by Aer-ki Jyr
The beacon groups grabbed as many as they could, as did the portals onboard the ship that were not only accepting incoming portal transports as fast as possible, but they were also reaching out to grab people on the surface who did not have the ability to fling themselves up to the ship, but were rather emitting an Essence distress aura asking to be pulled up.
If they were close enough the ship portals could do that, but only the upper buildings in the city below were within range as Plausious saw vast tracks of the city light up asking for rescue as they knew it was too late to get underground.
There were so many that couldn’t be saved, even with the four supply ships helping to grab some of them, and this was just in the Neofan city beneath them. There were so many more scattered across the Temple that had no ship near them at all, and some that had smaller vessels taking who they could, but Plausious knew their shielding probably would not hold.
A disaster was playing out before him…and not just for the Neofan. Their population was miniscule here compared to the Vargemma, all of whom would be lost unless they could get into the catacombs where the Caretakers would not allow them to go.
Plausious made one final alteration, quickly updating the Caretakers to allow people inside while ordering all mechanical units on the surface to descend as far as possible. They would be needed in the aftermath, and maybe a handful of lucky Vargemma might flee there, for they now could see the coming blast wave on sensors as well…though some had to feel it coming before that.
Some of the Gjardans, which were no longer clumped together and had spread out around this side of the Temple, were pairing up to better whether the storm, and he wished one of them was closer so his flagship could do the same, but there was no time for such travel. Two more Gvan and a Gpio were racing to get to his position and burning Essence in their drives to do it while skating around the curve of the Temple and igniting the atmosphere as they went.
One of the Gvan was not going to make it, but there was an ocean they would be passing over soon so Plausious transmitted the best plan he had for them…and immediately saw the ship decelerate over the ocean and dive down into it, trying to get to the bottom and turtle up there, knowing the water would absorb some of the impact before it got to the ship.
The other two vessels got to his Gjardan in time and were incorporated underneath into the common defense matrix as the flagship poured all its remaining Essence into the primary shield…at least as much as it would take, and it was designed to take a lot, as little lights in the Essence realm kept rising up to, through, and around them.
The sight above them looked as if the star in the center had grown to encompass the entire Temple, with the burning light too bright to look at as it overwhelmed them but took forever to actually get there.
Then it finally hit.
The Gjardan did not move against the massive momentum, fixed in place relative to the gravity of the Temple beneath them as its engines were well up to the task of making jumps between stars at massive speeds, so the resistance here was not so impressive on a mass level, or for speed, which was still insanely high, but well less than the speed of light. What was the problem was that it was nearly all photons, and their collision with matter or energy matrixes would stress and overload them to the point of breaking.
His ship had to soak up, absorb, or deflect them before the hull armor became overloaded and detonated as if it were a bomb itself. And that’s exactly what happened below them in the Neofan city as its minimal shielding snapped instantly. The buildings were demolecularized in such a way that they become fusion bombs of their own…which threw off even more photonic energy that went deeper into the ground, causing more and more detonations until it ran its course and the rock remaining absorbed what was left without exploding, only liquefying into a sea of magma everywhere.
But it couldn’t be seen. All the matter that had fused together was still being flung back up and hammering the underside of the ships as the firehose of energy coming from the center of the Temple didn’t relent. The underside pressure was far less, though, and thankfully for the little ships that had got to him, the hull breaches in his underside were not compromised. Had no more than two of the ships got here they would have been, and those two ships would have been damaged or destroyed with the outer layers of his ship.
But they weren’t. Their protective cocoon held through the long torrent of destruction as the little lights coming up from the city below stopped shining…but those already floating up kept moving, for they were in the Essence realm and missing the blast wave.
“As soon as we are able to drop shields, I want transmutation grapples on as many of those people as we can get. They can last a while, but there’s no atmosphere out there for them to breathe. Pull in all we can here and go chase the others that are past us.”
“Say when,” the second in command prompted. “The armor can handle some of this when it relents.”
Plausious knew what he meant and agreed. Damage could be repaired later, but the lives could not be replaced, so he watched the indicator levels of the pressure on the shields coming from the Temple center as they slowly ticked lower.
But the lights beneath them were gone already, having passed the ship by.
“Keep shields up above us, but move the ship ahead of those in the Essence realm. We can capture them from below.”
The Gjardan immediately accelerated upward, which increased the pressure on the upper shields while lowering it on the conventional ones below, with those ships in their shadow not using the Essence to block it in the same way. As they all stayed linked together in engine synchronicity, they passed through many of the Essence bubbles, with the beacon groups grabbing some while the portals reached out much further and yanked them into their controlled apertures.
When the ship rose up enough, they were able to yank sideways and get people who were moving ballisticly away from the surface and also sideways a bit, but Plausious finally gave the order to drop the Essence shields the portals began pulling people in from everywhere, though the ship was having to move about greatly to pick them up as they continued to spread out.
Some couldn’t hold the effect long enough and emerged back into the debris-filled void, being incinerated by it before they could explosively decompress or suffocate. A few were able to use biological or technological body shields to protect themselves momentarily, and Plausious worked to transmute them inside as well, using his own telepathy to reach out, identify, and coordinate with them while the ship’s crew worked frantically to save as many as possible, as well as the crews on the smaller Neofan ships.
But many of those little lights went out before they could be rescued, followed by their Cores disappearing from what was left of their bodies soon after they could not hold their Essence bubbles.
Some though, could hold them for hours, and Plausious told all his ships to split up and search for them after the maelstrom ahead of them ended. He focused on helping mentally search for them after sending orders out to all surviving ships to do the same…without looking at how many were left. The Temple comm system was mostly down, save for what was underground, and he had to rely mostly on his ship’s sensors to tell him what was out there…and they were obscured by the nebula of debris rising up from the surface and beginning to fill the outer regions of the void within the Temple and slowly work its way in towards the distant center.
The rescue efforts lasted for days as some Neofan held on that long in the Essence realm due to the fact that the air in their little bubbles was augmented by personal armor they were wearing, and some of those actually were able to survive in space after reversion if they came out late enough not to get hit with the debris field.
Plausious was adamant that they not stop looking for 3 days, with the last survivor found being at just over two days and thrown so far away from the surface that it took a massive Essence flare from him to get the Gjardans’ attention.
All the Gjardans had survived, but so
me of them were missing large sections of their hulls. Their internal cores were intact, which meant they could be rebuilt, but the smaller ships had suffered far worse. 7 out of 8 of them had been destroyed when they couldn’t get to a Gjardan for cover, for they didn’t have military grade shields, nor did the former cities below…which were now completely gone.
Everything was gone, replaced by a debris nebula and solidified magma that rippled across the surface of the Temple around its entire perimeter. All stations across the void had been destroyed, the artificial star was gone, with everything now in blackness so deep it was terrifying, for there were no stars visible, but at least the artificial gravity was still intact and the ships could navigate using it.
Plausious hadn’t slept since he had arrived here, and wouldn’t for a long time to come. He was obsessed with finding survivors, if not in space then any that had gone underground, but most of the Caretaker units had been destroyed and the conduits that led down into the catacombs had allowed the blast wave in, wrecking a lot of equipment in those areas and collapsing tunnels. The Caretakers that were down there were already working to clear the debris and rebuild those tunnels, but Plausious didn’t have scans of what was down there in many places…and those places would have been the routes his people had taken to go down there, or the Vargemma, which was why no survivors had been found yet.
The dead zones were larger than the estimated blast damage, so he assumed it was communications problems, but he also knew sending down search teams was pointless given how big the Temple was. Using the Caretakers was the fastest route, but building more of them was going to take time…though it was already begun automatically as the Temple began to very slowly take steps to begin the repair process, continuing to draw in resources from the support grids beyond the Temple using the portals that were deep below ground, since the ones on the surface were completely destroyed.
And that included the ship portals, meaning Plausious’s fleet couldn’t go anywhere if they wanted to.
Fortunately that meant Truven’s ships couldn’t come in either and finish them off. Plausious was marooned once again, but this time he knew exactly what to do while everyone else that was living was clueless and on the verge of panic, though the Neofan naturally tried to suppress that emotion and ensure a state of calm control…with many failing to do so.
The Reignor would hold them together, as only he could now. This Temple, as it was before, was gone now and wouldn’t be coming back for at least half a million years…and it was his fault. He had underestimated the depth of the insanity that had taken hold in the Neofan for even one of them to do this…and the only reason it could have occurred was if Truven had ordered it, or the Diem had clandestinely, having obtained his codes by some means. Either way, this was a treachery beyond measure in Neofan history. The dead had not been given exile. They were wiped out entirely.
Neofan society, which was premised on respecting the longevity of life in their race, was now officially gone. Plausious had foreseen this eventuality. Of the collapse from within even if exterior enemies didn’t defeat them, but not this quick. He had no idea things had gotten so bad so fast, for while attacking Star Force was logically flawed, this was beyond imagining.
Yet it had happened, and he had to make sure it never did again.
So as he began the slow work of gathering those left alive and dealing with the mass of people crammed into the surviving ships, he assigned two saved engineers the task of redesigning the stellar emitters and their hydrogen storage supplies in such a way that this would be physically impossible to achieve again.
Plausious was going to remove this capability from all the Temples, strip it out of the Caretaker coding itself so it couldn’t be rebuilt. The regional purges that required a much higher Essence price would be sufficient to deal with massive problems, but this…this was a weapon that never should have been created. It put too much power in a single person’s hands, and allowed one act of betrayal to destroy so many.
And not just the Neofan. There were 4.8 trillion Vargemma in this Temple, or rather had been. Now they were gone, and Plausious doubted he would find even one alive hiding out there somewhere…let alone the Star Force personnel that were rumored to still be evading the Neofan here.
But if they were hiding underground, then there was a chance they might still be alive. The catacombs, or even their own subsurface structures, would make the best hiding places, especially if there were Star Force-designed Caretakers still operational to shield them.
When that thought occurred to him Plausious suddenly had a bit more hope, and input a message into the catacombs comm network stating that he was alive and the Neofan were no longer an enemy. He also unlocked all the surviving portals, telling Star Force that they could use them to escape if they wished, but that he was also asking for their immediate assistance with hunting for survivors underground…as well as getting a message to Director Davis asking for a small section of one of his Temples to relocate his people to as they refit their ships, regrouped, and prepared for a much different type of war than Plausious had expected.
Also, he requested assistance from any Vargemma in the Star Force temples who wished to fight…as well as putting in a request for the red tails to assist him.
For what he was going to need to do required a higher level of warfare, and one that House Atriark did not possess. One that required a Nuv’ernor, and all of them were under the possession of House Mutavi.
Except for those few in Star Force.
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