Fa-THOOOM!
Suddenly, they were all lifted off their feet and Cassandra saw the thunderclouds and the edge of the Alpha-vessel against her vision, before a dizzying twist and she was slammed back down into the sand again, heavily.
“Ugh…” She croaked and coughed, pushing herself up to her knees to see what had gone so terribly wrong…and if her limbs were all in the right place, it had to be said. Her limbs were just as they should be, but the sound of the battle had dulled to a low ringing in her ears.
There, just behind her where the master drone had been that Irie had taken control of, was a ruined and blackened circle, decorated with twists and shreds of blackened metal.
“The master drone!” Cassie gasped, before realizing what had happened to it. There was only one force in the nearby vicinity that could have precision-shot the master drone with such accuracy, and who had been able to work out just what Irie had done to empower them.
Alpha. Cassandra looked up to see the ship starting to turn in minute degrees so that it was facing them. “Alpha worked out we were using a master/slave relationship, and it…” Cassandra was saying, as the last of the freedom-fighter drones crashed over to its side, its limbs twitching as it did so.
Alpha had worked out that Irie’s bot was the master, and in taking it out with the precision-guided laser shot from the vessel itself—
All of Irie’s drones had fallen uselessly away.
Oh crap, Cassandra thought as Alpha’s own spider-drones immediately swarmed and leapt in the air towards them.
“RUN!” Irie screamed, already hopping to her feet to get to her beloved Mercury Blade.
“If you persist…” that same metallic voice rang out across the sky, amplified by all of the charging Alpha-drones. “I will be forced to destroy your ship.”
“No!” Irie was the first to burst out, as Alpha’s drones leapt and catapulted their spinning bodies high and far over their heads, landing between them and the Mercury…
No! Cassandra echoed. They had come so close, despite the odds. So. Drekking. Close.
The Alpha spider-drones landed all around the ship in a haphazard oval, raising a selection of their wings to point directly at the Mercury Blade. Cassie wondered how many that she could take out before they did so much damage that the Blade would never fly again.
“You can’t. You glorified drekking calculator, you can’t…” Irie had stumbled to her knees, helplessly watching the ring of spider-drones about to launch themselves at the Mercury Blade and literally tear it apart, panel by panel.
“Qw3i-ckl-4^oh,” the Q’Lot jabbered, and even though Cassie couldn’t understand its strange speech, she thought that she knew perfectly well what it meant.
“Yeah…” Cassie similarly slumped to her knees in the warm sand. “We’re screwed.”
5
Eliard, Home at Last
“But… This is impossible…” Eliard whispered into the still air of the House Martin hallway.
To say that he recognized where he stood would be a complete understatement. Eliard remembered running down this very hallway, holding a perfect replica of a T-Jet fighter aloft as he imagined the aerial battles he would one day take part in.
The real battles had been nothing like what he had imagined at six years old. I had been a fool, back then… His thoughts turned darker as he also remembered his father, Lord General Martin—now long since deceased, passed away on his deathbed right upstairs, without his only son there to watch his final moments—storming through these halls, shouting loudly that his son had to train harder, study more, be better!
The atrium hallway was one of the main arteries that crossed in front of the main reception hall, with two grand staircases at either end and doorways along its length leading out into Lady Martin’s courtyard.
My mother. Eliard took a few steps across the pristine, glossy marble to the open arched doorways to see the fairly small courtyard that his mother had presided over all of his childhood life. There in the center was the fountain statue of the Martin Sea Eagle still standing prominent over its stone basin, but no water flowed and chimed from underneath it. There were still the collections of great basalt and granite bowls in which his mother had trained lavender and thyme, heathers and rare flowers, but now they were just barren pots of desiccated dirt. The gravel was still crushed white, still as immaculate as it had always been, but everything else had the look of something long forgotten.
The doors, Eliard realized with a start. All of the computerized doorways were gone, ripped from their emplacements, leaving behind dangling wires. On the other side of the courtyard, the front terrace of the Martin Palace—which also formed the outer wall—had at its center a large, baroque-style vaulted archway inside of which should be two grand mahogany doors. These were seeded with conductors and sensors and energy field transmitters, of course—his father might have had a taste for the fine things in life, but he could never be called an idiot.
And through the main doors… Eliard wavered a little on his feet. The view should be one of the winding, wide roadway that swept down sharply as it zigzagged across the broken hill to the capital city of Branton, which took its name from this home world of Branton 1, the home of the Martin Noble House.
But the city was no more.
“What the…” The young captain’s feet took him across the courtyard without thought, he didn’t even notice the crunch of his feet on the gravel, until he was standing just outside the front of the palace and looking down at what should be a prosperous, almost idyllic scene.
The palace of the Noble House of Martin should have stood on the near crags of hills that surrounded the city of Branton on the coast of the great and wide seas. Behind the palace should be the lines of sharp-peaked mountains from which the Martin Sea Eagles and ospreys and raptors would fly. Branton 1 should have been a prosperous, wealthy Imperial Coalition city, sprawling past its original walled confines to form three further rings, interconnected with plasti-crete highways.
Even though generations of Eliard’s family had passed strict ordinance rules to ensure that Branton and its surroundings maintained the look of some ancient Earth Mediterranean coastal city, it should still boast a dozen of the crystal-glass domes and spires that the younger and gaudier noble houses threw up all over their townships. Only a few gunmetal skybridges should be in existence, and the various tall lights of the harbor—stone towers rising and narrowing like spikes many hundreds of feet into the air—should constantly be flaring with ruddy navigation lights.
But no more.
Branton 1 lay in ruins. A tortured and intentional ruin as well. Eliard’s mind quickly moved from one broken district to another.
The pirate captain had seen his fair share of battlefields—not as many as if he had stayed at Trevalyn Academy and been drafted as a captain in the Martin House Navy, granted, but enough to know that some terrible war had been waged against his home.
But when? This didn’t make any sense! Martin shook his head. Where was his mother, Lady Martin? She had taken over the rulership of the noble house, naturally, upon his father’s death, and even though she had despaired and was deeply ashamed over her son’s abandonment of his noble heritage, she was the one of his parents he’d always had at least a grudging respect for.
She should be here. Eliard’s mind started to panic. Unless…
Alpha had defeated the Imperial Coalition Fleet. Wasn’t that what Ponos had told him back on the ice planet of Epsilon G3-ov? That Armcore and the noble houses had amassed to try and put an end to the Alpha-vessel, but Armcore had betrayed the rest of the Imperial noble houses and had instead sided with the hybrid machine intelligence.
Had they attacked here after that? Eliard thought that the answer was obvious.
At the time, the captain knew that he and the Mercury Blade had taken the ECN back to the Old Earth Coalition station, and then Alpha and Armcore had come after them as the Mercury Blade had rendezvoused with Cassandra Milan and her Q’Lot allies
at the warp gate on Esther, intending to stop the flow of Valyien intelligence from whatever strange ab-dimension they now occupied into this one, and their puppet, the Alpha-vessel.
Alpha must have sent some of the Armcore war cruisers here. Eliard gritted his teeth as he studied the wreckage of the city he used to play truant in, going to down and out mariner bars in an attempt to annoy his father, which wasn’t hard for Eliard, being who he was and the lord general being who he was.
There were no crystal-glass domes anymore, only the shells of meter-thick composite glass, broken open and revealing nothing inside but debris and weeds.
The sky bridges too had vanished except for spurs like bones sticking from a trauma victim. Other parts of Branton had seemingly been turned into a soup of crushed rock and metal—all of the individual lines of houses and narrow streets losing their distinctive pennants, trees, colors, and instead merging into an ochre, bland soup of tragedy.
Circles. Impact craters, Eliard saw quickly. These areas of destruction were largely composed of various sizes of impact circles so large that they could only mean one thing: orbital bombardment.
“Only Armcore and Alpha have the firepower to do that…” Eliard thought aloud, before remembering that the Alpha-vessel had been chasing them through warp, heading straight to Old Earth before being beaten back, returning with a fleet, and then warping after them again to Alpha.
Could Alpha have so completely destroyed Branton during that time? Eliard wondered. Given the frenetic activity of the last forty-eight hours, he rather doubted that such a task was even in the hybrid Armcore-Valyien’s capabilities, as well as pacifying the entire Imperial Coalition at the same time.
“No… This is more like something that Dane Tomas would do…” Eliard’s face felt hot with rage and he could feel his heartrate starting to pound in his chest.
Dane Tomas was the CEO, Commander-in-Chief, and Senior of the Armcore industrial complex, inherited from his own father the old Senior Tomas just as Eliard should have inherited this world from his own father, Lord General Martin. Armcore was never supposed to make a direct attack against any noble house, let alone any of their home worlds, but the pirate captain was under no illusions about the murderous capacities of the current senior.
He did just betray all of the noble houses and lead them to their deaths, after all.
But still, as Eliard surveyed his corrupted inheritance, it was still hard to fathom how quickly all of this had happened. There were great swathes of blackened soot marks over entire districts as firestorms must have raged through the city, and the entire harbor wall facing the seas was down, with the near coastline not being the crash of white, slate-grey and blue coasts but instead a sluggish, brownish murk from all of the contaminants and debris that had washed into it.
Eliard, apart from being young, fairly quick-witted, and entirely reckless, had a few other advantages to his name, and one was that he had been trained at least a little in strategy and martial arts as the heir to a noble house. His mind quickly informed him that in order for this orbital bombardment to take place, and to be successful, the Armcore force must have also breached the space hub’s defenses far above them, as well as neutralizing the forward defense stations on each of Branton’s two moons, and that the Armcore Fleet had to have overcome the field of ring-satellites that were even farther out that protected Branton space and the valuable shipping lanes.
Each of these were conquests that a dedicated, highly-trained, and seriously-well equipped force could do of course, the pirate captain knew. He had himself run a dozen scenarios back in his youthful years at Trevalyn Academy where he had to work out the size of a force necessary to defend a noble house home world from invasion.
But it would take time, he also knew. And word would get out.
This looked as though it had happened so suddenly… He turned to look back at the palace before receiving his next shock of a lifetime.
The mountains that had always stood behind the Martin Palace before eventually turning into craggy clifftops further north of its position were…different.
“No. That is… That is impossible…” Eliard gasped for the second time since arriving here.
The mountain range itself had taken a battering as if some ancient god-hand had swept out of the sky and brushed aside their tops in a fit of rage. The peaks that he was so used to seeing that he could remember them in his sleep—Eyrie, Traitor’s Pass, Storm—were now a collapsed wreckage of rocky landslides.
“But… How?” Eliard couldn’t even begin to fathom the sort of destructive power that had been unleashed.
Of course, Armcore could perform such terrible feats, but it would probably take more than one war cruiser to do it, wouldn’t it? And it would also be an entirely non-strategic and punitive move, unless all that Senior Tomas had wanted to do here was to kick at the bones of his enemies like a child in a tantrum.
But something about all of this was scraping at the inside of Eliard’s skull. A gnawing realization that he knew was there, but for some reason didn’t want to surface.
A massive orbital attack, he reasoned. Something that hadn’t happened since the bad old years of the House Wars…
Looking between mutilated mountains and crushed city, Eliard realized all of a sudden what it was: the people.
“Where is everyone?” He turned his eyes to scan the debris below in just the same manner as one of the eagles that were his family’s crest. All of this had to have happened in the past forty-eight hours, but where had all the people gone? He couldn’t see signs of any movement in the wreckage. None. Nada. Zilch.
“No one can evacuate that fast,” Eliard said with conviction. Even with the best of planning, Eliard was trained enough to know that no matter how tight the security and emergency protocols, an attack against a city of Branton’s size would always leave refugees behind. It was a sad fact, but it was one that anyone with strategy and tactical experience knew. There were simply too many people in an urban center as large as Branton for there not to be some left behind—perhaps they were the ones who refused to leave their homes, or the last of the city defense staff, or the various mercenaries, looters, and criminal underbelly who always tried to profit from such storms of history.
And yet Eliard could see no one. At all.
All in forty-eight hours? Seventy-two? If Eliard wasn’t looking at the evidence with his own two eyes, then he quite simply wouldn’t believe it. He was caught between going down into the city itself or back to the palace, but a shiver through his limbs reminded him what he needed right now, more than anything.
I need food. And water. And medical attention.
One thing that Eliard could say in favor of his austere family was that even though they were one of the most prestigious, his father had always insisted that the Martin Palace be stockpiled as if at any time they were about to endure a siege or some other sort of disaster.
‘We may look strong, but in fact, all of the home worlds are vulnerable!’ Eliard clearly remembered his father lecturing him at some forgotten stage.
“Clearly.” Eliard thought of the vacant and disheveled Branton behind him as he walked through the empty arches back into his mother’s courtyard.
‘We may have warp drives. We may have faster-than-light communication through the data-space, but still… We must never forget that a few hundred thousand, thousands of thousands, in some cases, million leagues separate the Imperial Coalition worlds.’
Eliard reflected that his father was perhaps the most warlike person that he had ever had the misfortune of knowing. Not warlike in the way that the Duergar were warlike—that large, troll-like alien species with their shovel-heads and tusks and bodies that were almost double the width of even the widest human—but warlike in the way that everything had been a battle, a strategy, to the lord general.
His father had impressed upon Eliard the fragility of humanity, and importance of the noble houses—and of course House Martin in particular—in keepi
ng the Imperial Coalition and humanity together. Eliard had grown up with the sense that at any time, the Imperial Coalition might break apart or that some new threat would wipe out their wonderful technologies, leaving each of the outposts of humanity vulnerable and alone.
Which was why the old lord general had insisted on a limit to machine intelligence on Branton, not even owning a house intelligence worthy of the self-aware name. Instead, the lord general had ensured that his people were reliable and tough, and that they knew how to toil and survive with their own labors.
Which meant that the medical suite would be next to useless, as well! Eliard grumbled as he turned once in the atrium and took the stone steps up to the next level of the building, where a host of service quarters should be stationed: cleaning rooms, wash rooms, medical suites, and workshops.
His father had been so insistent on this tough legacy of self-reliance that he had even banned genetic aging treatments on Branton, insisting that while the other noble houses, like the Selazars, could pretend to live forever, the Martins would have no such truck with their ghoulish customs.
Which is probably why you died on one these medical gurneys instead of having the nanobots injected that would have remade your body, you old fool! Eliard thought as he swept onto the corridor containing the medical facilities. Not that Eliard was any great fan of the nano-genetic therapies—there was something in him that was grudgingly proud of the fact that his body was still his own—but he shied away from giving his father the benefit of that biological pride.
This corridor was just as ruinous as the rest of the palace, Eliard saw as soon as his boots stepped onto the still-glossy white-marble floors. The upper atrium, as this corridor was known, was marked by the windows overlooking the courtyard on one side, while on the other were the arched doorways that led into various bays and rooms. In each case, once again, the metal doorways had been ripped from their emplacements and had vanished, leaving nothing but wires and connector ports.
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