If you get your kicks from updating Wikipedia, check the edit logs on the article named "Satellites of Mars" the day this all kicked off. There was an automated telescope around Ceres, hooked up to an AI that for some reason happened to keep a running count of the number of moons around the planet, updating as fast as possible.
I'm not sure how this came to be, but mighty prescient of them, because the millisecond by millisecond doubling and halving of the count of the "natural" moons was a fair representation of just how many times Deimos flickered in and out of existence.
Nothing that big should move that fast, and at this point I think calling it a natural satellite anymore was a bit questionable.
Where it went, warships died. UN vessels that had survived impacts that would level cities were tissue paper, and Deimos the woodchipper. It had its own grav weapons, and if they didn't operate the same way as the Kill Star's did, they had much the same terminal effect on the poor fools caught in the way.
The UN tac referred to this abomination as a graviton whip. There was no sexy lady swinging it, just a pissed off battle-moon that projected just as much Fuck You as any number of tiny islands used by the American Empire to project force in its colonial endeavors.
The whip cracked, gravity jumped. Spacecraft were disintegrated, or if they looked intact from the outside, the interiors were anything but. Unlike the gravity cannon, as I choose to call it in lieu of a more official term (UN records called it the rather dull "Grade Alpha Graviton Weapon"), which delivered damage along the way before detonating in the midst of concentrations of enemy craft, this whip was a targeted weapon. Ships along the course were mildly discombobulated, but it seemed the weapon acted by focusing multiple slightly offset beams that converged at one point and poured titanic amounts of energy in a relatively small area. A sniper, as opposed to a rocket launcher.
Several Class 6 supes I hadn't even heard of (a clear sign they'd been working for national militaries since the day they'd manifested), attacked it from Gupta's flagship.
One of them was in, of all fucking things, a mecha, ignoring the square-cube law with undue glee and quite literally trying to punch the moon. I shook my head, real 100% physics based organic free-range bipedal mechs rarely grew bigger than 3 or 4 meters tall, at that point they had absolutely no upsides over a tank or aircraft. Maybe a little larger in low gravity, but they were still a solution looking for a problem.
This one didn't care that it was too dumb to exist, the Technomancer/Crafter who ran it didn't get the memo, and it roared, I mean roared, audible in my ringing ears despite the nominal vacuum of space.
This always gave me a headache. Back in the day, there was a lot of speculation on whether or not constructs like these were only pretending to be metaphysical, there were concerted efforts to reverse-engineer them in the hopes of novel yet reproducible insight.
I had to provide therapy to some of the Munchkins who tried.
In the early 20s, when AI image generation was in its infancy, and I was still in my first year of med school, I tried generating anatomical diagrams of a human, just out of curiosity really. They looked plausible, you could see muscles, tendons, nerves and the like, but if you actually looked closer, that's where the resemblance to reality absolutely fell apart. It looked human, but by Allah anyone built along those lines wouldn't have long to live.
It was a similar situation for people trying to open up and examine constructs, from the outside it might look like an unusually large mundane mech, but inside, despite having wiring, moving parts, targeting computers and so on, they ranged from vestigial to paradoxical. Some components were clearly not hooked up at all, yet the system stopped working if you removed them. Others had the exact opposite of their predicted effect. The best bet was to seal it back up and leave it like you found it.
(There are some supes who make things that are actually based on actual physics, Dr. Fang Shen's Reality Anchor was long believed to be entirely mundane, which is why the CCP lobotomized him. The moment they did so, they found out that none of the factories churning the devices out under his supervision worked any more, even if the devices previously made did; the new ones looked physically identical but simply didn't work at all)
The mecha moved fast enough to keep up with the warships, firing its oversized weapons, which, misgivings about how they actually worked aside, seemed to do very real damage. A blast crippled the USSF Emancipation, the ship unable to get away before a massive hand grabbed it by the midsection and then crushed it, tossing it down at Mars hard enough to deorbit. Despite the name, it proved just as much a slave to gravity as I was.
The supe piloting the mecha must have had a reasonable idea of what Deimos was capable of, since they did their best to lurk in the midst of clusters of US ships. It seemed the barrage of railgun sabots, fusion warheads and lasers that melted the carapace and blew one of the six arms off the mech were infinitely preferable to tussling with the moon. Smart man.
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Deimos took a dim view of the murder of its little siblings, cracking the whip again. The mecha convulsed, proportions visibly fucked, but stood its ground and fired a glowing energy weapon on its chest. A hapless unmanned logistics ship, which so far had been ignored in the fighting, was caught in the beam and disintegrated like a comet aiming for the Sun. The beam splashed against a force field that manifested around the Battle Moon, hard xrays and UV forcing the cameras I was using to squint. The shield flickered, and the last tail end of the beam managed to score a direct hit on Deimos, scouring away visible weapon emplacements even if the damage was nowhere near debilitating. In response, the Moon flickered, teleporting several kilometers away, and then cracked the whip again, cutting the mecha in twain. Both halves twisted fitfully, the bottom deprived of the weapons, the upper half losing propulsion even if the guns were still firing. Deimos pulsed, blowing up the base that had decided to accelerate at it in the hopes of landing a drop-kick, absolutely demolishing it into constituent ionized atoms that deflected harmlessly from incredibly strong magnetic shields, spiraling down to ground itself on Mars.
The supe was too important to lose, a UN Teleporter jumped over and grabbed the pilot, before scramming moments before an antimatter missile destroyed the rest, one last severed arm firing ineffectually at Deimos before the recoil sent it flying off elsewhere.
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When I first described Deimos, catching a glimpse as the Next Time arrived near Mars, it had seemed largely mundane, a glorified asteroid covered in installations, massive railguns and particle cannons. I didn't know if those were illusory, but now, the thing looked more alien than the Centauri did.
The surface was a swirling ball of something akin to ferrofluid, black swirls of dense liquid that crackled with static electricity. It buzzed, at such high electrical potential that you saw arcs of current crackling from damaged ships to ground themselves against it, and even the odd bolt up from Mars a dozen kilometers below. Its weapons were firing from inside the swarm, the skies parting for a shot before covering it up moments later. Incoming shots that made it past the shields sometimes evaporated the liquid, but more flowed to cover the wounds.
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It seemed like it would withstand all the firepower that the UN ships could pour into it, deflecting most of it, taking even antimatter hits and only shedding some boiling mass before teleporting away and returning the favor.
Two-thirds of the warring vessels were out of the action, gigantic cylindrical sarcophagi that either glowed with heat or had begun cooling down again, faster if the droplet radiators were still online.
While the UN had started with a numerical advantage, they'd taken the first hit from the panicked Americans, and they also took fire from orbital weapon platforms and surface installations. Mars wasn't owned by any single nation, but America had always had the head start in the colonization efforts, and there were no end of bases and stations that decided today was the day to justify the trillions that had been spent on them over the decades.
Civilian stations, the ones that hadn't been able to move into the furthest orbits they could, suffered in the crossfire. Even if nobody had been actively targeting them, they weren't built for such a hostile environment, and stray shots, Kessler junk, and gravitational perturbations compromised them one by one.
I felt the Admiral suppressing the tiny emotional portion of his remaining meat brain that felt black despair as the distress signals went quiet one by one. However, something else had been demanding the bulk of his attention:
Like most human warships, the Promises Kept relied on droplet radiators. Powdered tin melted in the enormous heat of the fusion plant and antimatter thrusters, melting into tiny droplets that were fired out from the sides, before magnetic fields were used to direct them in a loop where collectors captured them again and brought the cooled drops into a closed loop. It was far faster than deploying normal radiators, which were largely inadequate for the task.
In contrast, this was something rarely seen except as backups in Centauri ships, which preferred to eject their waste heat as neutrinos, and often used them for thrust too. Far harder to detect, but I found the glowing red wings that surrounded our own craft to be worth it for the aesthetics alone.
Our stores of suitable material, while enormous, were far from infinite. Large amounts had been lost in aggressive maneuvering, the collectors on the port side destroyed by the glancing impact earlier. And worse, when Iskra teleported us, his powers didn't encompass the entire volume around the ship, and more and more had been lost.
The ship was overheating, while most of the components could easily continue functioning even past the temperature at which lead melts, neither the ship computers nor the crew could survive. Heat sinks were prioritizing manned sections and the redundant compute clusters, but they were starting to give up the ghost.
The Promises Kept had minutes left to live before it cooked us all, perhaps half an hour if it didn't keep jumping away from Deimos. But stopping the latter would almost certainly end in us joining the other dead UN ships that had been too slow to evade.
I felt my stomach drop as the Admiral's mind made some very hard decisions. Why am I the only one with a degree of self-preservation?
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Earth sits in the middle of the largest sensor grid in the Solar System, likely still more acute and sensitive than even the ones around Sedna. Tens of thousands of telescopes and other sensors stare unblinking into the void, each to the old Hubble or Webb of my childhood what the latter were to my dad's backyard toy.
Nothing evaded their eyes, every asteroid, comet, or craft tracked well before it crossed the Oort and came into the inner reaches of the system.
The consequences of failure were unacceptable, it took one Relativistic Kill Vehicle making it through the early warning and defense systems to utterly end the cradle of civilization, even if humanity as a whole might yet survive. Earth was indispensable, still, the metahumans propping up our end of the war between worlds were a predictable function of the total population of baseline humans. And the majority, about 11 billion of them, were still right at home.
One of these tireless sentries noticed an abnormality, its relatively small machine brain, only about as smart as a human, spotting a tiny object accelerating far harder than anything ought to be able to. Centaur? They had some very fast drones. However, it discounted the possibility when it became clear the entity was moving away from Earth. RKVs only came one way, for now. Zooming in, it saw a mildly redshifted image of a human wearing a flowing cape, headed right for a secretive station where a Teleporter was quartered for emergencies.
Ah. Consul. It had seen him before, the man was restive, often doing laps around the system when nobody bid high enough for his attention. The AI was a pared down, emotionless thing, built for one task and one task only. It felt no impatience, no real curiosity now that Consul wasn't a threat, no envy that the man could sail the stars while it would spend the rest of its existence quietly floating in the void, too cheap and disposable to be scrapped, or even for its consciousness to be beamed back home.
Still, if the emotions of something so far from human could be parsed productively, it was thinking along the lines of "Yeah, that's an RKV if I've seen one. I wonder what they're doing up there?".
And then its sensors spotted the first hints of the chaos around Mars, light itself achingly slow as it crawled between planets to bring word from distant shores. It brought rarely used cores and antennae online, and sent word home, as did the thousands of others watching the unquiet night.
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