Ravens of Eternity

210 Blood & Flame, Pt Mia slammed her fist down on the terminal in front of her, and shattered its screen to pieces. The terminal’s frame warped from the force as well, though it didn’t stop operating.

A fractured report glitched out on its broken screen.

“Say that again,” she growled.

“A-apologies, Crusader,” said the Prophet in front of her. “We’ve lost contact with a fifth retraining facility, the one in the Gorlett system. It had, at last record, 9,502 Hallowed in its ranks. There were also ten full drone squadrons onsite. All of it was lost.”

Mia stewed as the Prophet repeated his report. The Gorlett base was one of the larger, older ones that Father had created. It took him a great deal of time and patience to achieve what he did with that base.

Only now it was gone, like so many others.

She had come to terms that someone was going after them, and that they were relentless in their hunt. She was certain that it wasn’t the Federation’s work, otherwise they would have claimed all of the bodies and disposed of them through standard biorecycling procedures.

Instead, they left everything there for them to see. Especially their dead brothers and sisters, who were mostly reduced to mere chunks of bloody flesh.

It was as though they were insulting the Prophets directly, and slandered Father with their deaths. As though his efforts were ultimately meaningless, then shoved it in his face. That angered her most.

.....

Beyond that, what puzzled her was how they were found in the first place.

“And what about the databanks and logic circuits?” she asked, anger deep in her voice. “Do they report as set to default as well?”

The Prophet stood at attention in front of Mia’s desk, nervous as her anger grew further and further. Although he truly believed in the Crusader and her passion, he certainly didn’t want to be on the receiving end of her wrath.

He had heard that hers was both legendary and devastating.

“I-I don’t know enough to answer that question,” he stammered. “But if it follows the pattern of previous bases, then possibly, yes.”

“You realize how impossible that is, right? The only way to set them back to default is to have control of Security Intelligence, and you know what that means, don’t you?”

The Prophet paled when he realized her insinuation.

“Father hand-crafted SecInt’s code himself,” she continued. “No-one could have possibly broken it, except perhaps himself. Or are you implying that Father is flawed? Because if Father’s creation is flawed, then Father himself is flawed. That’s what you’re saying, right?”

“No! Of course not!” he yelled out. “I-I’m only reiterating what the Chief Datacoder relayed to me. I don’t know anything about code or SecInt, and couldn’t possibly make any such assumptions...”

Mia stood up slowly from her seat and glowered at the Prophet with murderous eyes.

“Since you’re so goddamned useless,” she hissed, “go throw yourself out of an airlock.”

“But I-”

“Just get the hell out of my sight!”

She slammed her fist down on her already-broken terminal, and shattered it further. Its pieces flew in every direction, even as the Prophet ran out of her office.

Just as he ran through the doorway, another Prophet came in.

She walked up to the space in front of Mia’s desk, smiled, then plopped right into one of the seats next to her. She looked up at Mia, who was positively fuming, then sighed deeply.

“You really oughta take it easy on your fellow brothers and sisters,” she said. “Their morale and loyalty to you will get better – if you don’t berate them as often as you do.”

The Prophet’s words sunk down into Mia, and allowed the steam and anger to ebb out slowly. And once she cooled back down, she shook her head and slumped back into her seat.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “I just get so mad sometimes, especially now that someone’s out there, destroying Father’s projects. As if they have the right!”

“Sure, that anger’s natural,” said the Prophet, “but point it at your enemies, not your family.”

“Oh, easy for you to say, but come on! Do you honestly believe someone cracked Father’s SecInt? Are you honestly going to tell me you think Father’s code was flawed enough to break?!”

“Saw the logs myself,” replied the Chief Datacoder. “Everything was reinstalled from default using root restore commands. Can’t do that without approval from SecInt.”

Mia immediately became heated once again, and her tone rose sharply.

“You realize you’re insulting Father, right?!” she screamed.

But the Prophet simply frowned at her in response, and huffed.

“I never said any such thing,” she replied. “Anyway, I’m not here to talk about Father’s SecInt. I’m here to tell you that I’ve figured out a way to catch the pests that’ve been plaguing us.”

Mia’s eyes widened, and her anger quickly redirected away from the Chief Datacoder. Instead, she hung it out there and saved it for her potential prey.

“Go on,” she said.

“Well, they’re grabbing those settlements’ databanks, right?” began the Datacoder, “It’s the only way they’ve got our settlement’s coordinates. But each settlement only has one or two others at best. Any other coordinates in there were unsuitable. Which means we know where they’re most likely going to go.”

Mia’s grin widened at the prospect.

“So we try and ambush them,” she said.

“And pay them back in kind,” replied the Datacoder. “For insulting Father, of course.”

“I’m in. How do we do that? Every settlement they hit, the more coordinates they get! Guessing which one they’re gonna be at is... impossible.”

The Chief Datacoder chuckled as a grin formed on her face.

“Not if you switch out the settlements’ coordinates,” she replied. “Which I did hours ago.”

~

Nighttime had fallen over the hilly settlement, which was now solely populated by smoke and flame. Many of its buildings became home to pyres bold enough to try to reach the sky. In them, the corpses of the dead were consumed into ash.

And this time, there were too many corpses, too many Hallowed. This was the largest settlement they had come across, and it was home to nearly 10,000 colonists.

Both corvettes had landed on a plain a few dozen kilometers away, as four of their mecha stood by. Another two had been disassembled and sat in the Spirit of Amelia’s cargo hold, destined to be spare parts.

The nine of them stood side by side as they looked out to the flaming settlement in the distance. Over the course of an hour, they all watched as the fires diminished. Most of the smaller fires had reduced themselves down to glowing embers.

This act of watching the flames die down had become their ritual after each of their fights. A little internal maintenance, in a way. Each of them held some measure of guilt for the people they had to kill, to burn. Despite the deaths being necessary, it still dug at each of them.

The deaths of thousands of colonists became necessary to prevent thousands, if not millions more.

It was Azrael who felt that guilt most of all of them, and the funerary pyres were at her insistence. She saw it as a way of sending the dead off peacefully. To at least give them the respect that the Prophets had denied them.

Sometimes, she wondered if it was her simply trying to ease herself of guilt, that the fires were meant to quell what she felt in her heart. But then she supposed it was both.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, she concluded. Only way to deal with this madness, really.

They all looked out towards the settlement and had variations of the same thought. Guilt for not being able to save them, but relief that they were no longer in pain.

Raijin lamented the loss of all the potential ideas, of what the settlement could have grown into. Of the varied futures that were stolen from its inhabitants.

Freya felt anger at the Prophets’ actions, how their single-minded, self-serving interests destroyed the lives of so many. She felt anger at the Federation for not doing anything about the terrorists. And most of all, she felt anger at whoever their ‘Father’ was, and the conceit he held.

Once they were all done processing their thoughts and eased their hearts, they went back to the task at hand.

The normal humans ate a little before they slept, while the refugees took the time to maintain their ships and mecha.

Both corvettes and all four mecha were performing their usual armor reinforcement routines and complete out-of-combat repairs. Although these repairs were much slower than field repairs, they were able to completely mimic the material’s structural integrity and complexity exactly.

Field repairs, for the most part, had diminishing returns as it traded up true replication for print speed.

More than the repairs, the pilots actively maintained their ships and mecha. They made sure everything was running to spec, and tuned to the exact precision. Raijin even upgraded their Intelligences every chance she got, and smoothed out any bugs or flaws in their code.

She even lent a couple of her ladybug maintenance drones to T-Rex, to help keep his ship in top shape. After having them for only a cycle, he was so impressed that he offered to outright buy them.

Once they were done with everything on their plates, they put together a nice little campfire and sat around it to relax, talk, drink.

And strategize.

“I have discovered something after peering into their latest set of datalogs,” said Raijin. “Only two of the settlements we have visited were relatively new. This new one was created months earlier. Perhaps closer to a year.”

“Okay, so that means they’ve been at this for a while?” asked Freya. “I mean, would figure they were doing this for years or something.”

“It is stranger than that. The two new ones were much different from this older one. For one thing, the new ones had better technology, better cybernetics, better logic circuits. But the iteration is generations apart from this one.”

“What, so they did this for a while,” said T-Rex, “then stopped? And only recently did they pick things back up?”

“Yes, perhaps.”

Raijin pointed out to the settlement in the distance, which was still smoldering in the dark. Its glowing embers now a deep red.

“That one appears to have come into existence right after the Prophets’ attack on Mars,” she said. “As though it was created because of it. And as we saw, it was deeply entrenched. They had the time to build an entire bunker underneath.”

“So basically, we should expect that we’ll find a lot more like this,” said Freya. “Heavily defended and ready for action. Isn’t that just great.”

“Hold on,” said T-Rex. “I thought they had those numbers because they were reinforced, not because they already had it all on hand.”

“Probably a bit of both,” said Azrael. “I mean, we’ve been seeing a lot more resistance with each settlement we hit. More and more and more.”

“And we oughta expect them to ambush us at some point too,” said Freya. “No way are they gonna let us keep trashing their little project like this. Not without a real fight.”

T-Rex looked up into the night sky, past the stars and into the deep black beyond.

“How many coordinates have we found so far?” he asked. “A dozen? Two dozen?”

“Yes, twelve,” answered Raijin. “However, only about half of them are habitable.”

“And how many coords did we get from this settlement specifically?”

“Three more.”

.....

T-Rex hopped up on his feet, and paced a bit around the fire as he thought.

“Even if they ambushed us, what could they do?” he asked. “Even if they gathered up all of the Hallowed in the quadrant to face us, we could still shut them down quickly.”

“I doubt their ambush would involve just basic foot troops,” said Freya. “They’ve seen the leftovers of our fights – of the huge bullet holes and blast marks we leave everywhere. They’re gonna respond in kind, and in force.”

T-Rex grimaced as he thought about their predicament. They had set themselves into a pattern that was easily predictable, and it was only a matter of time before their enemy acted.

“So then, let’s switch it up for a bit,” he said. “Throw those assholes for a loop.”

“I agree,” said Raijin. “Fooling the Prophets should be child’s play.”

“I say we fall for their trap,” said Freya, “and slap ’em around a bit.”

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