I watch the gears turn in Corporal poo’s head when the room shakes and concrete chunks and dust blow in from the stairwell at moderate speed moments later. Some heck of a bomb must have been detonated above us. If a concrete enclosure was damaged, the warehouse must have been leveled.
What the hell was mom thinking!! What if I was still in there, damnit?!
My personal shields activate as I fail to avoid some chunks of the rubble. Other members of the team fell and others had their shields cracked by large chunks of concrete. Before we have time to recover, the better protected cats advance on us with weapons free. Except the one that fell into the open door. Half of it is missing. Now there’s an idea.
/Corporal, that door is equipped with a disintegrating array, if you can push them toward it, I can kick them through./
\No way am I letting you get into melee with them.\
/Put your head shields on and throw some grenades, Corporal, or we’re going to die soonest./ Idiots have good t-2 armor and they haven’t activated their head shields. Dingbats. When a bolt skims off my armor, I scurry behind the nearest Marine. I didn’t remember to ask for a spatial storage device before this expedition and now I’m at a loss for a ranged weapon. I should have take a gun off of the cats in the office, but now the office doesn’t exist.
While the Marines are firing back, I’m inventorying grenades on their persons. Seeing an appropriate thermobaric—weird what the system thinks I should remember—I pull it off the belt, activate it and blink forward and up to drop the grenade and blink back to hide again. Heat and pressure slam us against the wall and I see that another cat is almost in the door.
I blink again and speed burst dive bomb the cat as he attempts to stand, wings out as I kick it with all my speeding mass. Before seeing the results of my daring-do, I double blink back to where I was and collapse for a few breaths. I pull out some aether infused snacks and jam them into my face.
\Warn us next time, kid.\ He rises to keep shooting at the recovering cats. \Some of us were hurt in that blast.\
/To hurt to shoot or throw grenades?/
\There are thousands of pounds of batteries in here kid.\
/They’re inert you turd. Stop whining like a child and get to work./ Corporal’s face screwed up into a sneer as the rest of the squad showed astonishment. Good. Called me Kid again. Jerk.
The opposing sets of guns trade shots and get nearly nothing done. The cats have amazing energy protection this time and the ballistics we brought don’t seem to hurt them much, even if they get through.
Corporal poo tosses a grenade after we brace and then the whole team focuses on one of the cats with their weapons and manage to gun down one of the remaining seven. Another is recovering by the door so I take another chance to blink up and torpedo toward it. At the last moment I swear it grins as it swats me toward the doorway as it slumps aside. The slap dazes me for a moment and before I can collect myself enough to blink away, I’m through the doorway. Horrified, I freeze up waiting for my disintegration. I wait long enough slam into the floor and then the wall when my vision blacks and my mind blanks.
***
Turns out, if you have the title ‘of the Matrix’ you can abuse loopholes in a few gate protocols as long as they aren’t explicitly for war. For example, it would not normally be possible to link to the gate network without being physically present. For a primarily aether-based being with the right title and an entanglement-based ability, I can use a small portion of my mater to open a gate enough for my energy to pass through. This is what allowed my pre-planned will to get me from Clotho to the system host in Astoria system that I used to sling me a galaxy over at great token cost through the respective core hosts to a trade planet in Andromeda Galaxy, a single node away from the home of the Supercluster Forum.
I’d landed here previously after taking my shuttle through one of the ship gates in the system and landing for a mana re-supply. In the last two years, my aether infused Corundum crystals have become a popular storage medium in the Milky Way, but many of the Supercluster powers were reluctant to adopt foreign tech from an upstart civilization. Can’t blame them really. Also hard to argue with the fact that drained crystals were dirt cheap on the shade markets here, and that aether infused food was common and reasonably priced, making my current situation of needing a large amount of stored aether tenable as I can charge them myself.
I try to focus on the demands of the here and now, and of the mission that I had committed the will for, but flashes of horror and destruction of my Marines come back to me, and the unknown fate of my daughter.
Though I hadn’t planned on being a mother this soon, learning new things about the creature I am becoming and having this fun, reasoning miscreant call me ‘Momma’ has been a gift—the happiest of accidents.
I pinged Astoria as soon as I arrived. Knowing how the energy space works, and the impossible distance involved in traveling two million plus lightyears, the process is going to take at least a few hours. Until then, I won’t know how my errant acceptance of my daughter’s pleas have been met with disaster or catastrophic dysphoria. I feel a sickness in my stomach, but a part of me knows that whatever has happened, that even if it’s my last act, I can ensure that my daughter survives.
Which is more than I can say for the Herrati.
After gathering and charging twenty crystals of various size, I summon my shuttle and charge her at the nearest port authority. The details of how many credits and tokens I have spent are largely immaterial. As the Empress, I have ultimate authority of my systems’ funds. But after the emergency purchases I’ve made, I have maybe a thousand tokens and a few hundred million credits—nowhere near enough to run an Empire.
It’s sad to say that I bankrupted my people to even stand a chance at pushing back the Herrat threat. Now, I feel as though I have to finish it to ensure we make our short term escape into a long-term survival plan. Well, it’s a lesson to me and the cats: don’t engage in total war, unless you can afford it. The danger is, the desperate party decides when total war exists.
I decide.
As the desperate party, the extra gates I engraved were pre-positioned. As the desperate party, my advisors and businesses have been gearing up for nearly a year. With my shuttle and my collected crystals and my personal reserves, a desperate party might be able to power two gates by themselves for several minutes. What could an enterprising young Empress devise that would make a difference with a few minutes? I asked myself that many times. Still wonder if it’s enough.
I convinced myself that ceramics are hard to melt. Then, I read the tech specs of the enchanted gate ceramic gateway blanks. Finally, I realized just how many extra enchantments I could fit on the blank side of a one-way gate. At first, I tried to think of ways to make my efforts more destructive and not a single consideration was mathematically more destructive than more time. So, I researched and devised interlocking protective enchantments that might be able to survive a nuclear blast. Instead, the protective enchantments of one gate would be sent to skim the bottom of the photosphere of the local star, moving at hundreds of kilometers per second.
The other gate I’m parking on their planet’s surface. The best part is I could have funded a space fleet with the millions of tokens this cost to implement, but I didn’t have the time or the people to build it. The truth is, once the Herrat delivered their ultimatum, it was too late to hire others to build it because the traders didn’t want to be caught on the wrong side of the victors.
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“It’s sad that my normal voice of reason was recently emancipated from my body and thus her constant presence in my brain.”
I still listen you know.
Yeah, but you’re going to tell me this isn’t necessary again aren’t you?
I disagree that this is necessary, but it is the quickest way to keep the Herrati from threatening our futures.
Thanks? Also how are we talking this way over the distance?
I left a remnant, like I do with shuttles and bases on occasion. We’ll synch after you return to a reasonable communications distance.
Huh. Well, great. Another witness. We will talk about your spying habits later.
I blip the shuttle out of the local gravity well and set a course to the opposite side of the star that the Herrati home world orbits to find my gate nestled on some trojan asteroids following the dominant gas giant in the system. I charge the runes as I place the opening toward the star, using the HUD in my suit to plot the optimal course for skimming the photosphere before the protections are overcome. I energize the timed plasma jets that set the ring spinning at tens of thousands of rpm before the jets cut out. I take another moment to check the teleport and plasma jet calculations before energizing the propulsion jets and teleporting the gyro-stable mess of enchantment to within 0.01 AU of the star. That should give me an hour and a half or so to finish setting up and maybe talk the Herrati down before I destroy them.
I take my ship to a closer position behind one of the Herrat home world moons and make my preparations for the gate that has been stored within my shuttle cargo space for a year. I portal to the surface in a desert-scape with the gate and lay it down with runes to the sky before the cats notice my shuttle. I have a relay set up, no doubt they will be able to track it in minutes despite my desire for Tessa to rout it through their Magitech systems.
“Astorian craft, you are in Herrati system space. You will be arrested and your ship will be destroyed.” Said some nearly robotic goon.
“Herrati goon, this is the Empress of the Astorian Empire. I demand a cessation of hostilities and an audience with the War Leader’s Council.” The green air traffic controller stuttered a bit and said the equivalent of ‘wait one’. I waited ten and then energized the runes on the exit gate and teleported to my shuttle.
The screens on my shuttle popped with energy, then static, then I see a scarred and tired hunter address me. “Empress claimant, we have dispatched a diplomatic envoy and then an investigation fleet to speak with you. Have they not been cordial and forthcoming?”
“Before I respond to the outlandish misrepresentation of your intent, am I talking with someone that can make decisions for the Herrati at large?”
“You are, but this is irregular for . . .”
“It was irregular for a diplomatic envoy to try and kill me. It is also irregular for me to offer your species survival in exchange for a century-long cessation of hostilities, but here we are.” I nearly growl at the console. The longer they delay and posture, the less I can do to cancel the destruction.
“We were unaware that Humans were capable of reaching this galaxy. It must have been exorbitantly expensive. What more could you levy if all you brought was a shuttle?”
“War leader, I invented the tech that propelled my race to Matrix propelled space. What makes you think I couldn’t ruin a civilization after three years of having the Matrix enhance my actions.”
“We have enjoyed the Matrix for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Empress, our forces are far beyond your Empire’s capabilities.”
“I agree entirely, War Leader, but a motivated, enterprising person can become more powerful than the restrictions of their society.” I say, openly acknowledging the restrictions of the Forum and that I actively ignored how they apply to me. “My tech tier may be slightly behind yours, but I assure you that my aether tier is far beyond. Stop this war and you will not have to find the limits of my resolve.”
Despite what I know of myself, despite what I know I have planned, I hope that they don’t just fully rely on their intelligence reports—such an action would be folly. Yet when I hear the scoff and see his paw-wave, I know he has no faith in my statements. I know he assumes I’m bluffing.
“Well, if that’s your position, then I recommend you evacuate? The point of no return is nigh and if you send ships I will steal them.” My HUD alerts me that the spinning ring has entered the star’s corona. The initial effects would be slow, as matter density is low at that position unless a flare occurs at a fantastically low probability of location.
“Our ships will be on location within an hour, please do not resist, we will not hesitate to kill you.” His smug whiskers twitch in pleasure to a game he thought he’s won.
I might have to play a little cat and mouse to get the times to align, but nothing difficult.
Doing the math, an average main stage star has a circumference between 1 and 10 million miles, or 1.6 to 16 million k. At 100 kps or kips, and skimming about two percent of the photosphere in it’s transit. That’s about two to twenty minutes in that space with the gate collecting plasma to dump through the other gate. A solar flare puts out an average of 40 megatonnes of tnt a second and severely restricting that over a period of the time required is a frankly unseemly amount of energy deposited on their planet. Despite the Chronosphere not being particularly dense in matter, the flux of photon and other radiation is massive—that is if a coronal mass ejection doesn’t knock the gate off course.
The gate in the sand will likely start off slow by the radiation coming through and being absorbed by the local atmosphere, attenuating more than 90% of the energy withing the first t300m of air. It should progressively heat the area until the surrounding sand starts to melt into a multiple thousand centigrade inferno of molten and vaporized glass, driven by hydrogen plasma many multiples hotter as the density of the plasma ejected increases as the gate lowers through photosphere to touch the surface. Even minutes of the ground sustaining this continued heat injection could be catastrophic, but the ejecta of a molten sand pit erupting into a climate system is enough to ruin a world without the radiation flux continuing to attenuate in the thickening atmosphere. At some point the roiling plumes of hot hydrogen ions will diffuse enough through the atmosphere that an odd occurrence of chemistry will start to ruin the atmosphere further. I don’t know the exact mixture of gasses in Herrati air, but they seemed fine on astoria. Anyway, once the hydrogen reaches a saturation above 5% or so, it starts burning oxygen when heated over 700k or 427 Celsius. At the higher end of the heat and hydrogen spectrum, the oxygen in the sand strips from the silicon and aluminum and burns as well. It’s possible that as the gate skims the surface, enough hydrogen will be introduced to create a chainfire in the atmosphere—if the troposphere doesn’t catch on fire first.
The low-end predictions say that the Herrati survive, but have to evacuate because 97% of flora will die based on those conservative estimates. The average has most of the cats cooking before they can make it to a space port or a bunker.
About thirty minutes of bouncing around their moon to evade capture, and less than thirty seconds into the gate activation the aurora across the magnetic poles of the planet begin appearing in the day.
My comms chirp then.
“Empress, enough, we agree to your terms!” The now desperate cat pleads.
“Too hot to turn it off War Leader. Time to own it and evacuate with the minutes you have left.”
“There is not enough time! There are billions of citizens that need to evacuate! Have mercy.”
I scoff at that and sneer my response, “Like the mercy you would have given my race as slaves?! Now my vengeance is paid tenfold, War leader.”
I’m sure he had more to say and to swear, but the communication was shoddy already, and the electronic systems in space must have finally expired. The communications failed far before their ability to escape did. The War Leader’s reluctance to take the situation seriously doomed all but the most prepared survivalists and paranoid dignitaries. I proceeded to shoot government vessels out of the sky because they should have to lie in the bed that they made.
I watched the minutes until the origin gate in the star disintegrated in expired aether and ceramics. The snuffing of the exit gate was barely noticeable save the flare of energy retreated back into the atmosphere where the superheated sand and volcanic ejecta dominated the heating forces while the cascading hydrogen burn exacerbated the devastation, watching the hours distant forests and water heat beyond design as they burned and evaporated in turn. The more smoke and steam, the worse the prognosis was. I’m sure that scholars in the future would identify the superheated promulgation of hydrogen burning everything is what started the global extinction. The heat rise would get most, but the smoke and atmospheric debris would get the rest. The truth of it was, though, Penny is what started it, or rather ended it—the Herrat started this war.
Beware the intelligent and capable sociopath. Not that I can’t empathize, it’s just that the ends justify the means to me, to a degree that seems insensitive and immoral. My people’s freedom: the fey, Human, Collective, or otherwise, deserve a future free of intergalactic harassment. The Matrix tells me that the Herrati would never have stopped, only regrouped, led me to this.
As a third of their planet burned in visible flames, I wasn’t sure that justification mattered. One might find my willingness, no duty, to watch the consequences of my decisions as a psychotic indulgence. One might also question whether boarding and planting A-M bombs on the remaining military ships as excessive. One might also underestimate the cost of persistent and lasting freedom.
As penance, Andromeda forced me to read every single notification. I minimized the window to a small corner of my view, but even then, I could see the small window scroll with notifications that I murdered people. It would eventually take days for those notifications to stop.