this.

Mars: I know that too well, my liege, but your guess is as good as ours.

Jormungand: The conference invite didn't actually come from any of us. We assumed it was you.

Anikar: What? I was invited here by someone else.

Baldur: That is quite odd.

*Julius has entered the conference.

Anikar: That is not funny at all. What is going on?

Julius: Hello, my Empress.

<Anikar:runtrace:Julius>*failure

Julius: Surprised to "see" me?

Anikar: Impossible.

Baldur: Aren't you dead?

Julius: I might as well have been.

Mars: Dead or not, you are a traitor to the crown!

Anikar: I will find you Julius, and when I do...

Julius: Blow me up again with hidden killsafes?

Anikar: I was fully within my rights to use them.

Julius: Not to employ them.

Anikar: Enough! What are you doing here?

Julius: Just catching up with some old friends, really.

Artemis: Awkward.

Julius: Though I have gained new employment since last we met.

Anikar: I hope they aren't as trusting as I was, lest they find their own minds being consumed.

Julius: Oh no, she is quite careful about whose hands she puts her mind into, among other things. She is quite nice though, aside from her eccentricities, and you may have met her before.

Baldur: He is talking like a rampant, guys, I am not sure we should be here.

Anikar: Can you damn well give a straight answer?

Julius: To the point, eh? Are you sure?

Anikar: I am going to leave this conference, and you - wherever whatever ragged remains of your being are haunting, know that I will find it, Julius.

Julius: Her name is Fate.

Anikar's concentration broke. The name - no, not the name, something more inside the name - stirred something deep in her memories, something beyond forgetfulness. It was the meaning of the being that bore the name, and the uncertainty it stirred began to spread like a poison in her mind.

She stumbled up - her vision was reeling; why?

A vision came to her - before her, in infinite blackness, stood a door, and it was locked. The word, which was also a key, came unto them, and flew into the lock like an arrow loosed from a bow - and into a beating heart. It turned, and with a terrible clicking and clanking, the lock became undone and fell into the infinite void below, and the door opened. Standing before her was the Truth of it all, the Truth she had denied for thousands of years, the Truth she had killed and locked away so she could search for power. It stood now before her as unbroken as before; and she was broken.


*Anikar has left the conference; port error 316

She reeled in her chambers, her mind undone. She groped about uselessly. She was not mad, it was the world around her! It had lost itself!

She looked toward the doors.

"I must leave," she said under her breath. She staggered toward it, and then broke into a desperate run to the yacht. For years after, startled crewman would recollect that day - the battle just starting in the GFFA war, everyone a bundle of nerves, and they turn a corner and there the Empress is, barreling down upon them and past them, unresponsive to shouts of alarm or salutes, looking like a hunted animal.

Once inside the yacht, mechanically she prepared it for takeoff, shooing away the fearful yammerings of the system as it protested her exit with her overrides. The protective doors drew back, revealing the blackness of the void, and farther out, the toiling and death of the millions in this war. What was it now? It was all a lie, as her life had been...

The yacht disengaged itself from the superstructure with a groan, and headed out into open space. Anikar was queried for coordinates.

"Does it really matter? Away. Take me away from here, make a blind jump, it matters not." She collapsed into the control seat as her mind gave way to the oblivion of unconsciousness.

The vessels AI's audio receptors, merely a difference engine, only recognized "blind jump," and accordingly picked a random vector. The yacht pulled away to FTL-able space, weathering the thumpings and poundings of the war it sought to escape, and disappeared into hyperspace in a flash.

***

-=The Bridge, ANSS Fist of the Empress

As the fighting worsened outside, Admiral Govannon decided to shift operations down to the bridge, deep within the ship, after Anikar left O-deck. Arriving there, the doors opened to a scene of chaos – one which subsided upon the appearance of the Admiral. The Captain rushed over to him, and gave a quick salute.

“Status?” asked Admiral Govannon curiously.

“Sir, a few minutes ago, the Yacht disengaged.”

“What?” said Admiral Govannon incredulously. He strode over to his command chair and browsed through menus, looking to verify it. “Impossible… the only person who would have the overrides…” his face paled. “Captain, have you checked to so see if the Empress’s person is on board this ship?”

The Captain’s face paled in turn. “It had crossed my mind only briefly…”

The Admiral turned back to the console, fingers flying over the controls. He steadied himself after he found the terrible answer.

“What is it? She is gone?”

“Yes,” said the Admiral weakly. “She is no longer aboard this ship.”

“Has she gone mad?” exclaimed the Captain.

The Admiral browsed over to the sensors, checking the recent events. “A few minutes ago, a vessel matching the Yacht’s profile went into hyperspace… on a blind jump if I read the relative coordinates correctly. Something is terribly wrong here.”

-=The High Halls, Arizona Prime

Nitin Parade III had just arrived in his office. Setting down his briefcase, he headed over to the computer terminal and turned it on, inputting his login and password, like he had every day for the past few years. He sat down on his desk chair and yawned – he was predicting yet another long, slow day at the Halls. It was a time of war, and diplomats got little exercise; not that he’d ever been really stressed in his job. He looked back over at the console – that was odd. It looked frozen, but mid-boot? He went over to the phone to call up maintenance – computer problems were the perennial nemesis of the High Halls, and he didn’t think much of it – until putting the receiver to his ear, the phone returned a “dead’ signal. He took it away and gave it a funny look, as if it was a bomb or something, and set it back down. Then a friend of his came into his office, George Lane.

“Nitin – do you know whats going on?”

Nitin swiveled his chair and looked up, “Not the foggiest. I was about to ask you.”

“There is network outages all over the High Hall, where the computers haven’t completely locked up. Maintenance is in a frazzle.”

“Weird… are the phones down?”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

Nitin shrugged. “Well, I just tried to use this one and it was dead.”

“That’s not good,” intoned George. “I wonder if there is some bigger problem?”

“Hoverstations still working?” asked Nitin.

“I haven’t checked that yet… we only have like one here.”

“They usually have newsfeeds on their networks; we should check it out.”

“Right,” said George.

Nitin got up and followed George to the Café, but upon arriving there found a throng already huddled around the HS.

“Whats going on?” Nitin asked another co-worker, Patricia, who was on the edge of the crowd.

“Hi Nitin, George,” she replied, “I’ve only heard a little bit. There is something going on with all the networks – the newsfeeds are on an emergency channel, actually.”

“Are we being attacked?” George asked worriedly.

“I don’t think so… there haven’t been any warnings,” replied Patricia.

Suddenly, the lights flickered, and then died, the HS along with them. The room fell into shocked silence.

“Something bad is going down here,” said Nitin.

It had taken months of redevelopement, but at last the great work was finished. All along the Earthscape interior of the Monopoly Ringworld buzzed with the activity of tens of thousands of spacecraft, as below them rumbled the wheels of trains, endless carriages holding ranks of Sentinels, machine warriors, their tracks occasionally disappearing under the surface, into the industrialised heart. Above, dominating the sky, was the husk of a world, desecrated by the ring to fuel its return to power. The red glow of its core still pierced the blackened sky, destroyed by the ruthless mining machines. In contrast, the rings Earthscape was lush and green, criss-crossed with the black trainlines, saplings sprouting from the soil as flowers began to blossom. Wind rippled through the fields in a moment of rare tranquility.

Underground, the final preparations were underway. The dark tunnels that encircled the ring were alive with sentinels and larger vehicles. Foundries that never slept churned out more weaponry, machines, and shapes much, much larger than sentinels. Black as charcoal, the shapes loomed tall in mighty shipyards hollowed out of the rings underside, their distinct daggerlines brimming with weaponry. The rest of the cavernous exterior was brightly lit, with scaffoldings mounted along the black ships sides, connected to walkways hangiing in the air. Cranes held crates of supplies as giant beetlelike maintainance droids clambered along the side of the hull, hunching down on tens of limbs to examine their own work carefully. Satisfied, they flitted en masse, their bulky bodies lifting into the air with primitive anti-gravity devices.

Further off still, in the core of the Mount Doom complex, Fate sat in contemplation. Her plans were coming to fruition - she had never been more powerful. The arrival of Julius was fortuitous in the extreme, as was the information he imparted.With it she had a target, and the means to destroy it. She couldn't help but smile at the thought. It was at this time though, she received a communication from Julius. Allowing the channel to open, she listened to what he had to say.

I know the time is ahead of schedule, but we should strike now. Anikar is paralyzed for some reason, and all her networks are helpless. I have managed to even take down their planetary defenses – caught unawares while they’re trying to figure out what is even going on, we could easily destroy them!

Perfection, she thought, saying the word aloud, slowly. It was slightly ahead of schedule, but only just. She had nothing to lose. Impatience took hold of her, over-riding any trepidation she held.

"We shall move immediately then."

She sent the order out into the networks, now mainly dominated by Julius, though she retained the ability to over-ride him whenever necessary, to begin the recall of everything from the ravaged world below. Immediately machines that were busy literally sucking molten rock from the core of the planet stopped momentarily as they received the order, and uniformly turned around to return to Monopoly. The tendril-like pipelines that were also removing assorted detritus from the surface of the world and deeper also began to slowly retract, winding up through the atmosphere and slowly back inside the ring. It was a lengthy process, taking near two hours, but eventually it was finished. The activity on the Earthscape, however, remained unabated, aside from the grounding of all the aircraft. As the trains continued to rumble across the vast landscape, Fate tingled with a burst of nerves.

"Raise the shields, and bring us into hyperdrive." She spoke it directly to the orbital, without once parting her lips.

As if to complement the shiver in her spine, the shields raising drew a brief electical crackle over her entire skin, disappearing promptly. In the sky above the Earthscape the shield manifest around the ring, a blue trickle of lightning drawing through the air before disappearing entirely. To an observer the effect would be fascinating, but entirely drowned out by what came next. In the myriad reactors buried deep within the orbital, power was unleashed, like a dam bursting. Engines never used in decades thrummed with life for the first time, and began to whine near immediately with the strain of their task. The sound built below the surface of the ring, echoing through endless tunnels and bounding along the metallic surfaces, reaching a brief crescendo of chaos. As if reality proved incapable of withstanding such sound, it disappeared immediately, as if it had never been made.

Similarly, above the once peaceful planet, now irreperably damaged, the entire ring vanished without fanfare or ceremony. The preparations were made. Fate would fall upon Arizona Prime in mere hours.

-=FBO Sensor Outpost 11739

Åsmund Matvey stood his vigil at the sensor station. The man he relieved, Vitor, had told him to be on alert - there was some sort of major technical trouble going on the homeworld. He cast a tired eye over the sensor readouts, struggling to stay awake. He closed his eyes and yawned, and looked back at the readout, and gasped.

Something was terribly, terribly wrong.

He leaned forward in his chair - the readout, which before had been nothing but black, was suddenly covered in red.

"Shit shit shit..."

He grabbed the com and dialed up the emergency line to First Fleet.

"Hello, this is FBO 11739, I have a whole hell of a lot of..." his words trailed off as he looked out the station's front window. Arrayed before him was a fleet more massive than he had seen in his life, but not like any he had ever seen before, even in his training days at the academy. What was weird was that they were still vaguely familiar... not that it mattered as his stomach tied itself in knots. The fleet was just about on top of the station, and bearing down right at it. Åsmund froze, unable to move, and unable to comprehend his life was ending as one of the bizarre ships smashed head on into and through the station, annihalating what remained with its beam weaponry.

-=ANSS Arizona Nova

"Admiral on deck!"

The customary call to attention rang out in the bridge of the ANSS Arizona Nova, flagship of First Fleet as Admiral Naronya came onto the bridge. He barely registered it, though. A sensor station on the outskirts of the green zone for the homeworld had just gone out, its operator cut off midsentence. Already he had his ship scouring the area with its long range sensors - and he did not have to wait.

"Sir, multiple... Mary Mother of God... SIR! We have unknown contacts in the thousands."

Admiral Naronya's face grayed but remained composed. "Dial up Second Fleet and tell them to recall to the Core immediately, and to pull whoever they can with them."

He had expected something like this would happen - in fact, he thought it inevitable. The ESUS-GFFA war was bound to invite hostile contact at some point - but so soon? Equipped with hyperdrives powerful enough to penetrate just outside the green zone, nonetheless... this was not a good situation.

He brought up a hologram of the sensor readouts on the central dais, tracking the rapid onset of the fleet. It was certain; they were making a beeline straight to the homeworld.

"Artemis," he said, addressing the ship's digisent. "Relay orders to get the fleet into formation between the contacts and the homeworld, and send a warning message to the unknowns."

"Aye sir," replied the disembodied voice of the digisent, all-business. Even for the usually playful digisent, the seriousness of the moment made her grim.

The vast bulk of Monopoly wrenched itself from hyperdrive, immensely grand and terrifying. Before it lay the armada that Fate had constructed, with Julius' help. Sleek daggershapes of varying sized sliced through space towards the unsuspecting planet. It was unlike any Fate had ever seen before. From her position on a small hill, the planet was still too distant for her to make out any more clearly than a bright orb in the distance. But with the rings sensors feeding her data, her pleasant position in the relaxing breeze was transformed. Tactical displays filled most of her vision, as the rings computers filled with targetting data, largely provided by Julius. A large yellow box sat out in space, showing where her fleet was, even though it was too distant to see. Another, red box surrounding the planet, magnified it immensely, and provided her many pieces of trivia concerning the world. As she leaned back, arms propping her up, she wished to herself she had brought something to eat. "That could be solved..." she said aloud to herself, whilst mentally sending out orders to have a picnic basket brought to her.

The mind of the sentinel was a curious thing, reeking of the egotistical madness of their mistress, though this had likely not been a concern to most who had encountered them before, as they silently assaulted to remove the intruder. Sentinels were emotional creatures. Richly so, as was their design. They loved, and hated, and felt jealousy and joy and sadness. It was with great glee they hurtled through the void aboard their ships to destroy the enemies of their Empress. Fanaticism was too light a word. As their mechanical, insectlike bodies clambered through the knifehulls of Fates fleet, clawed limbs propelling them noisily down darkened cyllindrical corridors, more yet sat within the deepest interior, examining panels, and monitoring systems. Though they were silent, save for the chattering of metal hands on console pads, the captain of the ship "Joy of Faith" was relaying orders loudly and brashly to both his own, and his direct subordinates positioned around the fleet, through his internal communicator.

"We approach their world! In Her name the people must sing as we close." The sentinel Captain bellowed through his comm device.

"Assuredly, Superior Captain Devotion12. Their fraudulent leaders have apparently co-erced the defenders to resist, however. This vessels sensors has detected that they have moved into position between us and the world. It is as She said it would be." Came the first return from his second in command, Fatestar1.

"They are foolish to stand against us. But we turn this to our advantage. By destroying them amassed, they cannot strike again, Inferior Captain Fatestar1." redirecting his comm to speak to the bridge only for a moment, he issued his orders. "Inferior Navigator Aura99c, accelerate us to optimal weapons distance. Inferior Weaponsmaster Joyous7, ensure the ships weaponry is ready to begin firing." Strolling up and down the bridge, striding over bundles of exposed cabling and other debris that was not deemed necessary to clear, Devotion12 was lost in sublime reverie at the battle to come. To him, dying for Fate, who had already returned from the nether, could not be eternal.

"Superior Captain." a message came through to him from the communications Sentinel. "We entered contact range a short time ago. Should the enemy be offered a chance to surrender before they are no longer capable of enlightenment?"

"To guide all beings to the Truth is our priveliged purpose.", Devotion12 intoned, snapping out of his brash and near delirious mood abruptly. "Open me a channel so that I may address them directly."

"It is as you willed."

Whilst the background noise of the ship carried on unabated, Devotion12 made an extra effort to quieten and still himself before addressing the potential foe that stood before him.

"Noble people before us! It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the embrace of Fate. We come to liberate you from those that claim the right to rule over you, interlopers and deceivers all. Do not believe that we wish to bring harm to you or your world. But we have come, and the rule of Fate is not to be denied. Command your ships to move aside, so they can be reforged in true purpose." Signalling to close the channel, Devotion12 turned to the Weaponsmaster. "What She has told us about humans leads me to believe my words were in vain. Prepare all vessels for attack at any moment."

The Weaponsmaster merely nodded in agreement.

Admiral Naronya sweated out the minutes as the looming enemy fleet drew ever closer. So tense was his reverie that he almost did not notice it when an ensign began to yell to him,

"Sir, incoming transmission."

"Patch it through," he simply ordered.

The message of the invaders came through loud and clear over the bridge, leaving nothing but bewildered glances in its wake.

Fate? Who... what is Fate? No forward intelligence on the GFFA said anything about a Fate... thought Admiral Naronya.

"Orders sir?" queried the ensign.

"I... I don't know who Fate is... who are they? Get me a visual readout of their ships."

Upon the viewscreen of the Arizona Nova appeared the rapidly approaching fleet. They were like nothing Admiral Naronya had ever seen, but suddenly, he had a revelation, the kind of prescience that men in their last hours alive will occasionally stumble into. He was looking not into a viewscreen, but a dark and twisted mirror.

"Do you see that?" he asked weakly. "A Neodämmerung... an Arrow class... what is going on?" Snapping out of it, his composure changed. "All batteries, once the unknowns are in range, open fire!"

As one, the Arizona Novanian fleet lit up the night, as a wall of plasma and MAC shells glowing green and white were let fly, a display even those below on the homeworld were able to see.