THE TRUMPETS OF JERICHO

POV Call Sign: Tripwire

POV Unit Type: kernel engineer

I DIDN’T EVEN DRINK LAST NIGHT AND I FEEL LIKE I HAVE A DAMN HANGOVER.

So I was delayed a bit getting myself out here. The repair sled hung up on something and it was hell getting it untangled.

Now, I am headed for the phase array that creates the Trumpets of Jericho, skimming along the underside of the ship (The Good Shepherd) heading to the deployment point. There are guide lines to follow, which I do.

I don’t mean guide lines like ‘ways to deport myself properly in space’, when I say guide lines I mean ‘thick fucking colored lines painted on the hull of the spacecraft for idiots like me to follow so they don’t get lost’. It’s a big damn ship, I wouldn’t be the first to get lost out here.

There was an idiosyncratic report from one of the disruptors. It’s not the end of the world, probably nothing. Anomalies happen all the time. But the Trumpets are mission critical important so even a hiccup has to be checked out by someone. Why that someone had to be me is the only real mystery out here.

I guess all available hands are combing the Apocalypse and surviving tech databases, looking for a restoration procedure for the cracked space fold drives.

So I got stuck with going out there and checking/clearing the error. I really should have brought some beers with me. If I’d known my head was going to hurt anyways, I definitely would have.

I arrive at the deployment point. I secure my tether, so I can get back to the ship safely, then pilot the repair sled into the open space between The Good Shepherd and the Trumpets, my tether unfurls behind me like a… Like a…

Like a tether unfurling.

Because it’s a tether. And they all look the same. Like a space rope, except they’re not. They’re tethers. They do what all tethers do. They attach things to other things. In my case attaching me to the ship. If this concept is confusing to you then you’re in the wrong apocalypse. Go read a propaganda officer’s take on how jolly the end of everything will be and feel good about yourself all day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah… Quit yer bitchin’. If you don’t like my writing, thumbs down my apocalypse. Somehow, I don’t think it’s going to bother me. Nobody ever reads my stuff anyways.

And besides, I’ve always hated similes..

I am grumpy at my hangover in the face of a pressing lack of beer.

The tether is also a primitive method of communication that my handler (Enqueue, the junior kernel noob who got stuck attending me, but his callsign is too friggin hard to spell. So I’m calling him nQ the Noob from here out.) back aboard The Good Shepherd can use to get my attention when I’m inside the Trumpets.

Anyways, here I am. Skimming on the repair sled through space, having left the safety of The Good Shepherd behind as I head for the orbiting platform of one of the four phase disruptor assemblies that make up the Trumpets of Jericho.

Ahh, yes, Lansing’s brainchild. It’s been a while since I’ve had to work on one of these. Never met the guy (Lansing) but I once attended a lecture by someone who had.

Feeling quite cheated about the beer situation I quickly review my crib notes on said lecture as I make my approach to the Trumpets of Jericho.

The lecture was given by a guy called Mosfet, you can look him up if you’re interested. Mosfet’s apocalypses aren’t totally useless, very practical but lots of good info in there. He was Lansing’s understudy, so even though he wasn’t technically the Trumpets’ developer he definitely had a better understanding of how these disruptor things work than the rest of us.

Pity he’s dead now. I could certainly have used his help.

Because this shit makes little sense. If I didn’t already know it worked I would never believe it did. Lansing was a genius no doubt. But I can’t help but wonder if he didn’t intentionally obfuscate some of his work to make him seem smarter than he really was.

f=ma, e=mc2, πr2 (pie are not square! pie are round! heh, little kernel joke there) those are equations a guy can get behind. And understand. Even with a hangover.

You really can’t appreciate what the Trumpets of Jericho are, unless you understand the Krag life cycle. And I really should have taken better notes at that lecture.

The Krag do not experience reality as we know it. It is theorized but has not been observed that the normal laws of physics either break down or conditionally no longer apply in their existence.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

This is due to the well observed and well documented faster than light nature of the Krag life cycle.

We all know how the Krag Subjugation destroyed our civilization. Worlds, colonies, sectors of influence, remote exploration outposts. The Krag purged it all. There were never any great fleets or galactic battles to challenge them. The only way we could detect the Subjugation was its wake of absolute destruction it left behind.

And the histories are very clear on this point, they frequently reached back in time and destroyed things that had existed for years after their destruction.

Yeah. I know.

Don’t argue with me, I’m on your side. I thought it was all a bunch of crap too. I was just the (back-row) guy sitting in the class taking notes. I even went so far as to raise my hand once or twice, calling the bullshit for what it was. It’s still kind of a point of pride for me, how many failure grades I chalked up during my academic years.

The Krag annihilated without mercy, unseen and unopposed. Following some master pattern only they were aware of, crisscrossing the galaxy, destroying everything humanity had ever touched, on some cosmic timetable only they could follow.

No need to elaborate. Most of us grew up in the slaughter and the rest of us lived through it.

We were years into it before we even fathomed the Krag existed. And years more before Lansing published his miracles.

All hail Lansing, all hail the scientific hero who saved us all. Lansing and his ‘Perfect Year of the Three Miracles’.

His first published miracle—The Foundations of the Three Spaces—proved reality can be split into at least three.

The first space, the highest space, he wrote, was kragspace. This was the natural order of existence for the Krag. He claimed they were without mass, and eternal, both living forever and having always lived in some kind of faster-than-light pocket dimension entirely separate from our own. You can imagine the reception this got.

The second space, the space whose discovery cemented his genius and saved us all, was protected-space. Achieved only in irregular orbit around large and heavy objects whose gravitational influence forced certain boundary conditions of his miracle theory to remain constant. The Krag, can not exist in protected-space.

The third space, heritage-space is nothing special—just the garden variety reality we have always assumed to be the only one to exist—the one the Krag Subjugation laid to waste and the one we abandoned and hope to some day return to. You know…

Home.

Yeah, I miss it too.

Lansing didn’t just publish his ideas or lay the groundwork for someone else to complete. First he had to invent the math that would explain his theory. Then he had to explain the theory. And then he had to produce a machine—The Good Shepherd—that would prove his theory correct.

All while the insanity and chaos of the slaughter raged around him.

It was, without question, a miracle.

The mechanics and mathematics of protected-space are complex, and were hotly debated when Lansing first proposed them and claimed it a safe-haven for humanity and put forward his desire to evacuate into it. To Lansing’s credit, thus far, his claims have been proven true.

Ever since the first refugees fled heritage-space we have played a deadly cat and mouse game with the Krag. Popping into heritage-space only long enough to harvest sufficient materials and energy to power our ships and feed ourselves and then scurrying back to the safety of protected-space.

Which brings us to the second of Lansing’s miracles—The Trumpets of Jericho.

The Trumpets are not an extension of protected-space so much as an aberration of it. In the simplest terms, they are an array of four orbital platforms, deployed in a geosynchronous irregular orbit over a targeted sector of heritage-space, typically a planet’s surface. Though there have been some interesting edge cases.

Together the four platforms create the matrix of overlapping signals that establishes the battlefield, also called the quad.

Without which, our little incursions back into heritage-space for materials and energy would immediately fail. The Krag’s authority over heritage-space is absolute. Humanity went extinct there over a decade ago. The Krag killed us all.

Now, unless you are on a battlefield, to set foot in heritage-space is instadeath.

No exceptions.

If any human were to step outside of the protective confines of the battlefield, the Krag massacre units would strike immediately, unseen, undetected from kragspace killing the poor unfortunate bastard who was dumb enough to do so.

The Trumpets exist, without question, entirely in protected-space. We are as certain of this as we are of anything Lansing promised us.

However, each platform emits a powerful suite of signals that penetrate into both kragspace and heritage-space simultaneously. The kragspace signals act as a beacon, drawing Krags to the battlefield where they are ensnared in the Trumpets’ disruptor fields and forcibly shunted from kragspace to heritage-space.

Yeah, that’s a mouthful (he said thinking of breasts).

The disruptor fields of the Trumpets alter the Krag life cycle. They pull the mass-less, eternal, faster than light Krag from their airy-fairy existence in their home dimension into ours. Where the normal rules of the Universe apply to them. They take on corporeal form. They have mass. They move at normal speeds, a human can see them, bounce radar signals off them, touch them.

On the battlefield, we can kill them.

Lansing was adamant that this process, the transmogrification he called it, of ripping the Krags from kragspace to heritage-space was an eternity of torment for them.

Apparently, they are not too quiet about it either. I have never set foot on a battlefield, but to a man every first hand account I have ever read of it describes the sound of the Trumpets as hellish. Demonic. An endless litany of pain of suffering.

I’m not complaining. I’m all for the bastards suffering. But the implications—no matter how vaguely applied—that eternity has an end is not lost on me.

I quietly arrive at my destination. Took me long enough. The malfunctioning disruptor is not much to look at. Some antennas, amplifiers, some field effect resonators. The platform itself, and the control center where it can be managed from. If you go the rest of your life without ever seeing one, you’re not missing much.

I tether myself to the workstation and climb aboard. Quickly locate and login to the debug console. Time to get to work. Let’s see what’s going on. Check on this anomalous reading and see what the story is.

But since we’re on the subject…

As for Lansing’s third and final miracle—The Hidden Miracle?

Jury’s still out on that one. Of course I hope he was right. Humanity is doomed if we bet wrong.

But damn.

Some things are hard to believe.