Ekological Chimera
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Chapter 17 - Interlude II
🕑 Added 2024-09-18 19:23:49 +0000 UTCAdmiral Renard frowned as space reasserted itself. A moment later after Bastion, the dreadnought-class battleship exited the warp, the rest of the task force arrived, announced by dozens of dots appearing on Bastion’s sensors.
He straightened out his black uniform, before clasping his hands behind his back again, listening as the warships checked in.
Through it all, he kept frowning.
He could not shake the feeling that they had already lost. Not the war. He had faith in a victory there. A violent, bloody victory.
Admiral Thaler, one of the oldest admirals and the first among equals, spoke with pretty words and cold logic but had neglected to ask perhaps the most important question.
Would such a victory even be worth it?
While all of them pursued the same goal, the retention of humankind’s sovereignty, Renard was very well aware that their reasons for doing so were hardly uniform.
From fanatics to simply people who thought it prudent to not let a… third party hold the reigns.
Renard was the latter. While Athena might have been capable, she was still just a tool. An intelligent one, doubtlessly, but for humanity’s fate to be in the hands of such a thing would be distasteful.
But meriting a civil war?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Yet they would forever be the ones who escalated the whole conflict to outright violence. Simply because they had been losing.
So he frowned, for he could not come to another conclusion than that they had lost to the AI in the arena where it mattered the most.
“Check complete, all systems clear!” The chief engineer announced, shortly followed by similar statements from the other officers.
“Current coordinates within the expected deviation.”
“All ships accounted for, Cerberos reporting a minor engine malfunction.”
Colonel Navarro, his second-in-command, just gave him a nod.
Renard turned to the previous officer, a young girl barely in her thirties with short red hair, “How minor, Lieutenant Ivanova?”
Hearing his voice, she straightened her back, double checking the console in front of her, “Warp deviation over 0.2 percent, they ended up an AU or so away from the main formation. Their engineers are looking into it, best guess seems to be regular wear and tear, sir.”
If Renard was not already frowning, he would be now.
Regular wear and tear his ass. 0.2 percent was enough to leave the ship far away and isolated from the rest of the task force. The idiots on Cerberos were damn lucky that no one had been waiting for them this time.
Checking such things should have been a top priority for the crew. He’d have to have words with their Captain. Such things were completely unacceptable.
Making a mental note, he turned back to the young Lieutenant manning the sensor station, “The situation in the system, Lieutenant?”
“Uh, I’m only getting two cruisers and both seem damaged, sir.”
“The colonists?”
She shook her head.
Renard did his best to stop himself from sighing. Obviously, things wouldn’t be simple.
“How long until the IFF reaches us?” He asked.
“Still twenty or so minutes, sir,” Ivanova responded.
He nodded, before resigning himself to waiting. If he had known how much of space combat was waiting when he had been younger, Renard doubted he’d ever would have enlisted.
If only light travelled faster, or someone finally figured out FTL comms.
The following twenty minutes passed swiftly. The Admiral did not move from his post, overlooking his people and listening as more thorough checks were completed.
Before the time was up, Cerberos managed to fix their issue and calculate an intercept course. Letting the lagging ship catch up would slow their approach to ‘Eigos’ by another hour, but Renard always disliked gambling.
Better to approach cautiously and at full strength.
Soon, Ivanova spoke up again, “We’ve got the IFF along with a report. The two surviving ships are Alcyone and Pleione, forwarding the attached message to you, Admiral.”
The Admiral blinked. He had expected the Special Operations stealth ship to be one of the survivors.
Luckily there were answers right in front of him.
The next half an hour was spent mostly in silence as Renard read and then re-read the twelve-page document signed by both Captain Song and Captain Black.
“What an absolute clusterfuck,” he swore, startling a few of the officers on the bridge.
If his ship wasn’t already on high alert he’d have ordered one now.
The Admiral stayed silent for a moment before turning to his second in command, “What do you think, Navarro?”
“Respectfully, sir, I concur,” his second in command responded, eliciting a snort from the Admiral.
“At least the colonists made it,” Navarro added.
Renard inclined his head slightly in agreement. The two colony ships had booked it and hid behind the gas giant the moment the shooting started. He couldn’t see any use for them now, but perhaps something would come up.
Sending them back before the situation was resolved was out of the question.
And what a situation it was.
Two fully crewed cruisers were destroyed, over a battalion of men was brutally killed by some mad barbarian and of course, the nearly handpicked crew of Sterope apparently betrayed them.
Poor Shepard. Hopefully, he wouldn’t follow in her footsteps, but he’ll definitely have to add more people to his guard detail.
“What are we going to do, sir?” Navarro asked, bringing him out of his thoughts.
Renard turned to him, before glancing at the rest of the bridge and raising his voice, “The situation might be more complicated than we expected, but the plan hasn’t changed.”
“We still have to seize whatever lets these savages do what they do, there is just going to be more of it than we assumed.”
“As for the rest, we’ll have to operate under Sparrow protocols while maintaining a constant state of battle-readiness.”
The officers present were too well-trained to groan, but he could almost hear the sound. A constant state of readiness was annoying, but the dreadnought had enough capable crew for it to work smoothly. On the other hand, Sparrow protocols never worked smoothly because no one liked them.
Understandable, really. Never being left alone was maddening for most people. Unfortunately, spaceships were rather vulnerable to sabotage.
With the implied degree of infiltration, anything less would be foolish.
Now he’d just have to figure out how to deal with a walking surface-to-orbit canon.
It was going to be an interesting few weeks.
______________________________________________________________________
Aisac Ferrier, Knight Commander of the Temple Knights, sat crosslegged in his room, a blue light winking in and out of existence in front of him.
His duties done, he should have been resting, but he could not help himself. Never in his wildest dreams would he have imagined that something would make the old monster share her power.
And what a power it was. He knew, intellectually, that the Custodian was the closest thing Eigos had to a god walking around. That she was but a proxy to an even greater being meant little, for Eternity only interacted with mortals through her Custodian. But the Custodian, for all her purported power, had not truly flexed it in living memory.
Oh, she used it here and there and it always impressed, but never anything remotely close to the legendary feats ascribed to her.
Until two days ago. In the end, knowing and seeing were different things. Even he was surprised at the amount of power she had casually thrown around.
It only reinforced his weariness towards the Terrans. The battle had been an overwhelming victory, but the Custodian did not do victories. Or battles. Not really.
She did massacres.
The less educated would probably not see the difference, but he had studied the Temple’s history since he was just a small child. There would be others who would see the same thing, he knew.
The more idiotic ones would probably even act on the knowledge. He’d bet on at least a couple of the more inbred kings trying something.
The Seven Fools would likely be getting a name change soon.
The Terrans might have managed to surprise her, but that hardly meant anything. Unlike what some people pretended, the Custodian was not infallible, even if she seemed close. Aisac knew that more than most.
She could be surprised. She could make mistakes. Hardly groundbreaking knowledge, but he had little doubt that some would see it that way. Not many realized how little mistakes meant in front of overwhelming power.
No, poking the Custodian now would be even more stupid than usual. She acted more lively than she had been in decades. The Terrans might have gotten a poke off, but the only thing more idiotic than poking a sleeping dragon was poking one that was awake.
Why anyone would want to try and fight Eternity and her inhuman chosen, especially after the latest display, was beyond him. Yet the southern kingdoms were already showing signs of rebellion.
He doubted the Terrans would miss such a great opportunity, which was likely the point of said rebellions.
Suddenly, the gentle glow of the pendant he wore on his neck lessened to nothing and the blue light disappeared. He had lost his concentration.
Aisac sighed. He was getting close, he could feel it. It made him wonder whether the Custodian had once struggled like this too.
He tried to imagine her as a young girl struggling to properly use her power. He failed.
Perhaps she had not. Very little was known about the beginning of the Church, despite a living witness. The Custodian had struck a covenant with Eternity and that was that. As far as he knew, no records of her personal life existed before that point. He also strongly suspected that the covenant recorded in the Church’s archives was not the full picture, but he might be wrong there.
Maybe he’d muster the courage to ask her one of these days. Despite the approaching strife, the Custodian’s mood seemed better than it had been in his entire life. An ideal time for questions, possibly.
Still. Actually doing so felt way too personal. Sacrilegious, almost. He did not think the Custodian would actually take it that way, but he was a firm believer in not poking dragons.
Not many others shared his opinion, unfortunately.
