Admiral Franconi had a problem. The Promises Kept was understaffed, instead of the full contingent of three other Class 4 or above metahumans he was supposed to have, and would have had, if he'd made it to Sedna where they awaited him; he was stuck with just Iskra, a decent but not particularly awe-inspiring Teleporter.
Not that he wasn't happy to have him, if he had to pick one of the four to keep, Iskra would always be first choice, his powers had already saved them from being destroyed several times over.
Still, he missed them dearly, it had been a scheduling issue that had him delayed in awaiting his American fleetmates now turned foes, it was better, he supposed, that they didn't come into conflict after joining the Task Force. Honor was no balm to the dead, but he wasn't dead yet, and thus he felt mildly better about killing people who weren't flying the same colors as he was.
He told me this via a massive packet of data that took my lace far longer to unpack than it did his extended systems to generate, gifting me mild insight into what the fuck was going on.
I was too slow for this shit myself, you might think I'm a hotshot military cyborg, but I had lightyears to go before I could keep up. What made it worse that he was used to dumping partial brain scans, his hardware made it largely unnecessary to go through the destructive scanning and uploading that was required for a full fidelity mind upload, that had already been done when his meat was remade into something better.
This was a queer sensation, I supposed the rest of the crew took it for granted, the ability to send each other their thoughts without the crude intermediary of language or even verbalization. Perhaps if my neuromorphic backup was smarter, we might even converse in a similar manner. Right now, it was just patiently waiting, aware that there was no need to intercede.
It was no Anjana, but I was a little less lonely in my head. This new emotion was unusual, I couldn't place it amongst the others I'd felt before, rage, bloodlust, purring contentment at a job well done. I eventually recognized it, the damn thing was afraid, and that wasn't even listed as a possibility in the user manual.
Understanding the data took understanding the Admiral. His mind was obviously human, more or less, and thus almost everything but certain high level concepts were conserved between our neural architectures and data structures. How do you think that Parrots and other adversarial attacks manage to work on such seemingly different people? We're almost all the same inside. Even the metas.
Still, I grappled with the occasional lack of clarity, places where I had to consciously try and unpack things instead of just grokking it right away. His mind devoted as much consideration for Honor and Integrity as I deployed for making sure my wife came back to me. He had to think different after all, not just anyone is given a nation's concentrated wealth in the form of a warship. The exams were brutal, but if you sat them, they expected you to pass anyway.
I felt sorrow that hadn't been entirely clamped down leak through, flashes of images and memories of other captains, the odd ensign he'd shook hands with before they'd rotated to a new craft. His memory was prodigious, almost eidetic even before he had a lace.
Vice Admiral Ansari. He had a husband waiting for him, now waiting for a cooling corpse gently spinning into the endless black, to be lost forever in the enormous cloud of dead ships and deader humans littering the void. The ship sensors were acute enough to tell he had been alive when he'd been spaced, and had died choking on antifreeze.
Captain Hatori. Cheers at a pub, the rare drink the Admiral let himself indulge in bright in his memory as they raised a toast in his honor.
His children. Almost grown now, living on one of the ships that were gunning it just slightly slower than light for a distant star as far from Centauri colonization efforts as possible. I take it back, there were things he cared for more than honor, he'd taken to the stars for much the same reasons I raised my gun, to keep his loved ones safe, even if his bet on doing so was to send them so far away that they would never meet again (this reminded me of El Presidente). The attrition rates in AC meant he'd made his peace with that long ago, even if it was theoretically feasible.
His pain resonated with mine, Anjana appearing in my mind's eye, holding a child who looked nothing like either of us, my hand reaching out to them a different color, more hair than usual at least. Yes, the Admiral had an arrested mental homunculus, his self-image still convinced he was made of meat and bone.
I counted cybernetic fingers in my dreams.
Was this what it was like to be psychic? It matched what the ESPers and Clairvoyants I had debriefed hesitantly conveyed.
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, sufficiently analyzed magic indistinguishable from technology.
Superpowers? I had super strength, speed, could read minds (if they had the right access ports), and was a mean motherfucker on the ground, if not the sky.
An inane recollection had me chuckling as we hurtled through space again, there had been some "superhero" in a children's cartoon that was already old by the time it was re-syndicated. His shtick was that he was just a fucking run of the mill cyborg, I think that had just been his name as well, so no points for style. Even then, I'd watched, barely in my teens, the youtube videos of humanoid robots dancing to catchy music videos, and wondered why they didn't just make more of him.
OK. Enough. Head back in the game Adat, even if it makes no difference to the outcome.
It was absolute chaos out there, Gangaputra, while far from the biggest fleet out there, had been the culmination of almost half a year's worth of output from the swollen military-industrial complex.
Great shipyards on Luna, the hundreds of captured asteroids tethered together like schoolkids holding hands in near Earth orbit, the massive foundries around Jupiter and Saturn, they'd all poured the wealth of Sol into hungry machines that turned money and raw resources into warships that weren't embarrassments next to an opponent that had flown them before my ancestors were anatomically modern.
There had been almost 700 ships in Gangaputra, the numbers would swell to over 3000 if they had merged with the USSF, then picked up the brand new vessels still awaiting crews in the outer system. Entering the Sol end of the transit network, 5000, there were retrofitted craft waiting at Sedna, forced out of obsolescence.
10,000 when they emerged from the wormhole, a quarter of a lightyear from AC.
They didn't have a fixed number in mind when they linked up with the tattered remnants of Taskforce Raijin, the exact count would depend on how many of the battered ships managed to limp their way back to the relative safety of our own star fortresses. They were supposed to go home, but the sense of pity I felt in his mind suggested that the crew weren't going anywhere but back into the meat grinder.
My mind ached, my lace and then my backup both kicking in to glean insight from a transhuman mind that dwarfed mine.
Yes, I was filtering it the wrong way, thinking that emotional salience was how he had prioritized his thoughts, instead of being entirely uncorrelated. He wept for the men on We Go Willing, while he still implacably ordered that ship to sacrifice itself to buy the metas on Agamemnon and The Red Nile time to deploy, having already released their own supes.
Good, I was getting actual tactical info, I began to understand, even if my understanding was outdated almost as soon as I grasped it.
There, that was where his mind merged seamlessly into the ship's AI, and here I couldn't tell left from right, it was just noise, anymore than I could look at the byte code on a processor and follow a game of chess.
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Fuck. I was wrong again. His homunculus wasn't just a memory of his old human form, I was looking at the entirely wrong thing, a vestigial remant I'd recognized instead of gleaning further. He felt every inch of the ship with the same unconscious awareness that I did my own fingers and the feel of my tongue against my lips.
His back was a spinal cannon, eyes zooming till he could see the continent-sized foundries around Titan. The utter cold of space was as comfortable on his hull skin as a warm breeze on mine. His rage manifested as a marginally unsafe rate of recharge in the ultracaps that fed his railgun teeth, and he wished to bite and bite and bite and bite and bite and -
Oh man, I'd been one of those blind men from the parables, jerking off the elephant and declaring it was a snake or something. He was barely human after all, looks can be deceiving. He was a wolf to my uppity chihuahua.
Fleet Admiral Gupta had taken him off the leash, even a few milliseconds of latency were well past unacceptable. Gupta had handed down the overall intent, and every ship used their best judgement to enact it.
They had gone full burn to make room, desperately struggling to keep the Kill Star between them and Deimos. While Turing hadn't bothered to interface or collaborate with the UN fleet, they had so far been shooting at the enemy, which was just about good enough to work with.
A hundred ships had perished on either side in the first minute of the engagement, the short distance making it incredibly difficult for even machine systems to evade weapons that were lethal from a thousand times the distance.
The only reason it hadn't been even worse is that in the moments before the beginning of open hostilities, most ships were still repositioning, the USSF trying to stay low and head towards Deimos, the UN trying to corral them while staying as far as they fucking could from it.
The most powerful weapons, usually lasers that outshone suns and particle weaponry, had largely been pointing at nothing. That left fusion and amat missiles, graviton torpedos (dangerous to use at such close ranges), and yet more exotic weapons.
Oh, the supes. We can't forget the supes. They were slower to warm up than the automated systems, even the poor bastards currently being puppeted by AI had to operate on neuronal firing time scales. They teleported, flew or walked into some of the most hostile territory known to man. At least until the survivors, and it was far from certain there would be any, reached AC.
One by one, some of the most powerful metahumans still in the Solar System were brought online, told which of the nigh identical ships out there were hostile, and then began their rampage.
The temperature in the cabin dropped precipitously, so fast that I could see crystals of ice propagating in the shock foam. We withdrew out of range, the heaters diverting a ridiculous amount of energy from the engine to keep us from icing over. Whichever enemy supe had done this, he fucked thermodynamics harder than usual, managing to act as a heat sink that was operating thousands of degrees below the theoretical limit of zero kelvin.
It wasn't Frost. I'm sorry if I gave you the impression that supes are particularly unique. Far from it, the classification system only worked because most could be thrown into convenient buckets. Cryomancers were common, but one that could pull gigawatts of heat out of a fusion plant coupled to antimatter engines had to be Class 5, and Frost was an ice-cube to his glacier.
A UN ship diverged from its projected course, its engines were flaring at max Q, so strong it could have tugged a modest planetoid across the system in days. Yet it was slowly, inexorably being pulled down, decelerating, then gaining relative velocity on a collision course for the convenient corpse of a USSF ship, the Class 6 Telekinetic deciding to kill a bird with another, deader, bird. The impact did the celestial neighborhood no favors, but we were already on the wrong side of the wrong tracks.
A USSF ship, gamely firing a particle lance at a seemingly disabled ship from the Indian contingent, didn't have time to do much of anything before the illusion dissipated, revealing another USSF ship screaming with electronic throats gone hoarse for the friendly fire to cease. Too late, it was a moth flitting into a flamethrower. Yeah, things were moving so fast that you could misplace something the size of a skyscraper, all the worse because of the energy flooding the space, ships with cloaks either technological or metahuman flitting in and out of sight.
Mars was 15° C hotter and climbing, and it had only taken a small fraction of the bombardment. Anyone stupid enough to keep on looking up had lost their sight ages ago, and now they'd be roasting in the radiant heat of the upper atmosphere.
The Kill Star was seemingly unbothered by the fracas. A Space Force supe, convinced that at the high end of Class 5, he was close to the top of the pecking order, attempted to buzz it while shooting what could best be described as "energy" balls from his palms, each growing to the size of a city block, yet beachballs next to a Tyrannosaurus when they arrived near it and promptly vanished.
Then he and the intrepid ship he was standing on were torn into their constituent quarks, and since you can't separate quarks, with efforts to pull them apart only imbuing them with more potential energy and force to recoil back with, this went poorly. Think of it like a rubber band that'll snap the universe before it does, it all came flying back at close to the speed of light, achieving energy densities so high that space-time couldn't take it any more, forming into a black hole of the mass of a very stupid man and a just as idiotic spaceship.
It wasn't particularly black, black holes get colder the bigger they are, and conversely, they get very very hot when they're small, getting ever hotter at an exponential rate till they dissipate with an enormous bang.
If it had been just the man, or even man plus ship, then the new blackhole would have microseconds or less to live, so goodbye Mars, and Earth probably. But that was something the Kill Star likely didn't want to see either, so it lumped him in with both the ship and gigatons of random debris, clearing up several cubic kilometers around it and packaging it into a black hole that didn't just explode again. The dull red new celestial body was then grabbed by the gravity manipulators and yeeted out of the plane of the ecliptic.
I genuinely couldn't tell how much metahuman power it was using, remember what I told you about technology and magic becoming interchangeable? It was still far from showing its full might, engagements between Kill Stars and Centauri Dreadnoughts had left some of the outer gas giants in AC with brand new rings and missing moons.
Another reason for the lower than expected casualty rate was the amount of graviton flux. It was perceptible to a baseline human from all the way down on the surface, as an ache in their bones and nausea as their vestibular systems were throwing up their hands as well as their stomach contents.
Closer, it was titanic, stars seeming to jump and wobble erratically, like an extremely clear yet very dense lens had centered itself around the Kill Star. Everything went somewhere slightly different from where you fired it at, but the ship sensors had already recalibrated.
It wasn't all endless violence. I was surprised to see a Class 3 civilian supe screaming for mercy on the comms, using either telekinesis or super strength to carry a small space station on his back, crammed full of more civilians. He was half blind, his skin peeling where it wasn't fused to his suit, and had blundered into the crossfire. Yet I saw an USSF ship take a blow it could have dodged, and fire at a less than optimal target, as per our projections which had so far been accurate, all so it didn't turn the man into a slightly different shade of plasma. The fight moved on so fast that he was left alone, not aware of that small act of mercy.
There was a military target that neither opened fire nor was targeted, despite the abundance of opportunities.
It was the Chinese ship bearing the unfortunate Shen. Nobody seemed to be in a rush to give him the reprieve of death, and for good reason, he was extremely valuable, outright irreplaceable. Both sides were concerned about rogue metahumans, and some of the defenses relied on metahuman powers to handle some of the hacks an alien AI could unleash.
Both sides were talking to each other, with packets of information and not just their guns. Imagine a scene out of the 18th or early 19th century, when two gentlemen generals drank tea with their pinkies out and discussed Clausewitz, wrinkling their noses when the stench of bowels and the screams of men and horses were blown their way by the wind.
It happened on much faster time scales, of course, machines shaking cryptographic hands, able to trust the other would keep their word because they were open books to each other, sharing their cognitive architecture after the standardization and streamlining organized by Turing a decade prior. The Polonium-class running the Promises Kept was identical down to the compute units with the sibling it was trading fire with.
Trades were being made. This supe too expensive to die, we'll let you keep that warship that is dead but could be deader. You refrain from glassing Hellas and we'll hold fire on your colonists in Tharsis, if they're not already dead from the sheer rads. The anthropogenic global warming on Mars had been unevenly distributed, the battle was largely over the side in the shade, or at least it would have been if we didn't outshine the sun on a regular basis. The polar ice caps had slowly started to melt. Anything on the surface that wasn't smart enough to seek shelter had been irradiated, the Firmament was long gone, the collapsed shroud that had draped abandoned cities like a funeral shroud had burnt away, and even hardened structures were scorched, the ash blasted into a rain of sand and glass.
And yet both sides preferred to fight to the bitter end, no compromise had been made, and Turing, like it was wont to do, decided it was time to keep swinging the stick, they never really handed out carrots in the first place.
Why had nobody told me that Deimos could teleport?
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