Iskra was on his last legs, opting to slow down the teleport so he could precisely pick and choose what to take with him. In the end, this consisted of me, personal effects included, a black box that had the scans of the crew, and finally, himself. Oh, and the entire bridge of the ship, not that it was very large.
The more gradual jump was an unusual experience, I was used to them being instantaneous, instead, I felt myself phase out from existence, left behind as a ghostly entity as the ship sped away, watching it from a detached perspective for aching seconds.
It wasn't a moment too soon, the Captain had died in its own waste heat, relegating terminal guidance to the very primitive yet sturdy systems that were only good for keeping it on a linear course. This was good enough, because they were aiming for a big target, one that was close enough to see with the naked eye.
The interdiction on teleportation caused more issues for the large craft than it did Iskra; Deimos, which was locked in a duel of gamma lasers and gravity weapons with the Kill Star several hundred kilometers away, didn't have time or opportunity to jump itself away before 500 meters of pissed-off howling warship struck it at several hundred kilometers per second.
If the impact hasn't done the job (and it didn't), then the release of the grams of antimatter from their cages picked up the slack.
I'm tired of describing explosions, each one bigger than the last. I'll settle for telling you that the Promises Kept kept its last to the Admiral in the fragile box I held onto, my other locked onto the grips of the cocoon containing Iskra.
We were inside the now detached bridge, blast shutters down, the hardened structure designed to survive hits that would tear the ship apart. It was just about sturdy enough not to be evaporated in the explosion, which, even a thousand kilometers or more away, made my voidsuit melt where it had physical contact with the walls.
I desperately attended to Iskra, who was in the throes of a seizure. It had been a while since I'd done this, but muscle memory survives even a decade of lazy psychiatric work. I helped the cocoon, checking that his airways were clear, forcing more drugs than it deemed safe into his curdling blood.
Every vital reading was red, the pupils of his eyes only a window into a sea of blood.
"No more.." That's what the transducers on his throat picked up, he was in no position to speak. Even if I had been sorta slightly counting on him to get us out of this mess, I couldn't blame him too much. I checked that the life support was doing absolutely everything it could to keep him alive, without the time to evaluate if he was brain dead when I finished.
Fuck.
The bridge's systems were unresponsive, I waited for things to cool, and when the foam was no longer boiling, I manually pulled the layers of physical shutters open a crack to see what I could.
I was immediately glad that Iskra had overloaded himself to bring something along that might shield us, if he'd settled for a minimal jump, then we'd have been immediately evaporated. As it stood, our imminent demise was stuck in traffic.
Deimos, or what was left of it, had disintegrated. There were a hundred chunks of a respectable size, held together by the inky tendrils stretching out kilometers. They were the only hint of black on the surface, the rocks were melting. Most of its mass had been outright vaporized, what we were seeing had been on the far side, and even then I could tell the craft was out of commission. Great globs of liquid metal with the odd hint of man-made structures were sizzling into iron vapor, with enough making it to the surface to manifest as endless titanium rain.
Fuck that thing, I didn't care if it had been designed as one of the last lines of defense for humanity if ET overran the perimeter, it had been killing too many of our own for me to mourn the loss.
The Kill Star had halted in its rampage, almost curious, using its own grav beams to gently pry the mass apart, effortlessly tearing off the swarming tendrils that had kept the corpse together. It almost seemed disappointed, as if it had been getting just started and was psyching itself up for a real fight, only for its opponent to have an untimely stroke and fall out of the ring.
Thanks for nothing, you starfish-ass bitch.
Spacetime sighed, unraveling tense knots, the residual waves rippling my bones and making the bridge groan. It seemed quiet, while hooked up to the ship, there had been a software feature that translated events in vaccum into sound. Both convenient for meat without laser pickups, and I remember hearing something about how our auditory senses are faster on the take than our eyes are, with a noticeable delay between when we hear something and when we saw it. Another quirk of biology, likely meaningless for the crew, but I'd come to take it for granted.
Now, I hear nothing but the beating of my heart and the thrum of the life support from Iskra's coffin where it contacted my suit.
We were surrounded by corpses, dark leviathans floating past, visible only where they contrasted against the Martian surface below or blocked the stars above.
A few distant ships still had thrust, long arcs of ultrahot exhaust cutting the pizza sky into delicious slices of crumbling coal with a sprinkling of oregano stars to taste.
I felt delirious, I was running a fever even after discounting the heat dumped into my body. My lace was desperately re-routing warm blood, minimizing hypoxic brain damage and trying and failing to deal with the thermal issues. It hurt to think. So I stopped, just for a little while. Maybe a minute at most.
I was hungry. Thirsty. Thankfully there was a bit of water in the voidsuit, I sipped the hot fluid uncaring that it scalded my still unaugmented tongue. I'd kill for some Coke.
Anything new? I peeked out through the shutter again, and nobody was shooting anyone that I could see. The Kill Star hadn't made it through entirely unscathed, two of its petals had been torn off in the fight against Deimos, sedately sailing into the void while still glowing hot. There were USSF ships about, they pointed their spinal weapons at the beast, almost trembling as if they expected it to vent its wrath again on them. I half shut the blinds again, convinced that another Amat explosion would do my vision in, but there seemed to be a minor detente in the engagement.
How do I get myself out of this mess? We needed to hail something, preferably UNSC, I didn't want to subject myself to the tender mercies of the Space Force, not if I had a choice.
The bridge had electronics, but they were utterly fried, displays dull and occasionally sparking to life to show the American Megatrends screen. Man, I expected them to be running something more fancy.
Alright Adat, look around some more. And look I did, discovering that Iskra's cocoon had some kind of transmitter attached. I hooked into it, first discovering the plaintive beeping of the black box, but after figuring out how to do a broader sweep, I started listening in on emergency channels.
After finding nothing, I figured out that the bridge was acting like a Faraday cage, so I hauled my sorry ass to the door, opening it and extending the antenna out, letting the remaining shock fluid drain into space.
There, signals. It was a cacophony of distress calls and cries for help, more sobbing and swearing, operators forgetting comms brevity in their predicament. Thousands of emergency shuttles begged for assistance, or at least for nobody to shoot them while they slowly thrust out of the warzone.
Right. So that's how you manually enter auth codes. Now I could hear military comms, at least the ones that weren't further encrypted by either side.
CEASEFIRE IN EFFECT
CONFIRMED DETECTION OF CENTAUR AGI
CEASEFIRE IN EFFECT
ALL CRAFT DIRECTED TO INTERDICT UNAUTHORIZED SURFACE LAUNCHES
LEO IS NOT SAFE
ROGUE METAHUMAN PRESENCE
CEASEFIRE IN EFFECT
TRIPLE VALIDATION OF RESCUED CREW
SUBMIT AI TO AUDIT
REFUSAL WILL RESULT IN DESTRUCTION
CEASEFIRE IN EFFECT
SUPPRESSION FIELD SET TO ULTRAWIDE SPECTRUM
BROADCAST INTENT BEFORE USING POWERS
NONCOMPLIANCE WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE TERMINATION
I heard this loop over and over, with barrages of dial-up modem noises I took to be further verification codes from the respective sides. The hardware confirmed the validity of the UN code, and I presume that Turing and the USSF were saying much the same.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Put down your lances, you knights jockeying at windmills, and each other. The real enemy is showing their hand.
There, a damaged escape craft with a meta on board who hadn't been listening in, either from an inability or unwillingness to. It was immediately disintegrated, by fire from both the UN and the USSF, with even the dormant Kill Star rotating to face it before deciding it was as dead as could be.
Poor bastards. I wasn't one for prayer, multiple peer reviewed and highly powered studies had shown that praying to SAMSARA did absolutely nothing, not that that stopped the Penitents or the dozens of religions that had sprung up in its wake. Even so, I shut my eyes and held my peace, not that I was with anyone particularly talkative.
Would drinking antifreeze kill me, even with my enhanced physique? Probably, but I was sorely tempted to try, I'd do anything for a buzz.
Let's see if the drug glands have anything nice left.
My casual perusal of the paltry options remaining, most of them with undesirable psychedelic effects, was rudely interrupted by something bumping into our life raft. Not too surprising, by itself, given how much junk surrounded us, but then it was followed by the clamp of magnets attaching, and rhythmic tapping. Someone wanted my attention.
If it was USSF, I was in half a mind to shoot first, ceasefire be damned. But as I had my gun ready, pointed at the opening porthole, I noticed the man entering was in the uniform of the Texan Void Corps, that distinctive star didn't lie.
"Well, I really didn't believe Lady Purple when she said you were still alive. I suppose it's true the good die young eh?" Raul Graham told me, looking like he hadn't just been through the biggest war in Sol. I suppose he hadn't, for all I knew he had been sitting pretty ever since the ships had turned the skies to ash.
"Captain Graham. Shit, come right in." I kept my gun ready, just in case I'd outlived my usefulness, but he was unarmed, his void suit didn't seem like it could conceal much of note.
Several more troopers piled in, without weapons again, so I didn't protest too hard.
"Goddamn, this was part of a warship wasn't it?" He told me, gently touching the remnants of the Admiral's chair, keeping his hands away from the corpse with the missing head.
"Teleported out. Oh, do you happen to have medical facilities?" I asked him, pointing at the comatose Iskra, his face bruised so hard you could have mistaken him for a different race. He didn't seem like a bad sort, and if I could save him, I would.
"Shuttle's just outside, we can fit him. I assume he's not coming out of the cocoon yet?"
That was negatory, the bridge was depressurized, and Iskra couldn't be wrangled into a void suit without compromising his life support.
After a quick explanation of why I was lugging that black box along, I watched the Texans cut open the side of the bridge, with quite a bit of difficulty despite their plasma torches. A few minutes later, and we managed to detach the cocoon, after confirming it had sufficient auxiliary power.
I clambered out, noticing the shuttle waiting for us a few hundred meters away, a military model, Texan again, lights shining down on us. It had a few missiles and my desire to resist was dampened by the knowledge that if they wanted me dead, I'd already be so.
Go with the flow Adat, figure out a way to get to Gupta.
A corpse floated by gently, visor frosted, a long laser weapon gently trailing from its tether. American Space Marine, it seemed, but the exterior was so utterly roasted any identifying markers were gone. One of the presumed Texans grabbed the gun after hacking away the cord.
While nobody was firing at Mars, it seemed like there was little reason to anymore. Our orbit had brought us over the daytime side, which still roughly corresponded to what it had been when the battle had begun on the side in the shade.
Here, it seemed that some of the cities had survived, or at least not been utterly razed to the ground. I didn't envy anyone caught out on the surface, Mars had gone from being dead cold in my thermal sight to roughly what I pegged as around 60 degrees in the shade. It was cooling, rapidly, the thin atmosphere quick to release the captured heat. Right now, the most exciting thing to watch were the chunks of the equatorial Space Elevator gradually de-orbiting, sizeable portions barely visible as red meteors below.
The low gravity meant that it had been the second to be constructed in Sol, a few months after its Lunar counterpart. Far less sturdy than the one needed on Earth, and shorter too, with areostationary orbit being only 17k kilometers up. They'd managed it with kevlar, made on Mars itself. I wondered whether they'd try that again, or go with graphene. Probably not, most of the industrial capacity was going to the one in French Guiana, about 10% done now.
Half of it had collapsed when cut, intentionally or not, the other dangled below the small asteroid that been part of the counterweight on orbit. It seemed that was our destination, as the shuttle slowly thrust away from the desolate bridge, but only after they grabbed a few components that no one would miss.
The shuttle was old, the interior suggesting it had been built before the Secession, perhaps part of the early Space Force when it had been divvied up between the three new nations. It wasn't particularly spacious, but your legs don't cramp too bad when they're not made of flesh anymore.
I settled in, attaching the restraints, but this thing didn't go nearly as hard as the other craft that had terrorized me. It felt quaint, like I had taken a ride on a Model T (not the Tesla one, after they wrangled the license from Ford, I mean the OG thing, in your choice of black) after getting used to joyrides in Formula One vics.
I kept my helmet on, while the others were quick to remove theirs. Graham did look peachy, almost beatific, I can't imagine he could have hoped for a better outcome.
"So, the Texans really are behind the Patriots eh?" I asked him, checking the black box for damage. Unlikely, a label told me it was solid diamond, the data etched into the matrix, built to survive centuries in the void.
Raul shook his head. "I wish I could claim that, they've been helpful, certainly, but always too leery of starting another war with the Feds. Still, I can't say that despite being in their Martian Guard, they ever particularly cared what I did when off duty.".
Ah. He was active duty then, holding rank in the Texan Colonial Army, or more specifically, their equivalent of the National Guard. I can't imagine they were particularly mobilized, the Patriots had always targeted USMA, and their Chinese equivalents were on the other side of the empty planet.
"These guys Patriots, or Texan?" I indicated the squad he'd brought along. Hard men, extensively cybernetic, and they held their weapons like they knew how to use them. As had become instinctive, I considered if I could take them in a fight, but I'd need surprise on my side which was unlikely when they kept a close eye on me, all the more if I wanted to keep this fragile shuttle intact.
"Both. It's not mutually exclusive. By the way, can we hook into that computer? I've always wanted to talk to an upload, never had a chance myself."
"Not unless you've got an x-ray laser and a computer bigger than this thing, it's cold storage, they're going to need a while to scan and dump the contents."
Despite my bitching about the age of the craft, it wasn't so old that it needed a manned pilot, so everyone had time on their hands. After asking, I hooked into the cams, which were frankly terrible next to what I'd become used to, but still capable of spotting anything that wasn't trying too hard to stay undetected.
The Kill Star was out of my sight, it had little compunction to obey orbital dynamics, and had opted to hover in place on the night side. I was glad, even if I was likely at the bottom of the list of things it wanted to kill.
If my count was correct, about 23 UN ships were still flightworthy, maybe 30, if you considered the ones that were being pushed along by drone tugs but seemed to have working weapons.
The USSF was harder done, they had maybe ten proper warships left, but a significant number of merely interplanetary craft, which wouldn't last all of ten seconds if battle started again. Instead of tugs, the warships had clustered at a few surviving space stations, which, while armed, had wisely kept out of the fight and thus hadn't been targeted. Probably because they were packed with thousands of refugees still stuck without a way up or down.
Sensors complained about our shuttle being aggressively raked with radar and LIDAR, but it wasn't a prelude to a missile barrage and I unpuckered my anus just a little.
"Raul. Why did they stop shooting?" I had to know. Rogue metahumans? Had to be BULWARK or Lumen. Centaur AGI? If that wasn't Prometheus, then humanity was utterly fucked if we were letting multiple AI run roughshod over our systems.
He winked.
I kicked at him, not hard enough that the men opposite me shot their weapons, but they certainly had them raised in a flash.
He seemed a little unhappy about that. "Jesus Christ. Look, I'm being polite, but don't think we're friends, Blue Man. I get that we fucked up when we captured you without an explanation, but those were my friends that you killed."
"If you don't want a repeat of that, then I strongly suggest you give me the barest clue about what's going on." I glowered back, remembering Riley's terrified screams as a railgun round took out that MRAP we'd been riding in.
"Okay, I'll tell you this much, we've got word that the Centaur AI was active, but I know just about as little as what it's doing as you do. I heard that we're supposed to try negotiating with the UN, since they haven't shot at us, yet. See why we don't have to start that fight again?" He leaned back, arms crossed.
"And what's the plan? Hand me over to the UN again? I'd be okay with that, I intend to try and get to the Fleet Admiral's flagship. But what the hell, I know that you think that USMA is done, but if you think either the UN or Turing is going to let you just have a seat in the General Assembly, that's really not how that works."
"Well Blue Man, you really didn't bother to read Clark or Dennison did you? The Patriots are just the armed wing, we've got legitimate political parties and sympathy up high." He looked smug. I suppose they weren't as bad as Hamas, and they did eventually get an observer in the GA till the Israelis got bored and killed them all. All that guy did was sit in the bar and drink, religious prohibitions be damned.
The asteroid, nameless before it had been coaxed into areostationary orbit, now went by New Anchorage. That's either very staid, if you assume it followed the typical naming scheme of christening everything after a terrestrial counterpart, or a mildly acceptable pun, if you consider that it anchored the upper end of the elevator.
It functioned as the counterweight keeping the line taut, and to aid in that role, its original rough shape had been stretched out, with several kilometers of metal sticking out perpendicular to Mars. Imagine a baked potato with a rod stabbed through it, that gets the job done.
The extension had another practical purpose, it served as a sort of dock, with dozens of craft attached like puppies suckling on their Borzoi mother.
Mars did have plenty of third parties on it, even if USMA was the biggest state. There had been national fleets, Astral Marine vessels you can think of as equivalent to Merchant Marine ones on Earth's oceans. A few privately owned craft, if you were a billionaire into that. It seemed a sizeable number had sought refuge up here at New Anchorage, and I could occasionally see them flaring engines despite being docked.
Ah, so with the tether compromised, the released tension must have manifested as a shoving force forcing the asteroid into a higher orbit. They were probably trying to compensate for that, and the noticeable wobble.
There was a sizeable space station, embedded into the remaining rock. I'd passed through on my way down, but didn't really get a chance to have a proper look, I'd been hustled onto the first available slot. It seemed standard enough, but there were visible impacts scarring the white walls, likely debris that had found its way up even this far out. Still, this was a high orbit, and the worst of the carnage had been within a thousand kilometers of the surface. I didn't see any humans outside, so the risk must have still been unacceptable.
The place was owned by a conglomerate, the Elevator had been an international collaboration, and I felt a tad relieved that even if there might be a few Gray Men lurking about here, they'd be unlikely to act.
We docked, under the light of curious searchlights, and I brushed myself to shed some of the congealed gel still stuck to my suit before entering neutral ground.