I find myself peering out of a hole. I am sitting comfortably in a seat elevated from the bowels of a machine – a large, ornately decorated combat vehicle that I do not remember getting. Ahead of me are similar, but smaller and more austere machines – with subtly different designs and colouration. Others are looking out of them; much more cautiously – in some cases, all that they let show is the eyes, but that’s more than enough. They’re somber. Skeptical. Hostile, even.
Ah. They are not my followers. Not real ones, in any case – I would be feeling them differently otherwise. I wouldn’t need to see them if they were already in my Empire. And they have heard… things, doubtless. One of my newer advisors is quick to pick this note up: The Emperor is a monster. He is a mutant, a genetic throwback. He puts himself above all others. His “mental network” is a blasphemous parody of the electronic networks of the hamme; there, all worked under the godar, and the godar was accountable to everyone; but here, all become slaves, mere body puppets to the mutant’s mind. There is no victory to be found here, only a dead end and ignominous extinction.
I quell this voice. Who was it from, again? Must have been during one of my blackouts. Very annoying things, those, but it seemed that I could get a lot done without being fully conscious. It has worked out so far, but I still should get some work done to prevent them in the future, or at least control them. Why are you so stubborn about this, Helgi? I need to see the war won first. But it’s already as good as won! I do not fear the Enemy. I only fear our own kind. I can’t afford any delays in that struggle.
My dead, disabled eyes scan over those assembled. I wonder if they’re finding it unsettling or comforting; I really wonder this, as I do not remember if I had any cosmetic repairs done. The eyes are merely a focus; I can feel them, their heat and their activity. But they are not yet linked to me. I ponder; some of them must be important individuals. True hamme godar or not, they are all leaders, kings over packs of Ysir who had led them in striking back against the invaders that shattered their original hammes. Could I take all of them at once?
By this point, maybe I could…
No. A thousand voices in my head yammer about hubris. They chatter about unknown factors, and bark about unjustifiable risks. I am silent. I have a different reason to add to all of that. I want to convince them, even if it isn’t necessary anymore.
“You, the assembled!”
My voice comes across as unpleasantly hoarse and quiet at first. I grit my teeth – another odd throwback response, a random thought occurs – and do my best to amplify it.
“Allies gathered here before me!”
A quiet scrutiny is my reply.
“I need you to open your minds, and accept my gifts. I will lead you, and destroy the Enemy.”
“By what right would you command us?”
“I have come from the other side of the world. We were attacked there, just as you were, and it fell to me to rally the survivors. We have pushed the Enemy back before they could destroy all of our homes, and we have slaughtered their spawners that threatened to drown us in monsters. My forces have done this with my guidance; now you shall do the same, and victory will be in our hands.”
“These are the lands of borg Arungveld,” one of the foremost drivers speaks. “Not your borg Iruskan. What you have done on the other side of the world matters not. You are not from here.”
“But I am here now, ready to lead from the front.”
“As an invader, as a conqueror.“ “Do not your followers call you Emperor?”
“Others have joined me along the way. Not just the hammes that dwelled around borg Iruskan, but also those at borgs Thiulved and Bahara.”
“More the fools, they. Or perhaps we are the fools for letting you get this close, after hearing of how others were defeated.”
“Defeated? I have led them to victory. I picked them up when they were about to be crushed, joined them with my forces and altered their fortunes.”
“Convenient,” an elderly driver speaks. He seems to be a real godar, if no one else in this crowd is. “But irrelevant. We are not about to lose. Your help would be appreciated. Your leadership would not be needed.”
“You are struggling by!” I cry out.
“Exactly. We struggled by against the rulers of the borg, before they were destroyed. The female is now hiding in the ruins, and sending out her forces to harass us. And we are struggling by just the same, for we are good at it, and we do not get lazy,” the old godar sneers.
Another adds: “The time to destroy our enemy is here, aye. She has grown and has started to release new kinds of beasts that strike from underground. But we can do so independently, in loose cooperation.”
I fall silent for a moment. Intelligence comes flooding in. Ah, yes. Yes. They can do this… They could actually win. They were hit hardest when the invasion began, but they adjusted very well, without any of the tricks that we had on our side. They could triumph with the slightest technological assistance that they had requested, and…
And then what?
I did not listen as they spoke about preserving their independence; I knew all that already. Yes, they were willing to accept higher casualties to remain outside of my empire. Even as I took over the rest of Destination, the hamme in this land – and who knows what others might have slipped through my web, or through that of our would-be destroyers in places that we were still trying to clean up? – would remain free, just like before. I might try to conquer them for their valuable resources and manpower, but they would do as we would have done in the old days. They would wage a raiding war against my forces, and if we entered their homes, they would destroy them, with everyone and everything inside. Just like we would have done in the old days.
In other words… if I wanted to add them to my empire, I had to act right now.
“All you could get is undefeat!” I silence them.
“You could destroy the spawner, perhaps, and not worry about the others that I will destroy myself. But all you will get is survival. Continued existence is just one half of victory; survival is merely undefeat. Victory requires more than that.”
I continued. I must have sounded shrill and silly, and they probably had some objections, but I ignored them; my hearing was barely better than my sight, in any case, especially when I didn’t bother using my augmentations for it.
“The war that I will wage will not stop with the elimination of this facet of the Enemy from this planet. That will be only the beginning. The second half of victory is the death of our enemies, and to do that we will need to go back to space. We won’t abandon the planet, but we will raise our spaceships, and build new ones, with all the resources that we could gather, including those that are now in your hands, and those that will be ours after we get borg Arungveld.”
They were now talking with their swords; or more literally, they started firing at my vehicle, even as I dug into their minds. Modified for convenient networking, damaged by said networking’s destruction; they were easy to hijack with my odd talents, no matter how much they tried to resist now. I could never pull this off with animals, to say nothing of the Enemy, though I have tried.
“To bring our kind back to the stars, I will need to control all Ysir on this planet. I need all to be part of my Empire; part of my network, coordinated by my own mind. I will pull all of them together, and we shall be a thousand times more efficient than we were before, when we were in artificial division. Our new fleet won’t be for flight and migration, but for the war that begins now. We won’t wait for Naggarok; we’ll fight and our victory will come to us.”
They still did not agree, but… I was shielded well enough. The damage to the vehicle was irrelevant or easily repaired; as for myself, I did not feel pain anymore, and I knew it was not enough to kill me. The Hammenammir are never easily killed, I mused; we’ve been built for survival, and upgraded a thousand times since. My upgrades were but the most recent, and the most thorough. It was fitting, as I was a key figure in our plan.
And as for them, they stopped. One by one, their weapons powered down. Their minds were filled with acceptance, with new understanding – or maybe just with obedience and despair. I’ll sort everything out later, I promised to myself. Time permitting. Right now I needed to steal a march on the universe.
Those proud chieftains were now in my network. I knew now that they were not unprepared for this outcome; they simply were misinformed as to how powerful I was, and even then, I had to admit that I was strained to do what I just did; but it worked, didn’t it? Through them, I would take over those who followed them until now. Adding this to the forces I had brought with myself on this deep raid, we will take out the spawner and cleanse the ruins with minimal collateral damage.
The spaceships of Arungveld, best cared for on the planet and allegedly upgraded several times since the landing, will be ours.
I will claw our way back into space, and we will then make war among the stars.
At least, some of the stuff that you end up being asked about anyway could go there for everyone's use.
