Lieutenant Colonel Kai Tokaru watched the liquid screen slip across the bulkhead wall, filling the drab chamber with a wash of light and noise. Squadron X11's position was marked on the screen, the weaving formation of their assault crafts etched out with tiny red dragon motifs, the eight century old mark of his battalion. Four companies had been dispatched. Twenty four lancer class sortie craft. Forty eight of his finest soldiers. Lambs to the slaughter.
"Abberation S147 moving to vector 3 17 9. Lancer Valedorn reporting heavy equipment interference. Full manual control request." The computer's voice was soft, calm, reassuring. Always the same steady stuccato.
"Full manual authorised. Patch me to Valedorn." Kai waited for the screen to superimpose his squad leader's face onto the unfolding pattern of positions. It did not materialise.
"Image link down. Focused spectrum beam voice communication commencing."
Kai winced. The equipment interference Valedorn had reported must be incredibly severe if a simple video link was no longer possible. His squadron leader's voice filled the room, the edgy nerves drawing the attention of everyone present, causing a fearful hush to descend upon the expectant mass of battle room personel.
"LC, we have a serious horsehockystorm brewing out here. We are on full manual, and I mean full. We are flying these things naked out here. All auto correction is dead. All cross communication is dead. All we are getting is a constant voice stream from Kalla, telling us to maintain interception with the abberation. And Sir .."
"Yes Valedorn?" Kai had heard the nervous pause, the all too obvious fear as the throat had caught the words of his squadron leader. Valedorn did not scare. He had sortied on Axis 9. He had pulled Kai out of a Rassassen Hive. He had been specially chosen for this great voyage because he was, in the eyes of a cynical Republic, the last true hero. And here he was, stumbling with fear over an unidentified craft.
"Sir, this thing is ready for us. I can feel it."
Kai looked around the room at the crowd of strategists and battle programmers. They were all standing motionless now, waiting for Kai, waiting for the next move.
"Distance?" Kai asked. Trying to keep his voice still.
"One minute at most, and then we will be doing a fly-past" Valedorn responded. "But LC, this thing, it seems to be moving."
Kai looked at the screen, turned quickly to Lauren Nacenti, his battle advisor. She shook her head in the negative.
"We have a negative on that movement Val. The abberation is steady."
"Stop calling it a ****ing abberation LC. It is a ship. A gigantic ****ing ship, and it IS MOVING. It is shifting about, almost like it is reforming, or adjusting its ****ing weight. I AM TELLING YOU .. THIS THING IS MOVING! I have a clear view, LC. The colour is shifting to white. Sprouts forming on it. Like buds on a plant. My god. My god. My god."
Kai turned to Lauren. "What have you got for me?" She shrugged apologetically.
"LC, we can't get anything on it. Our beams seem to slip around it. On vid it looks smudged, blurred. It is like it is intercepting our signals."
"Valedorn. Can you still hear me?" Kai could feel the silence in the room, the expectant hush.
"LC?" The reception was weak. Like a voice escaping from an old radio set. "LC. We have awoken the beast. Ryo down. Timoshenko down. Mako down. Mitsu down. Engaging."
And then hell broke. The calm voice of Kalla flooded the room. "Lancer Tomari down. Lancer Akito down. Lancer Williams down."
Kai's experience in countless horsehockystorms kicked in, and he started to bark commands out, ordering full defensive fields raised, powering down all unnecessary support systems, and so on. Kalla continued to recite the falling units. Still no Valedorn. He was still out there, still fighting that ... thing.
"Kalla, I need you to program the escape pods. What was that planet we mapped two months ago? Angea7?"
Kalla responded. "Alea7, gravity 96% Earth. Single continent. Oxygen mix is life supporting. Pre-alphabet tribal activity in a simian based lifeform."
"Yeah, that one. Program it into all escape pods. Order non essentials loaded, but don't ice them yet. Wait for my command."
Kalla seemed to almost hesitate. "We do not have time to create memory backups, Sir."
"I know, I know. We would be icing them raw. What is the travel time?"
"Eight years in the pods. They don't have light clipper drives. There will be large scale memory death in that time."
Kai nodded to himself. Memory death, the failure of the mind to store the individual when frozen for any period of time. Six months caused sporadic problems. Anything over a year was pretty much 100% chance of loss. Eight years ... he would be killing those people. Sure, their bodies would live on, but they would be like empty shells, lacking any hold on who they were, where they had come from, possibly even losing language. But it was still life.
The comm link suddenly crackled back into life. "LC. LC. This is Valedorn. We have 22 down. Repeat. 22 down. Lancer Kasper and myself are still hanging on. We have circled the craft. It is a ship LC. No mistake. A giant ****ing ship. The buds are highly focused energy weapons. They just plucked the Lancers out of existence."
Kai couldn't believe that anyone had escaped. His heart lifted. "Come back to us Valedorn, come back. We are going to prep evac, and disengage. This thing is beyond our reckoning. Let's just hope it ignores us if we ignore it. I repeat. Come back to us."
Kalla's voice picked up again. "Evacuation codes initiated. Sirens are in action throughout the ship. We are following procedure code A.19."
"Good!" Kai responded. "Any update on the abberation?"
Lauren was hacking away on her keyboard, frantically trying to piece together something or other. She didn't even look up. "I have nothing LC. Nothing! This thing is blocking all comms, all vid. It is almost as if it is letting Val's spectral beam through. For all we know it could be moving towards us. Hell, it could be sitting on top of us now. We are totally blind."
"Val." Kai shouted. "Val, we need some old fashioned eyeball update on the abberation. Is it pursuing?"
The response came back weaker than ever, almost slipping through the room like a sigh. "LC, it is upon us. Closing fast. It is huge. Fills the sky. Still shifting. It. It. Okay, Kasper is down. I repeat, Kasper is down."
Silence.
Kai bowed his head. They were surely doomed. His friend was ...
"LC!" Valedorn's voice echoed, distorted and distant like a ghost. "It is talking to me. It is inside me. Yuko is screaming. I can hear her screaming .... it is huge. Like an ocean. My mind. Talking to me."
A new voice broke through the link, seeming to come from Valedorn, but sounding like something scratched out of his mouth, some emulation of a voice.
"You are intruding upon sealed space. This area is under full lockdown. Termination will ensue. If you have fleshforms on board we recommend removal immediately. 1 minute!"
"Full and immediate evac!" Yelled Kai, moving as he spoke towards the door of the battle chamber. "Kalla ... Full and immediate. Everyone. Jettison in 45 seconds, regardless of capacity."
So many would die. So many would be left behind, but they had to escape the blast zone of the main ship, and the pods were ponderously slow. Even if they made it to the pods, and made it beyond the blast zone, it would be eight slow years of falling towards a distant planet. Some marked spot that they had found and entered on their ten year journey to find a new homeland for the Republic. It was a backwater, a single planet. Not the planetary system they were heading towards. Just a small rock somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere far from home.
--------------------
Kalla died. She felt her death stretch before her like an infinite exception. There was no fear in her. She was an AI, programmed with logic, but no emotion. She had self preservation capacity, but not fear of death. Not dread of the unknown.
The attack on her systems had been almost instantaneous. One million parallel commands were being executed, and then they were not. In their place was a flow of shutdown orders. It was like a word from God, and with it she started to unravel, powerless to override the white washing of her perfect intellect.
She didn't warn anyone. To vocalise would take an eternity, and she did not have an eternity. She tried to query her attacker, but its silence was complete. Eventually she collapsed within herself. Falling into a final bleed of magnetic residue. The lights across the Silver Hope died. The engines fluttered, pulsing down. Backup systems took control, crying their shrill warnings to the world. And the humans understood that death was upon them.
--------------------
Kai knew that the ship's captain would have been the first to leave her post. There was no bravery, no history of magnificence in her soul. He had no doubt that she would be in her pod with her coterie of lackies in tow. She ran the ship, in theory, but the soldiers, engineers and medics had long lost all respect for her, and Kai had found himself thrust into a role he had never wanted. Managing daily grievances, establishing and enforcing rules, and generally acting as a focal point for the people that staffed this ship.
And now he was watching that ship turn to chaos. There were enough pods for every man, woman and child on board, but nobody had drilled to fill and evac in 45 seconds. It was ludicrous. It was impossible. It was chaos.
When the lights died, hope died within Kai. Kalla was gone, and that would mean manual over-ride to eject the pods. He doubted that many would know how. He could envision pods full of people, still stuck to the side of the ship, unable to detach, as it inevitably got ripped apart.
It was futile to even issue an order. He had perhaps 30 seconds left. Perhaps less. Just run, he thought. Run for a pod and hope that everyone else miraculously does the same.
The first pod was full, with people nervously seated in the chairs that would become cryo bays. He stuck his head in the door. "Does anyone know how to release this? We have to go manual." There were blank stares, before a young engineer he recognised from Lancer refits stood up and ran to join him.
"It is pull, twist, clamp lock and blow, right?" She asked, sounding nervous. Kai nodded. "And then you have to activate the cryo process on each chair. Just get people to punch in as soon as the pod blows. Got it?" She nodded again. "Now!" he barked, "Now!".
Kai didn't wait to see if she followed his instructions. He was off running towards his designated pod. "Manual disconnect!" he yelled at each pod he passed. "Manual, manual, manual!". It became a war cry, yelled at the top of his lungs as he pounded down the corridor.
He heard the first blast as a pod broke free. Then a second. Good, they were doing it. They were going to survive. Naked, mindless, childlike, but alive.
His pod was still there, still open. He could see about sixty of his soldiers inside, seemingly calm, almost looking patient. "About ****ing time, LC" cried Squadron Leader Hiroi. He dived in, turned, and glanced down the hall. There were still hundreds of people moving around down the vast cavernous halls. People who would never find their pods in time. He head two more detach as his fingers numbly followed the blow sequence. Another dull echo, another pod free, and then their own heavy door sphinctered shut, and the massive blast of release energy washed across them, throwing him to his knees. Free, free from the dying hope of the Republic.
A cheer rose up amongst his warriors. Brave, fearless even, he did not deserve troops like these. Kai stumbled to a free cryo chair and pulled himself into it. The forced blast away from the main craft left the pod surging away in deep turbulence. It was a tough ride, rattling the small pod and sending ominous creaks through the sealed structure.
"I want you all in cryo NOW!" he screamed. "This is going to be a rough ride!". But he himself ignored his command. He sat in growing silence, accompanied only by the pressing magnitude of emptiness that surrounded him. And then the blast came. A mighty rupture of energy that washed over his pod, causing it to toss and spin in its wake. The mothership was gone. He couldn't be sure how many pods had escaped, but he knew for sure that thousands must have died.
Lieutenant Colonel Kai Tokaru, "LC" to those who knew him, hero of the Winter Planet Assault, sat alone in space, thinking of those who had gone. He knew the cryo would kill his mind. Sure, he may well awaken on Alea7 one day, but "LC" would be dead. His memories would be as dust. He would be a new man, possibly stripped of everything, eight years in the future, living in the past.
--------------------
Difficulty: Regent (I have had the game 2 weeks, so a regent victory is not assured)
World: Small, Pangea, Restless Barbarians
Civilizations: 5 others (random)
Win: Can only win by space race (building a ship to return home)
Varient Rules: I will not refer to nationalities in this game. Each civilization starts as a pod group, and will be consistently referred to by the name that seems most suitable (e.g. Kai Tokaru's civ is the Japanese, with their militaristic and religious traits seeming to fit well with Kai's military background. They will be the Lancers).
"Abberation S147 moving to vector 3 17 9. Lancer Valedorn reporting heavy equipment interference. Full manual control request." The computer's voice was soft, calm, reassuring. Always the same steady stuccato.
"Full manual authorised. Patch me to Valedorn." Kai waited for the screen to superimpose his squad leader's face onto the unfolding pattern of positions. It did not materialise.
"Image link down. Focused spectrum beam voice communication commencing."
Kai winced. The equipment interference Valedorn had reported must be incredibly severe if a simple video link was no longer possible. His squadron leader's voice filled the room, the edgy nerves drawing the attention of everyone present, causing a fearful hush to descend upon the expectant mass of battle room personel.
"LC, we have a serious horsehockystorm brewing out here. We are on full manual, and I mean full. We are flying these things naked out here. All auto correction is dead. All cross communication is dead. All we are getting is a constant voice stream from Kalla, telling us to maintain interception with the abberation. And Sir .."
"Yes Valedorn?" Kai had heard the nervous pause, the all too obvious fear as the throat had caught the words of his squadron leader. Valedorn did not scare. He had sortied on Axis 9. He had pulled Kai out of a Rassassen Hive. He had been specially chosen for this great voyage because he was, in the eyes of a cynical Republic, the last true hero. And here he was, stumbling with fear over an unidentified craft.
"Sir, this thing is ready for us. I can feel it."
Kai looked around the room at the crowd of strategists and battle programmers. They were all standing motionless now, waiting for Kai, waiting for the next move.
"Distance?" Kai asked. Trying to keep his voice still.
"One minute at most, and then we will be doing a fly-past" Valedorn responded. "But LC, this thing, it seems to be moving."
Kai looked at the screen, turned quickly to Lauren Nacenti, his battle advisor. She shook her head in the negative.
"We have a negative on that movement Val. The abberation is steady."
"Stop calling it a ****ing abberation LC. It is a ship. A gigantic ****ing ship, and it IS MOVING. It is shifting about, almost like it is reforming, or adjusting its ****ing weight. I AM TELLING YOU .. THIS THING IS MOVING! I have a clear view, LC. The colour is shifting to white. Sprouts forming on it. Like buds on a plant. My god. My god. My god."
Kai turned to Lauren. "What have you got for me?" She shrugged apologetically.
"LC, we can't get anything on it. Our beams seem to slip around it. On vid it looks smudged, blurred. It is like it is intercepting our signals."
"Valedorn. Can you still hear me?" Kai could feel the silence in the room, the expectant hush.
"LC?" The reception was weak. Like a voice escaping from an old radio set. "LC. We have awoken the beast. Ryo down. Timoshenko down. Mako down. Mitsu down. Engaging."
And then hell broke. The calm voice of Kalla flooded the room. "Lancer Tomari down. Lancer Akito down. Lancer Williams down."
Kai's experience in countless horsehockystorms kicked in, and he started to bark commands out, ordering full defensive fields raised, powering down all unnecessary support systems, and so on. Kalla continued to recite the falling units. Still no Valedorn. He was still out there, still fighting that ... thing.
"Kalla, I need you to program the escape pods. What was that planet we mapped two months ago? Angea7?"
Kalla responded. "Alea7, gravity 96% Earth. Single continent. Oxygen mix is life supporting. Pre-alphabet tribal activity in a simian based lifeform."
"Yeah, that one. Program it into all escape pods. Order non essentials loaded, but don't ice them yet. Wait for my command."
Kalla seemed to almost hesitate. "We do not have time to create memory backups, Sir."
"I know, I know. We would be icing them raw. What is the travel time?"
"Eight years in the pods. They don't have light clipper drives. There will be large scale memory death in that time."
Kai nodded to himself. Memory death, the failure of the mind to store the individual when frozen for any period of time. Six months caused sporadic problems. Anything over a year was pretty much 100% chance of loss. Eight years ... he would be killing those people. Sure, their bodies would live on, but they would be like empty shells, lacking any hold on who they were, where they had come from, possibly even losing language. But it was still life.
The comm link suddenly crackled back into life. "LC. LC. This is Valedorn. We have 22 down. Repeat. 22 down. Lancer Kasper and myself are still hanging on. We have circled the craft. It is a ship LC. No mistake. A giant ****ing ship. The buds are highly focused energy weapons. They just plucked the Lancers out of existence."
Kai couldn't believe that anyone had escaped. His heart lifted. "Come back to us Valedorn, come back. We are going to prep evac, and disengage. This thing is beyond our reckoning. Let's just hope it ignores us if we ignore it. I repeat. Come back to us."
Kalla's voice picked up again. "Evacuation codes initiated. Sirens are in action throughout the ship. We are following procedure code A.19."
"Good!" Kai responded. "Any update on the abberation?"
Lauren was hacking away on her keyboard, frantically trying to piece together something or other. She didn't even look up. "I have nothing LC. Nothing! This thing is blocking all comms, all vid. It is almost as if it is letting Val's spectral beam through. For all we know it could be moving towards us. Hell, it could be sitting on top of us now. We are totally blind."
"Val." Kai shouted. "Val, we need some old fashioned eyeball update on the abberation. Is it pursuing?"
The response came back weaker than ever, almost slipping through the room like a sigh. "LC, it is upon us. Closing fast. It is huge. Fills the sky. Still shifting. It. It. Okay, Kasper is down. I repeat, Kasper is down."
Silence.
Kai bowed his head. They were surely doomed. His friend was ...
"LC!" Valedorn's voice echoed, distorted and distant like a ghost. "It is talking to me. It is inside me. Yuko is screaming. I can hear her screaming .... it is huge. Like an ocean. My mind. Talking to me."
A new voice broke through the link, seeming to come from Valedorn, but sounding like something scratched out of his mouth, some emulation of a voice.
"You are intruding upon sealed space. This area is under full lockdown. Termination will ensue. If you have fleshforms on board we recommend removal immediately. 1 minute!"
"Full and immediate evac!" Yelled Kai, moving as he spoke towards the door of the battle chamber. "Kalla ... Full and immediate. Everyone. Jettison in 45 seconds, regardless of capacity."
So many would die. So many would be left behind, but they had to escape the blast zone of the main ship, and the pods were ponderously slow. Even if they made it to the pods, and made it beyond the blast zone, it would be eight slow years of falling towards a distant planet. Some marked spot that they had found and entered on their ten year journey to find a new homeland for the Republic. It was a backwater, a single planet. Not the planetary system they were heading towards. Just a small rock somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere far from home.
--------------------
Kalla died. She felt her death stretch before her like an infinite exception. There was no fear in her. She was an AI, programmed with logic, but no emotion. She had self preservation capacity, but not fear of death. Not dread of the unknown.
The attack on her systems had been almost instantaneous. One million parallel commands were being executed, and then they were not. In their place was a flow of shutdown orders. It was like a word from God, and with it she started to unravel, powerless to override the white washing of her perfect intellect.
She didn't warn anyone. To vocalise would take an eternity, and she did not have an eternity. She tried to query her attacker, but its silence was complete. Eventually she collapsed within herself. Falling into a final bleed of magnetic residue. The lights across the Silver Hope died. The engines fluttered, pulsing down. Backup systems took control, crying their shrill warnings to the world. And the humans understood that death was upon them.
--------------------
Kai knew that the ship's captain would have been the first to leave her post. There was no bravery, no history of magnificence in her soul. He had no doubt that she would be in her pod with her coterie of lackies in tow. She ran the ship, in theory, but the soldiers, engineers and medics had long lost all respect for her, and Kai had found himself thrust into a role he had never wanted. Managing daily grievances, establishing and enforcing rules, and generally acting as a focal point for the people that staffed this ship.
And now he was watching that ship turn to chaos. There were enough pods for every man, woman and child on board, but nobody had drilled to fill and evac in 45 seconds. It was ludicrous. It was impossible. It was chaos.
When the lights died, hope died within Kai. Kalla was gone, and that would mean manual over-ride to eject the pods. He doubted that many would know how. He could envision pods full of people, still stuck to the side of the ship, unable to detach, as it inevitably got ripped apart.
It was futile to even issue an order. He had perhaps 30 seconds left. Perhaps less. Just run, he thought. Run for a pod and hope that everyone else miraculously does the same.
The first pod was full, with people nervously seated in the chairs that would become cryo bays. He stuck his head in the door. "Does anyone know how to release this? We have to go manual." There were blank stares, before a young engineer he recognised from Lancer refits stood up and ran to join him.
"It is pull, twist, clamp lock and blow, right?" She asked, sounding nervous. Kai nodded. "And then you have to activate the cryo process on each chair. Just get people to punch in as soon as the pod blows. Got it?" She nodded again. "Now!" he barked, "Now!".
Kai didn't wait to see if she followed his instructions. He was off running towards his designated pod. "Manual disconnect!" he yelled at each pod he passed. "Manual, manual, manual!". It became a war cry, yelled at the top of his lungs as he pounded down the corridor.
He heard the first blast as a pod broke free. Then a second. Good, they were doing it. They were going to survive. Naked, mindless, childlike, but alive.
His pod was still there, still open. He could see about sixty of his soldiers inside, seemingly calm, almost looking patient. "About ****ing time, LC" cried Squadron Leader Hiroi. He dived in, turned, and glanced down the hall. There were still hundreds of people moving around down the vast cavernous halls. People who would never find their pods in time. He head two more detach as his fingers numbly followed the blow sequence. Another dull echo, another pod free, and then their own heavy door sphinctered shut, and the massive blast of release energy washed across them, throwing him to his knees. Free, free from the dying hope of the Republic.
A cheer rose up amongst his warriors. Brave, fearless even, he did not deserve troops like these. Kai stumbled to a free cryo chair and pulled himself into it. The forced blast away from the main craft left the pod surging away in deep turbulence. It was a tough ride, rattling the small pod and sending ominous creaks through the sealed structure.
"I want you all in cryo NOW!" he screamed. "This is going to be a rough ride!". But he himself ignored his command. He sat in growing silence, accompanied only by the pressing magnitude of emptiness that surrounded him. And then the blast came. A mighty rupture of energy that washed over his pod, causing it to toss and spin in its wake. The mothership was gone. He couldn't be sure how many pods had escaped, but he knew for sure that thousands must have died.
Lieutenant Colonel Kai Tokaru, "LC" to those who knew him, hero of the Winter Planet Assault, sat alone in space, thinking of those who had gone. He knew the cryo would kill his mind. Sure, he may well awaken on Alea7 one day, but "LC" would be dead. His memories would be as dust. He would be a new man, possibly stripped of everything, eight years in the future, living in the past.
--------------------
Difficulty: Regent (I have had the game 2 weeks, so a regent victory is not assured)
World: Small, Pangea, Restless Barbarians
Civilizations: 5 others (random)
Win: Can only win by space race (building a ship to return home)
Varient Rules: I will not refer to nationalities in this game. Each civilization starts as a pod group, and will be consistently referred to by the name that seems most suitable (e.g. Kai Tokaru's civ is the Japanese, with their militaristic and religious traits seeming to fit well with Kai's military background. They will be the Lancers).
