“Ha-ha! I finally got one!” Wakizashi exclaimed, looking up from her tablet.
“Got what?” Rapier asked, not looking up from his console. He still had not forgiven her for her grievous transgression previously, and had no plans to do so; the Broodmatron was already enough of a bother without being incentivized to continue with Rapier’s absolution.
“The Magistry of Logistics has granted my request for a human servant! Ooh, I hope I can pick the color.”
Rapier made a mental note to inform Wakizashi that humans generally took offense to attempts to categorize them by hue. Apparently, a number of the darker points of their history had been perpetrated because of color. It was a sentiment he found hopelessly backward–some colors were just aesthetically better–but then again, he came from a people where brother had not slain brother in some fifteen hundred Poslush years, so what did he know?
What did he know? Such a strange phrase, Rapier noted, so familiar yet unknown to him. All his life, he was trained to see things exclusively from the perspective of his betters; all the better to serve them, after all. They were all-knowing, and thus he was all-knowing, a member of a race that took upon itself the responsibility of maintaining the moral and cultural hygiene of the Orion Arm. Humans were odd in comparison; they spoke of seeing things from a plethora of angles, a hopeless folly in a galaxy where some were right and most were plainly, irreparably wrong. However, their way of thinking had proven itself oddly infectious, to Rapier’s chagrin. The prospect of him using one of their more problematic expressions without thinking worried him slightly.
The communicator in the center of the room played its tone again. Rapier turned around in his chair to answer it, but Ulo was faster, pressing the button and allowing the bluish projection of Overbattlematron Dao to once again illuminate the room. Rapier scrambled to leave his chair and kneel.
“There’s no need, Captain-General. What is your time of arrival at the destination?” she regarded him, her voice emotionless.
“We should be in its orbit within the hour. And you, ma’am?” Rapier bowed his head.
“We are already above New Vancouver. Looking down from here, I must admit that the damage you did with such limited resources is impressive. I can’t imagine the world will contribute anything to the human war machine again, though I also can’t imagine it ever did, what with its rather rural constitution.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“When you arrive, we will begin our own invasion. After that, you will link up with our fleet and we will progress to Novoarkhangelsk. You are aware of the plan from there, yes?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good,” Dao moved to switch off the communicator, but stopped. “And do be more careful with your men this time.”
“I will, ma’am.” Rapier saluted as the hologram faded into nothing. Then, as if on cue, the ship jerked as it exited hyperspace. With a low, metallic shriek, the blast shutters lifted from the great reinforced windows, revealing a greenish-yellow prairie world, the land crisscrossed with rivers flowing down from the poles to conglomerate into a great equatorial sea. Behind it loomed an enormous, ocean-blue gas giant, around which the relatively-tiny moon orbited. Kormoran was just as beautiful as the day Rapier made his mistake. Unconsciously, he reached his hand up and touched his silver antenna, a painful reminder of his arrogance in failing to gather intelligence about the enemy.
“This time, we’re here to stay.” Rapier said to himself. He hadn’t seen many human worlds, but it seemed that few could make a better place to live when Rapier decided to put away the officer’s cap at last.
Then, he heard the heavy stamping of Wakizashi’s feet as she moved towards him. Steeling himself, he prepared to turn her down again. Of course, he still remembered his martial arts training from his days as a marine, but he would rather it not come to that.
His chair rocked back slightly as Wakizashi put her hand on his headrest. Then, she leaned forward so that her head poked out from around the seat, staring at him. “Such a romantic sight, isn’t it?” she said, exuding a desirous smell. It was the type of pheromone that Rapier didn’t experience often, the kind that made him want to lay back and do what he was told, as it was evolutionarily designed to. Still, Rapier pushed the chemical’s effects to the back of his mind.
“I’m not interested,” he said flatly. Wakizashi stared at him for a moment, checking to see if he was being sincere. Then, she slapped the back of his chair and stood straight, spinning on her heel to return to her throne. “You’re no fun,” she grumbled. Rapier could tell that soon, she wouldn’t be taking no for an answer. He was running out of time to do something, anything, or face a lifetime as little more than a spoil of the Viceroy’s conquests. After all, trophy consorts were just concubines by a different name, despite the insistence of the Broodmatrons that one was right and just and the other was outright degeneracy.
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“Ulo, how quickly can we launch the Aerial Knights?” Rapier asked.
Ulo let out a high, trilling call. “I’ve taken the liberty of commanding the squires to fuel their aircraft before we arrived. They should be in the air as soon as the order is given.”
“Good work, soldier. Relay the news to the Overbattlematron; I’d rather get out of this place as soon as possible.”
On the surface of the world, the sirens screamed out a high tone of warning, and those few who chose to remain on Kormoran after the disaster on Omen were already sequestered away, hidden in deep underground shelters, on the slopes of mountains, or in the few forests this planet of steppes possessed. The Bundeswehr had fled the planet by and large, leaving behind only a number of fanatically-determined Sternjaeger special-forces units, who were to form a core around which a partisan movement could form. The planet had been all but written off; its flat, predictable terrain and miniscule economic output made it both impossible and unrewarding to defend.
Not all was quiet, however. The German military, in its withdrawal, had left behind a number of autonomous gun bastions around the planet, composed of anything from machine guns hidden in the brush just off a major road to entire eight-hundred-millimeter anti-orbital coilguns and everything in between. They were to fire upon enemy forces until they ran dry of ammunition, at which point the metric ton of high explosives buried under each would ensure that they could not be repurposed against their creators. It wouldn’t be enough to defend the world–nothing short of ten million men would–but it would be a hindrance for quite a while.
As thousands of Aerial Knights made a sweeping course over the planet, they were met with gunfire. As over half a million Poslushi infantrymen touched down all over the two continents of Kormoran, they were met with gunfire. As the land was secured and the majority of the men were slated to return to the troopships to continue their invasion, their transports were met on the way down with gunfire. The damage done was nowhere near decisive, but it wasn’t meant to be.
Kormoran had fallen in an hour, but that was all part of the plan.
—
Hidden in the vastness of Jupiter was an aerostat station, floating just above the dense, brownish clouds. There were many like it in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant, spaced thousands of miles apart, but only a few were inhabited at any given time. Those few held generals, political liaisons, heads of government, and the like. This was Alpha Constellation, home of the Coalition’s High Command.
In this particular installation, a special room had been installed in the center. It was a cylinder, about ten meters in diameter, with the inside coated in a silvery, mirror-like material. Today, it was to be used for its intended purpose. Five shimmering, ethereal men sat around a similarly-incorporeal table. Three wore suits and ties, while the fourth wore the finery of a Russian marshal. The fifth wore the far more austere uniform of the Bundeswehr.
“So, tell us,” a holographic John Herald cocked his head to the side, “what do you know of the enemy advance?”
“The constituency of the Republic is becoming uneasy with the war. If Pas-de-Astres is lost, I doubt that I can reassure it enough to prevent yet another governmental collapse in my country.” President Hector Poirot of the Tenth French Republic added. As the man who had been elected to clean up after the fall of the Ninth to corruption, he was very aware of just how little it took to overturn a nation’s political system.
Commander Ernst Weiss took a deep breath, gathering his thoughts. “We have credible reason to believe that the two main fleets of the Combine will link up in orbit of Kormoran and proceed to Novoarkhangelsk. Once they arrive, they will do to it what they did to our planet and to New Vancouver. After that, they will proceed to spread out and take Pas-de-Astres, then Russellton, then Habout-Alleh, and so on and so forth until they’re rolling through the core worlds and into Earth itself.”
“This is a very large amount of information. How do you know any of this?” Marshal Kuznetsov asked.
“Well, Mr. Kuznetsov, shortly before the engagement that led me and my men to retreat from Omen, a number of Sternjaeger troops managed to seize a particular data tablet of the Poslushi, and seemingly without their noticing. Unfortunately, I had left it in my office when the Poslushi nearly retrieved it, but a particular Russian officer threw herself in harm’s way to get it before their infantry could.” Weiss said, retrieving a large, slab-like device from under his seat and laying it flat on the table.
“Is that…” Kuznetsov’s eyes widened.
Weiss bowed his head. “Yes, Marshal. Lieutenant-Colonel Svetlana Kuznetsova, despite her grave wounds, survived, with the aid of one of my men, to deliver this to me. You see, my soldiers had taken from the Poslushi a list of particular alphanumeric tables.”
Prime Minister Gordon Berry’s eyes lit up as he realized what Commander Weiss was talking about. “It’s a codebook,” he smiled.
Weiss chuckled back. “As it turns out, the Poslushi aren’t very good at keeping secrets once you break the encryption on their messages. It seems that the concept of codewords is foreign to them.”
“I trust that you’ll transfer the data to High Command as soon as possible. My people are up in a riot due to attacks on home soil; they need victories to buoy their confidence.” President Herald said.
“Undoubtedly, sir.”
Then, Herald looked at Kuznetsov. “I have a number of Thule-Class stealth missile cruisers arriving in the region. They’re nuclear-armed, of course. It’s your planet, and thus your decision if you want them deployed.”
Kuznetsov nodded. “Your assistance will be appreciated.”
President Poirot raised a hand. “It would be in the interests of our nation to have assets present in the orbit of Novoarkhangelsk. I would also like to reserve the right to fire a nuclear warning shot, in accordance with French doctrine.”
“Hold on, Poirot; we haven’t even decided if we want to go that far.” Prime Minister Berry cautioned, but Kuznetsov stopped him. “You’ll get your chance once the details are worked out.”
“Your contributions to the cause are not forgotten, Commander. Transfer the data to High Command. Dismissed,” President Herald said, saluting.
“Thank you, sir,” Weiss said, his hologram fading away.