Jidari 76th Orbital Precinct, Jidaruun, Thiezl System, Gel’dan Quadrant, 4056AD
~
CODE BLUE.
ALL PERSONNEL REPORT TO DESIGNATED BRIEFING ROOMS.
CODE BLUE.
ALL PERSONNEL REPORT TO DESIGNATED BRIEFING ROOMS.
“You’re with us, kid.”
Marvin looked up at the big warrior with apprehension. Corporal Wilkins had left the hapless officer with the intimidating squad of Legionaries as he left with the Speculator on higher-up business. He’d assumed the two would return before drop time but obviously not.
“I- but- the announc- okay, sir.”
He wasn’t anywhere near brave enough to gainsay the mountain of flesh in front of him, so he just walked along with them quietly.
Still though, surely the soldier didn’t mean he would be dropping with them? That would be… insane.
He queried his companionAI on the details.
Just as the text came up in his viewfield, just as his worst fears were confirmed, he blinked.
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Warning: Training module engaged. Module: Tutorial [1/2].
What the hell? I’m gonna kill that fucking AI.
Khoza tried to blink, but his body was not under his control.
It was also not his body.
The fuck? Are those tech implants? Why am I white now?
Warning: Non-interactive mode.
He tried to scratch his suddenly-itchy nose.
Warning: Non-interactive mode.
He tried to call for Dag.
Warning: Non-interactive mode.
Awesome.
From what he could tell, he was in a virtual space of some kind, though vastly more advanced than he was used to back in Sol. He could feel the rustle of his police-issue AugSuit over his arm hairs. He could taste the echoes of mint and lavender on his breath from his motherAI’s special morning brew. He could smell the faint musk of sweat and violence that emanated off the Legionaries in the room with him.
AugSuit? MotherAI? What the fuck is a Jidaruun?
Legionaries, at least, was a self-explanatory term. The four massive, ridiculously muscled, hard-faced men standing with him couldn’t be anything other than the soldiers named for the ancient scourges of classical era Europe, whose boots marched Rome into immortality.
The huge soldiers were talking to the person whose perspective he had taken, a local named Marvin Ruun #4703819, a vat-baby raised by the government for civil service.
That’s… wow.
They were ushering him into what looked like one of the enclosed bubbles dotting the outside of the Dialectic, one of the hub stations the Commune was built around. They were little more than private viewrooms for the wealthy to admire the Belt and the constellation of all the O’Neill Cylinders and enclosed habitats that orbited within the ring of asteroids that defined the borders of Inner Sol.
These bubbles, however, were more serious. Marvin and the soldiers all squeezed into the pod, clearly cramped, the big men going over their strategy, Marvin taking deep breaths and trying not to faint.
Same, dude.
Having exhausted all his options and getting that stupid warning sign every time, Khoza decided to sit back and let this play out. This was clearly part of whatever plan the aliens had for him and it didn’t seem like they wanted to simply kill him. It was strange, though, how an alien technology had deposited him into a human experience. He didn’t know whether these were real events or completely fabricated, but he was meant to learn something in here.
So he metaphorically sat down and let himself fully embody Marvin.
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Marvin mumbled to himself, not even keeping track of the words he was saying, he just had to get something out, lest he whimpered in fear and further embarrassed himself in front of these legends.
He’d never been on a drop before.
And now here he was dropping with the most badass men in the galaxy.
He shifted uncomfortably in his harness. The seats in the drop-pod weren’t meant to be comfortable, but they could’ve sprung for at least a thin layer of mem-foam.
All part of the thankless job of keeping the peace.
Sitting across from him were the four men, who’d shucked off their robes in favour of tight black bodysuits. The Sol’raan Command Special Operations First Branch, colloquially known as the Iconoclasts, were the stuff of legend. Before Marvin had ever even seen the sky, his motherAI had let him watch the holofics. Footage of them in action was heavily censored, and incredibly hard to obtain, but across the galaxy, many had imagined what kind of missions they got sent on. Every child in the central territories and most in the frontier had watched the Adventures of Dangir and imagined themselves wearing the Lorica in his place, dispensing justice all over the Empire.
These hard-faced giants were nothing like Dangir.
One of them turned his eyes, glowing with light circuitry tracing through his irises, onto the uncomfortable young man sharing the pod with them. When he spoke, his voice vibrated Marvin’s chest.
“You’re going to be our native guide. Tell us more about this gang, your own perspective from walking the street. Datapackets never contain the full story.”
Stammering out an answer, Marvin summarised the meteoric rise of the Apostles in much less coherent terms than Corporal Wilkins had. They’d been around for a while but over the past year, they’d moved from being one of the many subordinate gangs of the Collective, to pushing the planetwide criminal organisation completely out of four gridblocks, with them having effectively replaced the government in their main gridblock. With only three million men under their command, they were nowhere near the most powerful illegal element on the trillion-citizen strong hive-world, but they were the only one punching so far above their weight class, disrupting the regional balance of power, as to warrant Imperial attention.
The soldier listened to him quietly, slowly nodding. When the police corporal mentioned the illegal experiments his precinct had flagged, the huge man shared a knowing look with his squadmates before questioning further.
“Experiments?”
Marvin nodded.
“Yes, some sort of illegal gate experiments. Their main lab was destroyed in our very first raid, we went in hot as we thought they were smuggling through their tiny gates. Luckily they just had useless coordinates, but it was enough to prompt us to delve deeper and-”
One of the other soldiers cut in.
“There weren’t any coordinates in the datapacket.”
Marvin shrugged, slowly growing more at ease with the burly men.
“Like I said, they were useless. They all lead to black holes, and in a few cases, the centres of neutron stars if you can believe it. It must have been discarded as junk data though I think I still have… yes, here, it’s still recorded on my companionAI. As you can see it’s…”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
He trailed off as he saw their faces change expressions. The first soldier to speak to him, the one who looked to be in charge, spoke rapidly into his wrist.
“Command, this is Centurion Harjina. We have credible reason to believe these Apostles are more than simply tapping into the echoes of power. They might be trying for a jailbreak. Look at these coordinates I just sent you.”
Marvin looked on confused as the tracers in their eyes flashed, likely them receiving commands from the Imperial Relay ship in deep orbit.
Then the alarm blared.
CODE RED.
ALL PERSONNEL TO DROP STATIONS. DROP IMMINENT.
CODE RED.
ALL PERSONNEL TO DROP STATIONS. DROP IMMINENT.
Marvin looked around in confusion.
“What’s… what’s going on?”
The squad leader’s eyes dimmed.
“You, Corporal Marvin, have just gotten yourself a field promotion. It seems the scope of this mission has expanded.”
Of course, it was at that very moment, they detached from the orbital precinct, and the drop-pod fell out of the sky.
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At the unseen signal, hundreds of drop-pods detached from the three precincts in low orbit above the Apostles’ territory. The planetwide city simultaneously belched thick, blanketing smog over the lower levels, while the countless towers poking through the clouds glittered as the rain of fire began.
CRASH
Smashing into the upper atmosphere with a jolt and a crash, the drop-pod shook like a wet dog, trembling and vibrating as it forced its way out of the void and past the air molecules now trying to slow it down, throwing Marvin around in his harness.
Blasting through the ozone layer with sheer velocity, the pods were engulfed in the vicious flames of re-entry, looking like shooting stars driven from the heavens, bringing divine judgement upon those who dared worship a god other than humanity itself.
Though the Apostles were not defenceless.
The moment they broke atmosphere, anti-air batteries, massive railguns hidden in secure alcoves, revealed themselves with a roaring thunder. Streams of light, railgun shells accelerated to blinding speeds, shot up at the approaching drop-pods, strafing the sky with reckless abandon. All around them, explosions rang as some unlucky men were welcomed by the booming air defences.
The interior of the drop-pod was bathed in red light as the squad of Iconoclasts made their preparations in silence, to the raucous applause of the magnetically-propelled bolts streaking past outside.
With a flash of harsh crimson light and the smell of electricity, their bodysuits fuzzed, seeming to phase in and out of reality. As Marvin watched, a dark metallic liquid spread across their bodies like an oil slick, licking up their arms, legs and torso before hardening into sleek lines, defined ridges and short intermittent spikes that made them look like evil knights out of a holofic. An inaudible hum set Marvin’s teeth on edge as soft red light shone ominously from between the joints and spaces in the armour.
Instead of marvelling at finally getting to see the famed Lorica armour, the newly minted corporal was hyperventilating in his seat, the explosions outside combining into a constant dull roar.
I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die.
The squad leader, Harjina, took pity on him, unstrapping his own harness, walking over and squatting in front of the officer. Even like this Marvin had to look up at him, and in the armour, he was a sight to behold.
“Your first orbital assault? It gets hectic, I know. Nothing much to do except trust in luck and our targetAI.”
TargetAI? Are we shooting back? Into the city?
Right then, the sky outside the pod trembled as the attackers’ response came. Intelligent targeting systems had noted the positions and possible manoeuvring options of the anti-air guns, and the ships surrounding the precincts above them had unleashed their counter-batteries.
The air howled and screamed as burning projectiles came down in a deluge, with dedicated cyberspears sent lancing into the planet’s local network, disrupting the gang’s own less-sophisticated targeting systems. Through the seeming impenetrable wall of flak, the Imperial ships’ targeting systems were still working hard, firing hypersonic missiles at oblique angles, trying to take out as many guns as possible for the soldiers to make landfall.
All was pandemonium, all was chaos as explosions rang out, rattling the drop-pod like a child’s toy. The corporal’s police-issue hormone regulators were working overtime to stop him from fainting from the stress.
Marvin quietly wondered what the point of sending the Iconoclasts in was, as looking outside gave him the sense that a god had already descended, dragging the firmament down to fall upon the heretics as railgun bolts, missiles and the falling bodies of the already slain rained down around them in a tumultuous torrent.
What more could they even do?
There was always an acceptable level of collateral damage allowed during normal raids. The grim reality was that, in an ecosystem with a trillion sapients, there was no way to save every life. So their missionAI calculated the acceptable level of collateral for the crime being investigated, weighed against the expected number of lives positively impacted by the successful prosecution of a crime. Many a time, the intelligence had told them to leave particular criminal acts alone, as police involvement would only make things worse rather than better.
But what Marvin saw now… Nothing living in the first ten levels of the Apostles territories would survive. No doubt they’d packed those levels with civilians to throw off the AI’s calculations. They didn’t seem to understand the scale of the attention they’d provoked. Marvin’s companionAI spelled it out clearly in blocky text scrolling across his eyeballs, a missive that chilled him to the bone.
Potential systemwide threat developing. All measures approved, all collateral acceptable.
He’d never even heard of that being possible. The soldiers’ talk of gods had shaken him, but seeing the lengths the AI and its handlers thought were appropriate to quash this threat made it all too real.
This is serious. Really serious. Am I… Are we saving the world here?
Marvin’s train of thought was brought to a halt as the drop-pod’s airbrakes deployed and jolted the occupants. Centurion Harjina, menacing in his dark, powerful armour, turned towards him.
“We’re low enough. Now we go down hard.”
Marvin’s eyes widened.
“Wait, that was going down easyyyy-”
He trailed off into a scream as the soldier grabbed him and unclasped his harness, while the other squad members kicked out one of the walls of the still-falling pod, and they all leapt out into the frenzy outside.
He could no longer hear anything over the rushing of wind in his ears, but from his position in the Centurion’s arms, he saw destruction on a scale he’d scarce imagined before. The gridblock underneath them was now a massive, smoking crater, and even now Marvin saw structures deeper down collapsing internally, their all-out assault reverberating through the city’s dozens of levels. An hour more of this and they would hit the actual planetary surface.
But looking around, he saw many Legionaries in freefall, a few with their attached officers and corporals in tow. The suppressive fire had done its job, now it was up to them. The odd railgun still gave booming retorts from the ground, but without the benefit of being one among hundreds, they were easily targeted and explosively decommissioned.
In the air, Harjina took off what looked like a backpack from his Lorica and strapped it onto the helpless corporal. Talking was useless in these circumstances, so the soldier sent a message directly to Marvin’s companionAI.
This is the Rana Bellum. All you need to know right now is it’ll help you survive this fall.
True to his words, the Rana unfolded into an exoskeleton, hugging along the backs of the corporal’s limbs and humming with suppressed power.
Marvin only had time to marvel at the seamlessness of the tech, much smoother than the clunky police exoskeletons, before the ground rushed up much too quickly.
With a series of booms, the team of five hit the ground hard, their suits heating up with the effort of dissipating all their landing force. Marvin was still slightly shaking as the Rana separated itself from his back, transforming into a squat, four-legged robot reminiscent of a frog.
The Centurion was all business immediately.
“Weapons out, men. Corporal, I’ll need you and your AI to guide us to the location of their tests. We should be able to track any emanations from there.”
With grim nods all around, the squad assembled around the small robot, whose jaw unhinged wide enough to swallow an antelope whole while cables snapped into place between this Rana and the other soldiers’ Ranas still moulded to their suits. One by one, they reached into the frog’s mouth and withdrew massive coilguns, silver two-handed rifles nearly as big as he was, with barrels the size of Marvin’s fists.
He looked down at his own tiny bolt thrower, feeling inadequate. Centurion Harjina didn’t notice, having sent out a drone swarm from the frog’s mouth to scout out the surroundings.
They have a folded dimension to store their weapons? They really break the bank on these guys.
“Okay, team. We’re pretty separated from the rest of the assault battalion, but we’re close to Corporal Ruun’s lab, or at least where it used to be. Lead the way.”
And thus, they set off amongst the ruin and black smoke left by the bombardment. Picking their way through rubble until they could find an entry point into the lower levels, Marvin grew curious.
“So… black holes?”
Maybe it was the suit, but Harjina’s voice was cold as he responded.
“They’re the only thing that work. What you call ‘gods’ are real, but not in the way you might think. Gods, at least in this universe, are parasites. Extradimensional vampires. They latch onto sapient civilisations and leech them of their fundamental ‘spark’, the drive to progress and thrive. This leads to stagnation and eventually extinction.”
Marvin couldn’t hide his shock.
“How? Why?”
“It’s how they reproduce. Whatever it is that makes sapients look up at the sky and imagine themselves among the stars, is sustenance to these beings. The problem is, they grant real power, as these Apostles have doubtless discovered, so there will always be fools willing to open their minds to these aliens.”
“I thought… I thought aliens didn’t exist. That we were the first.”
Chuckles sounded from the four huge soldiers. One of them responded.
“Son, we were about a billion years too late to be the first sapient life in the galaxy. But when we left Gaia, all we found were dilapidated temples and ruined shrines. No intelligent life whatsoever. Just unanswered prayers.”
Another chimed in.
“Unanswered prayers and gods trying their grift on the newest species on the block. They nearly got us too before we discovered gate technology. With the gates, we figured out that if you could tweak physics in a localised area, you could give these extradimensional beings a physical form. A form that we could restrain. That we could hurt.”
Harjina finished off.
“Of course, you can’t kill a god. Not permanently, in the way you can kill something living. But the exotic matter at the heart of neutron stars has a very useful property. It negates a god’s manipulation of reality, trapping them there. And once that star collapses into a black hole, that god is as good as gone. The problem is how to get them there.”
They were deep in the bowels of the city now. Despite having yearned to see the sky his entire childhood, Marvin felt strangely nostalgic about the mid levels. He knew the surrounding gridblocks like the back of his hand. Unfortunately, listening to the Iconoclasts talk about the enemy they faced, he had the feeling this was the last time he’d be down here.
The Apostles couldn’t be allowed to release a god.
No matter what.