by Aer-ki Jyr
The rest jumped out along with the two Star Force jumpships, headed to the rendezvous point where every other surviving Protovic ship from Dfarch had fled with as many children shoved into them as they could fit.
When Nero returned to Heffen he did so alone. None of the Scorpions who had fought alongside him during the 13 year war had been assigned to him, giving him a fresh group of warriors and techs that hadn’t witnessed the struggles and horrors that had happened here. Those that did had been allowed to move on and shake it off, leaving him alone as the only one with a tie here.
As soon as they got back to the planet a scattering of ships in orbit ran off. None of them were Mendz, but rather scavengers coming to pluck what they could from the surface ruins and the fields of dead…but as soon as he got his people to surveying the planet from orbit he discovered that there were pockets of survivors. None too large in scale, but they were numerous and spread across the planet in a shotgun spread of malnourished and dying Mendz…with a few having fared better at or near where Nero had left the supply caches.
He immediately ordered troops to the surface armed with stun weapons and orders to hunt down and capture the survivors. Meanwhile he had techs pouring into one of the burnt out cities to start refurbishing pieces of it in order to establish a prison where the Mendz could be kept while they pumped food into them and dealt with whatever other medical issues there were…whether they liked it or not.
None of them were going to be allowed to run free, but as it turned out about a third of them had no wish to fight him. The others were textbook copies of those that had burned the planet, with the resulting horrors having done nothing to diminish their uncompromising defiance. Nero had them put in a separate area while he collected those that were, or had become reasonable out of the small groups that the hunters kept sending back as they scoured the planet.
It would take months to pick them all up, and at the end of the day there was just under 30,000 surviving…but that was 30,000 more than he’d expected, and while he wasn’t giving them back the planet it did feel good to know that his original mission here hadn’t been a total failure. Most of the planet’s population had died, but not all of it. And out of that tiny remnant there were those that were able to be worked with. Nero decided not to bother trying to incorporate them into Star Force via indoctrination, so he had one city partially demolished and then rebuilt for them to live in while his people began claiming the rest of the planet for their own.
The prisoners remained prisoners, and as he got proper facilities built he put them into the standard ‘indoctrinate or isolate’ protocol that would give them a chance to change their ways and if not they would be contained and cared for until they died. They wouldn’t starve to death or be eaten by their fellow Mendz. They’d have an ‘easy’ end, if there was such a thing, all the while with the obvious out available to them if they wanted to try for it.
With them taken care of and the agreeable Mendz wanting to be left alone anyway, he gave them a set amount of square miles to reestablish their fields and build other buildings as they were able, then put them out of mind while assigning a personnel relations attendant to oversee the building of a voluntary indoctrination program that he knew they would not make use of. It was there as an option there so there was a way out in case he was wrong and an individual amongst them suddenly decided to grow a brain.
With that redundancy in place Nero was able to write them off. His mission here was to create a full colony for Clan Scorpion, and from it to exert their influence on the surrounding systems and put some order to the chaos in this region. Right now that meant he had to build, build, build, and in the process of doing so pick up all the dead and clean away the riot marks on the Mendz cities as he slowly deconstructed and recycled them, removing one dot on the map after another while adding his own, made of proper Star Force architecture.
What had happened had happened and couldn’t be undone, but Cora had been right about not letting the defeat linger. This planet was a marker for a great horror, but it wasn’t going to remain as such. With every day that passed the stain on it was slowly removed with a new destiny rising in its place…and the same was true of Nero’s mojo, which had been utterly destroyed upon his previous failure here.
His brain told him otherwise, but his screaming heart had been overwhelming it with grief and futility that were washing away with the therapeutic construction that he was overseeing. There were no more battles to be fought here with weapons, for the Mendz were all contained and the scavengers and other visitors wanted to have nothing to do with the impressive warships in orbit. The battle here was now one of resources and construction, which were also part of an Archon’s impressive skillset.
Nero would stay here for a long time, but Cora would never come. Not that she had to with so many other projects on the table and an empire to lead on top of her Clan, but this was still due to her. He and the others might be doing the work of building, but had she not seen fit to send him back here, he felt that he would have carried a scar from this place for the rest of his life rather than experiencing the slow healing that this assignment allowed him.
And as the decades went by the free Mendz population expanded, their older ones dying off, and in what was a blink of an eye for an Archon centuries old, those who had been part of the great Riot were all gone. None had even attempted indoctrination amongst the prisoners or the colonists, leaving him with fresher minds to guide and who, after several generations, grew restless enough that they wanted more than to simply exist. They wanted a purpose, a mission, and to avoid the boredom of their reclusive existence they decided to officially become a Star Force ward and join the empire…even as it was crumbling.
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